The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty

by Ilan Pappe

  There were several Husaynis in that virtual government: Jamal, in recognition of his deeds and abilities, was named Foreign Minister, and Said’s son Raja’i, who had been active in politics after First World War but then withdrew to the sidelines, returned to the arena as Minister of Defense. On the face of it, these were the two principal ministries, but in reality they were of no importance whatever, as this government vanished in history’s oubliette as abruptly as it had appeared.

  King Abdullah swore to oppose this government to the end, and the British government instructed all its representatives in the region to do all they could to destroy it.69 But it was the Egyptians who gave it the coup de grâce. Egyptian premier Mahmud Nuqrashi ordered al-Hajj Amin to return to his exile in Cairo. When he refused, an armed Egyptian officer came to his house and took him away by force. With al-Hajj Amin’s political demise, the government fell apart. Raja’i, who became addicted to politics, accepted the post of Saudi Minister of Transport in 1949, perhaps the clearest signal of the family’s disappearance from the country’s leadership after the Palestinians had lost Palestine.70

  Of course, the Husaynis did not cease to exist in 1948. While al-Hajj Amin lived, he was first at the heart of Palestinian activity, then on its margins. After his death in 1974, there were still some prominent Husayni public figures – for example, Dr Hatem al-Husayni, the director of al-Quds University, and the first lady of Palestinian nationalism, Amina al-Husayni, the widow of Abd al-Qadir and mother of Faysal al-Husayni. Faysal would make his appearance as the last remaining Husayni in Palestinian politics after the war of 1967. He soon discovered that to join the new leadership it was not enough to flourish the family’s ancient lineage. The key to success was a faded document testifying to membership in Fatah – proof of personal sacrifice in the national cause.

  In this history of the family, however, 1948 does mark the end. For in that year the curtain came down on the Husaynis as a social and political entity. When the war ended, it became clear that as well as losing their homeland, houses and properties, the Palestinian people had also lost their aristocracy. Other Arab nations lost their aristocracies as well, but under very different circumstances resulting from local radicalism, whether socialist or nationalist.

  The author is no admirer of aristocracy – a leadership based on blood relations, enjoying many privileges and in almost complete control of the society’s resources. But at a certain stage in the history of every nation, even opponents learn to appreciate the ‘grandees’ and ‘notables’. Forming a bridge between past and present, between power and the people and between tradition and change, they enable social transformation to occur in a moderate fashion, and their destruction provokes revolutions. Their premature annihilation, before an alternative leadership has had a chance to arise, before the society has adjusted to a new reality, results in disaster.

  This was the Palestinians’ disaster.

  Epilogue

  Though this account of the family’s history has come to an end, the story is not over. In 1948 a chapter in the history of the country was closed, a long chapter that began at the start of the eighteenth century and ended with the Nakbah. The part played by the family throughout this period, most notably by al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni, will continue to occupy generations of Palestinian historians. But there are still other chapters involving the individual Husaynis who continued to play important roles in Palestinian politics after 1948.

  Al-Hajj Amin was not allowed to participate in diplomatic contacts that occurred after the 1948 war. In April 1949, when the Palestinian issue was raised at the Lausanne Conference with the UN’s bumbling attempt to revive the Partition Resolution – this time with Arab consent and Israeli refusal – al-Hajj Amin played no part at all. When he heard that on 13 May 1949 the Arab delegations in Lausanne had endorsed a protocol expressing their willingness in principle to negotiate a peace settlement with the Jewish state, al-Hajj Amin wrote to his old acquaintance Adil Arslan, the Syrian foreign minister, ‘Do not recognize Israel. Whoever says he intends to do so is committing grave treason.’ In Syria, al-Hajj Amin concentrated on opposing every possible attempt at reconciliation with Israel, such as the one made by the Syria.n ruler Husni Zaim in April 1949.1 His somewhat hostile Israeli biographer Zvi Al-Peleg described him as ‘striving against the formation of a new reality’.2

  Nevertheless, in the early 1950s, al-Hajj Amin was still the most politically prominent member of his family. However, the connection between al-Hajj Amin’s activities and the family began to evaporate. Other members of the family pursued various personal careers, some fairly successfully. For example, before his death in 1954 Yunis al-Husayni published three basic books on social and economic development in Palestine, on social thought in the world and on the cities of the Middle East.3

  Al-Hajj Amin’s main activity was behind the scenes, mainly trying to prevent the Jordanization of that part of Palestine, the so-called West Bank, that had fallen to the Hashemite kingdom. Demographic reality in the enlarged kingdom made it into a de facto Palestinian state. Al-Hajj Amin hoped that this would challenge the legitimacy of Hashemite rule, if not across the Jordan, at least in the West Bank. King Abdullah’s almost open peace negotiations with Israel, and his 1949 concession of the ‘little triangle’ (an area of the West Bank) to Israel, were added reasons to undermine the Hashemite ruler. Finally, although it should be said that there is no clear evidence connecting al-Hajj Amin to the murder of King Abdullah, those directly involved were very close to him. It is likely, but not easy to prove, that he decided that the king should pay with his life for the peace moves and for his betrayal during the war (the abandonment of Lydda and Ramleh in particular). Perhaps he also thought that such a dramatic event would destabilize Greater Jordan and lead to a new geopolitical configuration.

  As always, Jamal worked in the opposite direction from al-Hajj Amin’s. He toiled above all to encourage the population of the West Bank to preserve its distinct identity and strive to create an independent Palestinian entity. Jamal’s messages often included the term qiyan (entity), a vague word that substituted for ‘state’ until the aims of the Palestinian national movement were defined. But beyond all this, the Husaynis made little contribution to the movement’s reawakening in the 1950s and 1960s.4

  Al-Hajj Amin’s collaborators were Transjordanians and Palestinians who wanted to settle accounts with King Abdullah, perhaps also with the dynasty. Of the family, only al-Hajj Amin’s kinsman Dr Musa Abdullah al-Husayni was directly involved in the plot. In Germany, Musa Abdullah had been al-Hajj Amin’s right-hand man. After the war, he was detained in Belgium, before he was exiled to the Seychelles in 1947. After his release, he taught at Beirut University and soon afterwards moved to Amman.

  In Amman, Musa Abdullah joined the forces of Abdullah al-Tal, the commander of the Arab Legion in the Jerusalem sector, and appeared to be a keen proponent of the Transjordanian scheme to annex the West Bank and integrate it into the Hashemite kingdom. It later became clear that he had worked his way into the Hashemite establishment in order to undermine it. He had a chance to display his acting ability at the Jericho Conference – convened by King Abdullah to compel the West Bank grandees to call for the unification of the two sides of the Jordan River and declare him king of the joint entity – by expressing great enthusiasm for the scheme. The palace rewarded him with the post of liaison officer with the Red Cross, a kind of honorary consul to the international body with a senior political and diplomatic status. His amiable personality won him the favor of the monarch for whose assassination he would be chiefly responsible.

  But perhaps we are doing Musa Abdullah an injustice by depicting him as a schemer who wormed himself into the king’s favor in order to kill him. Perhaps he truly wanted to integrate into the Hashemite world, and it was only his bruised ego when he failed to be elected to the Jordanian Parliament in 1949 that changed his feelings and caused him to contact al-Hajj Amin and volunteer to act against the Hashemite m
onarchy. Be that as it may, after his parliamentary setback, Musa Abdullah opened a travel agency in East Jerusalem and worked in close cooperation with an Israeli travel agency, organizing pilgrim tours on both sides of the city.5

  By the time he returned to Jerusalem, he was already in close contact with his exiled relatives in Egypt: al-Hajj Amin, Rajai and Ishaq Darwish. The four joined forces with Abdullah al-Tal, who had turned against the king because of Abdullah’s attempts to reach a separate peace treaty with Israel. Together they laid plans to bring him down. Musa Abdullah became the pivotal player in the conspiracy, his mission being to strengthen his connection to the palace and to charm the king. He also located a potential assassin, a twenty-one-year-old apprentice tailor in Jerusalem, Mustafa Shukri Ashu, provided him with a handgun and instructed him to wait for the right opportunity.

  On 21 July 1951, the king was scheduled to visit the towns of the West Bank and Jerusalem, and Musa Abdullah joined him in Nablus. James Lunt, a senior officer in the Arab Legion, was greatly impressed by Musa Abdullah (then forty-odd years old), his British education (as noted before, he had graduated from London University) and above all by his obvious devotion to the king.6 Musa Abdullah accompanied the king in his car on the way to prayers at the Haram al-Sharif. Once there, he hastened to open the car door for the king, bowing demonstratively. A few minutes later the king told his bodyguards to move aside so he could wave to the cheering crowd. Mustafa Shukri Ashu was already there. He seized the moment, fired at the king and killed him.7 Musa Abdullah’s physical proximity to the king just before he was killed immediately drew suspicion to him.

  Jordanian security services at once hunted down all the members of the al-Husayni family who were active in Jordan and arrested them. In Cairo al-Hajj Amin published a statement denying all connection to the murder. Musa Abdullah was questioned and tortured, and he admitted to planning the assassination. Later in court he declared he was innocent, but was found guilty. On 6 September 1951, he was hanged, together with others who were convicted with him. Other members of the family, Tawfiq Salih and Daud al-Husayni, were arrested on the day of the murder but were released for lack of evidence.8

  Despite suspicions of complicity, al-Hajj Amin still wielded considerable influence in Jordan during the 1950s. His erstwhile follower Sheikh Taqi al-Din al-Nabhani founded the Islamic Liberation Party to rival the Muslim Brotherhood. In 1958 Jordanian intelligence suspected that al-Hajj Amin and Jamal were still active in local politics and financing the party.

  Al-Hajj Amin was also suspected of collaborating with Iraq’s revolutionary leader, Abd al-Karim Qasim, who came to power in a military coup in July 1958. Soon after coming to power, Qasim set about creating a Palestinian army and an independent organization for the liberation of Palestine. These moves did little for the country, but in the long run prompted Gamal Abd al-Nasser to create the PLO with Ahmad al-Shuqayri.9 Through him and the new organization, forces in Palestinian society, mainly from the refugee camps, were pushing forward the concept of the ‘Palestinian entity’, which was blessed officially by a special meeting of the Arab League Council (the Foreign Ministers Assembly) that took place in Shtura, Lebanon, in May 1960.

  These moves sidelined al-Hajj Amin altogether. But he was still the leading ambassador for the Palestinian cause in the mid-1950s. It was to his credit that the Palestinian issue appeared high on the agenda of the Afro-Asian bloc that emerged to challenge the rigid Cold War dichotomy forced on the world by the US and the USSR. At the 1955 Bandung Conference, al-Hajj Amin was accredited as an observer and helped make the situation in Palestine one of the major issues discussed.10

  But al-Hajj Amin failed to recognize the centrality of the refugees in the new movement.11 He waged a Sisyphean struggle against the reversal in Palestinian politics and the transfer of the leadership to the refugees. He organized demonstrations against the PLO’s proclamation of the independent Palestinian entity in 1964, having tried some years earlier to play a major role in creating a new, independent Palestinian organization, instigated by Qasim.12

  Nasser’s protégé, Ahmad al-Shuqayri, tried to mollify al-Hajj Amin and offered him the presidency of the nascent Palestinian National Council. But al-Hajj Amin and the organization to which he remained attached, the Higher Arab Committee, refused to take part in the launching conference in Jerusalem. ‘The conference is illegal’, the Higher Arab Committee declared in a public statement, ‘because it does not represent the Palestinian people and its goals.’ Four years later Ahmad al-Shuqayri tried again through another Husayni, Daud, to conciliate al-Hajj Amin, but the ex-mufti demanded that the new concept of the ‘entity’ be identified with him. He was quite out of touch with reality. Not only had he lost his political authority, in the eyes of certain Palestinian historians he also lost his moral sway.13

  The conflict with Ahmad al-Shuqayri diverted al-Hajj Amin from the national path to such a degree that when a conflict erupted in 1967 between the PLO and King Hussein of Jordan, Amin supported the young king. ‘The forces of evil’ is how he referred to the PLO in speaking to the Hashemite monarch, though luckily for his image, these words were not recorded in the Palestinian history books.14

  Thanks to Hashemite support, al-Hajj Amin was able to visit Jerusalem – a small consolation. Early in March 1967, he was received in the city as an important personage and visited the scenes of his childhood and youth that he had not seen for thirty years. Inside the al-Aqsa mosque he asked to withdraw into the mihrab, the Muslim prayer niche, of Salah al-Din al-Ayubi, as he used to do as a boy in the early years of the century. ‘The mosque is the same as it was in 1937, when I left it,’ he said to a journalist a couple of years later.15 After two weeks, he left the city. ‘When the plane circled above Jerusalem’s airfield I saw the Dome of the Rock smiling at me. I left a bit of myself in every corner of the city, on every one of its hills.’16 He never returned to Jerusalem, not even after his death. Israel refused permission to bury al-Hajj Amin in his native city. Even in death, he remained Zionism’s worst enemy.

  ‘Do you hate the Jews?’ he was asked by the Egyptian journalist Zuhair Mardini at his Beirut residence in Mansuriya in 1969. As was his custom from youth, al-Hajj Amin delayed answering. He summoned his servant – as always, by his first name – and asked for another cup of tea. What was he thinking about before he gave his answer? Pictures of the refugees, or more remote scenes of his deportation from Palestine? ‘I’m a Muslim and my position is based on the holy Qur’an,’ he said. Then he added, ‘I do not dip my pen in the ink of hatred.’ Mardini waited, knowing it was not the whole answer. The former mufti pedantically tidied the books on his desk. Most of them dealt with the problem of Palestine, and he gazed at them as if searching for the reply. He gave a very indirect and winding answer: ‘How much can one man, whatever his status, change an existing situation? All the efforts that were made did not lead to a solution. All we know is that emotions alone cannot solve a crisis. We’re in the midst of a bloody conflict, and we have no choice but to pursue it.’ Mardini had the impression that al-Hajj Amin was not moved by hate and was facing reality with reason and common sense.17

  By the 1970s, nothing was left of al-Hajj Amin’s status. He had been pushed to the margin of Palestinian action and memory. Another member of the Husayni family remained engraved in that memory as a heroic figure, to some extent balancing out criticism of the former mufti.

  Others – mainly the Husaynis who remained in Jerusalem – were not content to shape their image for posterity but returned to public life in the spheres of welfare and education. A notable example was Khalid al-Husayni, Abd al-Qadir’s brother who succeeded him as commander of the Palestinian forces in Jerusalem until the end of the war of 1948. Afterwards he became the director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in the district of Nablus and made his home in that town. He was perhaps the only Husayni who worked directly with the refugees, but apparently they were not grateful. Towards the end of February 1951, h
e was twice attacked by an armed refugee in Nablus; the second blow was fatal. He was projected as the main culprit in the Palestinian catastrophe. The family believes that the Hashemite secret service was behind his assassination, and it has been said that the murder of King Abdullah was an act of revenge.

  In the 1990s, Khalid’s work was continued by his son Sharif, who worked in Orient House. One of the few Husaynis who engaged in political activity during the 1980s, he joined the Palestinian leadership in the Occupied Territories.

  The story of Ishaq Musa al-Husayni, who made a name for himself in the 1950s, is quite different. He became a known spokesman for the Palestinian cause in the region and beyond. At first he went to Aleppo in Syria and in 1949 settled in Beirut, where he taught at the American University until 1955. Like other members of the family, he was impressed by Gamal Abd al-Nasser, and in the late 1950s he moved to Cairo and taught at the American University there. During those years he wrote one of the pioneering studies on the Muslim Brotherhood. In the 1960s, he contributed to the cause by writing books about the Arab character of Jerusalem and Palestine.18 During the following two decades, he was regularly invited by leading universities in the West to lecture on Arabic literature. He returned to Jerusalem in 1973, almost thirty years after he had left it, and to the subject of Palestinian literature as distinct from Arab literature as a whole. He has done a good deal to strengthen higher education in East Jerusalem. He died in 1990 at the age of eighty-six.

  FAYSAL AL-HUSAYNI

  The best-known member of the family at the end of the twentieth century was Faysal al-Husayni, the son of Abd al-Qadir. He played a major role in the Palestinian leadership in the Occupied Territories and in the Palestinian Authority. In May 2001 he died of a heart attack while on a frustrating political mission to Kuwait in an abortive attempt to secure a reconciliation with the Kuwaiti regime in the wake of Arafat’s unequivocal support for Saddam Hussein in the First Gulf War.