The Gazette and the 1952 revolution (256) The revolution and pacts (87) In the House of Commons (iii) The King David Hotel Massacre i- A Hotel That Hosted Royalty
In 1929, Palestine Hotels Ltd. purchased 4.5 acres (18,000 m2) on Jerusalem's Julian's Way, today King David Street. Half the construction costs were paid by Ezra Mosseri, an affluent Egyptian Jewish banker and director of the National Bank of Egypt, and another 46% by other wealthy Cairo Jews. The approximately 4% remaining was paid by the National Bank, which purchased 693 shares of the company between 1934 and 1943, according to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. From its earliest days, the King David Hotel hosted royalty: the dowager empress of Persia, queen mother Nazli of Egypt and King Abdullah I of Jordan stayed at the hotel, and three heads of state forced to flee their countries took up residence there: King Alfonso XIII of Spain, forced to abdicate in 1931, Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, driven out by the Italians in 1936, and King George II of Greece who set up his government in exile at the hotel after the Nazi occupation of his country in 1942. During the British Mandate, the southern wing of the hotel was turned into a British administrative and military headquarters. The Irgun chose it as a target after British troops invaded the Jewish Agency June 29, 1946, and confiscated large quantities of documents. At about the same time, more than 2,500 Jews from all over Palestine were placed under arrest. The information about Jewish Agency operations, including intelligence activities in Arab countries, was taken to the King David Hotel. A week later, news of a massacre of 40 Jews in a pogrom in Poland reminded the Jews of Palestine how Britain's restrictive immigration policy had condemned thousands to death. The Irgun had been committing armed reprisals against Arabs for some time. It began directing its ‘operations' (which included bombings, sabotage, and acts of violence) at the British Mandatory government. This followed the infamous ‘White Paper' (also known as the MacDonald White Paper). The paper was a statement of official British policy on the region. Among other things, it proposed limitation of Jewish immigration and after five years no immigration without Arab consent. This angered and outraged Zionists who were, in essence, being told that they would not have a fully Jewish state that they felt they had been promised and to which they felt they were obligated (with the restrictions, there could be no clear Jewish majority population). On May 4, 1948, when the British flag was lowered, the building became a Jewish stronghold. At the end of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the hotel found itself overlooking “no-man's land" on the armistice line that divided Jerusalem into Israeli and Jordanian territory. It was purchased by the Dan Hotels chain in 1958. The film Exodus was shot at the hotel in 1960. sami.elshahed@yahoo.com
