The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty

by Ilan Pappe

  While in Istanbul, al-Hajj Amin and his Azma friends heard that British foreign secretary Anthony Eden, while answering questions in Parliament about al-Hajj Amin’s fate, had said that ‘the mufti, the empire’s great enemy, was almost captured in Tehran, and we are still pursuing him.’17 Al-Hajj Amin did not stay long in Istanbul. His friends sent him on another long train journey – to Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, and thence to Rome.

  Once in Rome, al-Hajj Amin discarded all his disguises and put on his traditional robe and tarbush. It has been suggested that he put off meeting with Rome’s fascist leaders until his beard grew back. He was always very conscious of the connection between his external appearance and the message he wished to convey. Now he wanted to personify religious authority and tradition, as well as national leadership. In Rome he was described as one of the leaders of the ‘Arab nation’, and on his arrival he expressed the wish to collaborate with the government of Italy, provided it publicly recognized a unified Arab nation with a distinct national character.

  A virtuoso stage director, Mussolini housed the mufti in the splendid Villa Scarlani near Rome, a residence fit for a visiting leader. It is possible that al-Hajj Amin was dazzled by the grandeur – servants, a car accompanied by a brace of motorcycles – and forgot for a moment that in Palestine, the place nearest to his heart, he had become a marginal figure.18

  Italian documents state that the mufti planned a fascist Arab state, but it is not known whether he said as much or whether this was an Italian paraphrase. Perhaps al-Hajj Amin said this to curry favor with his hosts, and if so he achieved his purpose. After a month in Rome, the Italian Foreign Ministry recommended that the government support al-Hajj Amin and provide him with funds and a liaison officer.19 Al-Hajj Amin stayed in the Italian capital until the end of November and was joined by his faithful aide, Izzat Darwaza.

  The highlight of this visit was al-Hajj Amin’s meeting with Benito Mussolini at the dictator’s palace in Venice. He was met on the stairs by Il Duce’s personal secretary, who led him through one immense hall after another. In each hall sat a minor official behind a small desk who stood up and greeted the visitor with a fascist salute. Finally, in the doorway of the last hall, Mussolini awaited him, smiling broadly. Al-Hajj Amin would say later that he felt as if he was meeting Napoleon. Mussolini amazed him by his extensive knowledge of history and his manner of a Roman Caesar.20 To al-Hajj Amin’s dismay, however, their meeting was short. Al-Hajj Amin had expected a lengthy conference with a person he believed would soon be one of the rulers of the world, or at any rate the Middle East. Al-Hajj Amin conducted himself gravely as the leader of the Arab nation, which Mussolini’s reception of him seemed to affirm. He had prepared a long, well-reasoned survey of each region in the Arab world, and even wanted to air his view of the situation of the Muslim population in the Balkans. The farther he was from Palestine, the more he took on the role of a modern Arab caliph and shed that of Palestine’s national leader.21

  Though Mussolini was more interested in speaking than in listening, al-Hajj Amin managed to make his first statement. He had just enough time to request Italy’s support for an independent Arab state that would include Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Transjordan, as the best way to counter the threat of the Jewish national home. Not once since leaving Baghdad and heading to the Axis states had al-Hajj Amin mentioned the demand for an independent Palestinian state. All his appeals had been on behalf of the entire Arab nation, as though he were an Istiqlali, an associate of Awni Abd al-Hadi, rather than the head of the Party of the Arab Nation. Perhaps he thought that nothing less would interest the Axis governments or perhaps he was temporarily in despair about the prospects for an independent Palestine.

  Il Duce, for his part, talked almost exclusively about Britain and about the blood pact he had made with Germany against it. He agreed with his guest that the Jews had no right to Palestine, but emphasized that he was not anti-Semitic. He asked the mufti to guarantee the rights of the Christian Maronites in Lebanon. Al-Hajj Amin gave him his solemn word to do so – as though he were about to be crowned king of the Arab world.

  In fact, al-Hajj Amin obtained nothing. At the very least, he had expected the meeting to yield a joint declaration, thereby confirming his standing as the new leader of the Arab nation. But the pompous Mussolini, or at any rate his advisers, understood that the mufti was incapable of unleashing the Arab world against Britain. At best he might be able to help Italy when the campaign for the Middle East began – that is, in 1940. Using the pretext that the Germans had to be consulted about it, Count Malini informed al-Hajj Amin of Mussolini’s decision to postpone the joint statement for the time being. The only gains from the meeting were Il Duce’s promise to arrange for the mufti to meet Hitler, and the promise of the Italian foreign minister, Count Ciano, to provide him with a radio station.22

  Al-Hajj Amin reached Berlin in November 1941. After his stay in Rome, his penchant for grandeur and ceremony reached unprecedented dimensions. His entourage had increased to include several personal secretaries and the Italian diplomat Malini. He was met at the railway station by senior officials of the German Foreign Ministry, who took him to the palatial residence reserved for the ministry’s important guests. Al-Hajj Amin at once began to polish the joint declaration that Mussolini had postponed, believing that he could persuade Hitler to endorse an Italo-German commitment to Arab unity and independence. He himself was convinced that such a declaration would rouse all Arabs, perhaps even all Muslims, to rebel. During their journey to Berlin, Malini had – ingratiatingly or sincerely – encouraged al-Hajj Amin to believe that such a prospect was feasible.23

  Two days after his arrival in Berlin, al-Hajj Amin heard that his greatest rival in Palestine, Fakhri al-Nashashibi, had been murdered in Baghdad. It is possible that he knew that this would be Fakhri’s fate. The Germans, too, must have been pleased, as Fakhri had been energetically recruiting Palestinians to join the British forces. Though he was not very successful at that, he did recruit more men than al-Hajj Amin would do for the Axis (nearly 10,000 joined the British armed forces). When Fakhri went to Baghdad, where many of the leaders of the Palestinian uprising were still staying, a tribunal of rebels appointed itself a field court and sentenced him to death for organizing the ‘peace bands’, paramilitary groups that had fought for the opposition against the Palestinian guerrillas. He was shot and killed on 8 November 1941.24

  Dr Musa Abdullah al-Husayni, then in his late thirties, informed al-Hajj Amin of the murder. In 1938, as has been said, Musa Abdullah had led the Husaynis’ abortive contacts with Zionist leaders in Britain. He was still a socialist in 1938, when he went from London to Nazi Germany, and he was captivated by the Germans – or, at any rate, by the German Thea Maria, whom he later married. As soon as al-Hajj Amin arrived, Musa Abdullah became his guide and right-hand man.

  But at this time al-Hajj Amin was not concerned with minor matters such as local politics in Palestine. He believed he was on the verge of international glory, and he eagerly anticipated his meeting with Hitler. First, though, he had a meeting with the Nazi foreign minister, von Ribbentrop. They conversed in French, and the talk was pointless. Finally, twenty days after his arrival in Berlin, he got his audience with the Führer.

  Hitler’s interpreter recalled that the meeting began badly. Upon his arrival, al-Hajj Amin was invited by the chef de protocol to review a small guard of honor that awaited him in front of the Foreign Ministry. Then he was taken to see Hitler, where the mishaps began. Hitler ignored al-Hajj Amin’s outstretched hand and the interpreter’s suggestion to offer coffee to the guest. The photograph taken of the two men sitting on the edge of their armchairs as though about to rise would be useful to all the enemies of the Palestinian national movement, from London to Jerusalem, who wanted to harm the mufti’s reputation.

  Al-Hajj Amin launched into a lengthy speech and, unlike his meeting with Mussolini, was given enough time to display his knowledge of conditions throughout the Arab w
orld and to explain the importance of a joint statement. Hitler responded with pathos, referring to the Nazis’ commitment to Arab independence, but he spoke chiefly about the Jews. ‘My main struggle is against the Jews,’ he began. ‘The elimination of the Jewish people is part of my overall campaign. They want to establish a state that will be the basis for the destruction of all the nations in the world.’ It is possible that Hitler did not use the words ‘eliminate the Jews’, but this is how it was engraved in the memory of the mufti. After this there was no stopping Hitler. It is doubtful if the interpreter translated everything, but the message was plain enough.

  In 1969 al-Hajj Amin tried to reconstruct his response to that speech. By then he was aware of the damage that his association with Hitler had inflicted on the Palestinian image. He claimed that he was slow to answer because he felt cornered. ‘I replied that I was convinced we had an ally in our struggle against Zionism and the British, and said nothing more.’25

  At their second meeting, he recalled, he clarified his meaning. ‘We regard the Zionists, not the Jews, as the destroyers of the world.’ ‘You are a sentimental people,’ said the Führer. ‘I invite you to visit my research center, and there I shall convince you of the global conspiracy.’ In 1942 al-Hajj Amin spent three days in such a center in Frankfurt. In retrospect, he sought to depict himself as having accepted some of the Nazi analysis of the Jewish problem but not its solution. He similarly described a chilling discussion he had with the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, whom al-Hajj Amin made no effort to persuade because ‘he was like a religious man on this subject’.

  Politically speaking, al-Hajj Amin gained little during this visit. Hitler did promise to support the Arab struggle but wanted to postpone publicizing the fact until German forces had reached the Caucasus. He made a dramatic point of revealing to his visitor Germany’s secret plan to reach the southern Caucasus.

  The Führer was interested in the military potential that al-Hajj Amin could rally. Al-Hajj Amin was embarrassed, as he could not hide his objection to the idea of sending Arab soldiers to fight against the Arab soldiers in the Allied armies. Did he feel that in Germany, as opposed to Italy, he was viewed as a representative of an inferior race, and therefore not a serious ally?26 Whatever the case, the people around him testified that at this time he was still exalted, feeling that suddenly everything was about to happen.

  His enthusiasm infected Rashid al-Gaylani, who had also fled to Berlin. In February 1942, the two met the King of Italy, who gave them the longed-for public statement about Italy’s unreserved support for the Arab nation. In the summer of that year, the Axis forces won impressive victories in North Africa, seized Tobruk and moved towards Egypt’s western border. That summer the mufti met Count Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law and foreign minister, and suggested preparing the inhabitants of North Africa for the victory of the Axis powers. To that purpose, he published an open letter to the people of Egypt.27 He began to work fast, feeling that this gamble had gone well.

  But during his stay, the Azma brothers accused al-Hajj Amin of not keeping them in the picture. They complained that instead of adhering to the policy they had agreed upon, al-Hajj Amin was selling Arab support to the Axis powers too cheaply.28 After some time, Qawuqji, too, began to feel that al-Hajj Amin was seeking glory at his expense, and began to avoid him in Berlin. Qawuqji’s main complaint was that al-Hajj Amin did not involve him in discussions on military matters, in which the mufti had neither experience nor expertise. Al-Hajj Amin had several discussions with the Germans about the possibility of an anti-British revolt with Nazi help.

  On one subject, Fawzi al-Qawuqji supported al-Hajj Amin. He and Rashid al-Gaylani helped the mufti to carry out an idea he proposed in 1943 – namely, the creation of a pan-Arab committee led by himself, with equal representation for members from Syria, Iraq and Palestine, and with Rashid al-Gaylani as its foreign minister in charge of contacts with the Axis powers on the future of the Arab Middle East.29 This placed al-Hajj Amin at the center of a new pan-Arab project designed to bring about unity and independence with Axis help.

  Al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni, Fawzi al-Qawuqji and Rashid al-Gaylani adopted much of the Nazi vocabulary. They often took part in propaganda broadcasts from Berlin and Rome, spouting anti-Semitic vituperation, which may have been their composition or, more probably, translated from the Nazi Propaganda Ministry material. They made one minor contribution – they taught the Nazi ideologues, such as Alfred Rosenberg, the difference between the term ‘anti-Semitism’, which offended them, and ‘anti-Jewishness’, which they supported.

  Palestinian historiography was long uncomfortable with discussing these statements and their moral implications. However, recently they have openly and sensibly revisited this chapter of ill-fated liaisons, describing the players as a few individuals who were detached from Palestine and its politics and no longer attuned to the genuine predicament of the people there. This was not a formative chapter in Palestine’s history, but it is one that cannot be ignored given how it has been manipulated by Israeli historiography to Nazify the Palestinian movement as a whole and to justify brutal oppression, ethnic cleansing and occupation. For the purposes of this narrative, these events are highly important as an indication of al-Hajj Amin’s transformation from a bright, sensible leader of a movement into a hallucinatory figure losing touch with reality and assuming roles and capabilities far beyond those he actually possessed.30

  The reversals suffered by the Germans and Italians in North Africa did not faze the mufti. He proposed that the Germans declare the independence of the Maghreb and recruit a Maghrebi army to fight on their side. But the Germans had promised the region to Marshal Pétain, the leader of Vichy France, and could not guarantee its independence. Al-Hajj Amin worked diligently for the Germans through 1943. He persuaded Muslim leaders in India to support anti-British action, organized a Bosnian division in the Balkans and military groups to help the Germans in the northern Caucasus and promoted the idea of creating a Muslim state in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

  Then the idea arose of creating an Arab army division that would fight alongside the Axis powers. One hundred and thirty men began to train on the sands of Cape Sunion, not far from Athens, but the project fizzled out. In the Balkans, al-Hajj Amin wrote a booklet called ‘Islam and Judaism’, which could hold its own with the racist fliers distributed by the SS to German soldiers. Albania’s Muslims honored al-Hajj Amin when he helped create a local SS unit that would later take part in murdering the Jews of the Balkans. In the Caucasus, too, al-Hajj Amin enlisted Muslims to the war effort, above all to the German SS units. The Nazi discourse suited his aims and helped his enterprise. Palestine and Jerusalem might be far away – even perhaps from his mind – but he was still convinced that he was riding on the wings of history and helping to free the Arab world and to unify it.

  While al-Hajj Amin was rallying the Palestinians to the losing side, Winston Churchill acceded to the Jewish Agency’s request to form a Jewish brigade in the Allied forces. The brigade did not take an active part in the battles, but it became the basis for the Zionist military effort and highlighted the Zionist commitment to the Allied war. (The final accounting shows that the British armed forces included 12,000 Arabs from Palestine and 27,000 Jews, including the Jewish brigade.)

  But still al-Hajj Amin believed that the goddess of fortune was smiling on him and the Palestinians. He spent most of the war in Bari in southern Italy, now and then visiting Berlin to broadcast anti-British propaganda in Arabic on German radio. Only towards the end of the war, when the Nazi defeat became certain, did he realize that he had made a mistake. He was then in Berlin, and the Germans offered to send him in a submarine to an Arab country. However, a Swiss government radio broadcast offering political asylum to refugees convinced him to buy a small car and set out in May to the Swiss border. But the border was snowed in, and al-Hajj Amin and his companions could not proceed. The Germans offered to take him across in a light aircraft, but the Swiss gove
rnment, ignoring the pleas of diplomats from Arab countries, did not want him.

  Back he went to Germany, this time to Konstanz, in the French occupation zone. From here it was a short route to France, where he was held first in prison, then under house arrest and finally in fairly comfortable conditions. The soft treatment was due to France’s annoyance with Britain at the end of the war. France, which had given al-Hajj Amin refuge in Lebanon in 1938, seven years later gave him refuge at home. And just as in 1938, the British government dithered about his treatment and did nothing. It could have asked for his extradition – but then what? Should he be put on trial? Lord Gort, the new High Commissioner in Palestine, wanted nothing to do with him, imprisoned or free.

  For a moment it looked as though al-Hajj Amin would be tried alongside the Nazi leaders as a war criminal, as the Zionist organizations in the United States demanded. In the atmosphere that reigned after the war, this was not unthinkable: al-Hajj Amin’s behavior during his stay in Europe showed that he warmly approved of every Nazi act against the Jews, including extermination. Adolf Eichmann’s deputy, Dieter Wisliceny, claimed that al-Hajj Amin had acted in the countries adjoining the Nazi-controlled areas to bar the entry of Jews escaping from the concentration and death camps. But the context in which the mufti acted would have obliged the judges at Nuremberg to deal with the highly complex connections between the Holocaust and the Zionist movement, and between the latter and the future of Palestine. It is doubtful that anyone in the American Justice Department, let alone in Britain, cared to untangle them. The leaders of the Jewish community in Palestine also probably preferred these political and moral complexities not to be dragged into court. In any case, al-Hajj Amin’s identification with the Nazi death machine made it difficult for him to reintegrate into Palestinian politics and overshadowed everything else he had ever done. Many historians in the world, especially in Israel, have depicted him, unjustly and inaccurately, as a mini-Hitler.