The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty

by Ilan Pappe

  The year 1916 was a gory one, stained with the blood of Arab notables. On the day the Hijaz revolt was proclaimed, Jamal Pasha put to death another group of activists who had been convicted by a military court in Aley, Lebanon. At least one historian maintains that Jamal Pasha considered executing the most outspoken member of the family, Jamil al-Husayni, but changed his mind at the last moment for unknown reasons.69

  That year young al-Hajj Amin, aged twenty-one, returned to Jerusalem. Under the tutelage of his famous mentor, Rashid Rida, and after prolonged discussions with his friends Arif al-Arif and Khalil al-Sakakini, he began to seek volunteers to join the sharif’s revolt. Thousands put their names down but few would actually fight.70 Lloyd George, the future Prime Minister of Britain, deplored the fact that the Palestinian Arabs did nothing to help the war effort, and blamed most of them for joining the Ottomans in their fight against his own country. He counted only 150 Palestinians in the forces of the sharif of Mecca.71 Al-Hajj Amin’s efforts, which would be recorded in his favor, were conducted with the aid of Captain Brenton, a British military agent active in Palestine, and were much appreciated by the British government. Indeed, it has been argued that this helped his appointment as Grand Mufti of Palestine in 1921. But al-Hajj Amin was finding it difficult to rally actual support – while no one liked the Young Turks, certainly not after Jamal Pasha’s depredations, few were willing to betray Istanbul in time of war. The historian Philip Mattar states flatly that the sharif’s revolt did not arouse enthusiasm in Palestine and that the notable families remained loyal to Istanbul until 1918.72

  A young intelligence officer in the Arab Bureau in Cairo – set up in 1915 to observe the political developments in the Arab world in preparation for the British takeover – noted al-Hajj Amin’s activities in a positive light, and his report described the young Husayni as a pro-British personage. Here is another of history’s ironies, as twenty years later al-Hajj Amin would become the bugbear of the British rulers in the Middle East.

  Jamal Pasha’s continued presence in the region and his frequent visits to Jerusalem – from the summer of 1915, when he was planning his futile ‘Operation Lightning’ (yilderim in Turkish), in which he hoped to conquer Egypt with the German General von Moltke by crossing the Sinai Peninsula, to his equally futile resistance against Allenby’s forces in 1917 – hung like a shadow over the family. They were in the position of the knife-thrower’s assistant, tied to the target and sensing the whistling of the knives flying past their ears. Even the Husayni children were exposed to the tyrant’s violent whims. One day Ottoman soldiers burst into St George’s School and ransacked it, having been told that a cannon was hidden there for the pro-British rebels. Though they did not find it, they shut the school down and the boys spent most of the war at home.73

  The boys probably did not shed tears over this, but they were very reluctant to part from their much-loved teacher, Khalil al-Sakakini, who like other Christian friends of the Husaynis suffered greatly under Jamal Pasha. The latter was not always in the city, but the governor obeyed his orders to the letter. The persecution of Christian inhabitants began two months after the Ottoman Empire joined the war.

  Khalil’s house was well-known in Jerusalem. It was called the haririya – harir is Arabic for ‘silk’, and the house on the little rise beside the railway station had once been a silk-processing workshop. (Today it houses the Khan Theater.) One Tuesday evening Sakakini and Mayor Hussein al-Husayni, Sakakini’s old schoolmate, had just finished supper and were about to settle on the rush mats for coffee, when suddenly they heard a clamor in the street outside. Rifles were fired, shattering the evening calm. Ottoman soldiers were running through the city proclaiming that Jamal Pasha’s forces had captured the Suez Canal and taken 8,000 enemy troops prisoner. Khalil did not believe it – ‘A war tactic’, he said. In fact, Jamal’s army had failed to cross the Sinai Peninsula.

  Had someone overheard Khalil’s heretical statement? No one knows for certain. But some days later, on Saturday, 1 December 1917, the police rounded up Christians and foreign nationals and held them in the police station. The detainees knew from experience that the Ottoman authorities would deport them. Khalil al-Sakakini was one of the detainees, and his sister appealed for help from Hussein al-Husayni – ‘my pure-hearted friend’, as Sakakini called him in his diary. For a moment she feared she had lost her brother for ever. The respected teacher was sentenced to serve in the Ottoman porters’ battalion. Jamal Pasha had decreed that non-Muslims would no longer pay an impost for their exemption from military service – henceforth Jews and Christians would serve in non-combat missions. (Combat service was not considered because in Jamal Pasha’s eyes they were all potential spies.) The mayor was moved by the sister’s appeal and, despite his usual prudence, pulled the necessary strings to get Khalil released from servitude, which he might not have survived since the non-combat missions were hard labor in the most difficult conditions. Instead, Sakakini was sent to the veterinary service in the town of Bisan (the Jewish development town Beit She’an is built on its ruins). But Hussein persuaded the governor to overrule this sentence too, and eventually got Khalil assigned to work in a Jerusalem hospital.74

  This did not last, however and the teacher was arrested once again. To begin with, Jamal Pasha regarded Khalil al-Sakakini as a potential asset when he agreed to teach at the reformist al-Salhiyya College founded by Jamal Pasha. But the teacher again fell under suspicion as a supporter of Arab nationalism and possibly even of the British. Khalil tended to be reckless: three days after being released, he gave shelter to an American Jew who was wanted by the authorities. He was sent to prison in Damascus. However, the Husaynis and others of his friends in the empire succeeded in having him freed and smuggled across the lines to British-held territory.75

  Sakakini spent the rest of the war in the headquarters of Amir Faysal, the son of Sharif Hussein, who had come to Aqaba in early 1917. There he wrote a poem in praise of the Arab commander that would be sung in Jerusalem when the British forces entered the city in December 1917:

  Oh, our mighty lord, glory of all Arabia, your reign is as glorious as the reign of the Prophet, your grandfather, to whose rule everyone submitted through the ages, overwhelming all enemies to rescue the homeland.76

  When Sakakini was in Aqaba writing songs of praise about Commander Faysal, none of the Husaynis expected to support the man who would enthrone himself the following year as the king of ‘Greater Syria’. Yet when Faysal entered Damascus, many of the Husaynis agreed to regard Palestine as part of his kingdom.

  CHAPTER 6

  In the Shadow of British Military Rule

  From the Politics of Notables to the Politics of Nationalism

  On 30 November 1917, a platoon of British soldiers from the Seventy-fourth Division lost its way and ended up behind Ottoman lines near the village of Nabi Samwil. They soon ran into a division of the Ottoman Seventh Army, which had been assigned to defend Jerusalem, and after a brief battle took 450 Ottoman men and officers captive. It was a sign of things to come. Two days later, on 1 December, Ottoman storm troops launched an attack, with the result that an entire Ottoman battalion was destroyed, some of its men taken prisoner and others killed.

  Now, for the first time since the start of the fighting for Jerusalem a week earlier, General Allenby could begin to feel more confident. The supply lines of the British forces had been stretched to the limit, and the general feared that they would be unable to complete the conquest. The heavy rains and thick mud prevented reinforcements from reaching the besieging forces; many camels died of cold and others starved to death. On the other hand, the expeditionary force’s chief veterinarian wrote, ‘The two thousand donkeys which had been brought from Egypt, though they’d never had to tramp through snow in such fierce cold, did very well.’ But humans and horses, unlike the donkeys, fell like flies. Since the beginning of the fight for Jerusalem, the British forces had lost 1,667 men and 5,000 horses. Ottoman casualties were heavier, and
some 1,800 of their troops were taken captive. The British command believed that they were still facing 15,000 Ottoman troops, and wondered whether they could overcome them.1 The expeditionary force led by General Allenby was to launch its onslaught on 9 December.

  The night before the attack, Hussein al-Husayni awoke to the familiar sound of soldiers marching. ‘But where are they going?’ his wife asked and opened the shutters. A strange sight met her eyes: the Ottoman army was evacuating the city by the light of oil lamps. Hussein al-Husayni had expected the retreat but not its timing. In the morning the governor of Jerusalem summoned him, as head of the city council, along with other councilors, and gave them a document of surrender to hand to the British commander. A representative of the Anglican bishop, Mikhail Abu Hatoum, was present, and he kept the document for future record. It was written in Turkish, and Hussein wondered whether anyone on the conquering side would be able to read it:

  To the English Commandant [having spent many years with the Prussian general Erich von Volkenheim, the governor imagined that this was also the title of senior officers in the British forces]. Ever since the 6th of December shells have been raining down on Jerusalem, indiscriminately hitting members of all the millets [communities] and the sites that are sacred to all. There is no need for it, because the military force that was in the city has retreated. I send this letter with Hussein Bey al-Husayni, representative of the mayor of Jerusalem.2

  The final days of secular Ottoman government were strange. After almost a decade, the Ottoman rulers of Jerusalem, as though aware that their names would go down in history for better or worse, began trying to improve their images. The houses they had occupied during the war, as well as the permanent quarters of their officials and officers, were left in impeccable order, property was not looted and no one was hurt. Emile al-Ghuri wrote in his diary: ‘The picture of the evacuation is an astounding contrast to the kind of Ottoman despotism that Arabs have suffered under for four hundred years.’3 This was of course a distorted picture of the Arab population’s feelings towards the Ottomans, but it fitted well with their emotional response to the Young Turks since 1913.

  After the Ottoman flight, the Husayni clan gathered at the house of Ismail Bey, the head of the family. He greeted them with his usual smile spreading over his white goatee. It was only natural that the family would turn to him at such a time – he had never lost his self-possession, least of all in difficult moments. Dressed in the frangi (Western) three-piece suit, which had become his trademark and that of other Husayni notables, he managed as usual to calm the family and steer it through the current crisis.

  Some twenty members of the family were there, men and boys. The women sat in the women’s wing, but there, too, the talk was all about the recent dramatic events. An unexpected guest was the teacher Khalil Baydas, who had not been seen in Jerusalem throughout the war. Like other political activists of the pan-Arab national movement who had evaded capture, after years of living in hiding he was at last able to emerge and breathe fresh air. Ever since the Young Turks’ revolution, Baydas had used his newspaper Al-Nafais to publish the Arab nationalists’ demand that the Ottoman government set the Arab regions free. He published similar articles in the Egyptian journals Al-Muqatam and Al-Ahram, none of which endeared him to the Ottoman authorities. Baydas was also an ardent supporter of Sharif Hussein of Mecca. When Sharif Hussein called on all the national Arab movements to launch a jihad against the government in Istanbul in the summer of 1916, Baydas urged his students to join the revolt, and a company of Ottoman soldiers was sent to arrest him. The Husaynis, who had been careful to avoid being seen as collaborating with enemies of the empire – particularly since some members of the family were actually pro-empire – went out of their way to help him escape. This was due largely to the impassioned urging of young Raja’i, Said’s son, whose favorite teacher was Khalil. Thanks to their intervention, Baydas managed to escape to the Orthodox Patriarchate and to the personal protection of Patriarch Damianos, who saved him from the hangman’s noose. He remained in the patriarch’s house until the eve of Allenby’s assault.

  But the battle for Jerusalem was not yet over. On 9 December, the Forty-fourth and Sixtieth Divisions of General Allenby’s forces were encamped south and east of the city, blocking the roads to Nablus and Jericho. Their intelligence officers were still unaware that the last Ottoman soldier had left the city early in the morning – or, to put it another way, that the last Muslim soldier had quit the city that had been under Muslim rule since Saladin had defeated the crusaders.

  But the Christian conquerors returning to the region seven centuries after the Crusaders seemed to be hanging back, and Hussein decided to go look for them. Was he thinking about the historical significance of the event? We do not know, but he probably sensed the fluttering wings of history. However, he was unable to summon a respectable delegation for the great occasion, and there was something ridiculous about the small group that went out to look for the general and offer their submission without a struggle. One of the women offered a white blouse as a flag of surrender, but the mayor thought it would not do to meet the new conquerors with a woman’s garment. Better to use sheets, he thought, which were in plentiful supply at the Italian hospital. Two sheets were pulled off an empty bed, hastily stitched together and attached to a wooden plank on a flagpole to be carried by the surrendering delegation. They had never before used this European symbol of surrender – in their society, a white flag marked the residence of a marriageable virgin.

  The question was, which way to go? They were afraid to turn east or south, because a heavy cannonade rumbled on those sides. The road to the plains looked peaceful, so they walked out of the Jaffa Gate and went looking for the conquerors. It was boring to wait for the historical moment and unseemly for the notables to wander about with the emblem of surrender, so they commandeered a young idler by the name of Hanna al-Laham, who found himself dragged into the history books through no fault of his own. He was seized by Jawad Ismail, the black sheep of Ismail’s sons, a well-known bully who went about even in winter with his collar open to the bitter Jerusalem winds. Almost all the delegates were Husaynis. Two other members of the family joined them, and even little Burhan Tahir al-Husayni (grandson of Tahir II) insisted on coming along. The mayor agreed in the hope that the boy’s presence would soften the hearts of the conquerors.

  To solve the problem of communicating with the strangers, Hussein also took with him an interpreter of Swedish origin, a member of the Order of St John in the city who was employed by one of the consulates and had attended meetings of the city council. Though he made an important contribution to the occasion, his name was left out of all the reports, while that of the loafer al-Laham remains on record.

  The delegates took with them the city’s chief of police, Ahmad Sharaf, who in winter dressed like a Cossack in a short Russian coat and high boots, so that he looked like the delegates’ bodyguard. Hussein also summoned his cousin Tawfiq (the son of Muhammad Salih al-Husayni) who was now a mustachioed man in his twenties. Tawfiq dressed carefully and in front of the camera put on the haughty expression of the Prince of Morocco, whom he had personified with panache on the stage of St George’s School in 1908.

  The strange procession was led by the mayor, leaning on his walking stick, his long overcoat billowing behind him, a cigarette in his right hand. He was not a regular smoker, but the solemnity of the occasion made him very tense. Finally, near the neighborhood of Sheikh Badr, on the edge of the village of Lifta (the modern-day main western entrance to the city on Route 1, which connects the city with Tel Aviv), they found what they had been looking for: the troops of His Britannic Majesty.

  Sergeant Sidgewick and Sergeant Harcomb, two NCOs leading the scouts of the 219th Battalion of the London Division, which was approaching the city from the west, could not believe their eyes. A group of dignified sheikhs was calling to them in Arabic and Turkish, waving a white rag on a stick, while in their midst an elderly grandee he
ld up a small parchment scroll. ‘Who are you? What do you want?’ Sidgewick shouted, but the answer came in Arabic, which he did not understand. ‘Hey, don’t any of you Johnnies speak English?’ Hussein, who had lived in England and the United States, understood perfectly well but preferred not to reveal this fact. He told the Swedish interpreter to explain their mission. The two NCOs were flabbergasted. ‘Good Lord, we can’t accept the city’s surrender!’ they protested. They rejected Hussein’s outstretched hand holding a symbolic key to the city, and said, ‘You’ll have to wait for an officer of His Majesty’s forces.’

  About midday an officer appeared and obtained Hussein’s signature on a letter of surrender written on the back of a crumpled map. Fortunately for future generations, the Swede had a camera and he photographed the occasion. The result was a strange picture of officers and sheikhs looking surprised and embarrassed as twelve centuries of Muslim rule (if we discount the Crusaders’ eighty years) came to an end.