O Jerusalem - Dominique Lapierre & Larry Collins

 

This book recounts, moment by moment, the process that gave birth to the state of Israel. Collins & Lapierre weave a tapestry of shattered hopes, valor & fierce pride as the Arabs, Jews & British collide in their fight for control of Jerusalem. O Jerusalem! meticulously recreates this historic struggle. It penetrates the battle from the inside, exploring each party's interests, intentions & concessions as the city of their dreams teeters on the brink of destruction. From the Jewish fighters & their heroic commanders to the Arab chieftain whose death in battle doomed his cause along with the Mufti of Jerusalem's support for Hitler and the extermination of the Jews, but inspired a generation of Palestinians, O Jerusalem! tells the 3-dimensional story of this high-stakes, emotional conflict. 46th of 2021.

The book has forty-six chapters, grouped into four parts:

Part One: A Time to Mourn and a Time to Dance has six chapters.

Part Two: A House Against Itself has eleven chapters.

Part Three: A City Besieged has thirteen chapters.

Part Four: A City Divided has sixteen chapters.

The book begins with a prologue, and ends with an epilogue, index, and certain relevant information categorized under biographical note acknowledgements, a bibliography, chapter notes, and photograph credits.

History: In 1917, during World War I, Britain defeated the Ottoman Turks and Palestine and Jordan were put under its control. They came under official British mandate in 1922 by League of Nations approval. The Balfour Declaration of 1917, named after British Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, promised that Britain would assist the Jewish people in building their homeland in the Middle East ("Balfour Doctrine," Britannica). However, Britain also promised to give the Palestinian Arabs independence in the Husayn-McMahon Correspondence. Britain denounced the Husayn-McMahon correspondence with the Churchill White Paper, declaring Britain's favor of the Balfour Doctrine over the Husayn-McMahon correspondence. The 1930 Passfield White Paper reversed this policy with its pro-Husayn-McMahon policy. This White Paper was met with outrage in the Jewish community and Britain quickly reverted its policies back to the 1922 Churchill White Paper. Arabs responded with a strike, followed by a revolt (lasting until 1939) in 1936. In 1939 Britain released the 1939 White Paper, which acceded to Arab demands. The White Paper promised an end to Jewish immigration, and independent Arab Palestine. The Jews of Palestine rejected the White Paper as entirely outside Britain's mandate.

After World War II Britain asked the United Nations to solve the Zionist-Arab conflict. On November 29, 1947, the UN voted to partition the British mandate of Palestine to include a Jewish state as well as an Arab Palestinian state 

The book begins immediately after the partition decision was announced. The Jews flooded the streets of Palestine, celebrating. However, the Jewish leaders immediately began planning for war. Ehud Avriel was sent to Prague to buy arms in the name of Ethiopia. Meanwhile, the Jews built an army and air force from scratch. The Jewish leaders, like David Ben-Gurion, knew that, due to military shortcomings, the conflict could only be won through intelligence warfare. The Arabs vowed to put Jerusalem under siege, and did. For many months Jerusalem survived on very limited foodstuffs.

On the Arab side, Captain Abdul-Aziz Kerine bought arms in Prague in the name of Syria, the only sovereign Arab nation at the time. The Arab countries (Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Transjordan) discussed their plan of action. They agreed to work together, but everyone, especially King Abdullah of Transjordan, had their own agenda. In the end, the Arab states' lack of cooperation led to their downfall.

There was a lot of disorganization and non-cooperation on the Jewish side as well. The main Jewish army was the Haganah; however, the Stern Gang and Irgun were other Jewish militant groups. The groups had conflicting ideals (for example: the Haganah was willing to internationalize Jerusalem in order to have a unified, peaceful state, but Jerusalem was of the utmost importance to the Stern Gang and the Irgun), but they managed to retain more organization and cooperation than the Arab armies. In the main text of O Jerusalem!, it is related that the Stern Gang and the Irgun massacred the Arab village of Deir Yassin, outraging Arabs. The Haganah denounced the massacre, but the Arabs believed the Haganah to be responsible and retaliated at the Jewish kibbutz of Kfar Etzion.

As May 15 drew closer, the two peoples continued preparing for war. However, the Jewish intelligence learned that, although the mandate was set to expire on May 15, the British were planning to leave on May 14. Prepared for the early departure, the Haganah mobilized quickly and managed to capture many British buildings before the Arabs even realized that the British had left. Not privy to this intelligence, the Arab armies activated on May 15. The Jewish homeland of Israel was declared on Iyar 5, 5708 Hebrew, or May 14, 1948, Gregorian. Today, this day is celebrated as Yom Ha'atzmaut, or Israeli Independence Day.

After the expiration of the mandate, war befell the region. The Arab armies underestimated the Haganah's strength and were not prepared for a strong foe. Both the Arab and Jewish armies suffered major shortcomings in ammunition and manpower. The situation in Jerusalem worsened, leaving Jewish Jerusalemites near starving. On June 11, 1948, a UN sanctioned cease-fire began. Jerusalem's starving were saved by a temporary end to the siege. Jerusalem's storerooms and stomachs were filled again. By cease-fire agreement, neither army was allowed to re-arm itself, but the Haganah was able to buy arms through the black market. The Arab armies, however, were not. After four weeks, the fighting began again, followed by another cease-fire beginning on July 19 (July 17 in Jerusalem), 1948.

O Jerusalem partially covers the biography of Hitler's ally, and founder of the "Palestinian" Arab movement, Mufti Haj Amin El Husseini. Husseini stirred up the bloody Arab pogrom against the Jews, in the Old City of Jerusalem, in 1920. Two years later, at the instigation of the British Mandates political secretary, the rabidly anti-Jewish E.T Robinson, he was appointed "Mufti of Jerusalem", the equivalent of Bishop of a city, with Jewish and not Moslem routes, and a Jewish, not Moslem plurality.

Haj Amin El Husseini manipulated his way to becoming President of the Moslem Supreme Council, and in the following years, he set himself up as an unchallenged dictator of all the Moslems in the Holy Land, through a combination of patronage and terror, in which thousands of Arab opponents and potential or suspected opponents where murdered on the orders of the Mufti, in a bloody purge.

In 1929, the Mufti orchestrated more violent of Jews in Palestine, covering the Land of Israel in the blood of Jewish men, women and children.

When the British finally decided to arrest him, he fled to Beirut and later to Baghdad, where in 1941, he aided in a Nazi-backed plot to overthrow the British government in Iraq. When the plot failed he fled to Iran and then to Nazi Germany where he formed a close friendship with Adolph Hitler and attended Nazi rallies as an honoured guest.

He did everything in his power to achieve an Axis victory. He recruited Arab agents to drop behind the British lines as saboteurs and raised two divisions of Bosnian Moslems for the SS. He facilitated the German entry into Tunisia and Libya. He personally visited the Nazi death camps including Auschwitz and he urged the Nazis to speed up the Final Solution. In 1943 Husseini personally influenced Reich Foreign Minister Ribbentrop to prevent four thousand Jewish children being sent to Israel, instead diverting them to Hitler's death camps where they perished.

It was the Mufti who led `Palestinian' Arab forces against the fledgling Jewish State, and who is a much-admired uncle of PLO leader Yasser Arafat.

We also learn that Haj Amin was not the only Arab terrorist to be trained in Nazi Germany, as part of the Axis war effort. The commander of the Arab Liberation Army , Fawzi el Kaujki was a noted celebrity in Berlin during World War II , where he was furnished with every luxury he needed by Hitler's Nazi regime, including his blonde German wife.

The book covers the role in the war effort of the War of Independence of the likes of David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, David Shaltiel, Yitzhac Rabin, Yigal Allon, Yigal Yadin and millions of ordinary Jewish men and women.

A heroic account is given of the struggle of the Jews of Jerusalem, to survive Arab attacks and starvation.

In May 1948, when Rabbi Mordechai Weingarten, the senior citizen of the Jewish quarter, got the key to the Zion Gate, one of the seven gates of the Old City of Jerusalem, he said it was for the first time since AD 70 until today, that a key to the gates of Jerusalem was in Jewish hands.  Jerusalem had lived as no other city in the world, under the curse of bloodshed. Yet her name, according to legend, came from the ancient Hebrew 'Yerushalayim', meaning 'City of Peace', and her first settlements had stretched down from the Mount of Olives under a grove of palm trees whose branches would become a universal symbol of peace, sacred for three religions. On the 14th a page was turning in the history of the holy land.

160,000 people awaited the departure of Sir Alan Cunningham to start killing each other, there was no representatives of Jerusalem's Arab or Jewish community to bid him farewell.  United Nation's had the mapmakers nightmare to decide the two territories, the plan refused to both states sovereignty over the city of Jerusalem, the pole to which since antiquity, the political, economic and religious life of Palestine had gravitated. Re-creating a Jewish state in Palestine without Jerusalem as its capital was anathema to the Jewish people, the resurrection of a body without its soul. Most countries barred Jews from owning land. The church forbade Jews to employ Christians and Christians to live among Jews. The Early Christians had them banned from Jerusalem, and the Crusaders burned the Holy city's Jews alive in their synagogues.  In 1880, after the assassination of Alexander II, the mobs, aided by the Czar's soldiers, burned and butchered their way through one Jewish community after another, leaving a new word in their wake: pogrom. Herzl walked away from that spectacle a shattered man, from his anguish came a vision that modified the destiny of his people and the history of 20th Century. It was Zionism. It created its blue-print - 'The Jewish State'. By 1897, they had picked two indispensable symbols of the state the flag and the national anthem - 'Hatikvah' - The Hope.   Palestine's Moslem rulers had been more tolerant. The Caliph Omer had left them relatively unmolested. For Arabs the partition was a monstrous injustice thrust upon them by the white Western imperialism in expiation of a crime they had not committed, as they had been the majority in that land for seven centuries. They created Arab nationalism named Al Fatat - 'Young Girl'. On the day of divide, for Assiya Halaby, as for many others in Jerusalem, a new life was beginning in that dawn. Soon a wall would lacerate Jerusalem's heart, and its stones would make Assiya Halaby an exile in the city of her birth. Instead of a few days, she would have years to ponder the message of the book she had taken with her that morning 'The Arab Awakening'. 

As with Freedom at Midnight, the books reads like rapidly changing scenes off the streets of Jerusalem, the library of Tel Aviv, the palace of Amman, the fields of intense battle, and underneath the slits of the armored cars, and despite its mammoth size, it barely ceases to be unputdownable. May be because I was familiar with the history in Freedom at midnight, it seemed more comprehensive. This had many new names, and many new things to learn.