The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty

by Ilan Pappe

  During the final years of Abd al-Hamid’s reign, which ended in 1909, the European influence was so dominant that the sub-district of Nazareth was detached from the district of Acre and attached to the Jerusalem sanjaq, thus putting all the Christian holy places under one umbrella and ‘facilitating the services to the pilgrims’. But near the end of his reign, the sultan restored Nazareth to the district of Acre.47

  The process of economic and technological transformation driven by the foreign presence in the city accelerated in the early twentieth century. European influence was visible everywhere, and the increasing trade with Europe affected the patterns of life in towns and villages throughout Palestine. The new destination of the external trade and its growth in the three districts that would later form the British Mandate of Palestine – Jerusalem, Nablus and Acre (the last two being part of the Vilayet of Beirut, with its capital in Sidon) – would promote a certain economic unity among them. These districts did not need to use the Port of Beirut, and their external commerce could operate from within their territory. Foreign trade meant an increase of cash crops, with cultivators turning into hired laborers and agriculture being modernized. In the city, the effects could be seen in the growing number of foreign banks, in the postal services and in insurance companies.48

  Though the Husaynis became wealthier in the early twentieth century, they were not affected by the capitalist trend and did not join the world of finance. The capitalization of Jerusalem’s economy sustained three principal groups – Jerusalemites of Greek and Italian origin who operated energetically and accumulated fresh capital, a small number of Jewish settlers who arrived at the beginning of the century and the German Templers.49

  But if the rules of the capital market did not directly affect the Husaynis, other European imports did reshape their world. For example, the installation of a clock tower over the Jaffa Gate, one of the many towers built in honor of the sultan throughout the empire, revolutionized the perception of time and space among the people in Jerusalem and elsewhere in Palestine. According to the intriguing analysis of Benedict Anderson, a scholar of nationality, the clock caused people to relate differently to the reality around them and gave rise to a new political-cultural relationship that eventually became known as nationality. Until the end of the First World War, younger people in Jerusalem set their daily timetable by the clock tower, while the older people continued to live by a dual timetable – a Western one when required to fix a precise time, and the traditional one determined by prayers and meal times.

  The more traditional scholars of Arab nationalism agree that the encounter with Europe catalyzed the formation of national identity. It was a complex encounter that included several economic aspects and the advent of new technology which enabled speedy physical access to information and new places and made it possible for people to compare cultural worlds in terms of values. For the Palestinians in general, and the Husaynis in particular, this phenomenon was personified by a new kind of Jew, the Zionist.

  The Zionists saw themselves as a national movement that acted as a colonialist project, and they therefore claimed ownership over Palestine and attempted to occupy it by force. This new actor on the ground obliged the Palestinians to think in a totally different way about their own survival and existence. But it was too early to realize this. At this stage, what Zionism did seem to trigger on the Palestinians’ side was an impulse to sharpen their local national identity – and here the Husaynis had a major role to play.

  FIRST ENCOUNTERS WITH ZIONISM

  Individual Husaynis encountered Zionism in various circumstances and reacted in a variety of ways. It is hard to know to what extent the association of the family with the pre-Zionist Jewish elite in Jerusalem affected its attitude towards Zionism when it appeared. Apparently it had little or no effect, just as there was little or no connection between the world of the old Jewish community in Palestine and the new world that the Zionist immigrants were trying to create.

  The first Husayni to confront the new phenomenon was Mufti Tahir II, who found himself at the forefront of the struggle against Zionism in its earliest manifestations. Like other Muslim clerics in the empire, he viewed the Zionist movement as part of the concerted Western effort to undermine Ottoman rule in the shrinking empire. Already in 1882, these clerics prevailed on Sultan Abd al-Hamid II to pass a law banning Jewish immigration. From the day the law was passed – even before he became mufti in 1883 – and for the rest of his life, Tahir cooperated with the Ottoman religious establishment and, working like a one-man research institute, studied Zionism’s nature, meaning and aims. It was at his initiative that the authorities in Istanbul decided in 1889 to limit Jewish immigration and permit foreign Jews to spend no more than three months in Palestine, and then for religious purposes only.

  Tahir was thus in the vanguard of the anti-immigration front. The issue of land was more problematic, at least in the first decade of the Zionist presence. It is doubtful he succeeded in persuading his kinsmen of the importance of this issue, especially as he himself sold some land – though not a great deal – in the vicinity of Jerusalem to Zionist groups.

  On the other hand Salim, who said nothing about immigration, took his time when asked to sell land or to approve land transactions in the city council, which he headed. In 1890 the council first discussed the possibility of Jewish immigrants settling in the city and the desire of some of them to purchase plots of land. As usual, the council’s summer session dealt with the population figures, and it discovered that a full third of the registered inhabitants were Jews – a marked increase over the number reported in previous sessions.50 The city began to take on a Jewish character, at least according to the Ottoman records of the time. During the Hamidi reign, Jews who owned properties and houses paid taxes, and so every annual report revealed the demographic change in the city. Salim was convinced that this was not accidental and that it might indicate a plot to take over the city. Together with the Jerusalem notables, he organized a petition to the authorities to forbid the purchase of land by Jews and to the sultan to issue a firman to that effect.51 A year later the sultan did issue such an order, but pressure from the British government made it ineffectual.

  But while Salim believed that such action was necessary, he did not apparently see Zionist immigration as something new. He had become accustomed to the growing foreign presence in the city since the Crimean War and tended to view it as a general European scheme to take control of the city, a drive that had begun with the first consuls. His was not, therefore, a specifically anti-Jewish attitude. The family as a whole and Salim in particular had good relations with the Jewish community, notably in the economic sector. Before becoming mayor, Salim had had commercial and real-estate dealings with some Jerusalem Jews and business associations with several, primarily the Rokah family. In the 1870s he and Yitzhak Rokah were partners in a hotel in Bab al-Wad. Rokah had leased it in 1877 with Salim’s help (that is, the lease was registered in Salim’s name) and managed it, and the profits were divided between them. These profits derived from the taxes levied on travelers from Jaffa to Jerusalem and were endorsed on the tax receipts. This partnership persisted until the opening of the Jaffa–Jerusalem railway.52 (The hotel, by the way, is still there along Route 1 connecting Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, just as you begin the ascent to the city.)

  When Salim became mayor of Jerusalem amid an influx of Jews into the municipality, this did not damage these relations but in fact improved them, if only because the Jewish vote was needed. In the municipal elections of 1892, for example, 700 of the enfranchised Muslims cast their votes, as well as 300 Christians and 200 Jews, who among them elected ten representatives to the city council.53 Salim’s first mayoralty had been by appointment, but in 1892 the post was obtained by election, and he needed the Jewish votes. (Both systems were used irregularly until the end of the century.) Then, as now, votes were won by responding to the demands of the various communities. One of the main demands of the Jewish community w
as the enlargement of the space in front of the Western Wall. The Husayni family were guardians of important religious properties whose sale or lease could have eased the crowding at the Wall. In 1887 Mustafa al-Husayni agreed to sell to Nissim Bakhar and Edmond de Rothschild part of the Abu Maidian religious property. Named after a Maghrebi saint, this property was under the Husaynis’ guardianship and included the Western Wall area. But the deal fell through for unknown reasons.54

  The Husaynis were able to respond favorably to the less far-reaching demands of the Jewish community and thus obtain their votes for the mayoralty. For example, Salim acceded to the request of three Jewish notables to pave the Western Wall square so that some sewage work being carried out nearby would not sully the Jewish holy site.55 In fact, this was the last time that the Jewish presence at the Wall was treated as a communal-religious, rather than national, issue. In 1897, when the Baron de Rothschild wished to buy the Western Wall square from the Muslim religious authority and the mayor almost agreed, both branches of the family became alarmed, especially the sheikh al-haram, Bashir al-Husayni, the son of Abd al-Salam II, who managed to block the sale. The Husaynis’ ability to do so was due to the fact that the purchase of lands required the approval of the city council as well as the governor.56

  It would seem that Salim did not distinguish between the influx of Jews and the growing foreign influence in Jerusalem. He regarded Jewish immigration as another aspect of the same problem. The British consul John Dixon reassured him. He had seen the correspondence between Beirut and Istanbul, which stated that very few Jews were arriving in Beirut and Haifa. Still, he admitted that it was extremely easy for a Jew to enter Palestine: ‘Five pounds are enough to ensure admission to a Jew of any nationality whatsoever’ (most were Austrian, Russian and American nationals). The influence of those countries’ local consuls meant that the authorities could not bar the entry of many of the Jews. Nevertheless, from time to time the Ottomans managed to put obstacles in their path, as when the 1880 decree forbidding Jewish visitors to stay longer than three months became law in 1901. After a while, Jews who were British nationals could evade the law because their passports did not indicate their Jewish origin. In this way, the British emancipatory spirit assisted the movement that fought against Jewish assimilation in Europe.

  An individual’s reaction to Zionism often depended on his official position. The mayor was ambivalent; the men of commerce and finance, far from opposing it, made business deals with the newcomers, while the Tahiri branch linked Jewish immigration to the European challenge to the city’s Muslim sanctity. Indeed, it was the British consul James Finn, not a popular figure in the Husaynis’ historical memory, who connected the arrival of the Jews with the restoration of Crusader glory. It is no wonder, then, that Mufti Tahir II led the opposition to this immigration, with a special emphasis on the sale of land, not only within the family but among the Jerusalem notables as a whole. He knew that possession of land indicated a prolonged stay and a claim of ownership, whereas immigration without settlement was transient pilgrimage. There is no point in searching for a non-national motive for this opposition to the permanent settlement of foreigners in your country. While it is true that it arises – as the scholar of nationality Anthony Smith has shown – from the desire to preserve the purity of the tribe, or the religious or geographic community, it is equally true that it is especially forceful when it bears a national character, as Smith’s colleague Benedict Anderson argues.57

  Tahir al-Husayni II was the first national mufti to react to Jewish immigration. At the time, there were half a million inhabitants in the territory that would later be demarcated as the British Mandate for Palestine – 80 percent Muslim and only 5 percent Jews – yet Tahir saw every additional Jew as a threat to the holy city. He was especially incensed that the foreign consuls were unreservedly helping Jewish immigrants to buy land by enabling them to do so as European nationals unconstrained by the laws of the Ottoman Empire. Thus the Zionist presence began to establish itself in Palestine despite the Ottoman government’s hostility.

  In 1897 the government responded to Tahir’s urging and appointed a committee to examine the question of land purchases. This was the year that the First Zionist Congress was held in Basel, Switzerland. The committee recommended that strict limitations be imposed on Jewish land acquisition, and the government adopted the recommendation.

  But while Tahir was fighting to stop the process, Rabah was selling land to the highest bidder. In 1891, for example, he sold the lands of the village of Qaluniya, lying between Abu Ghosh and Jerusalem, to the founders of the Motza settlement, led by Yehoshua Yellin. We have seen how Ismail al-Husayni had abused one of the villagers, and it seems that the relations between the villagers and the Husayni family had not improved since. Not only did Rabah sell the land, he helped the Jewish buyers evade the Ottoman law under which the tract in question, categorized as uncultivated, had reverted to state property after three years and was barred from sale. Rabah purchased the land from the village headman and promptly sold it to the Jews. Twenty years earlier Yehoshua Yellin had been one of the Jewish bidders who had competed with Musa al-Husayni for some land in the valley of Jericho, but the government had stopped the Jews from buying it.

  It is difficult to determine to what extent members of the family grasped the future potential of Jewish immigration. No doubt they read the newspapers of the time and took in the insights they offered (namely that we cannot analyse how it was received only how it was produced). In 1897 the local press in Jerusalem and Gaza mentioned the opening of the Zionist Congress.58 It published a letter from Frankfurt reporting that a movement of Jews wishing to return to Palestine had been founded six months previously. The movement, which the letter said was viewed favorably by the United States, Britain and Germany, was called Zionism. It went on to say that, if given permission by the Ottoman Empire, the Zionists proposed to establish in Palestine masakin (housing) for Jews who were being persecuted in Russia, Bulgaria and Romania. They promised to develop the agriculture and industry in Palestine, reduce the number of poor people in Europe and promote trade between Europe and the Orient. A correspondent of the newspaper Al-Muqtataf al-Mufida reported that the British press was sympathetic to the idea, and stated that there was no reason for the Ottoman Empire to reject such support from Europe or for Europe to object to a reduction of its poor population. The Europeans believed that the Jews, being utterly loyal to the West, would spread its culture and expand its trade and industry.

  This extended report came in response to frequent questions from readers in the Arab press about the significance of Jewish immigration. An editorial noted that the Jews who had arrived so far had not fulfilled the above promises. While they had indeed developed trade and industry, they had failed badly in agriculture – and no wonder, since they were not farming people. But the principal failure was that the Jewish capitalists were doing nothing to help. ‘We local people’, the editorial concluded, ‘must hope that the situation of the Jews in Europe will improve.’59

  The Egyptian newspaper Al-Manar was the most emphatic, calling on the local population to resist the vicious European decision to export the weakest of its peoples to Palestine. The indigenous people should rise up and fight for watan and umma (which some translate as ‘homeland’ and ‘nation’, while others argue that those concepts were far from clear at a time when the Ottoman and Classical Arabic discourse was turning into a national one). The newspaper urged its readers not to ignore the problem, but it also showed understanding for the plight of the Jews. It explained that the Jews had competed with the Europeans, which was why they were subjected to persecution. The Jews, it stated, were like the Japanese – ‘Orientals who successfully competed with Europe’ – whereas the Muslims were failing to do so, a theme that the Egyptian press had harped on repeatedly since the end of the previous century.60

  But unlike Salim and Tahir II, the grandest member of the Husayni clan, Ismail Bey, did not understand what the
fuss was all about. While some of his kinsmen were issuing public calls against the sale of land to Jews, in 1906 he himself sold an estate, a steam-driven mill and an olive press in the village Ayn Siniya, on the Jerusalem–Nablus road, to the family of Jacob Chertok, a member of the early Zionist Bilu group and the father of Israel’s future prime minister Moshe Sharett. As noted above, Ismail had inherited his father’s extensive properties, including the Ayn Siniya land and more.61

  To begin with, Ismail’s brother Shukri regarded the Zionist issue as a purely economic one and offered the Zionists land near Petah Tikvah and Hulda. Representatives of the Jewish Agency used to visit him at his office in Istanbul, where he was a high official in the Ottoman Department of Education. He spent most of his life in the imperial capital and was a tower of strength for the family during the dramatic transition from Ottoman rule to the centrist national government of the Young Turks.62 He was there when Theodore Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, came to see the sultan, and heard that Herzl proposed buying Palestine for billions, though Abd al-Hamid II refused. To Shukri this was merely an amusing anecdote, but the future mufti al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni would speak of this episode – which occurred a year after he was born – as the most decisive event for him and his family, with the exception of the Balfour Declaration.63

  The family could not tell whether Herzl was a serious person or a mountebank, since in those days there was no shortage of charlatans who presented themselves as deliverers of Judaism and Christianity. The so-called Prince Emmanuel, for example, was an eccentric Jew who asked the Husaynis to help him set up an Anglo-Zionist college. Before receiving an answer he proclaimed that he had founded the first Zionist college in Jerusalem, then vanished as suddenly and mysteriously as he had appeared.64