The British military occupation of Jerusalem, 1917–1920

Abstract

During the late nineteenth century, Jerusalem experienced a boom in tourism, but sightseeing in the Holy Land remained the reserve of the rich. With the extension of fighting into Palestine during the First World War, ordinary British soldiers were given the chance to be tourists in a land already familiar to them from the bible and crusader legends. On 9 December 1917, General Allenby marched through the Jaffa Gate and formally began the British military occupation of Jerusalem: a major propaganda coup for the British Empire. Rather than revisiting this well-studied narrative on the takeover of the city, this chapter focuses on Jerusalem as an occupied city between 1917 and 1920. There, British soldiers filled a role that was somewhere in between pilgrim, tourist and soldier. The violence and destruction of war in the Middle East could be forgotten and the Palestine campaign was memorialised as a ‘most interesting and most educating holiday.’ Using diaries, letters and memoirs, this chapter highlights how soldiers blotted out the realities of day-to-day Jerusalem in favour of an account of the re-imagined biblical Jerusalem, a city that was familiar to them and allowed them to relate their experience to their families back home.