The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty

by Ilan Pappe

  No wonder the Zionists and Europeans appeared to be conspiring. That year the Nabi Musa procession threatened to erupt into violence. It began on 10 April 1910, and before the celebrants returned from Jericho a scandal rocked the Muslim community in Jerusalem. The immediate cause was the activities of a British archaeological expedition that was digging under the Temple Mount. Under the agreement made with the sheikh al-haram, the expedition’s workmen did their digging in the small hours of the night, when the outer gates were kept locked for four or five hours. They had been working for the past month when a rumor suddenly spread that they were searching for King Solomon’s sword and gold and that the excavation had been approved by the government. The rumor reached the Nabi Musa procession, led by Mufti Kamil al-Husayni, who made a fiery speech – though this was unusual for him, oration was an art his father had excelled in and a talent that his brother al-Hajj Amin would emulate. Kamil accused the governor of Jerusalem of taking part in an anti-Muslim conspiracy with the British infidels to turn the Haram into an archaeological site. The festive mood was shattered, the celebrants turned back and the procession was transformed into a mass protest. Kamil and his family received a lesson in popular resistance. Under their pressure the district governor, the district commander and the sheikh al-haram demanded a commission of inquiry. Their demand was met, and calm returned to the city after the protest of Mayor Hussein al-Husayni was formally noted.36

  The debate about Zionism continued in 1911, when the power of the Jews in the districts of Palestine and Damascus was increasingly discussed in print. The notables were uncertain about their number – it appears that at the outbreak of World War I there were in Palestine some 85,000 Jews, including the old community and Zionist immigrants. The Husaynis relied on the data obtained by the parliamentary representative from Damascus, the editor of the daily Al-Qabas, Shukri al-Asali, who tabled a question about the precise number of Jews in the sanjaq. Getting the answer did not take long – 100,000.37

  One of the rumors that spread in Jerusalem and that was quoted in the papers referred to the influence of the new Jews in the Young Turks’ power centers. The rumor originated among Arab students in Istanbul who heard that there were some Jews in the new Ottoman army’s high command who wielded great influence over policies. The Husayni family had at least two sons studying in the capital – the Umari Jamil and the Tahiri Mustafa III, who together with others organized the Arab students against Jewish immigration and land purchases.38 But most of the family read about the rumors in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram. Under the heading ‘Zionists in the Ottoman Parliament’, the paper discussed the influence of Jewish members of parliament on the government’s Palestine policies. Worst of all, the paper said, was Sheikh al-Islam Jawdat Pasha, a Jewish convert believed to be pro-Zionist, who was meeting European bankers and, like Herzl, offering Jewish money for support for the Zionist enterprise. The paper also expressed the suspicion that Talat Pasha, the minister of the interior, was likewise pro-Zionist. It stated that the minister had admitted in parliament that he had met with Jewish bankers from France, Austria and Germany, though he insisted these had nothing to do with Zionism.

  As we have seen, the revolution of the Young Turks restored the constitution and recalled the Ottoman parliament, which functioned between 1908 and 1912. During the parliamentary sessions the representatives from the district of Jerusalem, Said al-Husayni and Ruhi al-Khalidi, were often interviewed in Ottoman and Egyptian newspapers (such as Al-Aqdam), where they expressed adamant opposition to the continuing Zionist immigration. In reality, Said had not yet formed a rigid attitude towards Zionism. It would be fair to say that as time went by he became more opposed to the Zionist project, especially in his public appearances. On the eve of the elections to the new parliament in 1913, the representatives from Jerusalem again voiced this position (this time Ghalib al-Khalidi replaced Ruhi).

  On 16 May, Said al-Husayni raised the question of Palestine for the first time in the newly elected Ottoman parliament, arguing that ‘the Jews were proposing to create a state in the region that would include Palestine, Syria and Iraq’. Following the debate, Minister of the Interior Khalil Bey stated that the empire was opposed to Zionism. But Said could not ignore the general indifference to the issue among the other Ottoman representatives.39 Before the elections to the Ottoman parliament in April 1914, Said again spoke up against Zionism in the Palestinian and Egyptian press. He told the editor of Al-Aqdam about his anger at the Ottoman Empire’s passivity in the face of the Zionist menace: ‘The government should wake up and face what it is happening,’ he said. The main danger lay in the Zionist acquisition of the lands of the fellahin. Like Mayor Hussein, Said, too, feared the fellah’s weakness, though it was the effendiya, including the Husayni family, that sold lands to the Zionists.

  After his interviews appeared in the Egyptian newspaper, Said discovered that they had been reprinted in the Hebrew newspaper Ha-Herut in March 1914. He was in the habit of reading every issue of this paper, and now he made a point of telling some of his former Jewish classmates that the peremptory tone was designed to placate public opinion, or at any rate the electors whose votes he would need to get elected to parliament.40

  But Said al-Husayni’s unease was not only about public opinion. His knowledge of Hebrew and his close friendships with his Jewish friends from schooldays, some of whom were Zionists, made for some tension between his personal feelings and his principles. It was also due to the difficulty of appraising the Zionist phenomenon. Until the end of the Great War, his attitude towards Zionism remained ambivalent. Despite his reassurances to his Jewish friends, in 1911 Said was a prominent member of a group of Arab parliamentarians who formed an all-Arab anti-Zionist lobby.41 Yet his activities were insignificant compared with those of Shukri al-Asali, the representative from Damascus and former governor of Nazareth, or of the Egyptian journalist of Syrian origin Ibrahim Salim Najjar, who was beginning to write about Palestine and about ‘Israelites in Palestine’.42 Al-Asali had attracted a good deal of favorable attention in 1911, while he was still governor of Nazareth, when under local pressure he fought against the decision of the Lebanese landowner Elias Sursuq to sell the lands of Marj ibn Amar (Jezreel Valley) to the Zionists.

  Said was not the only one to make public his position on Zionism. In 1914 young Jamil al-Husayni was also interviewed in the press, and he may be regarded as a forerunner of the Palestinian resistance movement. He spoke of the need to fight against Zionism because ‘it might lead to the expulsion of the Palestinians from their lands’. Zionism was being helped by the government, he warned, and ‘ordinary people don’t realize what is happening’. He argued that government officials were making it easy for Zionists to acquire lands.43 Concurrently with his open attacks on Zionism, he took part in attempts by spokesmen of the pan-Arab movement to reach an understanding with the Zionists. The initiative for the contacts with Zionism in which Jamil took part came from the Pan-Arab Decentralization Party, launched in Egypt in 1912, which called for the establishment of an Arab-Ottoman kingdom, on the Austro-Hungarian model, to replace the Ottoman Empire. The plan was for the party leaders to meet Zionist representatives in Broumana near Beirut in summer 1914. The meeting never took place, but it is significant that Jamil was willing to take part in it.44

  In 1914 Said also took part in meetings with Zionist leaders, in association with the initiative of Victor Jacobson, the Zionist Federation’s representative in Istanbul who invited several prominent Palestinians to dine at his house. On this occasion, Said discovered that the Zionist movement wanted him to promote support for pan-Arab self-determination in Palestine, as opposed to Palestinian self-determination, so as to achieve an enduring understanding between Zionism and the Arab world. For his part, Jacobson learned that the Palestinian leadership would not be willing to accept a Jewish presence in Palestine, mainly because it feared being unable to limit it and that it would eventually take over the whole country. Although this may not have bee
n Jacobson’s intention, other Zionist leaders at the time wished the Palestinians to identify themselves as pan-Arabs so as to give up Palestine and move voluntarily to the Arab world around them. When it became clear that this would not happen, a more sinister and coercive plan to move them developed and was finally executed in 1948.45

  What Ismail, then regarded as the head of the family, thought about Zionism is not certain. Ismail had business dealings with Jews, such as his joint attempt in 1909 to establish the Commercial Bank of Palestine, a project stopped by the Ottomans. It was said in the family that his special regard for Jews was due to the fact that his wet nurse had been Jewish.46 He himself never said anything definite about it.

  It must not be thought that any subject considered essential and discussed at length in the present work preoccupied the Husaynis to a similar degree. When the snow melted, they no doubt turned to other matters. In the spring of 1910 a swarm of locusts arrived and consumed all their crops. Flying in from the east, the insects penetrated the houses and piled up in the streets, and the authorities offered payment for every sackful. Although thousands of sacks were filled, no one actually became richer.

  In the midst of this calamity, a son was born to Musa Kazim:

  ‘The sun entered the alleys of Jerusalem and lighted its streets, and in that month in 1910, in the neighborhood of the Husaynis, was heard the cry of a newborn baby. It filled the air of the holy city and blended with the ringing of church bells and the muezzins’ musical call – it was the voice of the heroic warrior Abd al-Qadir Musa al-Husayni.’47

  In view of the bad years that followed, not all of which show the family in the best light in the collective Palestinian memory, everything related to Abd al-Qadir, from his birth to his heroic death on top of the Qastel, is treasured in Palestinian history. The fact that his mother, Raqiya, the daughter of Mustafa al-Husayni, died eighteen months after his birth makes his childhood even more mythical, as though it was Palestine itself that nurtured him as her pure son. In reality, he was brought up by his grandmother Nuzha, the daughter of Muhammad Ali al-Husayni, and his nurse Thalija, whom he would later speak of as ‘mother’. But memory erases these women and replaces them with the Homeland.

  The locusts came from the east, while from the west swarms of pilgrims continued to pour in, and the involvement of the foreign consuls kept growing stronger. Even the Russians, whose standing in the empire had declined since the Crimean War, became prominent. Every day the Russian consul and his wife rode to the crowded suq, accompanied by the opulently dressed qawas (a consular official who acted as guard of honor to the secular or religious foreign representatives, generally of Balkan or Caucasian origin). Like the others, the Russian consul could intervene in the affairs of the city, since he was not subject to the laws of the empire.48

  But when they were not troubled by Zionism, locusts or the consuls, the Husaynis went about their daily routine in a world that was changing at an incredible rate. The family’s ability to adapt depended largely on the younger generation, its education and preparation for the future. Unlike the reign of Abdul Hamid II, when the family showed some impressive achievements, during the time of the Young Turks it did not manage to occupy any of the new power bases in Jerusalem. For example, it did not have a representative on the General District Council of Jerusalem, a body that was set up in 1911 as an expanded version of the district council that had existed during the Tanzimat. Henceforth, achievements were to be made on individual as well as institutional tracks.

  BETWEEN ISLAM AND THE WEST

  Izzat Tanus, who studied at St George’s and taught there from 1911, recalled that during those years the students were very confused about ‘the West’. Their curriculum was European and taught them to appreciate Western literature and philosophy, but at home as well as from some of the teachers they heard criticism and hostility about the West’s treatment of Turkey, especially as manifested in Jerusalem. But boys being boys, what really held their attention was football, and the whole city became enthusiastically drawn in. In 1910 some 5,000 spectators attended a football match at St George’s School, among them hundreds of veiled women. Not all the Husayni women wore veils, though, as pictures from the period show them wearing lacy Western gowns.

  The boys wore three-piece suits and ties. There was one exception: six-year-old Ishaq Musa, Musa’s younger son and grandson of the great Umar, who wore the white turban of the Muslim mystic orders. Ishaq Musa’s father had destined him and his brother Musa to join an order and devote their lives to the faith. Their father was a member of the Rifa’i sect in Jerusalem, and he introduced his sons into it in a traditional ceremony that included tasting a pinch of sugar – perhaps as a symbolic start of a long and arduous process of religious purification.49 But Ishaq Musa would not follow this path, nor would his brother. After his father’s death in 1911, his mother – a daughter of the reform-minded al-Daudi family in Jerusalem – removed Ishaq Musa’s turban and sent him to a local reformist school.50 Another mother in the family – Zaynab, the mother of Amin al-Husayni – also interrupted her son’s paternally directed career, but she diverted it from a secular to a religious track.

  To return to the new craze of football – every student dreamed of playing on the school team. In April 1912 the first ‘international’ match took place, between the Syrian-Anglican College of Beirut and St George’s School. The latter won 3–0 to tremendous rejoicing. Even the painful defeat in the return match could not erase the splendid achievement.

  Many reports describe al-Hajj Amin – the youngest son of Tahir II and brother of Mufti Kamil – as standing out among the boys of St George’s. Even then he was interested in serious matters rather than in boyish activities. His mother, Zaynab, aware of his intellectual curiosity, found him a private tutor, a Miss Hassasin, to broaden his education, chiefly in the Muslim religion. When he wished to go to Istanbul for his higher studies, preliminary to a political career, his mother convinced his brother, Mufti Kamil, to dissuade him from this course and train him to be his heir. This course led al-Hajj Amin to local politics. In 1913 Zaynab made two moves to achieve her aim – she took Amin on the pilgrimage to Mecca and sent him to study at al-Azhar University in Cairo.51 The young Amin impressed the heads of the university with his scholarship and serious mind, and he was admitted without difficulty – his private tutor had taught him well both in Muslim religious law and the riches of the Arabic language.

  Amin al-Husayni went to al-Azhar together with his cousin Yaqub al-Husayni, and studied theology and Arabic. As mentioned, in his second year at the college he became attached to Rashid Rida. Amin al-Husayni, (to whom we will refer from now on as al-Hajj Amin) was so drawn to him that he transferred to his theological seminary, and their warm understanding meant that al-Hajj Amin was often invited to his mentor’s house in Cairo. Rashid Rida preached some fairly clear guidelines that became entrenched in al-Hajj Amin’s mind: one, that Muslim society everywhere ought to be very cautious in its encounters with Western culture, some of whose aspects constituted an existential danger to Islam; two, to confront this danger it was necessary to return to a distilled form of Islamic precepts, sifting out all vestiges of the negative Western influence; and, three, the religious undertaking must be tied to the political and national struggle. Thus, for example, the British occupation of Egypt was interpreted as a conflict between Islam and the West. Rashid Rida also spoke explicitly about Zionism and the duty of fighting it as part of the overall struggle against the Western political takeover of the Muslim-Arab Middle East. Young al-Hajj Amin reduced these guidelines to an even simpler rule: political Islam was the most efficient way to fight Zionism and the British. From his mentor he learned that it was necessary to combine European technology and Western systems of government and administration with Arab nationalism and Islam in the struggle against the West.

  Evening lectures at the Faculty of the Humanities at the Egyptian university provided al-Hajj Amin with a more secular exposure. It was at t
hese lectures that he made friends with a Christian Palestinian whose name is not known, with whom he planned to create in Egypt an association for Palestine and against Zionism. Together with his roommate, Abd al-Rahman al-Alami, he rallied twenty Muslims and Christians to propagate awareness among interested students of the dangers posed by the Zionist presence in Palestine. His friend Kamil al-Dajani stated that in 1913 al-Hajj Amin was the first to perceive that Zionism, rather than the Young Turks, represented the real danger to Palestinians. The association did not last long, but al-Hajj Amin remained committed to this struggle until the end of his life.52

  Unlike him, al-Hajj Amin’s relatives in the Husayni neighborhood received clear indications about Zionism’s future plans but did not know how to interpret them. The same year that al-Hajj Amin engaged in his first anti-Zionist activity, the Zionist leader Arthur Ruppin came to Jerusalem and visited Sir John Grey Hill. Hill was a pro-Zionist English aristocrat who in 1875 built himself a summer house on Mount Scopus, not far from the Husaynis. Some of them were present at the meeting and heard about Ruppin’s plan to buy the house and turn it into a Hebrew educational institution, but at the time they saw no harm in it. By the time it became the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, it was too late.53

  To return to al-Hajj Amin – in Cairo he followed two parallel paths, the religious and the secular, and was wavering between them due to his mother’s influence. Zaynab realized that in the secular world established by the Young Turks the status of the muftis would be quite low. It had in fact been declining before the rise of secular rule. Now it was of less importance than other posts held by the family – mayor, parliamentary representative, senior positions in the Ottoman administration and even in the local chamber of commerce. Al-Hajj Amin’s father, Tahir II, had had to struggle to maintain a central position in the family, and his son and successor, Kamil, gave up the attempt. It would be the youngest son, al-Hajj Amin, who would achieve the impossible and not only restore primacy to the Tahiri branch and the centrality of the mufti’s post in the family, but also become, if only for a short period, rais al-a’ala, the supreme president of the Palestinian political structure under the British Mandate. A number of Palestinian historians would later argue that this achievement came at a very great cost to the Palestinian people.