Surrender of Jerusalem

On Sunday 9 December 1917 Jerusalem surrendered to the troops of General Sir Edmund Allenby. There was no assault and no street fighting. The day before, the British had taken the Turkish defences west of the city, and in the night its defenders had fled. In the morning the mayor, Hussein Salim al-Husseini, went out with a white flag to meet the British, carrying the Ottoman governor’s letter surrendering the city, and for several hours looked for someone willing to accept it. After four hundred years of Ottoman rule the Holy City of Christians, Jews and Muslims passed into British hands, and none of its holy places was damaged.

The city before the surrender

The war had reduced Jerusalem to destitution. Young men had been conscripted into the army, older ones into labour battalions, and the army requisitioned food. The British blockade of the coast cut off supplies by sea, in 1915 locusts destroyed the harvest, and typhus and other diseases decimated the undernourished inhabitants. Relief for the starving was organised by, among others, foreign communities such as the American Colony, which ran a soup kitchen for the poor.

From November the front drew closer to the city. After the battle of Nabi Samwil the British stood on the hills a few kilometres to the west and north-west of it, and Erich von Falkenhayn, commander of the Ottoman-German forces in Palestine, had already moved his headquarters to Nablus. The city was defended by Ali Fuad Bey’s XX Corps. Allenby did not want to fight in the city itself, and his troops were under strict orders to respect the holy places in Jerusalem and Bethlehem.

At dawn on 8 December, in pouring rain, the 60th and 74th Divisions of Lieutenant-General Sir Philip Chetwode’s XX Corps surprised the Turks in their trenches from Ein Karem to Beit Iksa and took almost all the defences west of the city, while the 53rd Division was approaching from the south along the Hebron road. The attack halted before the suburbs, but the Turkish units were already shaken. According to the British official history, panic broke out in several of them, and Ali Fuad, doubting whether he could rally them for further defence, ordered the city abandoned.

A night of evacuation

From midnight Turkish columns streamed through the suburbs, northwards along the Nablus road and eastwards along the road to Jericho. The army took all the vehicles. Many Christian and Jewish notables were ordered to walk with their families to Nablus, but in the haste of the retreat no one any longer saw to it. Before dawn the Ottoman governor (mutasarrif), Izzet Bey, left the city. He left the mayor a letter which in English translation ran roughly as follows: “Owing to the severity of the siege of the city and the suffering that this peaceful country has endured from your heavy guns, and for fear that these deadly shells will hit the holy places, we are forced to hand over the city to you through the mayor of Jerusalem, Hussein al-Husseini, in the hope that you will protect Jerusalem as we have protected it for more than five hundred years.”

By coincidence, the Jewish festival of Hanukkah, which commemorates the recovery of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Maccabees, began on the evening of 9 December. The British official history calls this coincidence fitting.

The mayor with the white flag

In the morning the mayor and a group of inhabitants went out westwards towards the British lines. According to later accounts, a bedsheet from the American Colony’s hospital served as the white flag. He was accompanied by the Colony’s Swedish photographer, Lewis Larsson. What followed the British official history calls an element of comedy in one of the most dramatic events of the war. The first British soldiers the party came upon were two cooks from the London 2/20th Battalion, Privates H. E. Church and R. W. J. Andrews, who had lost their way in the night while looking for water. They heard that the city wished to surrender and decided that this was no business of theirs. Then the mayor met two sergeants of the 2/19th Battalion, James Sedgewick and Frederick Hurcomb, who were on outpost duty. They too declined to accept the surrender. Larsson then photographed them with the mayor, one of the best-known photographs of the Palestine campaign. Next the mayor came upon two artillery majors out reconnoitring, who promised only to telephone the news to their batteries.

At last, among the first houses of the suburbs, the white flag was seen by Lieutenant-Colonel H. Bayley, commander of a field artillery brigade of the 60th Division, who had ridden ahead to choose a route for the guns. A man stepped out of the group and told him in French that the Turks had gone and that the mayor was here. He was then introduced to an Arab in European dress, who said in English: “I am the mayor of Jerusalem and I wish to surrender the city to the British general.” Bayley sent word to the commander of the 60th Division, Major-General John Shea, and sent one of his officers to the post office, which turned out to have had all its telegraph wires cut. Soon the commander of the 180th Brigade, Brigadier-General C. F. Watson, arrived. Amid the cheers of the crowd the two of them, with a small escort of gunners, rode to the Jaffa Gate. The streets of the Old City were calm, and the newcomers were greeted by delighted American women. Watson left a guard of one officer and one gunner at the gate. According to some accounts, it was he who first received from the mayor the letter and the white flag, which he afterwards kept.

The first formed unit to enter the city, however, was a party of horsemen of the Westminster Dragoons, the advance guard of the 53rd Division, which in the morning had passed through Bethlehem without a fight and at 8.45 a.m. stood beneath the walls. Then Shea, whom Chetwode had appointed to take over the city, arrived by car and formally accepted the surrender of Jerusalem in Allenby’s name. He set up his headquarters in the English ophthalmic hospital of the Order of St John on the Jaffa road.

A day in the city

The inhabitants greeted the British enthusiastically. There was some minor looting, according to the official history mainly from an excess of joy, which stopped when units of the 53rd and 60th Divisions arrived. The British occupied only the modern suburbs to the west and north. Guards were posted at the gates of the Old City, and until the ceremonial entry of the commander-in-chief no soldiers were admitted. Lieutenant-Colonel Bayley recalled the London companies marching along the Jaffa road: he had never seen such happy faces among soldiers.

Fighting was still going on at the edge of the city. The Turks held the ridge of Mount Scopus above the Nablus road and the Mount of Olives to the east. In the afternoon the London battalions drove them from the area of Sheikh Jarrah, occupied Shuafat and the hill of Tell el-Ful and repelled a Turkish counter-attack. British airmen bombed the columns retreating along the roads to Nablus and Jericho. By the evening the front already ran north and east of the city.

Significance

The British official history recalls that in its long history Jerusalem had been taken or recaptured from invaders more than thirty times, and among its conquerors it names David, Nebuchadnezzar, Alexander, Pompey, Titus, the Caliph Omar, Godfrey of Bouillon and Saladin. For the first time since the 13th century the city passed under the rule of a Christian state. For the Ottoman Empire, which within a year and a half had also lost Mecca and Baghdad, it was a painful loss of prestige in the Muslim world. For the Entente the news came at a gloomy time, after Caporetto, the disintegration of the Russian army and the counter-attack at Cambrai. The British prime minister David Lloyd George had wanted Jerusalem as a Christmas present for the nation and received it two weeks before the holiday. A little over a month earlier the British government had promised the Zionists support for a Jewish national home in Palestine, and now it was the British who would decide its fate.

The next day, 10 December, Allenby’s report of the city’s surrender was read in the House of Commons. Allenby himself announced his official entry into Jerusalem for 11 December. The mayor, Hussein al-Husseini, did not live to see the new era. He died a few weeks later, at the beginning of 1918. In 1919 Watson presented the white flag to the Imperial War Museum in London.