The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty

by Ilan Pappe

  Having become a political leader in the mandatory regime, al-Hajj Amin had two tasks before him. Besides material concerns, he had to represent the interests of the Palestinians before the Commission of Inquiry chaired by Sir Walter Shaw, which began its work in March 1930. Now al-Hajj Amin discovered the value of having Jamal at his side as a kind of Palestinian foreign minister when dealing with such British forums.

  The four members of the Shaw Commission arrived by train from El-Qantara on 24 October 1929 and were whisked off unceremoniously to the Fast Hotel in Jerusalem. Prisoners, Jews and Palestinians were at once sent to repair the road leading to the court, where the judge Muhammad Yusuf al-Khalidi presided. A company of armed British policemen guarded the entrance to the court, but there were no demonstrations. The only people who gathered in front of the judge’s office were journalists, both local and foreign. Four chairs were placed on the dais for the members of the commission and a secretary, and representatives of the Zionists and the Palestinians were ushered into the court. Al-Hajj Amin made sure that most members of the Supreme Muslim Council were present at his first public diplomatic confrontation with the Zionists and the British.

  Later sessions were held in the Customs House in Jerusalem, where the future of Palestine was debated in a small office. Each side had hired expensive and well-known British lawyers to advise them. That was the way of the world in those days: command of British law became a major weapon in the national struggle. Having toured the country, the members of the commission began to realize the magnitude of their task and had the walls of the stuffy little office knocked down to create a proper hall.

  The mufti was invited to testify at the forty-sixth session. In fact, the commission met in his office, and his testimony went on for five sessions. Al-Hajj Amin replaced the Christian interpreter Khalil al-Sakakini with the Muslim Musa al-Alami – not because of any doubt about the trustworthiness of the family’s great teacher and loyal friend but to indicate that the central issue, the fate of the Haram, was a purely Muslim matter.3

  Al-Hajj Amin used these sessions to conduct a historical review of the injustice done to the Palestinian people by the discriminatory British policy. For example, he noted that the mandatory government paved roads leading to Jewish settlements but refused his request to pave a two-kilometer road to Nabi Musa. But his main complaint was that the government regularly broke its promises – first the pledges made in the Hussein–McMahon correspondence, then the government announcements made during the 1920s. The lawyers for the Jewish side questioned his claim that there was a Jewish plot to seize the Haram.

  The mufti’s British lawyer was Henry Stalker. A corpulent man who sported a monocle in his right eye, Stalker was over seventy but looked ten years younger. Stalker got al-Hajj Amin entangled with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which did him no good. He had brought a copy of the book in Arabic and French with him, and the mufti was seen reading it during the sessions. The lawyers for the Jewish side made the most of the apparent connection between the book and the Palestinian claims that the Jews were conspiring to seize the Temple Mount.4

  Nevertheless, the commission ended up vindicating al-Hajj Amin, though it is uncertain whether this was thanks to his efforts or because the commissioners retained their independence. The Shaw Commission published its report at the end of March 1930, in which it upheld the basic Arab claim that Jewish provocations had caused the violent outbreak. ‘The principal cause’, Shaw wrote after leaving the country, ‘was twelve years of pro-Zionist policy.’ Now it seemed that the scales had tipped in favor of the Palestinians – and under the leadership of a Husayni.5

  Furthermore, the Shaw Commission did not blame the mufti for the violent outbreak. Whether this made al-Hajj Amin feel better is unclear, as a British declaration of his innocence did not enhance his national standing. Perhaps that was why he did not express his approval of the report when it was adopted as the British government’s official policy and published as a White Paper. The new policy determined that Jewish immigration and settlement in Palestine were to be curbed – which was, in effect, a repeal of the Balfour Declaration.

  All these developments, before and after the crisis, disrupted solidarity among the Husaynis. Jamal rallied the younger generation, his contemporaries, to support al-Hajj Amin, while the older relatives considered Musa Kazim’s conciliatory approach to be the best policy.

  Musa Kazim had managed to maintain good relations with the Nashashibis throughout the crisis, and together they evolved a compromise position in Palestinian politics focusing on support for a Palestinian-Zionist legislative council. The British authorities certainly regarded Musa Kazim’s stance as the embodiment of Palestinian moderation, but several of the Husaynis, notably al-Hajj Amin, thought it betrayed the cause. However, Musa Kazim’s position was strong enough to withstand heated criticism in the family. During the 1930s, he and Raghib al-Nashashibi cooperated closely. Perhaps in different circumstances the Palestinians might have benefited from such a dual leadership. It might have helped the families overcome the tension and hostility between them.6

  Though the Shaw Report appeared to vindicate al-Hajj Amin, if one examines British policies in the 1930s, al-Hajj Amin’s position became increasingly insignificant in the eyes of those who formulated Britain’s policy in Palestine. Neither moderation nor fanaticism would have enabled the Palestinians to persuade the British to turn against Zionism – certainly not in view of the dramatic and tragic developments in Central Europe during the 1930s and 1940s.

  Musa Kazim remained in the picture and was still the most popular of the Husaynis among the social elite behind the political leadership. In the spring of 1930, he was again chosen to lead a Palestinian delegation to London to discuss the country’s future. This time he was elected democratically. All al-Hajj Amin could do was ask that his kinsman and confidant Mustafa Kamal al-Husayni be included in the delegation as a representative of the paper Al-Jamaa’ al-Arabiyya. Plump, jovial Mustafa Kamal did not have to act against Musa Kazim because the delegation returned empty-handed.

  On this visit to London, Musa Kazim saw for himself how paltry the mufti’s achievements were. A crushing proof of the Palestinian leadership’s insignificance in British eyes was the reception which met the delegation when they arrived at Victoria Station. Instead of an official representative, three elderly English ladies met them waving a Palestinian flag enthusiastically. They were the only supporters of the Palestine cause during the talks in the British capital.7

  Sitting around a big square table under a dim ceiling lamp in a government office in Westminster, the delegates recapitulated the Palestinians’ demands. The British officials hardly referred to the Shaw Report but put forward a private proposal made by the British Arabist and best-known agent on the Arabian Peninsula, St John Philby. It was an anachronistic compromise solution based on most of the former British government proposals that both sides had already rejected. Inevitably, it would suffer the same fate.8

  Musa Kazim returned to Jerusalem immoderate and impatient: the British attitude had left him angry and frustrated. He decided to act more decisively in warning the Palestinian public of the Zionists’ plans. Together with Munif al-Husayni, editor of the family-owned newspaper Al-Jamaa’ al-Arabiyya, he launched a campaign in 1931 to convince the Arab public that the Zionist objective was the same as what it had been in 1929 – namely, to take over the Haram al-Sharif. Musa Kazim went to Gaza to get the local newspaper to publish his article on this subject, ‘A Call to Palestine’.9

  Any biography of the Husayni family covering the 1930s as well as the 1920s must focus on the political presence of the three leading figures in the family: al-Hajj Amin, Musa Kazim and Jamal (in this order). Yet Jamal really came to prominence only in the 1930s. Palestinian historians would agree that his contributions ought to be included in the finest chapters of Palestinian history, because there were few to match them at the time.

  Jamal was above all a gifted diplomat. D
uring the later stages of the British Mandate, the diplomatic skills of both sides were decisive in the struggle to win the country. Jamal was the most eloquent spokesman of the Palestinian cause and one of the few who tried to counteract the endless stream of reports and articles published by Zionists in the popular and even the academic press from 1929 on.

  Jamal’s first article appeared in November of that year.10 Written in response to Zionism’s most eloquent spokesman, Chaim Weizmann, it opened by drawing a clear distinction between Palestinian attitudes towards Judaism and Zionism. The Palestinians, Jamal wrote, were not opposed to the Jewish people but to Zionist aggression. Moreover, he went on, the struggle against Zionism did not mean a struggle against the British. Though the Palestinians were unhappy about Britain’s policy, especially failure to keep promises to the whole of its Arab nation, they nevertheless considered themselves the British Empire’s allies.

  Jamal was one of the first Palestinians to recapitulate the history of Palestinian nationalism. One of his articles stated that 1908 was the year when Palestine emerged as a distinct territorial entity within the Ottoman framework. Had it not been for the Great War, this geopolitical entity would have become a democracy within the Ottoman Empire and later, like Greece, an independent state. This was an important argument, because it countered the Zionist claim that it was the Jewish demand for a national home in Palestine that made the country a distinct geopolitical entity. This was a direct answer to Weizmann’s claim that but for Zionism the country would have been divided amongst its neighbors.

  Jamal was also the first to try to systematically undermine Zionist claims by juxtaposing the demographic reality in Palestine with its political structure. Ever since the 1920s, he argued, 93 percent of the population had had no share in determining the country’s future, while the Jewish population was over-represented in the political structure. Their representation was buttressed by the appointment of pro-Zionist individuals to senior positions, among them the general prosecutor, the legal secretary of the government, the administrator of the immigration department and the head of the Land Registry Office. The article also noted that even before the country’s future was determined, the Palestinians had already paid with their taxes for the Jewish ‘national home’. They paid for the entrenchment of an alien and hostile presence – the revival of the Hebrew language, a separate educational system and the salaries of the immigration department intended for the Jews.

  The article was a carefully constructed vindication of the Palestinian national ideology, and Chaim Weizmann hastened, the same year and in the same publication, to refute its arguments with ideological justifications of Zionism.

  It should be noted that Jamal’s article, and the arguments he presented in other forums about the economic cost that Jewish immigration imposed on the local population, did have some impact in Britain. While in London, he managed to persuade his British interlocutors that his arguments were factually sound, and apparently he sowed some serious doubts in the minds of policymakers regarding the meaning of the Balfour Declaration and its repercussions for the local population.

  An indication of such fresh thinking was seen in the work of the Hope Simpson Commission, appointed in October 1930 to reexamine the vague promises made to the Jews over the years, above all the promise to allow mass immigration into Palestine. It was also directed to find out if the country was economically capable of becoming a Jewish safe haven without harming the local population. High Commissioner John Chancellor hoped that the commission would leave out the political aspects, but this could not be done.

  Sir John Hope Simpson was the vice chairman of the League of Nations Refugee Settlement Commission in Greece. Having experienced firsthand the human price of ethnic conflict, he was determined to avert it in Palestine. He came back from Palestine convinced that the Palestinian population had been harmed, and suggested measures to alleviate their plight. He proposed curtailing the sale of land to Jews for five years and reducing immigration to such numbers as could be settled on unoccupied Jewish-owned land. The commission also proposed a new law granting Palestinian sharecroppers the right to lease their land and to develop lands for the settlement of Palestinians dispossessed by land transactions. The commission’s report was warmly approved by Colonial Secretary Sidney Webb (Lord Passfield), who saw it as a blueprint for a resolution to the conflict. It was published as a government White Paper in 1930.

  Although Al-Jamaa’ al-Arabiyya disapproved of the commission’s report, al-Hajj Amin was generally pleased with the change in Britain’s policy. Perhaps he thought that it was tactically useful to express disapproval, but it is more likely that, given their national outlook, al-Hajj Amin and Jamal expected and demanded much more than a tactical change in Britain’s policies. Be that as it may, the commission’s report became one more document of an alternative that could have directed the Palestinians towards a better future.

  Chaim Weizmann’s personal efforts and his influence with British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald caused Lord Passfield’s White Paper to be effectively disregarded. In February 1931, MacDonald sent Weizmann a letter spelling out the government’s interpretation of the White Paper: it did not repeal the restrictions placed on the Zionist movement but implied that Britain would not take action to implement them. Lord Passfield’s views notwithstanding, the British government did not feel the need to retract the principle embodied in the Balfour Declaration. It also became known that the government regarded the Jewish Agency as the official representative of the Jewish community in Palestine. It seemed that all the Palestinian gains of 1930 had gone up in smoke.

  At about this time, al-Hajj Amin paid a secret visit to London. According to his companion in England, Izz al-Din al-Shawa of Gaza, it was a complete failure. Ostensibly he was shown all the important sights in the city: he was taken to Piccadilly and Oxford Street, and then the car stopped on Regent Street in front of the Café Royal. The mufti was led down into the hall, which was full of cheerful music and couples on the dance floor. ‘What is this place?’ the mufti asked, and the guide assigned to him by the Colonial Office replied seriously, ‘This is one of the most important places in London. We want you to see it, to give you an idea of our culture and way of life.’ The mufti wanted to leave but politely went on listening to the learned guide. ‘Some of the most important people frequented this place. Oscar Wilde used to come here for tea, and people from all walks of life, young and old. Here class distinctions don’t matter.’ The guide spoke as though al-Hajj Amin were an emissary of the Palestine Communist Party rather than a member of Jerusalem’s aristocracy. At which point the mufti lost his patience and asked to return to his hotel.

  At every point during his visit, his British hosts made him feel that he was not the equal of the Zionist leaders and that in their eyes he was a primitive colonial native who should be impressed by crystal chandeliers and thrilled by a lively dance floor. Al-Hajj Amin had hoped for understanding and support, but he was shown superciliousness and disdain. It is worth remembering this episode, as Chapter Eleven will deal with al-Hajj Amin’s visits to Mussolini and Hitler. These visits were equally ineffectual, but he was treated respectfully and ceremoniously as a national leader. This may help to explain why he chose to associate himself with those who would become the enemies of humanity.

  The vexation was not only personal, it was national, and for a brief moment it unified the factions in the Palestinian camp. MacDonald’s letter caused the Palestinians to overcome past resentments and brought together the two great families, the Husaynis and the Nashashibis. Early in March 1931, the public was treated to a rare example of solidarity: both Raghib al-Nashashibi and al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni attended a special meeting of the Palestinian Executive in Jerusalem, another significant milestone in the history of a people confronted with fateful decisions almost every year. The situation was clear, as the British rulers had made it known exactly how far they were willing to adjust their policies. Even the Nashashibis could not
accept the idea that the Jews (who constituted 17 percent of the total population and most of whom were recent arrivals) would determine the character of the country, let alone the prospect that many more immigrants would arrive.

  On his way to the meeting, the mufti consulted with his relative Ishaq Darwish. As president of the Supreme Muslim Council, al-Hajj Amin was an official of the mandatory government, and if he wished to keep his post he had to respect certain limits. He believed that the proper response to Britain was a general strike throughout Palestine, but he feared that if he called for it he would lose his position. So it was agreed that Darwish would call for the strike. Perhaps, as some historians suggest, al-Hajj Amin also knew that the Nashashibis would not wish to go so far and that a resolution that worsened his relations with the British would fail. Finally, after prolonged debates, the council adopted Raghib al-Nashashibi’s moderate proposal to call on the Palestinians to boycott Jewish goods and buy Palestinian products.11 Consequently, in 1931 al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni seemed to be trying to avoid at all costs a head-on collision with the British or the Jews.

  But as in 1928, the Palestinian camp was not so easily mollified. John Chancellor made hostile public statements, the British police continued to treat Palestinian suspects brutally long after the events of 1929 and, to add insult to injury, the pro-Zionist Jewish general prosecutor Norman Bentwich retained his post. The mood grew uglier still when three Palestinians who had been charged with inciting riots were hanged, while not a single Jew was sentenced to death. The sentence looked like a deliberate perversion of justice and part of a hostile policy.12 Now whenever al-Hajj Amin addressed a large angry crowd, he had to revert to the role of the aggressive, demagogic sheikh pouring fire and brimstone on Zionism and British policies.