City of Riffraff

Abstract

Between the time of Jerusalem’s surrender to General Allenby’s victorious army by the Ottoman Governor Izzat Bey and Mayor Hussein al-Husseini (December 1917) and the commencement of the British Mandate (1920), Palestine experienced three years of administrative and legal flux.¹ Although British intentions for the country were already defined by commitments to their French allies (in the Sykes Picot Memorandum), and to the Zionist movement (as per the Balfour Declaration), these commitments did not immediately translate into clear policies on the ground. The bulk of the British military establishment in Palestine was either hostile or ambivalent towards the prospect of a Jewish national home on the grounds that it violated British promises to Sherif Hussein and his Syrian allies, or-more importantly-because it provoked Palestinian-Syrian yearning for independence and invited instability (Huneindi, 2003). But against those local administrators and field officers who were clearly opposed to a Jewish national home there stood a legion of philosemites² and supporters of Zionism, including General Storrs, military commander of Jerusalem (Segev, 2000).

This is a considerably reduced version of a longer introduction to the Memoirs of Jawhariyyeh Jawhariyyeh (Al-Quds al-Intidabiyyah fil Mudhakarat al-Jawhariyyah), 2004.

The reference here is to a number of colonial officials, including Churchill, Ashbee, and possibly Storrs, who held exotic views of European Jews, and adopted favorable attitude to the idea of “Jewish Return” to Palestine.