THE ROAD TO JERUSALEM Glubb Pasha, Palestine and the Jews BENNY MORRIS I.B. TAURIS Publishers LONDON • NEW YORK Published in 2002 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com In the United States of America and in Canada distributed by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 Copyright © Benny Morris 2002 The right of Benny Morris to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1998. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Library of Middle East History 1 ISBN 1 86064 8126 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress catalog card: available Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd From camera ready copy edited and supplied by the author ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Prof. Jimmy Weinblatt, the outgoing dean of humanities and social sciences, Ben-Gurion University, Beersheba, for helping fund the preparation of this book for publication. He has been a constant friend and aid these past few years, and merits far more than these words convey. I would also like to thank the Rockefeller Foundation for hosting Leah and myself at its estate in Bellagio, in incomparably beautiful and carefree surroundings, where the first draft of this book was produced (it’s hard to imagine a place more different from Glubb's adopted country). Last, I would like to thank Jeff Abel for his help in preparing this book for publication, for trying unfailingly (with scant success) to drag me into this digital age, for our friendship over the past thirty odd years, and for writing these words. For Leah CONTENTS Abbreviations vi Introduction 1 1 Glubb on Arabs and Jews 9 2 The Arab Revolt 1936-39 33 3 World War II and its Aftermath 56 4 The Road to Jerusalem 91 5 The Invasion 145 6 Border Wars, 1949 - 1956 209 Conclusion (After 1956) 233 Bibliography 243 Notes 247 Index 289 Abbreviations AAC – Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry ALA – Arab Liberation Army BGA – David Ben-Gurion Archive (Sdeh Boqer, Israel) CZA – Central Zionist Archive (Jerusalem) CAB – Cabinet (UK) CO – Colonial Office (UK) DP – Displaced person (post-World War II Europe) FO – Foreign Office (UK) HA – Haganah Archive (Tel Aviv) HMG – His Majesty’s Government (British Government) IDF – Israel Defence Forces IDFA – IDF Archive (Givatayim, Israel) ISA – Israel State Archive (Jerusalem) IWM – Imperial War Museum (London) IZL – Irgun Zvai Leumi or National Military Organisation or ‘Irgun' LHI – Lohamei Herut Yisrael or Freedom Fighters of Israel or ‘Stern Gang’ MK – Member of Knesset (Israel) MP – Member of Parliament (UK) NA – National Archive (Washington) PRO – Public Record Office (London) RAF – Royal Air Force RE – Royal Engineers (British Army) SAMECA – St Antony’s College Middle East Centre Archive (Oxford) TJ – Transjordan TJFF – Transjordan Frontier Force UNA – United Nations Archive (New York) UNEF – United Nations Emergency Force (Egypt) UNO – United Nations Organisation UNRWA – United Nations Relief and Works Agenncy for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East UNSCOP – United Nations Special Committee on Palestine UNTSO – United Nations Truce Supervision Organisation WO – War Office (UK) INTRODUCTION John Bagot Glubb lived most of his long life (1897-1986) in England, where he was born and died. But the 36 years of his main, adult career, as a soldier, were spent in the Middle East, most of them in the Emirate, later Kingdom, of Transjordan, which in 1948 became the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. It was there that he made his chief contribution to history. Glubb was born in Preston, England, in 1897 to a middle class Eng- lish civil service\military family. His forefathers, from the lesser landed gentry, had included a Member of Parliament (for Okehampton, Devon) in 1313. His father, Frederic Manley Glubb, served in the Royal Engi- neers (RE), where at the end of World War I he attained the rank of ma- jor-general. Glubb, at least initially, followed in his father's footsteps. Educated at Cheltenham College - where he imbibed ‘a reverence for the tenets of Christianity’,1 ‘a diet of games, classics ... [and] such im- portant Victorian concepts as the stiff upper lip, a sense of fair play, the importance of maintaining appearances, and adherence to an unbending moral code’2 - and the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, Glubb, an RE subaltern, was sent to the trenches of Flanders at the end of 1915 where he spent the next three years, twice being wounded (once se- verely). He was later to treasure the memory of those years of combat in, as he saw it, a just cause, albeit attended by much suffering and loss. He came to regard soldiering as perhaps the noblest profession. ‘People who have never been soldiers sometimes imagine the military profes- sion to be brutal ... [and that] the chief preoccupation of soldiers is kill- ing people.’ In reality, soldiers spend most of their time at other tasks. Throughout, they are bound together and governed by a worthy ethic of ‘brotherhood’ and camaraderie.3 An essentially reserved and solitary man, Glubb in his lifetime enjoyed three bouts of camaraderie - in the trenches with his fellow Englishmen in World War I, with his beduin recruits in the ‘Desert Camel Corps’ in Iraq in the 1920s, and, lastly, be- tween 1930 and 1956, in the ranks of Jordan's army, the Arab Legion, first as a senior officer and then as its commander. 2 The Road to Jerusalem: Glubb Pasha, Palestine and the Jews But while he may have regarded soldiering as a noble calling, Glubb experienced, and well understood, the evils of war. Above all, there was the death of fellow officers and subordinates, the loss of innocent, civil- ian life and the destruction of property and order. And ‘wars never end wars,’ he wrote. ‘Every war, on the contrary, gives rise to more wars and more violence, hatred and revenge.’ Nowhere was this more true than in the Middle East.4 Glubb's life in the Middle East began at the end World War I. The bulk of the British Army had been demobilized and Glubb volunteered for service in Mesopotamia (later Iraq), which was occupied by Britain and was about to become a British Mandate. He reached the territory - wracked by tribal and religious conflict - in 1920. At the time, he knew next to nothing of the Middle East, ‘its history or culture’; but he craved adventure and interesting work.5 Initially he served as an engineer. But in 1922 he was appointed an intelligence officer (a ‘Special Service Of- ficer’), serving along Iraq's southern frontier among the tribes. There was constant raiding from Saudi Arabia and occasional intervention by the Royal Air Force, with Glubb directing the aircraft to target. In the late 1920s, he organized and commanded the ‘Southern Desert Camel Corps’. It patrolled the frontiers of the mandated kingdom and success- fully parried Saudi and Syrian marauders and land grabs. Glubb gradu- ally learned the desert Arabs' language and ways and came to love them. They returned that love. ‘Glubb ... had a remarkable ability to attract and hold the affection of Arabs,’ was how Alec Kirkbride, Britain’s long- time representative in Amman, put it. (Kirkbride, an extremely discern- ing man, implied that this was because Glubb was ‘half Irish and half Cornish’ rather than a run-of-the-mill Englishman.)6 Over the years, Glubb became completely fluent in Arabic; indeed, one Jordanian official in the 1950s described his mastery of the lan- guage as ‘wonderful and fluent, and few Arabs could match it.’7 No doubt, this linguistic achievement helped endear him to the na- tives. In 1930 Glubb moved to Jordan, itself plagued by beduin maraud- ing and threatened by expansionist Saudi designs. He was appointed second-in-command to Frederick Peake, the founder and commander of the Arab Legion. (Peake and a number of British officials objected - Glubb was a complete outsider, and a non-conventional one at that. But they were overridden.) Glubb, as ‘Officer Commanding Desert,’ was responsible for keeping order and repelling raiders in the desert areas bordering on Saudi Arabia and Syria. For this task he fashioned a new force, the Legion's ‘Desert Patrol.’ In March 1939, Glubb succeeded Introduction 3 Peake as commander of the Legion. He was to remain at this post for 17 years. During World War II, Transjordan was the one Arab state that whole- heartedly cleaved to the Allied cause and stuck by Britain through thick and thin. (Glubb was later to belabour the point in his correspondence with Whitehall, often geared to eliciting additional subsidies and arms.) During the war's first months the Legion, under British auspices, was expanded from a desert gendarmerie into a small, mechanized army and in spring and summer 1941 it participated in the crushing of the pro- Axis government of Rashid `Ali al Ghilani in Baghdad and in the Brit- ish conquest of Vichy-controlled Syria. It was Glubb's first taste of war in a senior command position and the Legion became the only Arab army to gain combat experience in World War II. After Iraq and Syria, the Legion was used by Britain's Middle East Command to guard and garrison strategic sites and bases around the Middle East. Immediately following the war, and until May 1948, units of the Legion were sec- onded to the British Army in Palestine and deployed guarding bases and other installations around the country. In 1948, during the first Arab-Israeli War, Glubb led the Legion, with considerable success, in its occupation of the West Bank and East Jeru- salem and in its battles against the Haganah, and later, the Israel De- fence Forces (IDF). He remained in command of the Legion during 1949-56, years marked by sporadic Israeli-Arab border warfare and by fear of Israeli conquest of the West Bank. In March 1956, under pres- sure from Arab nationalists and republicans, King Hussein, Abdullah's grandson and Jordan's ruler since 1953, peremptorily dismissed Glubb and sent him packing back to England. He never again visited Jordan. He spent the following three decades, in retirement, writing volumes of memoirs, political analysis, a biography of Muhammad, and popular histories about recent and not so recent Middle Eastern history. He be- came a born-again Christian (he served as president of the Deanery As- sociation of the Church of England's Children Society) and published The Way of Love, Lessons from a Long Life (Hodder & Stoughton, Lon- don, 1974), a mystical, Christian work. He died on 17 March 1986 at his home in Mayfield in Sussex. Glubb was a major player in the Middle East between 1930 and 1956. As deputy commander of the Transjordan Arab Legion, he helped con- solidate the emirate and its borders. Subsequently, as the Legion’s com- mander, he led a detachment of his troops in support of the British Army in its conquest of Iraq and Syria in 1941, when Allied military fortunes 4 The Road to Jerusalem: Glubb Pasha, Palestine and the Jews around the globe were at a low ebb. And in 1948, he led the Legion in its finest hour to a limited victory in the first Arab-Israeli war. This suc- cess, due largely to Glubb’s competent preparations and to his more than competent leadership, radically transformed the kingdom’s geographic and demographic contours, with far-reaching implications for the re- gion’s states and peoples during the following two decades, and, in some important ways, beyond. During the following eight years, Glubb continued to command the Legion as, in effect, through a system of military governors, the police and the Jordanian intelligence service (all parts of the Legion), it ruled the West Bank and sporadically battled the Israelis along its borders. In Amman, the Legion constituted the Hashemite regime's main prop; in December 1955-January 1956, indeed, it sustained the monarchy in an hour of grave internal crisis. By all accounts, Glubb stood through the crisis like a rock while most of Jordan’s politicians lost their heads or nerve. The 1949-56 period, marked by cycles of Arab infiltration into Israel and Israeli retaliatory raiding into Jordan (and the Gaza Strip), was to set patterns of behaviour, on both sides, that were to characterize Israeli- Arab relations for decades. Glubb's wise handling of the Legion (and cool thinking in the royal palace in Amman) during those years probably helped defer Israel’s conquest of the West Bank until 1967. Besides Glubb's role in the formation of modern Jordan and in the Is- raeli-Arab conflict, he commands interest as one of the last - and cer- tainly the most influential - of Britain's ‘orientalist’ corps of officers and officials who stirred the Middle Eastern pot between the First World War and the debacle of Suez in 1956. His story - as well as the policies he helped fashion and the interactions he engaged in - tells us a great deal about a curious sort of ‘white man's burden’/Arab-enamoured Eng- lishman as well as something about Britain's ascendant and then declin- ing role in the Middle East. Throughout his years in Jordan, Glubb fed Whitehall - the War, Colo- nial, and Foreign offices - directly and indirectly with information and analyses which went into the shaping of British Middle East policy. By and large, his presentation of facts was respected, sometimes even ad- mired, as was the fertility of his mind, which churned out a steady stream of interpretations and solutions to a variety of problems. But he also, at times, tended to exaggeration and alarmism, letting his fears run away with him. As John Beith of the Foreign Office minuted on one of