The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty

by Ilan Pappe

  Shortly before the outbreak of the war, Hussein al-Husayni ran again for the mayoralty, this time making skillful use of the local press to broadcast his sense of responsibility for the public. He was one of the leading reformers of the family. The newspaper Al-Quds published the praises of Hussein Hashim Effendi al-Husayni (his full title), who walked about the city streets and markets and concerned himself with public sanitation, much like a modern-day mayor with public relations in mind. According to that report, he personally supervised the mending of potholes in the roads and the quality of the water supply.22

  The post of mayor was periodically filled by Hussein’s brother Abd al-Salih and his relative Said. The latter – mentioned earlier in connection with his parliamentary career – was the better known of the two and served as mayor of Jerusalem between 1902 and 1906, when he was in his mid-twenties. (The term ‘notables’ should not be interpreted as meaning ‘elders’.) Said was the most dynamic of the Husaynis in pioneering activities for Arab nationalism. After Shukri’s decline, it was Said’s work in the parliament along with the mayoralty that also made him the most political of the Husaynis.

  During the summer holidays, the students Jamil and Mustafa III (a scion of the Tahiri branch) returned home and met at Said’s house, where they found warm support for their views. A man of the in-between generation, Said encouraged their new national outlook. ‘We Arabs are more than half the population of the empire, so Arabic should be the language of common usage and schooling,’ he maintained. Together they read the speeches of Talat Pasha, one of the leaders of the Young Turks, as reported in Al-Aqdam, in which he rejected the idea of Arab nationalism.23

  Said supported the idea of Arab nationalism as enthusiastically as the younger men. He too joined the secret organization Al-Fata, which became the vanguard of the national movement. This group gradually attracted educated Muslims and Christians who wanted to break with the Ottoman Empire. Said was introduced to it by the Syrian friends of the Husaynis, the younger members of the famous al-Azm family. Another member was Ali al-Nashashibi, who apparently joined most of the associations, public or secret, that cropped up between 1908 and 1914.24

  Shukri al-Husayni was horrified by this mutinous movement and tried to persuade Said to support the attempts in Egypt to create a comprehensive pan-Arab national movement that would campaign for decentralization – that is, the preservation of the loose framework of the empire combined with cultural and administrative autonomy in the Arab regions. Although Shukri supported the Turks, in 1912 he approved of the Egyptian group that called itself the Decentralization Party, which he felt was anti-British rather than committed to pan-Arab independence from Turkey. Shukri’s chief concern was to support any entity that resisted Western penetration into the Arab Middle East. He had read about the Egyptian group in the papers that reached Jerusalem or heard about it from young al-Hajj Amin, who was studying at al-Azhar with Sheikh Rashid Rida, who was also involved with the Decentralization Party.25

  Most of Shukri’s contemporaries in the family did not share his hostility to Europe and all it stood for, and they were especially reluctant to adopt a strong anti-British stance. For example, like many of his companions in Al-Fata, Said was sympathetic to the British, whom he regarded as potential allies. He was an Anglophile who spoke excellent English – and no wonder, as he had spent much of his adult life among the residents of the American Colony.

  Having noted the various routes by which members of the Husayni family reached the idea of nationalism – whether in reaction to Istanbul’s forcible Turkification or inspired by the ideas of certain Greek Orthodox individuals or sheikhs like Rashid Rida – we should mention George Antonius’ argument that American missionaries had contributed much to the national thinking of Arab notables in Syria, Lebanon and Palestine. It stands to reason that all the Husaynis who had come in contact with the people of the American Colony had been exposed to the enticing vision of the American dream of liberty and progress and been inspired by it. Nevertheless, though the group of young men who would form the backbone of the Syrian and Lebanese national movement did learn much from the American missionaries, the most important teachers in the formative years of the Husaynis, who would lead the Palestinian national movement, were local men.

  These future leaders had their world shaped at an early age by the teachers of the kuttab, the Qur’anic school. The school of Sheikh Lulu stood at Bab al-Amud (the Nablus Gate), and the first lesson was devoted to the history of the gate. The children heard that in ancient times a column had stood in front of the gate that served as the epicenter from which distances to other parts of the world were measured, proving the universal centrality of Jerusalem. Some were taught by Sheikh Rihan, whose school was also nearby. But the best-loved teacher was Hassan Nur al-Din. He was seventy years old and had never raised his voice or hand to his pupils, but rather led them gently through their childhood via the sacred texts.26

  From the infant school the children passed to secular schools. There local Christian teachers – rather than American missionaries – ‘nationalized’ their outlook. Three of these teachers stood out: Khalil al-Sakakini, Zurayk Nakhla and Khalil Baydas, who influenced a whole generation of young Muslim and Christian Palestinians. With his thick beard and great nose and severe gaze, Zurayk Bey had a striking appearance. He was a Lebanese who had come to Jerusalem in 1889 at the request of Anglican missionaries to manage their store of religious books. In 1892 he became headmaster of the Gobat boys’ primary school on Mount Zion, which later became the English College and which most of the Husaynis growing up during the Hamidi period attended.

  One can still visit the school today. If you ignore a no entry sign on your right when you ascend towards the Jaffa Gate in the Old City of Jerusalem and follow the forbidden turn alongside the old Ottoman wall through the Citadel, on the mountain’s slope looking west lies the old Gobat School. Today it is an American college, and amongst the beautiful buildings left behind by the Anglicans, modern-day Americans have planted posters supporting the Greater Israel idea and a Zionist Jerusalem, which would not have shamed the most ultra-right Zionist settler movement in Israel.

  As mentioned, Samuel Gobat was an Anglican bishop who built a boys’ school there in the mid-nineteenth century. The Gobat School became the main preparatory school for the Palestinian elite. Gobat came to Palestine, as Americans still do today, because he believed that the return of the Jews would precipitate the Second Coming of the Messiah and the unfolding apocalypse of the ‘end times’. Unlike his successors, however, Gobat fell in love with the local population and helped tie them into the global educational system. In a way, he forsook his missionary task for the sake of granting them a more universal education. His efforts helped the embryonic Palestinian national movement to emerge.

  When Zurayk was headmaster and the Husaynis were studying there, the language of tuition at the school was Arabic, which prepared the students for higher studies. They also studied arithmetic, algebra, geometry and biology. Zurayk taught Arabic but did not confine himself to grammar and syntax. He told his students about the great Arab heritage, and together they read passages selected from the glorious periods of Arab history. This charismatic man so appealed to them that they were drawn to listen to him even when he was among adults. Al-mu‘alim (the teacher) he was called by all and sundry, including graybeards, because of his renown as a scholar. He used to invite some of his students to his house, where they would sit and listen to the gatherings of Jerusalem notables, including Mayor Hussein al-Husayni. In times to come, Zurayk Nakhla would be regarded as one of the pioneers of the revived modern Arabic.

  The Husayni family had close relations with the teacher Khalil al-Sakakini, who had been Zurayk’s student at the Anglican Mission in Jerusalem.27 Always meticulous in his dress, a man of noble qualities and courteous manner, he was widely learned and would be the subject of future writings. He had studied in Britain and the United States in his youth, and his command of the En
glish language was impressive. He returned to Palestine directly after the Young Turks’ new constitution was published in 1908, and began to work as a journalist and teacher. That year he opened a private school in Jerusalem, the Ottoman Constitutional School, where he sought to inculcate Arabic language and culture but with reverence for the new constitutional empire that reformers in Istanbul wished to build. He combined his particularist activity on behalf of his Greek Orthodox community with work for the emergent national movement. One of his favorite students was Raja’i al-Husayni, the son of Said, who used to come to his house during the summer holidays for private tuition in Arabic language and literature. Like others of his generation of Husaynis, Raja’i studied with all three teachers mentioned.28

  Khalil Baydas was born in Nazareth, where he attended the Greek Orthodox school. A charismatic teacher, he told his pupils that he had been a very mischievous boy and was subjected to severe physical punishment. His father died when he was five, and he was brought up by his grandmother after his mother remarried. In 1886 the Russians opened a school in Nazareth and invited Khalil to teach in it. Six years later, he was appointed supervisor of the Orthodox schools in Palestine and Syria. He spent two years in Homs and various places in Lebanon, and in 1908 he arrived in Haifa. The new Ottoman constitution prompted him to launch a scientific-literary magazine called Al-Nafais (Pearls), a fairly professional publication that came to be widely distributed through the Arabic-speaking world. When a council was created that year to manage the affairs of the Orthodox communities in Palestine and Jordan, his magazine’s popularity led to Khalil being chosen as the representative of northern Palestine. Consequently, he resigned his position as headmaster in Haifa and moved to Jerusalem. Khalil would later become known for publishing the best of Russian literature – chiefly Tolstoy – in Arabic.29

  These teachers promoted a more secular worldview among the mayoral sub-branch within the Tahiri Husaynis – a branch based on the post of mufti, but which had an important presence among the Husayni mayors of Jerusalem. Both Nakhla and Sakakini respected and liked Mayor Hussein al-Husayni, whose sons they taught,30 and the three men would sit together in the afternoons in Anaste’s café. The Greek’s café and theater were well-known Jerusalem institutions located on the upper floor of a building just outside the city wall near the Jaffa Gate. It was there, beside the mangal (the urn on which coffee was kept heated and the coal for the nargileh was prepared), that the three discussed an idea that would effect a profound change in the political life of Palestinian society: the creation of a Muslim-Christian association.31

  The Christian teachers felt that the Tahiri branch of the family, notably its secular members, differed from the other Muslim families and would resist the attempt of the religious leaders (including some members of the Umari branch) to create a local Arab national association dominated by Islamic scholars. Such a move would have led to further divisions between Muslims and Christians. But the idea of Christian-Muslim unity would fully take shape only after British forces clearly defined the boundaries of the country called Palestine and His Majesty’s Government gave the Jews a right to the land. That was when the Muslim-Christian Association (MCA) became the foundation of Palestinian nationalism in Mandatory Palestine.

  CONFRONTING ZIONISM

  The ‘nationalization’ of the Husaynis cannot be understood without putting Zionism in the picture. While contending with the impact of the Young Turks, many of the Husaynis wondered about the significance of the ongoing Zionist-Jewish immigration. Their interest in this new phenomenon suggests that the heads of the family had come to realize that their social position obliged them to look beyond their narrow family interests. Or, to put it more bluntly, the family now had political ambitions on a scale unimaginable during early Ottoman times. We have seen that their attitudes towards Zionism at its inception varied from individual to individual, depending on their respective positions. That of the mufti was naturally the most hostile. It should be emphasized, however, that once they understood that Zionism was a real political movement with a large following and one that was rapidly acquiring land, properties and positions, the differences in their attitudes towards it disappeared. They all saw it as an imperialist-colonialist movement whose one purpose was to rob the Palestinians of their country. The history of the Palestinian national movement is full of vain efforts to put an end to Zionism and occasional attempts to blunt its impact by negotiation. But no one, not even the movement’s founders, imagined how Zionism would develop or what its true nature would be.

  The Palestinians’ failure to understand Zionism’s dangerous potential was due in part to their tendency to regard it as a component of a familiar phenomenon, that of the European powers’ efforts to colonize Palestine. And no wonder – the Zionists, like the Europeans before them, advanced economic projects and settled in well-defined colonies (at this stage the movement closely resembled that of the German Templars). It is only in hindsight that we perceive that it was a different phenomenon: another national group in the process of formation through the colonization of Palestine, and with the aid of European colonialism; a settler project that focused as years went by on the dispossession of the indigenous population and the takeover of the land, or at least most of it. This colonialist nationalism had sprung from nothing – at least so far as the Palestinians were concerned – and concentrated all its efforts and hopes in survival. To begin with, its avowed aim was to save as many Jews as possible by gathering them in Palestine, and when this failed, the Zionists devoted their efforts to strengthening and expanding the small Jewish community that had already taken hold in Palestine. The most moderate Zionist conception of the Palestinian reality was that the Arab inhabitants could, in the words of the rabbi of Memel, leader of religious Zionism in Germany, ‘move a little’. If they did not, ‘we’ll hit them on the head and make them move’. The Palestinians would have to decide how to respond to the blow.32

  During the Hamidi period it was not easy to distinguish between Zionist fantasies and reality, but in the time of the Young Turks the appearance of seven Zionist colonies provoked real agitation. The newspapers voiced it. First came the press from Egypt and Beirut, which was read by some of the notables and whose contents presumably spread by word of mouth in the cafés, office courts and the like. Later, reports appeared in the newspaper Filastin, founded in Jaffa in 1909 by the Greek Orthodox Isa al-Isa, and in its competitor, Najib Nassar’s Al-Karmil, also under Greek Orthodox ownership. Thanks to all of these, people who had never met a Zionist heard about the movement. The distribution of these newspapers was quite small, but they reached those who saw themselves as the leaders of the Jerusalem sanjaq, or of the two southern districts of the vilayet of Beirut (i.e. Nablus and Acre) – that is to say, the territory that would later be defined, to some extent because of Zionism, as Palestine.

  A serious discussion about Zionism took place in the winter of 1910 at Ismail’s house. As previously noted, this was a significant year because of the elections for the mayoralty. The winter of 1910 resembled that of 1855, when the Husaynis first encountered the famous Jewish philanthropist Moses Montefiore. This time they were confronted with a different kind of Jewish presence. Once again snow fell and piled up in mounds, and there was nothing to do but sit at home and discuss current events. At this time, Al-Karmil was publishing portions of Theodore Herzl’s book The Jewish State as well as some of the resolutions adopted by the Zionist Congress in Basel. Being a parliamentary representative, Said was the most vocal against Zionism. Hussein, the mayor, was the most diffident – possibly because he owed his election to the Jewish vote, since the Association of Ottoman Jews, headed by Dr Levy of the board of IPAC in Jerusalem, had campaigned for him.33 But Hussein’s position was apparently more principled than pragmatic, as became evident some years later when he defended his opinion that Zionism did not represent any danger. He wrote in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Aqdam:

  I see no danger in the Zionist movement, because
it is not a political but a settlement movement, and I am certain that no sensible Zionist would even conceive of the idea of creating a Jewish government in Palestine, as people claim. The Zionists have come to this country to live in it. They are educated and cultured people. They have no grandiose ambitions, and they are united among themselves. It is neither just nor humane for us to hate and resent this nation.

  Events during the British Mandate would hardly reinforce this view in the minds of the Husaynis or of the Palestinians in general. And Hussein did show some caution:

  Nevertheless, we must keep our eye on them. If we go on as we do and they go on as they do, all our landed property will pass to them. Our fellah is poor and helpless, and a poor man may sell his property to save his life.

  Time would show that the fellah resisted Zionism fairly stolidly, whereas the landowners, including some of the Husaynis, could not resist the financial inducement. Hussein called for a law that would limit the sale of land to the Zionists.34

  As noted before, the attitude towards the Zionist settlers was part of the overall confrontation with the Europeans. They appeared as a force during the time of the Young Turks, while Jerusalem was swamped with Christian pilgrims, as though it were altogether a Christian city. It especially lost its multi-faith character during the Christian holidays, above all during the Easter season.35 Both sides of the Via Dolorosa and nearby alleys were packed with hundreds of people watching the procession. Pilgrims filled the balconies, windowsills and roofs, and wooden boxes, each holding some twenty people, dangled seven to ten meters above the crowd, adding to the overcrowding. The procession was like a human snake five or six kilometers long.