The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty
Page 23
Maintaining the status quo was not an easy matter, given the conflicting British promises regarding the future of Palestine. Would it become part of Greater Syria? Or would it become a ‘Jewish national home’, as implied by the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917? A year later a new declaration stirred the anxieties of political activists in Jerusalem and elsewhere about the future of Palestine. On 8 November 1918, the governments of Britain and France proclaimed the right of the peoples of Iraq and Syria to self-determination, but they excluded Palestine, probably because of the Balfour Declaration.15
It is important to distinguish between people’s preoccupation with the problems of their daily lives and their concerns about the great issues of the day. Palestinian leaders were not always aware of the rapid pace of political developments that would affect their country’s future. In this, they were at a clear disadvantage compared to their Zionist opponents who, with an energy and decisiveness that astounded the colonial officials, harnessed every possible act to help fulfill the Zionist dream. Kamil al-Husayni witnessed this himself.
On 27 April 1918, a few months after the British occupation began, Kamil and the leaders of all the other communities of Jerusalem were invited to a garden party at the house of Governor Ronald Storrs. At this time a delegation from the Zionist Congress led by Menahem Ussishkin was permitted by the military authorities to come to Palestine, tour the country and study the prospects of laying the groundwork for the ‘Jewish national home’. Ussishkin was the paragon of the new Zionist leader. Unlike some of his colleagues, he openly discussed Zionism as a colonialist project and declared on more than one occasion that any indigenous resistance to the Jewish colonization of Palestine would have to be met with force, coercion and even expulsion. One doubts how much of this Kamil knew, but he did go to Storrs’s meeting willingly and was curious to hear what this Jewish leader, whom he had never met, would have to say. To his dismay, the Zionist spokesman expressed support for the united Arab kingdom but without recognizing Palestine as part of it. Rather, he went on at length about Jewish plans for the development of the country and the joy of the people of Zion at the return of the Jews. Kamil stood up and was about to leave.16 He was persuaded to stay, though, and heard a milder statement from Chaim Weizmann, who said that the Zionists had no intention of taking over the country. In time, Palestinians would prefer the direct approach of the future Ussishkins and find it hard to confront the doubletalk and dishonesty of the future Weizmanns. At the meeting, Kamil responded with a measured, noncommittal statement. Weizmann later wrote in his diary that Kamil had been polite but disbelieving – and for good reason.17
Perhaps it was this occasion that prompted the younger Husaynis to organize the struggle against the implementation of the Balfour Declaration. Or it may be that they wished to help Faysal resist the French effort to dislodge him from Syria. These young men were not content with symbolic gestures, and they began to prepare for national action. Yet they tended to occupy themselves with minor matters, unlike the Jews, who were laying the foundation of their state. Al-Hajj Amin, twenty-one years old and with unusually red hair and deep blue eyes, was the spirit of the young Palestinians’ movement. When they formed an active organization called ‘The Arab Club’ – named after the famous club in Damascus where al-Hajj Amin had stayed with Faysal’s entourage during the Arab Revolt – they chose al-Hajj Amin as its president. This was not al-Hajj Amin’s only occupation. After his return from Damascus, he remained loyal to Faysal’s government and obeyed its instruction to join the British administration, which made him an official in the town of Qalqiliyah. Damascus’ secret directive was to use this post to recruit young Palestinians for Faysal’s army to counter a possible French invasion of Syria.18
Al-Hajj Amin’s closest friends were his brother Fakhri and his cousins Jamil, Ibrahim, Said, Hilmi and Tawfiq. They were joined by Ishaq Darwish and Muhammad al-Afifi, who were related by marriage to the Husaynis. Tawfiq was known for his community work – he opened and ran an orphanage in Jerusalem, an institution that still symbolizes the Husayni family’s social commitment. But the principal activities of the Arab Club were political rather than social, and its members hoped that the British authorities would allow it to function as a literary-political association supporting the union of Palestine and Syria and opposing the expansion of the Jewish presence. The mentor of the group was Sheikh Abd al-Qadir al-Muzafir, an activist of the Arab national movement during the war who had been deported for his activities. (As mentioned in the previous chapter, al-Muzafir was also an unexpected guest at the first and only collaborative meeting between the Zionists and the Husaynis.)
The young Nashashibis, however, had no use for the Hashemi Amir or Damascus, and they joined the rival Literary Club to demonstrate their different political position. They were a relatively new presence on the Jerusalem stage, and it had taken the earthquake effect of the Young Turks’ revolution to translate their economic power into political power. The year 1908 had been especially important for Suleiman al-Nashashibi and his sons Rashid and Uthman, who represented a transition in the family’s career as it became an influential social-political factor after the advent of the Young Turks. In later years, however, they would not constitute a substantial political force: at the end of the British Mandate, when the political vacuum offered an opportunity for action, they would have neither the power nor the drive to lead the Palestinian people. But in the period under discussion, the two families were on friendly terms, especially since Jamil al-Husayni was one of the leading members of the rival club, which was named after the famous literary club in Istanbul that he had been part of in 1909. During the course of that year, several Husaynis, including Fakhri, joined both clubs.
In the beginning members of the Arab Club were content to paint the slogans ‘Our Land Is Ours’ and ‘Palestine Is Southern Syria’ (that is, part of the Kingdom of Greater Syria to be ruled by King Faysal). Later they organized petitions and even enlisted some of the city’s notables to support their activities. The famous six of St George’s School – Hilmi, Fakhri, Ibrahim, Tawfiq, Said and Jamal – formed the core of this organization. Those who had got safely through the war, even in the Ottoman army, tended to follow the ideas and activities of the mufti’s younger brother al-Hajj Amin and the leadership of Musa Kazim, who became mayor after Hussein’s death. In 1918 the older activists included such experienced figures as Bullus Shehadeh, Yusuf Yasin and Hassan Abu al-Saud, whom the younger men described as the leaders of the Arab Club. Some time later they joined the Husaynis, not because of family connections but because they supported the positions taken by Musa Kazim, Jamal and Amin al-Husayni on the future of Palestine. Joining a group for ideological reasons was a novel feature in the lives of Palestinian notables.
Political restlessness was not confined to Jerusalem: young people and notables in other cities and towns sought to help the national movement and even to lead it. On 8 May 1918, a group of prominent Jaffa townsmen, both Christian and Muslim, met in a café to revive the idea of the three teachers who had met at Anaste’s café (see the previous chapter) and created Jaffa’s Muslim-Christian Association. This was the first time an association was formed on the basis of national rather than religious solidarity. Such ideas had been proposed in the past but never taken shape, and now the Jaffaite al-Hajj Raghib al-Dajani and his Christian friends brought it off. In November 1918, a branch of this association opened in Jerusalem, and before long branches appeared all over Palestine. In January 1919, the first general conference of all the Muslim-Christian Associations was held in Jerusalem. To give it an all-Palestine stature, the organizers invited the associations of the young Jerusalemites, and indeed the event came to be known as ‘the first Palestinian Congress’ after they decided to hold it every year.
Other political meetings took place in Jaffa in May 1918. At al-Hajj Amin’s request, or at least with his approval, some young men from Jaffa formed an underground group that they called ‘The Black Hand�
�. They later chose a new name that would become a national Palestinian label: al-Fida’iyya (‘The Self-Sacrificers’). It set up branches all over the country and served al-Hajj Amin as the operative arm of the national organization. (It would be disbanded in 1923 and replaced by rather ineffectual attempts to create a more orderly Palestinian fighting body.19 But at this point, the group’s work was principally channeled towards the first conference in Jerusalem.)
The first Palestinian Congress opened in Jerusalem on 27 January 1919 and lasted about a week. Twenty-seven delegates from all over the country attended. Arif al-Dajani, founder of the Muslim-Christian Association in Jaffa, presided over the conference, and the retired judge Hassan Abu al-Saud was his deputy.20
Organizing this conference had not been an easy matter. Before it got under way, a sharp dispute broke out between the ‘unionists’ supporting unification with Syria and those who favored a struggle for independence within British Palestine. The most prominent unionists were the Husaynis – Fakhri and al-Hajj Amin, who benefited from Khalil al-Sakakini’s sound advice. Since the attempts to create a unified kingdom with Syria were backed by an orderly political party, and since most of the leading members of the family were part of it, the family became the strongest player in the new political arena delineated by the British authorities and the Zionists in Mandatory Palestine. It was no longer sufficient to be an Ashraf family or to hold a senior religious post – if the Husaynis did not wish to abandon the field to other families or political factors, they needed a modern political organization with national and patriotic platforms.
Al-Hajj Amin was a prominent and active unionist, and he devoted most of his energies to persuading Jerusalem’s Muslim-Christian Association to support union with Syria.21 As we have seen, the first Palestinian Congress was convened not only in response to the Balfour Declaration but as the first political attempt to present the Palestinian position in public. Besides al-Hajj Amin, many others were active behind the scenes – indeed, it is doubtful that al-Hajj Amin was the chief player or even the leading Husayni activist at that first conference. The young Husaynis very skillfully persuaded some of the leading delegates, such as Sheikh Said al-Karmi, Isa al-Isa and Izzat Darwaza, to ensure that the resolutions would conform to the idea of unity with Syria. Al-Hajj Amin proposed allowing the opposition to present its argument, which called for the destiny of Palestine to be separate from that of Greater Syria. He argued that only by hearing both arguments could the participants weigh the two platforms and discover the weakness of the pro-Palestine idea. As we shall see, the time would come when he would adopt his opponents’ position.
All the delegates were pleased to see the family’s patriarch, the revered Ismail Bey, whose aristocratic presence imparted dignity to the gathering and gave the family a certain influence over the proceedings. The British, too, respected Ismail and acknowledged his fine record by putting him in charge of education in Jerusalem, and he repaid them by adopting a pro-British posture. His attendance at the conference was not wholehearted, and he disapproved of many of the young men’s actions. While he did not voice his true opinions at the conference, many of the delegates were aware that he disliked the idea of Greater Syria and was hoping to see the creation of an Arab Palestine. Nor did he support aggressive action against Zionism. Having entertained Chaim Weizmann at his house, Ismail believed it was possible to come to an understanding with the Zionist movement, though he did not dare say so in public.22
Despite Ismail’s attendance, the family had yet to reach a dominant position in the political arena. The Husaynis were conspicuously absent from the petition sent by the conference to the Paris Peace Conference, though they undoubtedly helped to formulate it. The petition read:
We, inhabitants of all Palestine, consisting of the Arab districts of Jerusalem, Nablus and Acre, Muslims and Christians alike, have met and chosen our representatives at the conference in Jerusalem … Before any discussion takes place on the problem of Palestine, we wish to express our strong protest against the promise given to the Zionists to establish a national home in our native land and to migrate to this country and settle in it.23
The petition’s authors went on to note that they represented the absolute majority of the people of Palestine.
The Husaynis took no part in other decisions of the conference. At the end of the discussions, the conference resolved to send two delegations to promote the Palestinian cause in world opinion: one to Paris and another to Damascus. There were no Husaynis in the more important of the two, the delegation to Paris; in any event, the occupying authorities stopped it from leaving. But even the lesser mission to Damascus did not include any of the Husaynis. Mufti Kamil and Mayor Musa Kazim were puzzled by their younger relatives’ frustration that no member of their family was elected to a representative post. How significant were places in such delegations compared with an ancient honor like that of mufti or the influential post of mayor? Time would show that al-Hajj Amin was right: a new era had begun, and the game had new rules.
It was not the military governor’s decision to prevent the Palestinians from presenting their case before the international peace conference that excluded any significant development in this direction. It was a change in American posture that froze any genuine attempts to reconsider Palestine’s fate. Had it been up to the American delegation, all the nations and groupings formerly ruled by the Ottoman Empire would have been invited to address the conference and express their wishes. But the ailing Democratic US President Wilson was unable to contend with the colonial powers because the Republican-dominated US Congress was eager to resume America’s prewar isolationism. Thus the two aging colonial empires of Britain and France, whose time would come before long, were left free to carve up the defeated Ottoman Empire. Their governments had no intention of allowing local representatives to appear before the conference and present agendas different from those decided upon in London and Paris. It was none of the local people’s business, said British Prime Minister Lloyd George; Georges Clemenceau, who was even less attentive to such wishes from below, readily agreed. The two powers had divided the region between them as far back as May 1916, before anyone knew the outcome of the war. Now that they were in power, they certainly had no intention of letting anyone else have their say. Zionism, however, being the colonialists’ ally, was allowed to appear and make its case before the world.
Nevertheless, there were some in the British Colonial Office and Parliament who viewed the emerging Arab national movement favorably, as a process that might benefit Britain. The famous historian Arnold Toynbee provided them with a metahistorical theory to justify British support for Arab nationalism, which he considered to be a new and youthful phenomenon, rather than for Jewry, which he argued would disappear from history like the colonial empire. But on the whole, support for the Arabs was neither metaphysical, as proposed by Toynbee, nor romantic, à la Lawrence of Arabia, but a pragmatic commitment to the interests of the British Empire. In Egypt in 1919, the British refusal to permit local Arab views to be heard by the international forum produced a national revolution and resulted in the creation of the Wafd (‘New Delegation’) Party – named after the group of Egyptian representatives whom the British barred from traveling to Versailles, as they did in Palestine. The term became synonymous with concepts like ‘homeland’, ‘people’ and ‘nation’. The Wafd was the dominant party in Egypt until Nasser came to power. It fought against the British presence in Egypt and laid the groundwork for the independent state of Egypt, which would influence the entire Arab world.
Barred from sending a delegation, the Palestinians used the old method of bombarding the participants at the conference with petitions and protests, each town and city sending its own. They had no other choice, given that the Zionists had a very respectable representation at Versailles, led by the skilled diplomat Chaim Weizmann. The brief appearance of King Faysal of Syria in Versailles provided some balance, but only the Americans were moved by such minor spokes
men on the conference floor. The leaders of the old colonial delegations scarcely noticed them and did not give much thought to non-imperial arguments.
Not everyone despaired when the Palestinian delegation was barred from leaving; nor was everyone content with sending petitions. In March 1919, directly after the first Palestinian Congress, the Muslim-Christian Association and the Arab Club decided to act. The dynamic al-Hajj Amin inspired their initiative. He had heard from his brother the mufti that the governor of Jerusalem was due to go to Egypt at the end of the month and that before leaving he would advise the Palestinians to hold a protest demonstration against the Zionists. Kamil and Musa Kazim spread a rumor that Storrs had asked that the demonstration be held in his absence, so that he would not be blamed if things got out of hand. Al-Hajj Amin convened the members of his club to discuss the matter and deplored the fact that ‘since the Balfour Declaration there has not been a single demonstration against Zionism’.
But not everyone was ready to take such a risk. Al-Hajj Amin’s former teacher Khalil al-Sakakini and his cousin Yaqub Faraj poured cold water on the eager young leader and persuaded him that Storrs was playing a dangerous game and could not be counted on to support them if they were charged with organizing a demonstration that turned violent. Sakakini noted in his diary that nobody liked Storrs: because of his close association with the Husaynis, he listened to no one else. This seems somewhat unjust, since at this time Sakakini was in the Husayni camp, but perhaps he was uneasy about the close friendship between Mufti Kamil and the British governor. Sakakini preferred the personality and the interests of Storrs’s deputy, Waters-Taylor, and suspected that if there were a demonstration, the governor would blame his deputy and have him dismissed.24