The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty

by Ilan Pappe

  In the 1950s, the mufti would argue that the struggle had been directed against the British too, but this does not seem to have been the case. Though many Palestinian historians have accepted this argument, others such as Philip Mattar have not. After all, during that time al-Hajj Amin was trying to cooperate with the British authorities and urge them to adopt a pro-Palestinian position. He was suspicious about the British government in London but tended to trust many persons among the mandatory authorities.66

  The year 1928 passed without a violent outbreak, but the war of words intensified and tensions kept mounting. In April 1929, High Commissioner John Chancellor suggested the mufti sell the religious property and allow the Jews to build a courtyard in front of the Western Wall. The mufti responded mildly, saying he could understand that the Jews needed to pray but such a concession would endanger Muslim standing throughout the Haram al-Sharif. Palestinian historiography, including recent work that draws on newly revealed materials, suggests that the mufti’s concern was not baseless and that there really was a Jewish plan to seize the entire Haram.67 But this does not correspond to the pragmatic Zionism of the time, which would have been satisfied with the Western Wall and would have regarded its possession as a major step forward for Zionism.

  The 1929 outbreak was caused not only by the events in Jerusalem but also by larger circumstances. Some 90,000 Jews immigrated to Palestine between 1921 and 1929. Though the influx ebbed from 1926 to 1928, the presence of so many new immigrants in the labor market and the efforts of the Zionist organizations to purchase land for them made Zionism into a tangible factor in the lives of many ordinary Palestinians. While in 1920 Jews bought a total of 262 acres, in 1925 they bought 44,000 acres. During those ‘quiet years’, the Jews purchased a third of all the land they would acquire throughout the British Mandate, though never at such a fast rate as in 1925. By the end of 1928, there were about 100 Jewish settlements in the country, the leading commercial concessions were in Jewish hands and the percentage of Jews in trade and industry kept growing. At the same time, rural Palestine was experiencing an economic decline, giving rise to internal migration to the growing cities, a process that would accelerate in the 1930s. Shanties began to surround the growing towns and cities, providing cheap labor for the urban population, both Jewish and Arab, and their misery could be used to achieve political objectives. Long working hours in inhuman conditions intensified the bitterness and produced pockets of wretchedness that in 1929 could explode into violent action. It was easy to persuade the populace that their misery was caused by Zionism, since the internal migration, the loss of land and employment, were connected to the growth of the Jewish community. This volatile situation was made worse by the activities of the Zionist rightwing movement Beitar, which launched a series of provocations that made the outbreak of violence unavoidable.

  Yet the first half of 1929 passed relatively peacefully. Despite the tension in the city, al-Hajj Amin had the leisure to cooperate with an urban project that had been close to his heart for some time: the construction of a hotel to accommodate the leaders of the Arab and Muslim world. Appropriately enough, he named it ‘The Palace Hotel’. This not only advanced the development of Jerusalem, it also answered the demands of the Palestinian tourist industry, which watched anxiously as Jews became the principal hoteliers in the city. To pay for the construction of the new hotel, al-Hajj Amin used funds from the Muslim religious properties. The site chosen was in the heart of the Mamilla neighborhood. This fact provoked a response that is only too familiar in our time: Muslim religious scholars protested that it would be built on top of Muslim graves (as though there were any site in Jerusalem that does not contain tombs!).

  At long last, the objections were dropped and the building rose up. Designed by an imaginative and experienced Turkish architect, it elegantly blended Arab and Western elements. The contractors were Jewish. Engineer Baruch Katinka and his colleague Tuviah Dunya, a well-known figure in the Jewish community, owned a construction company that operated in Haifa and Jerusalem during the 1920s.

  Early in 1927, Katinka heard from a Palestinian acquaintance that the Supreme Muslim Council had published a tender for the construction of a hotel, which the acquaintance thought would be a suitable project for Katinka and Dunya. Moreover, he suggested that they add his name – Oud – to the bid, so that it could appear to be a Jewish-Arab enterprise. To their surprise, the contractors won the tender. As Katinka recalled, they continued to be surprised during their meeting with al-Hajj Amin and Hilmi Pasha: ‘They received us courteously, and got down directly to drafting the contract.’ Other preconceived ideas were dispelled in the course of the negotiations. Al-Hajj Amin demanded that the contractors meet the stiff timetable he had set for the project.

  An elaborate Arabic inscription was painstakingly carved and placed high on the hotel’s façade. The entire building was designed in arabesque style, expressing the taste of the Turkish architect Nihas Bey. Al-Hajj Amin demanded that the contractors give priority to Arab workers, which they did. As often happens in Jerusalem, on the second day of the project Katinka came across ancient burials. The worried mufti asked him to keep it secret, fearing that the work would be stopped. He knew only too well that Raghib al-Nashashibi would not hesitate to turn the ‘desecration’ to his own political ends. ‘And so I became the Mufti’s confidant,’ wrote Katinka in his memoirs. He found al-Hajj Amin ‘a fairly easy person, intelligent, sharp and polite’. This was probably the last favorable comment made by a Zionist about al-Hajj Amin.

  Al-Hajj Amin came to the site every day to observe the progress and often expressed his satisfaction with the work of the Jewish contractors. He was so pleased with them that he hired them to build his new house in Sheikh Jarrah. ‘It was 1929,’ Katinka recalled, ‘and the tension between Jews and Arabs was mounting day by day. But my association with the Mufti had reached the stage of warm personal conversations.’ Al-Hajj Amin revealed to Katinka that his financial situation did not allow him to finish his house: ‘The foundations have been laid, but the rest is stuck.’ After studying the plans, Katinka offered to build the house cheaply and complete it in two years.

  Al-Hajj Amin’s house rose up, as did the hotel – both built by the Jewish contractors. This was not a trivial matter. Dunya was Chaim Weizmann’s brother-in-law and friend, and al-Hajj Amin knew it. Dunya recalled that al-Hajj Amin tried to send political messages through him, but he politely declined. One message, however, that al-Hajj Amin communicated to Dunya (though not to Weizmann) was that his opposition to the partition of the country was not personal but political, because it would not be accepted by the majority of the Palestinians. ‘When I stand before the Arab people and announce that I have come to an agreement with the Jews, based on concessions I made them, the entire Arab people would ostracize me and denounce me as a traitor who sold his homeland.’

  At the hotel’s opening ceremony, al-Hajj Amin publicly praised Katinka and Dunya, and thereafter always invited them to the Nabi Musa celebrations. He also sent them platters with warm dishes at the end of Passover, so they could enjoy fresh risen bread as soon as possible. Dunya and Katinka ‘repaid’ him by using the hotel to hide two arms caches for the Hagana.68

  But this kind of local and personal cooperation did not extend to the political arena. Tensions rose from day to day leading up to the eruption of 1929. (The Palace Hotel, incidentally, lasted for five years, then closed when the new King David Hotel eclipsed it as Jerusalem’s most palatial hostelry.)

  The mufti continued to cooperate with the British authorities through the spring and summer of 1929 in the hope of stopping the escalation, and he was bitterly disappointed when it turned out to have been in vain. In the summer of 1929, a new government came to power in London – a Labour government led by the vacillating Ramsay MacDonald. Colonial Secretary Sidney Webb had yet to acquaint himself with the issues. Between them they suspended all British action and initiatives in Palestine, and in the absence of clear directives
, the mandatory government dealt only with the symptoms.

  The mufti was pressured to stop the Sufi performances near the Western Wall, and when he gave in, he was accused by his opponents, notably the Nashashibis, of surrendering to the British. Seeking to counteract these charges, he started a restoration of the Wall near the section where the Jews prayed. Young Beitar men stopped the work and were praised by the chief rabbi, Abraham Kook. However, the leaders of the sixteenth Zionist Congress in Zurich were less impressed. They asked Jabotinsky to moderate his followers’ aggressive behavior, but it only grew worse. Two thousand young Beitar men led by Yosef Klausner circled the city walls, proclaiming that they were the ‘Western Wall Defense Committee’.69

  In the summer of 1929, al-Hajj Amin began to feel the ground rumbling beneath his feet. He was less occupied with the Western Wall, but the young men and many other Palestinians anxiously followed the developments there, waiting for the mufti and other leaders to take firm action. Just before the outbreak, al-Hajj Amin met again with John Chancellor, who expressed the hope that the mufti was satisfied with the government’s position. Al-Hajj Amin responded that he was loyal to the government but added that if the Muslim community did not receive any substantive proposals, he could not vouch for continuing law and order. At this point Chancellor, who had hitherto been pleasant, frowned and said sharply, ‘You need not worry about law and order. These matters are my responsibility.’ This arrogance was one of the reasons the British were taken by surprise in the summer when, for the first time since they had occupied the country in 1917, violence erupted on a large scale.70

  In August 1929, the seeds of disaffection sown the previous winter sprouted a venomous crop. On a Thursday in the middle of the month, a group of young Beitar men gathered in front of Government House and began to march towards the Western Wall. Facing the Haram al-Sharif, they raised the Zionist flag, sang ‘Hatikvah’ and shouted, ‘The Wall is ours!’ Rumors about the Zionist demonstration in the Mughrabi neighborhood spread quickly, inflated with a claim that Muslims had been beaten up. Tensions grew higher.

  The following day, during Friday prayers, they reached an intolerable point. Muslims held an anti-Jewish demonstration, and a Jewish boy who had kicked a ball into his neighbor’s tomato patch was murdered. The next day, a Muslim boy was stabbed. The funeral of the Jewish boy was large and forceful. It was organized by the Jewish Agency, which the Arabs of Jerusalem regarded as a particularly intimidating, rich and powerful body.71 The following week, Beitar held another demonstration, which was met with a mass counterdemonstration by villagers from the vicinity of Jerusalem, to whom al-Hajj Amin addressed a fiery speech. Unable to contain their rage, the crowd broke into the area in front of the Western Wall. In the following few hours, they also burst into most streets in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City.

  That Thursday the mufti consulted with his associates about the developments. He had not forgotten the British persecution of him in 1920 and tried to obtain a visa to go to Syria, but the local consul refused to give him one. In any event, he did not have to confront the British authorities. Testifying before the commission of inquiry that would investigate the events of 1929, al-Hajj Amin stated that he had not asked for a visa to flee the scene but for his regular summer vacation. He had been accustomed to go to Turkey every August, but since he suffered from seasickness, he had decided on an overland holiday.72

  That Thursday Jamal called on Harry Lock, the government secretary, who was trying to arrange a Jewish-Palestinian meeting to cool the atmosphere. But the two sides could not agree, and they decided to hold another meeting the following Monday. By then, however, scores of Jews and Palestinians had paid with their lives for the aborted reconciliation.

  That Friday a wave of violent unrest swept over the country, lasting a whole week. Al-Hajj Amin was urgently summoned from home by Alan Saunders, the acting commander of the Jerusalem police and deputy commander of the mandatory police. Thousands of Muslims armed with clubs and knives and a few rifles had gathered on the Haram al-Sharif, claiming that the mufti had told them to wreak vengeance on the Jews. In reality, the mufti was not responsible for this rumor. When he reached the plaza, he heard the cry ‘Sayf al-din, al-Hajj Amin!’ (‘The Sword of the Religion, al-Hajj Amin!’). He and Said al-Khatib, the imam who conducted the Friday worship, agreed that the sermon that day would be a moderate one, to calm the atmosphere.

  On Saturday al-Hajj Amin and Musa Kazim were summoned to the house of the High Commissioner, who demanded that the mufti do more to defuse the tension. Al-Hajj Amin replied that there would be no point in his issuing such a call unless the Jewish leaders did the same. ‘It’s Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath,’ Deputy Governor Keith-Roach said. ‘They can’t be reached by telephone.’

  That day al-Hajj Amin invited the headmen of the surrounding villages and asked them to calm their people. ‘The government is looking after the interests of the Arabs,’ he assured them. But neither there nor on the Haram, nor later at the Nablus Gate, was the mufti able to stem the irate human tide. Jewish attacks on Sur Baher and an attack on the Nashashibi house at Bab al-Sahra ignited an all-out Arab assault. A baseless rumor that a Palestinian had been lynched in the Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Meah Shearim made it into the arena. Thus the first casualties were non-Zionist Jews of that neighborhood, and later of Yemin Moshe, who had always been on good terms with their Arab neighbors.

  The mufti’s call, ‘Arm yourselves with compassion, wisdom and tolerance, because Allah is always with the tolerant!’ fell on deaf ears. Together with his friend George Antonius, he addressed the crowd:

  Calm yourselves, go home and leave me to do all I can. The government is not against you, nor the police. It is the duty of the government to maintain order. You know my feelings and views – I have always advised you to trust your leaders.

  But his voice was drowned out by the roar of the crowd. Antonius saw that the mufti’s presence stirred the people rather than calmed them, and at his urging al-Hajj Amin went home.73

  Al-Hajj Amin held talks with the leaders of Nablus and Hebron, but failed to pacify them. This was especially true where the Hebronites were concerned, since al-Hajj Amin’s standing in that town was shaky and they would not listen to him.74 There the Nashashibis were better entrenched, a fact that contradicts Israeli historiography’s dichotomous depiction of the Husaynis as ‘militants’ and the Nashashibis as ‘moderates’. They incited the mob against the Jewish community, with the result that sixty-four Hebronite Jews were massacred.

  The same thing happened in Safad, where twenty-six Jews were murdered. The opposite camp, Zionist and British, was no less ruthless. In Jaffa a Jewish mob murdered seven Palestinians, and all in all 133 Jews and 116 Muslims perished during that bloody week.

  Most of the Palestinians were shot by British policemen and soldiers. By 24 August, the government had decided to arm 500 Jews, and this contributed to the deadly score. Three days after this decision, a furious crowd surrounded al-Hajj Amin’s house demanding weapons. Al-Hajj Amin lost his head for the first time. He telephoned Harry Lock and asked him to receive a delegation led by Musa Kazim. Al-Hajj Amin sent Musa Kazim reluctantly, but he felt he was under pressure and in grave danger. At the urging of the delegation, the authorities agreed to disarm forty Jewish policemen as a countermeasure to the arming of 500 Jewish civilians.

  As soon as the violence subsided, the mandatory government took harsh measures, blaming the mufti and the Palestinians for what had occurred. High Commissioner John Chancellor had returned from home leave the day before the bloodshed in Safad. It was 1 September 1929.75 He published an announcement placing all the blame on the leaders of the Muslim community. Later the Commission of Inquiry would exonerate the mufti and place the blame on both sides, but by then a gulf had opened up between the Palestinians and the British. Thereafter the Palestinian population would judge al-Hajj Amin by his anti-British as much as by his anti-Zionist position.

  By November 1
929, there were indications that the violent eruptions were due to a mistaken British policy rather than ‘inherent Muslim aggression’, as the Israeli and pro-Israeli historiography would have it. The High Commissioner thought as much, and so did the government in London. On 19 November the Colonial Secretary issued a statement promising the Palestinians that the Haram al-Sharif would be restored to its former situation. But this was no longer sufficient: the Palestinians, or at least their political elite, expected a more substantive change in Britain’s Palestine policy.76

  CHAPTER 9

  The Great Revolt

  The Family as Revolutionary Aristocracy

  FAMILY STATESMANSHIP: THE FIRST CHAPTER

  The events of 1929 strengthened the standing of al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni and opened the way to his becoming the leader of the entire Palestinian nation. A British poll published in 1931 showed him to be the leader of nearly a million Palestinians. He was depicted as the captain of the 1929 Intifada and the one who had successfully defended the Haram al-Sharif and its shrines.1 The large number of Muslim casualties obliged the Supreme Muslim Council to organize aid for the victims, and al-Hajj Amin administered the welfare program. The opposition claimed that he did not do enough with the funds at his disposal, and later historians, albeit Israelis, found disorder and forgeries in the council’s bookkeeping. The old pattern of mixing private and public finances apparently persisted.2

  Looking back on this period in the 1950s, al-Hajj Amin described himself as a fearless opponent of the British, but in reality he was happiest when he did not have to confront them head-on. Even after the outbreaks, he continued to regard them as allies. They might have been at fault, but they were indispensable. This was very different from Ben-Gurion’s outlook, which was beginning to take shape at that time: if it became necessary, as it probably would, the Zionist enterprise would succeed even at the expense of a struggle against Britain.