The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty

by Ilan Pappe

  To general astonishment, he launched into a fiery speech against Western policies in the Middle East and against the part played by the American University in implementing them. He accused the institution in which he had studied of consciously and deliberately undermining the Muslim religion and its traditions and supporting the Christian mission. The aim of the Christian mission, he said, was to sow dissent between Christians and Muslims, whereas the Muslims aspired to pan-Arab solidarity. He stopped, raised the diploma he had just been given and declared, ‘This is your diploma. Take it away. It’s nothing to do with me!’ Then he tore the thick document before all the dignitaries, local and foreign, sitting on the terrace.

  The university was all agog, and its administrators appealed to the local authorities as well as to the American and British embassies. That evening they resolved to expel Abd al-Qadir from Egypt within twenty-four hours. During that time, the young man managed to tell his version of the event to the Egyptian press, preventing the university from denying the occurrence, as its directors were naturally inclined to do.35

  Abd al-Qadir returned to Palestine a national hero, and the young revolutionary became a journalist. At first he joined the newspaper of the Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Jamaa’ al-Islamiyya. Before long he realized that his articles were not published, and he suspected that the paper was succumbing to British pressure. He then began writing for the family-owned newspaper, Al-Jamaa’ al-Arabiyya. Every day he made his way to the editorial offices, located in what is today the Clark Building on Mamoun Allah Street, to hand in a fervent column that would stir the young nationalists of Jerusalem. Often it was not published but rather distributed in secret to the young people. When he felt that here he was being thwarted again, he made one final attempt to work through the press by joining the board of the newspaper Al-Liwa, edited by Jamal al-Husayni, whose offices adjoined those of Al-Jamaa’ al-Arabiyya. The latter publication represented the Supreme Muslim Council, and the former the Husayni party. But Abd al-Qadir soon realized that here, too, most of his columns were not printed, for fear of British reprisals.

  Thus ended his short career as a journalist. Helped by his family connections, he obtained a post in the Government Lands Office. One of his biographers, Muhsin, describes this as an impressive achievement. First he agitated against the government’s practice of preferring to hire Christians rather than Muslims, then he formed an organization named the Association of Educated Young Muslims, which pressured the High Commissioner Wauchope to give twenty-five Muslims jobs in the administration. The twenty-sixth post, with a handsome monthly salary of 25 Palestinian pounds, went to Abd al-Qadir.

  At first he was satisfied with the clerical post in Jaffa, but he advanced quickly and became chief of the Land Registry in the district of Ramleh. Here he became aware of the extent of Jewish land acquisition and the growing Palestinian distress, and he wrote to his friends in Egypt that he was using his post to tackle these issues. He claimed to have stopped the sale of many tracts in the center of the country and to have increased the number of Palestinians in high government posts. There is no external evidence for these claims, but this may well be the case. His committed biographer highlights these achievements in order to justify Abd al-Qadir’s willingness to work in the very government department that enabled the Zionists to buy more land (that is, he wished to work from within the system to curb the Zionist enterprise).36

  His energy and working pace were noted by the family. Not content with his newspaper and government work, he labored indefatigably to organize support for the family and opposition to the British and the Zionists. We have mentioned his creation of a group dedicated to fighting the growing unemployment among educated Muslims. Only a few months after his return from Egypt, he convened in Jaffa a conference on unemployment that called on the government to sack its British and foreign staff and to pass a law requiring companies to hire Muslims in proportion to their profits from the Muslim community. If these demands were not met, the conference threatened to call on Muslims to boycott those companies.

  But the government did not meet the demands. Abd al-Qadir failed to rouse the public to tackle this issue, since the breach with the opposition prevented large-scale action. Moreover, the opposition newspaper Mirat al-Sharq charged that Abd al-Qadir always acted in a Muslim context and was therefore anti-Christian. It was a difficult charge to refute, but a search through the opposition’s leaflets and publications has produced no tangible evidence of such discrimination on Abd al-Qadir’s part.

  Like other members of the Husayni family, Abd al-Qadir needed a government post in order to survive economically and to maintain a strong political stance in society. This created a dilemma similar to the one faced by the notables under the Young Turks – except that they had not been strongly opposed to the government and certainly did not aspire to replace it with an independent national entity. In the 1930s, the family was troubled by the question of whether to resign from or remain in government posts. Abd al-Qadir was the first to resolve it, and his determination spearheaded the Husaynis’ clash with the British and the Zionists. For this he eventually paid with his life. In 1934 he proclaimed that he was resigning his post in the mandatory government’s land registry because it was helping the Jews to take over the land.37

  The bravest of the family, however, was the aged Musa Kazim. He accepted the invitation of young Jaffaites to lead a demonstration they were organizing. The eighty-year-old Husayni thrilled the young men as he faced the mounted police and was knocked down by the horses. The newspaper Filastin reported that the old man was miraculously spared when a bullet fired at him struck one of the other demonstrators.38

  Abd al-Qadir’s action, and possibly Musa Kazim’s bravery as well, prompted al-Hajj Amin to act more decisively. But his decision to take stronger action against the British and Zionists might have been made at the start of 1933. This led to another attempt to unify the Palestinian camp – though, as before, the union was too brief to change the course of history.

  At the end of March 1933, after months in Jerusalem, the mufti took the train to Jaffa to attend a rare gathering of representatives from all the Palestinian political factions. Five hundred men listened to speeches calling for a boycott of Zionist and British goods and the rejection of the legitimacy of the mandatory government. Inspired by al-Hajj Amin, they publicly denounced Arabs who sold land to the Jews and delivered an unprecedented attack on the government’s pro-Zionist policy.39 The anti-Zionist utterances were clearer and more uncompromising than ever: ‘It is the overall plan of the Jews to seize the soil of this holy land, and by arriving here in hundreds and thousands, legally and illegally, they are spreading fear and terror through the country,’ stated a proclamation issued by the Jaffa conference.40

  Upon his return to Jerusalem on 31 March 1933, al-Hajj Amin visited the residence of Dr Heinrich Wolf, the German Consul General in Jerusalem appointed by the new Nazi government two months earlier. To Israeli historiographers, this visit made him one of the worst enemies not only of Zionism but of Jewry as a whole.

  The consul was unimpressed by al-Hajj Amin and wrote to his superiors that the mufti boasted he could rally Muslims, not only in Palestine but throughout the Arab world, to support Nazi Germany. The consul had the impression that it would not be easy to build up pro-Nazi sentiment among the Muslims of Palestine, in part because it would be difficult to convince them that Judaism was the source of all evil and responsible for the hardships they suffered as merchants and farmers. In reality, the strength of Palestinian nationalism lay in the widespread belief that Zionism, rather than Judaism, was the source of the trouble.

  Most of the Consul General’s report seems very dubious. According to Wolf, al-Hajj Amin urged Hitler to impose a boycott on the Jews of Germany, but not the kind that would drive them to migrate to Palestine. In reality, it is doubtful that al-Hajj Amin would have proposed such a thing, since he was concerned with boycotting the Jewish community in Palestine and preventing a
ny situation in Europe that would impel more Jews to immigrate there. Nevertheless, this meeting would be viewed by a good many Israeli researchers as proof that al-Hajj Amin was a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi.41

  While in Jaffa, al-Hajj Amin also dealt with some family interests, mainly to strengthen his relations with the non-clannish Istiqlal Party, which was in decline after having become a stronghold of the al-Hadi family of Nablus. Eighty years earlier, the Husaynis and al-Hadis had found themselves in opposing camps when the Husaynis formed marriage ties with the al-Hadis’ Nablus rivals, the Tuqans. But times had changed, and now the ideological element had come into play. Awni Abd al-Hadi was promoting a pan-Arab national program, according to which Palestine could only survive in the framework of a pan-Arab republic. Given the hardships of the 1930s, al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni felt he could live with such a platform, particularly if it caused a rift in the opposition camp. After all, he himself had once supported the idea of Palestine as a part of Syria. This duality between local nationalism (wataniya) and pan-Arab nationalism (qawmiya) would haunt the Palestinian national movement until the death of Gamal Abd al-Nasser in 1970. Pan-Arab solidarity would remain a major cultural-social component in the identity of the diverse Arab nations, and its remarkable persistence testifies to its vitality in the culture of the Middle East. However, it was not sufficient to rally the Arab world to Palestine’s aid.

  Relations with the Abd al-Hadi family improved, and ties with the Khalidis were at their best. Relations with the Nashashibis, however, were worsening. Al-Hajj Amin’s main purpose in holding the conference in Jaffa was to prevent Fakhri al-Nashashibi, the most dynamic figure of his family, from standing between the Husaynis and the Istiqlal Party. There was no pressing reason for Awni Abd al-Hadi to declare his support for one camp or the other. He enjoyed being courted by both and wished the state of affairs to continue.

  Al-Hajj Amin also had some satisfying moments while in Jaffa meeting the young men who ran his Young Muslim Associations. He was particularly impressed by Izz al-Din al-Qassam, whom he had already met when the Supreme Muslim Council appointed him registrar of marriages at the Shari‘a court in Haifa. At the time, al-Hajj Amin had considered this appointment very carefully, because the Syrian al-Qassam had been famous in the 1920s as an eloquent and passionate preacher at the al-Istiqlal mosque in Haifa.

  When they met in Jaffa, al-Hajj Amin knew that al-Qassam had been active for three years in the Black Hand.42 This group trained young men in guerrilla warfare against the British in the Carmel Mountains. A devout Muslim, al-Qassam wanted religious approval of this activity, but knowing the local clergy would refuse, he turned instead to a Syrian sheikh in Damascus who gave the stamp of religious approval to actions of this kind.43 Before the gathering in Jaffa, al-Qassam had already contributed to the more violent aspect of the Palestinian struggle against the British and the Zionists. In April 1931, his unit killed three members of Kibbutz Yagur.44 The following year they struck again, killing a man in the Jewish village of Balfouriya and another in Kfar Hasidim. Late that year, they slew a man and his small son in the village of Nahalal. Some members of the group were caught and hanged before the end of that year. Al-Qassam himself was put on trial, but there was no evidence to link him directly with the perpetrators.

  Al-Qassam’s unsavory acts attracted a great deal of attention during the rise of Nazism in Germany. The coming of the Nazis to power in Germany at the end of January 1933 focused Palestinian attention on Jewish immigration. In 1932 some 9,000 Jews arrived, and 30,000 came the following year. The Jewish presence was noticeable everywhere, not only because of the large numbers of new arrivals but also because of the rapid growth of economic activity, particularly in the urban areas, while the purchasing power of the Palestinian population dropped to about a quarter of the population.

  But the anxiety of the Jews of Europe was not on the Palestinian agenda. In the 1930s, the Arabs of Palestine were afraid of becoming a minority in their homeland, of losing their workplaces and their land and even of large-scale evictions. Their main outlet was the Palestinian press, which from the summer of 1933 became wholly committed to resisting immigration. From the press, the protest moved into the streets, and by autumn there were massive demonstrations. They began with thousands marching in the streets of Jerusalem and spread throughout the country. In Jaffa the demonstrators tried to break into the offices of the district governor and were fired on by the police. In Jerusalem young Palestinians broke into Jewish neighborhoods, and the police killed twenty-six and wounded many more.45

  In October 1934 the Palestinian Executive called for demonstrations in the desperate hope of changing the government’s policies, but to no avail. The government held the Husaynis responsible for the disorder and arrested Jamal al-Husayni.46

  When al-Hajj Amin returned from Jaffa, he immediately went into action. Once again elections were held in Jerusalem, but this time the family did not put forward a candidate of its own. On the advice of al-Hajj Amin, backed after some hesitation by Jamal, the family supported the candidacy of Dr Hussein al-Khalidi. Al-Hajj Amin threw himself into the campaign, and his speeches denounced Raghib al-Nashashibi, the opposition’s candidate for mayor, as non-national and not pro-Islamic.47

  Hussein al-Khalidi was a good choice – a gifted man, a good speaker and an outstanding chief physician in the Department of Health. He resigned his medical post so as to dedicate himself to politics and the city. He defeated Raghib al-Nashashibi and restored the Husaynis to the position of power they had lost with the advent of British rule fourteen years earlier. What is more, he caused a split in the Nashashibi camp. The 1934 elections were decided by the Jews, whose numbers in Jerusalem had grown to 30,000, thanks to immigration. They withheld their vote from Nashashibi, mistaking him for a nationalist extremist because he had taken part in the Palestinian delegation to London in 1930. High Commissioner Wauchope also expressed displeasure at Raghib’s obtaining another post.48 It should be noted that Hussein al-Khalidi helped the family even during the worst years of the revolt, and in 1936 he joined the Husaynis’ party.

  As they had many times before, the Husayni women played an important part in cementing the alliance. Hussein al-Khalidi’s wife, Wahida, cooperated with Amina, the wife of Jamal al-Husayni: in 1929 they had recruited twelve other women and formed a female Palestinian executive. It grew into a women’s congress, led by Salma, the wife of Musa Kazim, the first lady of Palestinian nationalism (to borrow a modern American term).49 Two hundred women, mostly from the families of the urban notables, attended the opening session of the congress.

  There was a dark passage in the life of the two families, however. Munif al-Husayni, editor of Al-Jamaa’ al-Arabiyya, fell in love with a young woman of the Khalidi family, but her parents opposed the match. Munif was powerful enough to force them to accept the marriage, but in response some of the Khalidis resigned from organizations controlled by the Husaynis. Rasim al-Khalidi quit the leadership of the Palestinian youth movements created by Jamal in 1932. But after a while the furor subsided, love flourished and the alliance survived.50

  This passionate drama and all the other upsets were forgotten in the winter of 1934 when Musa Kazim died at the age of eighty-four. The last two demonstrations in which he took part hastened his demise. In Jerusalem he fell and was bruised, and in Jaffa he was battered in a bloody demonstration. Though al-Hajj Amin was the people’s leader, Musa Kazim was the head of the family; perhaps even in the eyes of the people, his standing was higher than al-Hajj Amin’s. After all, he was the president of the executive, and his ability to achieve a consensus created the impression of unity in the Palestinian camp.

  Musa Kazim was the most highly respected of the Husaynis in the twentieth century – ‘Sheikh al-Mujahidin’ (‘Palestine’s foremost warrior’), ‘her greatest casualty’, as the historian al-Dabagh described him. His funeral became a huge demonstration, the likes of which had never been seen in Jerusalem, and he was buried at al-Aqsa.51 When he had f
allen ill, the delicate alliances he had built fell apart: the Nashashibis became a real opposition, while the Husaynis became the mainstream and led the movement towards a head-on collision with the British authorities. But when Musa Kazim died, the two camps seemed to agree on a successor – Yakub Faraj, Musa Kazim’s deputy (and a member of the opposition). Yet this moment of unity was, for all intents and purposes, the Palestinian Executive’s swansong.52

  FAMILY STATESMANSHIP: THE SECOND AND FINAL CHAPTER

  It is not known how al-Hajj Amin felt about the passing of the most admired Palestinian since the start of the mandate. In the early 1930s, the relationship between them had deteriorated after Musa Kazim accused al-Hajj Amin of falsely obtaining family funds to give to his supporters.53 Jamal, who was on close terms with both of them, tried in vain to arbitrate. Now that Musa Kazim was dead, al-Hajj Amin had the national stage to himself. But it is doubtful that this state of affairs favored al-Hajj Amin, who always benefited from having to consider opposing opinions within his family.

  With Musa Kazim gone, the family sought a new structure for its political and national action, particularly in response to the organizing skill of the Nashashibis, who created the National Defense Party in 1934. Therefore, the following year the Husaynis created the Palestinian Arab Party, whose avowed aims were ending the British Mandate, achieving Palestinian independence and abrogating the Jewish national home. In contrast to the Istiqlal, this new party’s platform did not contain anti-British or anti-imperialist statements. Jamal was chosen to head the party with the help of a Greek Catholic deputy, Alfred Rock. A Greek Orthodox – Emil al-Ghori – served as general secretary, and his main function was to win the support of the Palestinian youth. To the Husaynis, the presence of Christians in the party leadership was not merely an indicator of national unity, it also reflected their political and intellectual outlook since the 1920s. This party became the political center of gravity in Palestinian intellectual life during the 1930s.54