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With the departure of the Ottomans, Jerusalem began to live again. British army control was followed in July 1920 with the inauguration of a civil administration headed by the outstanding British Jew, Sir Herbert (later Viscount) Samuel, as Britain’s first High Commissioner. “Government House” was established in Jerusalem, in the Augusta Victoria complex of buildings. (It was moved some years later to an imposing new building on one of the city’s southern ridges traditionally known as the “Hill of Evil Counsel.” With the subsequent administrative deterioration, it was cynically observed that the location had been aptly chosen.) Jerusalem also became the headquarters of all the major institutions in the country, including the Zionist Organisation and the Jewish Agency Executive, representing world Jewry, and the Jewish National Assembly representing the Jews of Palestine.
The stage was set for the dynamic revival of this ancient city. Hopes were high. Two years earlier, in the spring of 1918, four months after the capture of Jerusalem, the Zionist Commission led by Dr. Chaim Weizmann had come out under the auspices of the British Government to begin implementing the Balfour Declaration and organize the basis of Jewish development. As a first step, Dr. Weizmann, who later became first President of the State of Israel, laid the foundation stone of the Hebrew University on the summit of Mount Scopus, where it was inaugurated seven years later.
Little conflict between Jew and Arab was envisaged at the outset. After all, as a result of the victory of Allied arms—and with minimal effort on the Arab part—the Arabs of the Middle East were eventually to receive independence in territories covering more than a million square miles. Palestine, home of the Jews, was but a few thousand square miles, only a “small notch,” as Balfour called it. Moreover, Dr. Weizmann had had a cordial meeting in 1918 in Transjordan with the Emir Feisal (later king of Iraq), and in March 1919 in Paris, Feisal, who headed the Arab delegation to the Peace Conference, went on record with these words: “The Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with deepest sympathy on the Zionist Movement.” Referring to the future—Arab independence in the Middle East and Jewish development in Palestine—he wrote: “I think that neither can be a real success without the other.”
But events rapidly moved the other way, and Arab hostility to the idea of the Jewish National Home soon made itself felt. This was not without its effect on the British Government—and particularly on those who had reservations about Zionism and who considered that British interests would be better served by indulging the more numerous Arabs. Thus, despite the Balfour commitment, the British Mandatory Administration in Palestine was to see its task not primarily as that of assisting the revolutionary development of the country—which was now possible with Jewish pioneering effort and resources—but of appearing to maintain an even balance between Jew and Arab.
However, at the technical level, the British administration brought a radical change to Jerusalem and to the country. Gone was the crude corruption and somnolent indifference of the Ottomans. Gone was chaos and lawlessness—at first. New roads were built. Jerusalem was provided with a new water supply, served by a pipeline from the Rosh Ha’ayin springs on the coastal plain. Though the diameter of the pipe was modest, and the flow not over-abundant, this was the greatest water project Jerusalem had ever known. The supply from Solomon’s Pools was also increased by the installation of a pumping station. Attempts were made to improve the sanitation in the Old City. Public health services were provided fort he Arabs. Some public schools were established, supplementing missionary schools, for the Arabs. The British claimed that the Jews could and did look after themselves, establishing their own educational, health and social services whereas the Arabs needed help.
In the light of this approach, the Jews expected that they would at least be allowed, if not encouraged, by the authorities freely to proceed with the challenging development tasks they had set themselves—to rebuild the impoverished and underpopulated country, to turn swamp into cultivable land, bring fruitfulness to the desert, raise new cities and farm villages on the ancient sites, and restore the splendor of Jerusalem. They were to do all these things, but they were to encounter frequent obstruction from the Mandatory Administration.
Nevertheless, Jerusalem became a vibrant and cosmopolitan city during the period of British rule, attracting pilgrims and ordinary visitors from all over the world, for international travel was now easier, and local travel was safe. The historic sites of Jerusalem were high on tourist itineraries. At any time, sightseers from every country could be seen strolling through the colorful bazaars in the vaulted alleyways, visiting the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Western Wall, the Haram esh-Sharif, and moving beyond the walls to the spacious modern city of stone that was springing up to the west. For there had been expansion outside the Old City, largely by the Jews, and soon the Jewish population in these western suburbs outgrew the numbers in the Jewish Quarter of the walled city.
The quarters founded in the latter part of the nineteenth century were no longer alone. Adjoining them grew up commercial, manufacturing and residential suburbs, with Ashkenasi Jews from eastern, central and western Europe, and Sephardi communities form the Mediterranean, the Near East, the Middle East, from the Yemen and Morocco, and from such distant places as Bukhara, near Samarkand, in Uzbekistan, the east Asian part of Russia. The Bukharan community was the wealthiest and most exotic of these groups, and theirs was the first prosperous suburb in western Jerusalem. The first members had settled in the Holy Land in the 1880s.
The Jews also developed Mount Scopus, with its glorious view of the Temple Mount, the Old City and the new suburbs stretching away to the west, the Dead Sea to the southeast, and the plain of Jericho to the northeast. After the inauguration of the Hebrew University in 1925 came the construction of the Jewish National Library and, some years later, the Hadassah Hospital-University Medical School, the most modern medical center in the Middle East.
Inside the Old City, the Jews lived in as crowded conditions as ever, cheek by jowl with the equally crowded Moslem Quarter. The Jewish inhabitants mostly belonged to the ultra-orthodox communities who were largely engaged in Talmudic study. In this confined area near the Western Wall, there were no less than fifty-eight synagogues, religious schools and theological academies.
By administrative arrangement, the mayor of Jerusalem was an Arab, but there was an overall Jewish majority in the city, as there had been for more than half a century, and it kept growing throughout the Mandatory period: in 1922, when the first census was taken, there were 34,000 Jews out of the City’s population of 62,500. The 1931 census showed that in nine years the figures had risen to 51,000 Jews out of a total of 90,500. In 1947, on the eve of the British departure, the population of the City had grown to 157,000. Of these, 97,000 were Jews. It was a far cry from Mameluke and Ottoman days!
The Arabs also stared moving outside the walls and established handsome residential suburbs, particularly to the north. In 1929, the generosity of the Rockefeller family gave their area one of its finest buildings, and certainly the most important cultural centre—the Palestine Archaeological Museum. Its superb architecture well matches the treasures it houses, treasures of ancient Jerusalem and Palestine. It stands just across the way from the northeast corner of the walled city, its octagonal tower soaring above the Kidron valley.
In religious matters the British, on the whole, maintained the status quo. There was freedom of access to the holy places of the three creeds, although the Moslem ban on Jews entering the Haram esh-Sharif, which stood on the site of the Jewish Temple Mount, was maintained. Christians, however, were allowed to enter.
The churches and the Christian community were, for the first time, as free as they had been in the Crusader period, and no longer feared being molested by the ruling authorities. Nevertheless, some Christian leaders felt that the special Christian relationship to the Holy Land demanded some special action to restore “churches and convents which still lay in ruins, or had been turned into mosques, dwelling houses and stables by the intolerance of Islam.” But the administration had no desire to arouse Moslem resentment by restoring churches or synagogues which Islam had taken over.
There was one notable occasion when the administration abandoned the religious status quo. The shofar, the ram’s horn, was traditionally blown at the Western Wall to mark the end of the fast on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the most solemn day in the Jewish religious calendar. In 1929 this touched off a violent Arab demonstration, which spread through the country and led to massacres, the ancient Jewish communities at Hebron and Safad being almost wiped out. The riots took the British by surprise and there was extensive loss of life before order was restored. One of the recommendations of the British Commission appointed to investigate the causes, was to ban the blowing of the shofar at the “Wailing” Wall. (This was the least of the restrictions on Jews which the Commission advised and the Government adopted.) However despite the ban, enforced by arrest and imprisonment, the sound of the shofar continued to be heard each year. It became a matter of national honor, as much a political as a religious act, to defy the British order. (On 14 October 1967, at the close of the first Yom Kippur after Jerusalem was reunited, the shofar was blown freely and openly at the Western Wall before ten thousand worshippers.)
One of the effects of the violence in 1929 was to strengthen the Haganah, the underground Jewish defense force, since the Jews realized that in time of trouble, they would have to rely on themselves alone; they could not depend on the security forces of the administration. This saved many lives in Jerusalem, as elsewhere in the country, when the Arab-Jewish conflict erupted into severe disturbances in 1933 and virtual civil war between 1936 and 1939. As a result of these troubles, a British Royal Commission recommended that the country be partitioned into Jewish and Arab States, but the proposal was shelved. Then came World War Two and with it an uneasy truce between the Jews and the Arabs. It was broken soon after war ended, and for the next three years Palestine was a land of violence. Those three years also saw the collapse of the Mandatory Administration.
In 1947 the British Government informed the United Nations that it could no longer govern the country and would terminate the Mandate in May 1948. On 29 November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly adopted, by a two-thirds majority, its celebrated Partition resolution whereby two separate states would be created out of Mandatory Palestine. One Jewish, one Arab. They recommended an international status for Jerusalem.
The Arabs vehemently rejected this solution to what had become “the Palestine problem,” and next day they launched a country-wide attack on the Jews. Throughout the land the two communities fought each other. The local Arabs were in an advantageous military position for they could receive arms and heavy equipment—as well as armed reinforcements—from the Arab states bordering on Palestine. The Jews had to rely on sporadic arrivals of small arms brought in clandestinely from overseas—for the British were still in power, and the Haganah was still illegal—and from primitive home-made armaments, such as a crude 6-inch mortar which had small lethal effect but which made a frightening noise.
In Jerusalem, buildings were dynamited, bombs exploded, bullets flew, city were cut off from the Jewish centers of strength on the costal plain. The highway from Tel-Aviv became almost impassable by the beginning of 1948. The ascent to Jerusalem through the steep, heavily wooded slopes of the Judean hills was a slow tortuous climb. The narrow, twisting road skirted by deep ditches, was so very vulnerable to ambush as the villages on both ridges commanding the defile were held by the Arabs. The losses to Jewish supply trucks, buses and other vehicles were heavy. Nevertheless they kept trying to press through, and those who managed to reach Jerusalem brought modest relief to the city’s dwindling supplies.
Traveling in the buses and trucks as military escort were young boys and girls of the Haganah—the girls hiding under their robes the dismantled parts of sub-machine guns and pistols, hand grenades and the possession of arms, even in circumstances of such danger, could carry the death penalty. By the third week in March, however, the toll of life and vehicles was too punishing, and traffic had to be halted. Jewish Jerusalem was under full siege.
Under the emergency—and superb—control of Dr. Dov Joseph, a member of the Jewish Agency Executive (he was appointed Military Governor of Jerusalem with the proclamation of Israel’s statehood and the start of the “official war”), food rationing was promptly put into effect. The allocation was below subsistence level, and young mothers, between spells of armed duty, went foraging in the less dangerous fields for something green to cook for their children. The water pipeline ran through Arab territory, so all cisterns in private houses were sealed and marked and an equal water ration distributed to all.
On 1 April 1948, David Ben Gurion, head of the Jewish Agency Executive—which had moved its headquarters to more convenient Tel Aviv—ordered the Haganah to open the road to Jerusalem at least long enough to get a few food and ammunition convoys through. This meant capturing the Arab villages commanding the road and holding them for a few days. There were not enough Haganah men—or weapons—to hold them for longer. As this was thickly populated Arab territory the Arabs would undoubtedly bring up massive reinforcements to regain them. Moreover, the Haganah men assigned to the operation would have to be drawn from other need to get back fast. So the Haganah Command resolved to do something they had never done before, mobilize a brigade of 1,500 men for this single task, and do so within hours. Up to then, being a clandestine force, the Haganah had never operated beyond company level.
The attack went in after sundown on 5 April. Meanwhile, close to the start of the defile, a relatively small test convoy of trucks with food, fuel, weapons and ammunition awaited the signal to move. It came at midnight and the convoy started up the mountain road. The Haganah units had cleared the western end though battles were still continuing above the section nearest Jerusalem. It took ten hours for the convoy to cover a stretch that normally took half an hour, but it got through, bringing joy to the beleaguered. Off-loading was fast and the empty vehicles were about to return when the Arabs counter-attacked a key height and the road was blocked while the battle raged. It was re-opened three days later and the trucks returned to the plains.
The success of this test convoy showed that the operational plan was feasible, and preparations were made to assemble large convoys and push them through. On 13 April, 175 trucks reached Jerusalem in seven hours and returned the same afternoon. On the seventeenth, more than 250 vehicles got through in four and half hours, bringing in arms, ammunition and one thousand tons of food. The largest convoy of all—294 trucks—was on the twentieth. This was a special Passover convoy, bringing, in addition to the normal supplies, unleavened bread (matzah) for the Jewish festival. But this one had a rough time. By now, the Arabs had concentrated large forces and they launched a heavy attack on the tail end of the convoy, destroying thirty-six trucks and killing and wounding a number of drivers. The rest, however, got through.
Thereafter, the road to Jerusalem was completely shut and the ring of siege was complete. But the three convoys had provided the Jews of the city with the means to hold out until the siege was lifted.