Jerusalem in the First World War

Jerusalem had no great military importance in the First World War, but as the Holy City of Christians, Jews and Muslims it was one of the war’s most powerful symbols. For three years it lived under Ottoman martial law, in poverty and hunger. On 9 December 1917 it surrendered to the troops of General Sir Edmund Allenby without fighting in its streets, ending four centuries of Ottoman rule. Until the autumn of 1918 it was the British base for the front that ran north of it.

A city under martial law (1914–1917)

On the eve of the war Jerusalem had about 70,000 inhabitants and was the largest city in Palestine, the seat of a district answering directly to Constantinople. It had spread far beyond the walls of the Old City, and since 1892 a railway had linked it with Jaffa. As early as August 1914, before the Ottoman Empire entered the war, martial law and general mobilisation were proclaimed in the city. Men under 45 were called up regardless of faith. Christians and Jews could buy exemption, but the fee was so high that few could afford it.

The war quickly impoverished the city. The Entente fleet closed the coast, food prices rose, and the army took whatever it could. In 1915 locusts devoured the fields, and typhus and other diseases cut down people weakened by hunger. The poorest were fed by foreign communities, among them the American Colony with its soup kitchen.

Syria, which then included Palestine, was ruled from November 1914 by Djemal Pasha, commander of the Fourth Army and an all but autocratic governor. Twice he sent troops against the Suez Canal, in 1915 and 1916, and twice he failed. On the Mount of Olives, in the Augusta Victoria building, a guesthouse for pilgrims that Emperor Wilhelm II had decided to build in 1898, the Ottoman army had its headquarters from 1914. When in 1917 the British stood before Gaza, Djemal ordered the deportation of the people of Jaffa, thousands of Jews among them.

The front beneath the walls (1917)

In the spring of 1917 the British were twice thrown back from Gaza, but London wanted Jerusalem. Prime Minister David Lloyd George saw it as a Christmas present for the nation. In June Allenby took over the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, and in the autumn his troops broke the front at Gaza and Beersheba. On 17 November they entered the Judaean Hills and, after the fighting for Nebi Samwil, stood a few kilometres from the city. Erich von Falkenhayn, commander of the Ottoman-German Yıldırım army group, had already moved his headquarters to Nablus.

Allenby did not want to fight in the city itself, and his soldiers had strict orders to spare the holy places. On 8 December, in pouring rain, General Philip Chetwode’s divisions took the Turkish trenches west of Jerusalem. In the night the defenders panicked and left by the roads to Nablus and Jericho. On the morning of 9 December the mayor, Hussein Salim al-Husseini, went out with a white flag and searched for a long time for someone who would accept his surrender. No holy place was damaged. On 11 December Allenby entered the city on foot through the Jaffa Gate, and from the steps of the citadel his proclamation of martial law and of the protection of the holy places of all three faiths was read in seven languages. For the first time since the 13th century the city was ruled by a Christian state.

The news came at a dark time for the Entente, after Caporetto and the collapse of the Russian army. For the Turks, who had lost Baghdad in March, it was another blow to their prestige. At the end of December Falkenhayn tried to retake the city, but XX Corps beat off the attack and pushed the front further north, beyond Ramallah.

Under British administration (1917–1918)

Jerusalem and the whole of occupied Palestine came under British military administration. The Sykes-Picot Agreement had envisaged an international administration for Jerusalem, and the French commissioner François Georges-Picot announced at dinner that he would set up a civil administration in the city. According to Lawrence’s colourful account, Allenby replied that in the zone of military operations the only authority was the commander-in-chief. On 11 December he was greeted at the gate by the military governor, Brigadier-General William Borton, and on 28 December 1917 Allenby gave the post to Ronald Storrs, a diplomat from Cairo. Storrs later recalled that there is no promotion after Jerusalem. A month before the city was taken, on 2 November 1917, London had issued the Balfour Declaration on a Jewish national home in Palestine, and now it ruled the country’s holiest city itself.

The city became the base of a front that ran north of it until the autumn of 1918. British headquarters took over the Augusta Victoria building. The narrow-gauge railway from Lydda was relaid to standard gauge and carried through to Jerusalem by 15 June 1918. Along it went the supplies for the troops in the Jordan Valley, opened by the capture of Jericho, and for the raids across the river, such as the raid on Amman. The city also served to deceive the enemy: before the Battle of Megiddo rumours were spread of troops concentrating near Jerusalem, and its largest hotel was requisitioned as headquarters.

After the victorious offensive that Allenby opened on 19 September 1918, the occupied lands were divided into three zones of military administration. Jerusalem fell in the southern zone, Palestine in practice, under a British administrator, Major-General A. W. Money. Military administration was the prelude to the mandate: in 1920 the San Remo conference entrusted Palestine to Britain with the duty of putting the Balfour Declaration into effect.