Allenby Captures Jerusalem
Allenby entered Jerusalem on foot on 11 December 1917, after the city had been surrendered by its mayor with a bedsheet. The Ottoman garrison withdrew during the night of 8 December, and the mayor went out the next morning with a white flag to find someone to give the city to. He surrendered it, by various accounts, to two cooks looking for eggs, then to a sergeant, then to an artillery officer, before a general could be found to accept it properly. The campaign that produced it had taken a year. Two attacks on Gaza in early 1917 had failed, Allenby replaced Murray in June, and the third attempt in October went round the inland flank at Beersheba, taken by an Australian light horse charge that reached the wells before they could be destroyed. Jerusalem had been under Muslim rule almost continuously since 1187 and Ottoman rule since 1517. Allenby dismounted at the Jaffa Gate and walked in, deliberately, to avoid any resemblance to the Kaiser's mounted entry in 1898 and any suggestion of a crusade; his proclamation guaranteed the holy places of all three religions and was read out in seven languages. Lloyd George had asked for the city as a Christmas present for the British people, in those words. The Balfour Declaration had been issued five weeks earlier, and the Sykes-Picot agreement had been published by the Bolsheviks two weeks before that, so the population knew roughly what was coming. Britain administered Palestine for the next thirty years.
- Year: 1917 CE
- Category: Military
