by Ilan Pappe
The first volunteers of al-Qawuqji’s Arab Salvation Army arrived early in 1948. Most of them came from the margins of society in their own countries or belonged to fringe groups – people whom the Arab governments were quite happy to dispatch to the battlefield.57 Al-Qawuqji found the Palestinian opposition easy to get on with, and thus inadvertently he helped to weaken the Palestinians further. policy of opposing the mufti was not due to personal hostility, as was the case in Amman and Baghdad, but mainly to Syria’s fear that al-Hajj Amin would embroil it in a hasty operation before the British actually departed and before the League exhausted attempts to prolong the mandate. Perhaps this was why the Syrian government held up permission for al-Hajj Amin to send young Palestinian recruits for military training in Syria in preparation for the imminent clash with the organized Jewish forces that had been training for the decisive battle since the end of World War II.
In vain, al-Hajj Amin begged the League in Aley to place him at the head of a government in exile and appoint him commander of a pan-Arab army. The League set up a military commission for the deliverance of Palestine, headed by an Iraqi general, Ismail Safwat, who was promised a budget of one million pounds sterling. However, only part of the money was provided, and when the general tried to coordinate the inter-Arab activity in preparation for the final British withdrawal from Palestine, he was hampered by a lack of genuine cooperation.58
Something similar occurred in Egypt. In December 1947, the League met in Cairo, and once again Iraq and Transjordan vetoed al-Hajj Amin’s participation. The leaders of the Arab countries resolved to intensify efforts to help the Palestinians and increase aid, but the resolution meant little, as the Arab armies held no training exercises for the forthcoming battle. They still had not coordinated their diplomatic or military strategy, or significantly increased their arsenals. While the Jewish Agency went into high gear, al-Hajj Amin’s proposals to prepare for the creation of a separate political framework for Palestine and for a civil takeover of the country were rejected. His plea for pan-Arab funding of the Higher Arab Committee was rejected because of the Arab League. The only outcome of the Cairo meeting was the division of Palestine into four command sectors; the Husaynis got one, the Jerusalem sector, headed by Abd al-Qadir, who made the best of the situation and recruited a relatively large force of thousands. This force gave him a higher status in the military enterprise than the League had assigned him.59
But al-Hajj Amin did not give up easily. He fought back against the League’s intentions to neutralize him. Early in 1948, he proclaimed the establishment of a civil administration – in effect, the government-in-waiting that should have been formed in the 1920s. The League gave in a little and declared that every part of Palestine that was liberated would come under that administration. But this was al-Hajj Amin’s only success in attempting to wrest a central role in salvaging Palestine for himself. He was so preoccupied by the vital struggle with the League that he hardly prepared for the British evacuation; and worse, he was unaware of the beginning of mass expulsions of the rural areas by the invading Jewish forces.
In Palestine, all these maneuvers gave rise to the feeling that the Arab world was sitting on its hands. The social and economic elite in Palestine was already preparing for a hasty collective departure. Some 70,000 Palestinians left, believing that no one could stand up to the Zionist movement; all of them meant to return, but did not want to find themselves in the battle zone. The rest of the population swung between hope and despair, unaware of the catastrophe awaiting them in the next few months.
In less than three months, between February and May 1948, large chunks of Palestine fell to a Jewish occupying force – mixed cities, major junctions and isolated villages. It began as a civil war, but around March that year it turned into de facto ethnic cleansing – the expulsion of the Palestinian population from the territory of the Jewish state. In the first stages of the war, the Arab volunteers did not distinguish themselves in battle against the Jewish forces. They would do better in later stages, but it would be too late. Before the Arab armies entered Palestine, more than 200,000 Palestinians, among them many Husaynis, found themselves in refugee camps. A few had fled out of fear of the war, but most were driven out by the Jewish forces. When the war broke out, they were joined by about half a million other Palestinians, most of whom had been expelled from the territory designated by the UN as the future Jewish state.
The ethnic cleansing was accompanied by some forty massacres. The Nakbah – the Palestinian catastrophe – happened while the Husayni family was leading the national movement. The dreadful stories about the expulsion and massacres reached the Husayni leaders, and their failure to raise an outcry about it would cost them and the other notables a heavy political price. They would no longer have the trust and support of their society.
The Husayni family’s collective memory of the Nakbah is dominated by the heroism of Abd al-Qadir, above all on the date of his death, 8 April 1948, in what became known as the Battle of Qastel (a village west of Jerusalem on the road to the coast). He was eulogized by his second-in-command Kamal Iraqat, known as Abu Da’aya. Khalil al-Sakakini wrote in his diary that, ‘The eulogy was one of the finest heard in that funeral.’
The masses that followed the cortege showed that the family was still popular among all strata of the population.60 Abd al-Qadir was buried in a chamber on the Haram beside his father, Musa Kazim, and Sharif Hussein, the leader of the Arab Revolt during the Great War. They are enshrined in the pantheon of the Palestinians’ collective memory, and in 1950 the respected periodical Majalat al-Azhar compared Abd al-Qadir to Salah al-Din al-Ayubi (Saladin). No other member of the family has been so lauded.61
Abd al-Qadir’s son Faysal was only eight when his father was killed. ‘I didn’t know my father because he was always on the move and came home rarely, but I read and heard a lot about him,’ said Faysal, who in the 1980s would become a leading political figure in the occupied West Bank. Though he barely knew his father, towards the end of the twentieth century Faysal continued Abd al-Qadir’s legacy by adapting himself to the national mythology and committing his own family to the service of the national movement. The movement’s organization, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), made no such demand of any other Husayni, because no member of the family, not even Jamal and al-Hajj Amin, has retained a place to equal Abd al-Qadir’s in the nation’s pantheon.62
The day before Abd al-Qadir’s death, Jamal al-Husayni, as representative of the Higher Arab Committee, and Moshe Sharett, the representative of the Jewish Agency, negotiated indirectly in New York. Jamal refused to meet Sharett directly, and messages between the two were passed by the president of the UN Security Council. Their purpose was to try to achieve a truce in the fighting in Jerusalem. Sharett and others in the Jewish Agency – with typical Zionist Orientalist prejudice – feared that the Jewish community in the city, being largely of Middle Eastern origin, might not be able to withstand the pressure. They therefore wanted a break in the fighting and even agreed to a temporary halt in immigration. Jamal’s position was uncompromising: he demanded they stop the implementation of the Partition Resolution. The UN refused – once implementation had begun, no one in the international organization dared to propose reconsidering the resolution. It should have, however, as it was a resolution accepted by only one side and forced on the other (who were the majority and natives of the land). Reconsideration would have meant reopening the negotiations over Palestine on the basis of a settlement acceptable to both sides.63
But neither the death of Abd al-Qadir nor Jamal’s firm stance – which had been so sorely lacking during the UNSCOP investigation – could save the Palestinian people from catastrophe. And when it came, it swept them all away: villages and towns alike, fields and houses throughout Palestine, including even the Husayni homes in the Husayniyya quarter in the city of Jerusalem.
THE NAKBAH: THE DEMISE OF THE LOCAL ARISTOCRACY
During the Nakbah, many of the Husa
ynis were living in the strategically important Husayniya neighborhood. Volunteers from the Arab world who came to save Palestine, together with the remnants of Abd al-Qadir’s fighters under the command of another nephew of the mufti, Khalid al-Husayni, took up positions in some of the neighborhood houses – not Husayni residences, incidentally, but Nashashibi ones, notably Raghib’s house. As early as March 1948, the Jewish armed force, the Hagana, tried to capture the family’s stronghold but was foiled by British intervention. The neighborhood overlooked the road to Mount Scopus, and it was from there that a Zionist convoy to the Mount – the site of the Hebrew University and Hadassah Hospital – was assaulted in April 1948.
On 15 May, the Israelis launched a forceful attack on the neighborhood. Five houses were totally destroyed, but the Husayni homes remained standing. The Nuseibah family living nearby felt they had been abandoned. ‘We were unarmed and undefended,’ they wrote in their memoirs.64 A British force was not far, in the mufti’s old house in Sheikh Jarrah – the house that had been built by Jewish contractors, which was now occupied by Katie Antonius, the widow of George Antonius, who had been renting it since 1943. The neighborhood’s inaction made it look useless, yet it was kept inside the Arab territory by the Transjordan Arab Legion.
Not so with the Arab neighborhoods on the western side of the city, among them Baq’a, Talbiyyeh and Malhah, which fell to the Jews. Jerusalem fell, and with it most of Palestine. With Abd al-Qadir gone, the Husaynis took no part in the Palestinian armed struggle during the war, which was in any case feeble compared to the Jewish or the pan-Arab efforts. Khalid al-Husayni was not a charismatic figure, and al-Hajj Amin did not approve of his appointment as Abd al-Qadir’s successor. In each neighborhood a different commander stood out – most of them from Iraq and Syria, or from the poorer classes, as for example the commander of Katamon, the above-mentioned Kamal Iraqat, aka Abu Da’aya.
For the leading figures in the family, Jamal and al-Hajj Amin, the war was entirely a political campaign, since they did not experience the fighting and did not become refugees, much less survivors of massacres. To many this meant that they had lost the moral and political right to lead the Palestinian people. This reversal did not happen all at once and was not perceived during the war, but by 1951 there was a man who thought of himself as the mufti’s legitimate successor – a young student of engineering in Cairo, a member of the al-Qidwa family of Gaza, named Yasser Arafat. Another man, Ahmad, the son of the mufti of Acre As’ad al-Shuqayri, whom the Husaynis had known in the late Ottoman period, waited a few more years before he became the leader of the Palestinian people in the eyes of the Arab League. But that is a subject for another book and other studies.
During the war, al-Hajj Amin spent most of the day in a small office at the Arab League. He was profoundly embittered and probably did not believe the optimistic reports from the front that appeared in the Cairo newspapers in the first days of the war. In the winter of 1947, he had realized that the Arab states were either not interested in saving the Palestinians as much as in fulfilling their territorial ambitions, as in the case of Jordan, or unable to do so, as in the case of Syria and Egypt.65 But though he probably did not expect a miraculous redemption, he had not imagined that the downfall would be so catastrophic.
His first secretary in Cairo was Dumiyya al-Sakakini, the daughter of Khalil al-Sakakini and the source for this part of the account.66 Her father had left his house in Katamon when the fighting broke out and settled in Cairo. The connection between the Sakakini family and the Husaynis was renewed on 20 June 1948, this time as exiles. Dumiyya, her sister Hala and their brother Sari had been living in the Heliopolis Quarter of Cairo since January, not far from al-Hajj Amin’s first residence in the city. One evening al-Hajj Amin visited the Sakakinis, and they talked about unsung heroes. Al-Hajj Amin told them about a Palestinian fighter known as Abu Da’aya, who had been badly wounded in the battle of Ramat Rachel, south of Jerusalem, and had been airlifted from the battlefield straight to the Cairo military hospital. Abu Da’aya was a skinny young leader whose men told stories about him fit for the annals of any war of liberation. He was a goatherd from the village of Suraif near Hebron. This village had already played a part in the fighting – for example, in the attack on the Etzion Bloc convoy (he should not to be confused with the first Abu Da’aya, Abd al-Qadir’s deputy). His bravery had been so impressive that the Jordanian commander of the Jerusalem sector mentioned him in the book he wrote about the war. When Khalil joined the conversation, his daughters urged him to go and visit the wounded fighter, who was completely paralyzed. Consequently, after al-Hajj Amin’s visit, Sakakini took his daughters to visit Kamel Iraqat, who was the deputy of Abdul Qadir in Qastal, and took over command from him. A warm friendship grew between them. But the patient was transferred to Beirut, where he died from his injuries. Khalil began to write a book about him but did not finish it. Such was the encounter between al-Hajj Amin and the man who had fought in his name and had tried in vain to defend Palestine.
During the war some 750,000 Palestinians ended up in refugee camps. Some remained in Palestine, either in the territory seized by Egypt, in the State of Israel or in the West Bank. They were victims of what would today be called ‘ethnic cleansing’. Behind them they left properties, villages and a homeland. By 15 May, al-Qawuqji’s Arab Salvation Army and the thousands of volunteers had failed to defend the mixed cities and the main roads. Nor could they stop Jewish forces from seizing the centers of power, such the customs, the ports, the treasury and most of the British army bases in the country. Now and then they managed to inflict heavy damage on isolated Jewish settlements and convoys making their way to besieged outposts north and south of the country.
After the Jewish state was declared, Arab armies invaded the country, raising the hopes of the population. (It also raised their concern about hasty surrender to the Jewish forces; they feared that a victorious Arab army would punish those who gave in too readily.) Most of the Palestinian inhabitants were unarmed and did not fight very hard, hoping that the Arab states would come to their aid.
In the first week of the war, Syrian units crossed into the north of the country and surrounded some isolated Jewish settlements but were unable to break through. The Arab Legion captured the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City and Gush Etzion in the central sector, but, abiding by an unwritten agreement with the Israeli army, it did not advance beyond Jerusalem and the nearby villages.
In the following weeks the legion held back, abandoning the towns of Lydda and Ramleh, with their tens of thousands of inhabitants, to the Israeli forces. In Lydda the expulsion was accompanied by a massacre of the young men in the city’s mosque, prompting the rest of the population to join the thousands from nearby Ramleh who had already been driven out of their houses in a march of death toward the West Bank.
The Legion also abandoned the Egyptian army, which became trapped in the Falluja enclave. This army was made up of Muslim Brotherhood volunteers, Sudanese troops and a regular Egyptian division. During the first week of the fighting, it made some impressive gains. It came close to Tel Aviv, having captured several kibbutzim en route. But its lines of supply became too stretched, its ordnance ran out and it could not fight off the Israeli forces. During the truce, the Israeli army recovered, rearmed itself with weapons from the Eastern Bloc and drove the Egyptians back onto the Sinai Peninsula.
The central part of Palestine fell in July. The north was lost in September and October, and by January 1949 the south of Palestine had also been occupied by Israel. Some 800 villages, six towns and more than a million Palestinians were divided between Israel, Egypt and Transjordan. The finger of blame was pointed not only at those who expelled them, or those who had promised to help and instead betrayed, but also at those who had insisted on leading and failed.
In the summer of 1948, while the Palestinian social and cultural life was totally destroyed, an absurd drama took place, involving many Husaynis. That July, the Arab League pr
oclaimed the formation of a Palestinian Arab government. When Palestine had still been in one piece and al-Hajj Amin wished to establish such a government, he had been rebuffed. Now the League defied the harsh reality with a meaningless act of desperation. The inspiration behind this initiative was Jamal al-Husayni. He went to all the Arab capitals, and this time, unlike the months before May 1948, he was fully supported – except in Amman, where King Abdullah would not hear of it. Abdullah already knew that he stood to acquire a fair chunk of Palestine, not because he fought to save it but thanks to his agreement with the Jewish Agency before the outbreak of war.67
Only in October was the Arab League able to keep its promise to the Palestinians and call on the leading figures in Palestine to form a government in Gaza. These were al-Hajj Amin’s last days of grace, though in fact he was functioning in an imaginary reality unrelated to the disaster on the ground. The eighty-five men who took part in the opening session on 1 October formed the Palestinian National Council, which elected the All-Palestine Government. Al-Hajj Amin headed the council, and the government was led by Hilmi Pasha, one of al-Hajj Amin’s men in the Higher Arab Committee. All that this futile exercise left behind were phrases and symbols. Al-Hajj Amin’s opening words in Gaza were: ‘Based on the natural and historical right of the Palestinian Arab people to freedom and independence, we hereby declare ...’ – which would remain the central motto of all the Palestinian documents up to the Palestinian Declaration of Independence in November 1988.68 The symbol that has survived from that time is the Palestinian flag, whose colors derived from the banner of revolt raised by Sharif Hussein in 1916. The black, white and green flag, with a starless red triangle on the left-hand side, has rallied Palestinians to their national struggle up to the present time.