Anonymous Soldiers
Page 5
In sum, 1922 to 1928 was a uniquely halcyon period in Palestine. But the main reason for the country’s quiescence, though not fully grasped at the time, sowed the seeds for the resumption of intercommunal violence—this time on an even grander scale. The aforementioned economic depression in Palestine had been triggered by the Polish currency crisis of 1925. This necessarily affected the financial prospects and economic comfort of the lower-middle-class Polish Jews who accounted for the bulk of Zionist immigrants during the 1920s. Fully 42 percent of immigrants settling in Tel Aviv, for example, came from Poland, thus earning the city the sobriquet Little Warsaw. Jewish immigration to Palestine thus fell from a record-setting 34,386 persons in 1925 to a little more than a seventh of that total during 1929. In fact, Jewish emigration exceeded immigration between 1926 and 1929. With so few Jews arriving and many more leaving, Arab restiveness was temporarily held in check. But impatience and frustration were growing among a younger, more activist generation of Palestinian nationalists. They watched anxiously as the Yishuv nonetheless experienced a net 50 percent population increase under British rule as their elders’ nonviolent approaches failed to secure any definitive repudiation of Britain’s support of Zionism.10
“Modern Arab politics,” one historian of the Middle East has written, “depends in large measure upon a ‘street,’ an urban mob that can be summoned at will and given its marching orders, whether these be to provide a demagogue with a vocal and approving audience, [or] to intimidate political rivals.” Between 1928 and 1929, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, summoned such a mob in Palestine for exactly these purposes. In doing so, he infused the Palestinian nationalist movement with an emotive religious component that both energized and radicalized his followers. Further, through his mobilization of both the urban masses and the rural fellaheen (peasants or agricultural workers) around a common religious issue, al-Husseini was able to circumvent the traditional Arab leadership and thereby consolidate his position as the movement’s preeminent head. He pressured the British for more political concessions, and the question of Palestine, until then a local dispute confined mostly to that country, was elevated to a pan-Arab, region-wide Islamic issue.11
The catalyst for the turmoil that would engulf Palestine at the close of the 1920s was a minor dispute that erupted over Jews’ bringing chairs and benches with them while worshipping at Jerusalem’s Western Wall. The Western Wall is Judaism’s most sacred landmark, constituting the only remaining part of the Second Temple’s outer wall built by King Herod around 19 B.C.E. but destroyed by the Romans in 70 C.E. For two thousand years since, Jews have mourned the temple’s destruction and the exile from Zion that followed, and for at least the past millennium they have venerated and prayed at the wall. Muslims revere this same spot as well. Called the Buraq Wall (Hā’it Al-Burāq), it forms the western boundary of the Temple Mount or Noble Sanctuary, Islam’s third-holiest shrine, erected in the seventh century on the site of the Jews’ destroyed Second Temple. Muslims believe that Muhammad tethered his horse, Buraq, at the wall before embarking on his mihraj, or ascent to heaven.12
The wall’s religious pedigree apart, the prevailing consensus in 1920s Palestine was that it belonged to Muslims. Indeed, the pavement opposite had long been settled by Moroccan Muslims who attended to visiting pilgrims and maintained the surrounding area. Jews were allowed access to the wall by sufferance and custom rather than legal right. Adherence to the religious status quo had been clearly defined from the day British rule over Palestine began.13
To Muslims, the Jews’ efforts to alter the status quo by bringing chairs and benches to the wall, however modest, were a harbinger of further designs to rebuild the Jewish temple. Years of constant bickering and recrimination were then unhelpfully electrified when the chief rabbi of the European (Ashkenazi) community issued a broadly worded decree calling for the temple’s resurrection. Armed with this edict, a group of Jewish worshippers in September 1928 decided on Yom Kippur to place a larger than customary ark in front of the wall and to fasten a screen to the wall and the pavement in front of it to separate the male and female congregants, per Orthodox tradition. After the Muslim guardian of the site complained, Keith-Roach, who was then deputy district commissioner of Jerusalem, asked that the screen at least be removed before the Jews’ morning prayers the next day and alerted the British police inspector on duty at the wall to ensure this was done. Morning found the screen still in place, so the police forcibly removed it—along with a rabbi who stubbornly clung to the prohibited item. Howls of protest erupted from both Jews and the Supreme Muslim Council. As the most powerful quasi-governmental, representative institution in Palestine, the council was responsible for most Arab community affairs, and Haj Amin al-Husseini was its president. In the aftermath of the contretemps over the screen, he adroitly exercised his political clout as head of the council while exploiting his religious authority as mufti to transform the dispute into a major issue. Within days, Haj Amin organized a mass rally at the al-Aqsa Mosque. A detailed memorandum to the government followed, and meetings were held between al-Husseini and senior British officials. Financial contributions were solicited as far afield as India to support the campaign to preserve Muslim access to the Noble Sanctuary, and leaflets in Palestine linked to the Supreme Muslim Council summoned the faithful to its defense.14
Meanwhile, Zionist agitation was becoming more feverish as well. Newspapers representing a cross section of the Yishuv’s political spectrum repeatedly criticized British officials for their acceptance of Muslim claims to the wall. Even the moderate daily Ha’aretz proclaimed that the Yishuv’s patience had been exhausted. A committee for the defense of the wall chaired by a leading Jewish scholar was established, and urgent telegrams were sent to community organizations and prominent Jews abroad soliciting financial, political, and moral support.15
At the center of this gathering storm was none other than Jabotinsky. Although Samuel’s commutation of his prison sentence in 1920 also nullified the deportation order issued by the British military tribunal, Jabotinsky had been expelled from Palestine the following year on charges of incitement to violence during the 1921 disorders. The general quiescence in Palestine afterward had persuaded Lord Plumer, Samuel’s successor as high commissioner, to allow the Zionist leader to return—on the condition that he abstain from politics. Jabotinsky thus arrived in Palestine that October—just as the controversy over the wall was heating up. His employment as an insurance agent, which was necessary to secure an entry visa, proved to be very short-lived. In November, Jabotinsky announced that he had been named editor in chief of Doar Ha-yom—the most militant of the Hebrew newspapers engaged in the dispute over the wall. Under Jabotinsky’s editorship, it was poised to become even more aggressive.16
The newspaper provided Jabotinsky with an invaluable platform at a critical time in his political life. Five years earlier, he had resigned from his elected position on the Zionist Organization’s executive committee. Its acceptance of the 1922 white paper and what Jabotinsky derided as its “minimalist” approach to Zionism had laid bare the ideological chasm separating him from his fellow Zionists. Jabotinsky insisted that a Jewish state would only be established through a “maximalist” interpretation of Britain’s commitment to Zionism—that is, by ensuring Britain’s full compliance with the Balfour Declaration’s inalienable principles. Foremost among these, Jabotinsky argued, was an aggressively expansionist conception of a Jewish state that would in fact encompass both sides of the Jordan River. Jabotinsky also believed in a policy that would actively “liquidate the Diaspora” and encourage Jewish immigration to Palestine on a larger, more intensive scale. Accordingly, he demanded that Britain rescind the policy limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine (Jabotinsky’s abiding, if misjudged, faith in the compatibility of British strategic interests in the eastern Mediterranean with Zionist aims in Palestine underlay his pursuit of these policies). Finally, with respect to the Yishuv’s self-defense, Jabotinsky disdaine
d the mainstream Zionists’ emphasis on self-reliance and again insisted that Britain be pressed to faithfully fulfill its commitment to Zionism, which, he argued, included providing for the Yishuv’s defense in concert with an officially sanctioned Jewish self-defense force.17
Perhaps Jabotinsky’s most fundamental disagreement with mainstream Zionists, however, was over whether there could ever be any kind of modus vivendi with Palestine’s Arabs. In a seminal 1923 article Jabotinsky declared that Zionism’s aims would only ever be achieved through the construction, in cooperation with British arms, of an “iron wall that the indigenous population could not break.” This separation of Arab and Jew was as obvious, Jabotinsky argued, as it was necessary. “It is impossible to dream, now and in the foreseeable future,” he wrote, “of a voluntary agreement between Jews and the Palestinian Arabs … As long as the Arabs harbor even a glimmer of hope that they could get rid of us, no sweet talk or enticing promises will motivate the Arabs to abandon this hope, precisely because they are not a mob but a living nation.”18
In order to attain these political aims, and thereby “revise” a Zionist ideal that Jabotinsky believed had been diluted and corrupted, he founded a new political party in 1925, the World Union of Zionist Revisionists, known as the Revisionist Party. Its youth wing was called Histadrut ha-Noar ha-Zioni ha-Activisti al Shem Joseph Trumpeldor (Organization of Zionist Activist Youth in the Name of Joseph Trumpeldor), more commonly referred to as Brit Trumpeldor or simply by its acronym, Betar. The word “Betar” carried the additional significance as the name of the site of the legendary Hebrew warrior Bar Kochbar’s last stand against the Romans in 135 C.E. Affiliates were soon active throughout Poland and neighboring eastern European countries.19
The first Betar training school opened in Tel Aviv in 1928. Instruction consisted of military preparedness exercises, political awareness seminars, and attention to personal appearance. Among the new wave of Jewish immigrants who arrived in Palestine during 1929 were many Betar and Revisionist Party members; it was a group of these Betarim who would trigger the violence that swept Palestine in August 1929.20
After a year of Arab and Jewish agitation and mounting tension, Palestine was primed to explode. The catalyst was one of the regular demonstrations that a Jewish committee in defense of the wall had organized. On August 14 some six thousand people gathered in Tel Aviv to denounce the government to chants of “The wall is ours!” That same evening, another crowd of around three thousand Jews converged on the wall for a prayer meeting and vigil that lasted until midnight. The following morning, the pious Jews coming to worship at the wall were joined by some three hundred Betarim wielding truncheons. The demonstrators raised the Jewish flag, stood in silence for two minutes, then sang the Zionist anthem, “Ha-Tikva” (The hope; now Israel’s national anthem), and then dispersed. The British commission of inquiry appointed to investigate the violence that followed would later single out this incident as its cause.21
Word of the Jewish demonstration spread quickly among the Arabs the next day, Friday, the Muslim day of prayer. The Supreme Muslim Council quickly organized a protest to follow services at the al-Aqsa Mosque. At least two thousand worshippers, proclaiming, “There is no God but God; the religion of Mohammed came with the sword,” attended the rally and then descended from the Noble Sanctuary to the wall, setting fire to Jewish prayer books and other devotional items. The next day, as both communities seethed with resentment and recrimination, some nonobservant Jewish boys bored by the Sabbath were playing soccer on a field in Jerusalem’s Bukharan quarter, which bordered the Arab neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. When an errant kick sent the ball into an Arab’s tomato garden, one of the boys went to retrieve it, and a fight erupted. Several people were injured, and the Jewish youth who had gone to retrieve the ball was stabbed. He died three days later, on August 20.22
The funeral took place the following morning, and inflammatory eulogies crying for vengeance whipped up an estimated two thousand mourners who had gathered before the government hospital at the Russian Compound. The crowd then attempted to march down the adjacent Jaffa Road, Jerusalem’s central artery, toward the Old City but did not get very far before encountering a double cordon of police drawn up in front of the Central Post Office. Refusing to halt or disperse, the procession had to be beaten back by baton-wielding police on horseback and on foot.23
“In Jerusalem there is great excitement,” the August 22 edition of the Arab newspaper Falastin (Palestine) observed. “The atmosphere is tense, and it is apprehended that tomorrow (Friday, August 23rd) when many fellaheen assemble for prayers in Jerusalem a substantial answer will be given to these incidents.” The Hebrew-language press was similarly rife with rumors of impending Arab attacks designed to blunt a Jewish attempt to occupy the Noble Sanctuary. Belatedly, the Palestine government intervened to defuse the situation. The timing of this latest crisis could not have been worse. Both the high commissioner, Sir John Chancellor, and Attorney General Norman Bentwich were away on leave. It thus fell to the chief secretary, Sir Harry Luke, as acting high commissioner, to persuade both the mufti and the chief rabbi to arrange for sermons to be given on Friday and Saturday that would restrain their respective congregants. But it was too late. Already that day, there were reports of Arabs from surrounding towns and villages converging on Jerusalem armed with clubs, sticks, and other simple weapons.24
Friday prayers at the al-Aqsa Mosque on August 23 began inauspiciously. The khatib, or preacher, entered. He was attired, as usual, in the traditional green cloak worn by Muslim prelates in Jerusalem. As was also typical, he was preceded by a kavass (guard), who loudly struck the ground with his stave to announce the start of the service. What was atypical was the drawn sword that the khatib ostentatiously displayed. Sheikh Sa’ad el Din mounted the pulpit. After praising and thanking God, he called upon the faithful to defend Islam from the Jews and their plots to seize the Noble Sanctuary. “If we give way an inch to the Jews in regard to their demands at the Wailing Wall,” he inveighed,
they will ask for the Mosque of Aqsa; if we give them the Mosque of Aqsa they will demand the Dome of the Rock; if we give them the Dome of the Rock they will demand the whole of Palestine, and having gained the whole of Palestine they will proceed to turn us Arabs out of our country. I ask you now to take the oath of God the Great to swear by your right hand that you will not hesitate to act when called upon to do so, and that you will, if need be, fight for the Faith and the Holy Places to death.
The packed congregants raised their hands in unison and swore this pledge. “Then go,” the sheikh instructed them, “pounce upon your enemies and kill that you in doing so may obtain Paradise.”25
Around 12:30 p.m., Major Alan Saunders, the acting commandant of the PPF and one of its original and longest-serving British officers, received word that a large and unruly crowd of Arabs was leaving the Noble Sanctuary and heading in the direction of Jaffa Gate. About ten minutes later he saw a young Orthodox Jew run past with an Arab mob in pursuit. British police officers intervened, and the Jews’ pursuers were driven off, but within minutes they were overwhelmed by hundreds of rioters streaming through the gate toward the Orthodox Jewish Mea Shearim neighborhood.26
Shouting, “The country is our country and the Jews are our dogs,” and, “The religion of Mohammed came with the sword,” the Arabs descended on the quarter with sticks, clubs, swords, and a handful of rifles. The Arab police again mutinied and joined the onslaught, at the end of which twenty-nine Jews lay dead and forty-three injured. Thirty-eight Arabs had also died: twenty-six from bullet wounds inflicted by the security forces. Fifty-one others were wounded.27
The beleaguered police and handful of troops on hand in Palestine could do little to stem the violence. Successive government fiscal crises since 1922 had impacted the police more severely than any other arm of the Palestine government; the force was thought to be a quarter of its required establishment on the eve of the 1929 riots. The British police contingent c
omprised roughly a fifth of the approximately fifteen hundred officers in the PPF, while the entire British military contingent in Palestine consisted of fewer than a hundred soldiers with six armored cars and five or six flight-worthy aircraft. As the violence intensified, Luke telegraphed the Colonial Office in London requesting that at least a battalion of troops (that is, six hundred men) be sent from Egypt to Palestine without delay. He also wired the Royal Navy base at Malta asking for naval assistance. In the meantime, fifty Oxford University theology students, studying in Jerusalem over their summer vacation, were enrolled as special police constables. The first military reinforcements, a contingent of sixty men, arrived in Palestine about 5:00 p.m. on Saturday, August 24, but by then the violence had spread beyond Jerusalem.28