The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  Bunches and bunches of roses are coming,

  Death is hard to bear for me,

  Wake up, sultan, tyrant sultan!

  The whole world is weeping blood!

  Down the corridor, a very old man is lying on a bed. He is Haroutioun Kebedjian. He is holding in his left hand a Bible in Braille and his right hand is fingering the embossed paper letters. He greets me with a smile, sightlessly. It is now the year 2000 and he is ninety-three years old, so he was eight when he survived the Armenian Holocaust. His memory is as clear as his emotions:

  We lived in Dortyol. My father was called Sarkis and my mother was Mariam. There were ten children including me and my brothers and sisters. The Turks collected all the people with their donkeys and horses. We were to go to Aleppo and Ras el-Ain. But they started killing us on the way. The Turks forced us to the Habur River and by the time we got there, there was only my mother and my sister and me left. They told the women and the men to take off all their clothes. My sister was eighteen and a man on a horse came and grabbed her and put her on his horse. He did this in front of us. It happened in front of my eyes. I was not blind then. And they started to beat my mother. As she begged them not to take my sister, the Turks beat her to death. I have always remembered that as she died, she screamed my name: “Haroutioun! Haroutioun!” Later an Arab Bedouin took me to his house and I stayed there for three years. The war was over and then people came saying they were looking for Armenian orphans. I said I was Armenian, so they took me to Aleppo. There I caught a virus that affected my eyes. I was suddenly blind and I was only eleven years old. Until I was twenty-three, I was filled with rage because the Turks took my sister and beat my mother in front of my eyes until she died. But when I was twenty-three, I felt this was not the right way to be a man, so I began to pray to God so He would see me. I was making peace with myself. Now I am ready to meet my God. I am at peace. Last year when the big earthquake happened in Turkey, it killed so many Turks. And I prayed to God for those Turks— I prayed for those poor Turkish people.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Fifty Thousand Miles from Palestine

  And be these juggling fiends no more believ’d,

  That palter with us in a double sense;

  That keep the word of promise to our ear,

  And break it to our hope.

  —Shakespeare, Macbeth, V, viii, 23–26

  IN A CORNER OF THE PALESTINIAN “Martyrs’ Cemetery” in west Beirut, surrounded by the graves of Palestinian guerrillas and Syrian soldiers who fell victim to Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, there stands a raised tomb, surrounded by a cheap concrete wall. A bunch of withered flowers lies on the marble slab, which has been chipped by shrapnel and partly damaged at its base, as if someone has tried to break into the vault. But the Arabic script on the lid is still legible:

  The tomb of . . . Grand Mufti Al Haj Mohamed Amin al-Husseini,

  leader of the Palestinian Arab Higher Committee,

  President of the Supreme Muslim Council.

  Born Jerusalem 1897. Died Beirut 4th July 1974.

  Photographs in that summer’s memorial issue of Palestine, the quarterly political magazine Haj Amin founded more than a decade earlier, show mourners at the graveside, less than a year before the start of the Lebanese civil war. Chafiq al-Hout, the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s ambassador to Beirut, and a clutch of former Lebanese prime ministers can be seen standing by Hassan Khaled, the Lebanese Grand Mufti; and just to their left, the figure of Yassir Arafat, sunglasses covering his eyes, the familiar kuffiah atop his younger but still unmistakable face, a handkerchief pressed to his mouth.

  Archive pictures in the same issue show the Grand Mufti—the supreme religious officer and the most important elected Muslim leader in Palestine—sitting proudly among Palestinian fighters during the 1936 Arab revolt against British rule in Palestine and, dressed in a gold-fringed robe, alongside the Palestinian delegate to the League of Nations in Geneva. A tall man with broad, serious eyes and a carefully trimmed beard, he exudes, even in old photographs, something of the charisma of which his supporters still speak. Those who knew him talk of his unusual, bright blue eyes.

  But there are other archive photographs that Palestine did not choose to print, pictures far more troubling than those of the last farewell to a man described at his funeral as “Sheikh of the rebels, Imam of the Palestinians.” These snapshots show Haj Amin sitting in a high-backed armchair, dressed in turban and black robes, listening attentively to a short-haired man with a brush moustache who is dressed in a military jacket, a man who is gesticulating with his left hand. A German eagle holding a swastika is stitched on Adolf Hitler’s left sleeve. The place is Berlin, the date 28 November 1941. There are other pictures of the time: of Haj Amin at Nazi rallies in Berlin, Haj Amin greeted by Heinrich Himmler, Haj Amin, right hand raised in the Nazi salute, inspecting newly recruited Bosnian Muslims who had joined the Wehrmacht.

  Perhaps it is not surprising that more than thirty years after his death, the very name of Haj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, can still ignite both passion and hatred among Palestinians and Israelis. Recall the dedication with which he pursued the cause of Arab Palestine, his refusal to compromise when the British mandate government demanded the partition of his homeland, and Israelis will ask you why you do not condemn Haj Amin as a Nazi war criminal—which is how they portray him today in the Holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem, west of Jerusalem. Examine the motives for his flirtation with Hitler, question what Palestinians sometimes refer to uncomfortably as Haj Amin’s “German period,” and Palestinians will ask you why you wish to support the campaign of “Zionist” calumny against the old man’s memory. Merely to discuss his life is to be caught up in the Arab–Israeli propaganda war. To make an impartial assessment of the man’s career—or, for that matter, an unbiased history of the Arab–Israeli dispute—is like trying to ride two bicycles at the same time. “My advice to you is to write about Haj Amin when you retire,” one of his former associates warned me when I asked him for his memories of the Grand Mufti. “It could be dangerous for you to produce such a biography.”

  Certainly, the name of Haj Amin rarely appeared in Yassir Arafat’s speeches in the last quarter of the twentieth century, and not only because of Haj Amin’s cooperation with the Nazis. Relaxing in a Beirut garden in July 1994, the Palestinian scholar Edward Said suggested to me another reason for this reticence. “I was sitting with Arafat in 1985 when he placed his hand on my knee, gripping it very tight. And Arafat said: ‘Edward, if there’s one thing I don’t want to be, it’s to be like Haj Amin. He was always right, and he got nothing and died in exile.’ ” But in 1990, Arafat was to follow a curiously similar destiny. Just as Haj Amin travelled to Baghdad and then to Berlin—believing that Hitler could guarantee Palestine’s independence from British rule and Jewish immigration—so the PLO leader travelled to Baghdad to embrace Saddam Hussein after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, convinced by Saddam’s promise to “liberate” the land he called Palestine. Little wonder, perhaps, that Haj Amin’s ghost sent a chill through the old retainers of the PLO. In 1948, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem even set up a short-lived Palestine government in what was left of his country—like Arafat’s rump administration, it met in the seedy confines of a Gaza hotel.

  The facts of Haj Amin’s life are well documented. Born in Jerusalem in the closing years of the Ottoman empire to a family that traced its ancestry back to the Prophet, he was educated at Islamic schools and at Al-Azhar University in Cairo before serving, briefly, as an officer in the Turkish army during the First World War, the war in which the British made their two conflicting promises. To the Arabs, they promised independence in return for an Arab alliance against the Turks. To the Jews, Lord Balfour declared Britain’s support for a Jewish national home in predominantly Arab Palestine. From these betrayals, Haj Amin emerged an Arab nationalist and an uncompromising opponent of Jewish immigration into Palestine.

  Blamed for inci
ting violence against both the Jews and British in 1920, Haj Amin fled to Transjordan and then to Damascus, where he was feted as a national hero. Ironically, it was the British—impressed by his family’s status and his nationalist standing among Arab Palestinians—who engineered his election to the post of Grand Mufti. Haj Amin swiftly internationalised the Palestine question among Muslim nations and secured election to the newly created Supreme Muslim Council, which controlled Muslim endowments, courts and religious institutions. He was, needless to say, only one among many Arabs who would be raised to advantage by the Western powers—then bestialised when he no longer followed their policies.

  Like King Hussein of Jordan in 1992, Haj Amin embarked on a project to restore the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa mosques in Jerusalem, an undertaking that earned him enormous popularity in the largely rural areas of Palestine. “His major sources of power were the imams of the mosques and the villagers,” Chafiq al-Hout remembered. “The Arabs in the municipalities were for the English. To us laymen, the heads of the municipalities were traitors because they were against Haj Amin.” In August 1928, speeches by Haj Amin and other Muslim leaders to Arab villagers incited rioting in which sixty Jews were murdered in Hebron.

  Among Haj Amin’s Arab opponents was Raghib al-Nashashibi, the mayor of Jerusalem, one of many Palestinians who would find themselves unable to accept a man who would never—ever—compromise. In 1930, the British seemed prepared to restrict Jewish immigration and land purchase in Palestine. But when Haj Amin insisted that an Arab “national government” be created as well, the British lost interest. When the British arrested the leading Palestinian nationalists during the 1936–39 Arab revolt, Haj Amin fled secretly to Lebanon. Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, the British, amenable again to the Arab cause, called an Arab round-table conference to discuss Palestine. Haj Amin—who was prohibited from attending the talks by the British—insisted that Britain “stop trying to build a Jewish national home and give independence to Palestine.” The conference failed. A subsequent British White Paper agreed to abandon Balfour’s promise to the Jews and offered a state with an Arab majority within ten years. Haj Amin again turned down what Malcolm MacDonald, the British colonial secretary, called a “golden opportunity.” Later, Arafat would be accused of almost identical intransigence when he did not obey Israeli or American wishes.

  Fearful of arrest in French-Mandate Lebanon, Haj Amin fled again, this time to Iraq, where he was received as a Palestinian hero and swiftly broke his promise to the prime minister, Nuri es-Said, not to meddle in domestic politics. Believing that a British victory would doom Palestine, he supported the pro-Axis Rashid Ali al-Gaylani as es-Said’s successor and wrote Hitler a long and angry letter, outlining the plight of Arab Palestinians in the face of what he called “world Jewry, this dangerous enemy whose secret weapons—finance, corruption and intrigue—were aligned with British daggers” and finishing with wishes for Hitler’s “shining victory and prosperity for the great German people . . .”

  Nadim Dimeshkieh, later Lebanon’s ambassador to the United Nations, was a teacher in Baghdad at the time and frequently visited Haj Amin. “I suppose it was a great mistake to involve himself in Iraqi politics,” Dimeshkieh would recall more than half a century later. “The people he involved himself with were wild and irresponsible. But where was he to turn? To America? To Britain? He was hoping that Iraq would support Germany and that this would put the Arabs in a better negotiating position over Palestine when the war ended in Hitler’s favour. Haj Amin would keep on saying to us: ‘Well, let’s hope Germany doesn’t lose the war.’”

  When Britain invaded Iraq in 1941,79 Haj Amin tried to organise a brigade of Palestinians living in Baghdad to fight alongside the Iraqis; elements of this organisation went to Abu Ghraib to confront the invading force, only to find that the Iraqis had already collapsed. So Haj Amin fled once more, to Iran, where he requested asylum in Afghanistan. But he rejected Kabul’s permission to cross the frontier and took the ultimate, politically fatal step of escaping across Turkey to Axis Europe. It was then that Haj Amin became, in Palestinian eyes, a hostage to history, a man forced by patriotism to turn to the only ally available to him. For survivors of the Jewish Holocaust—and for Jews around the world—his act was unforgivable.

  By the mid-1990s, the only survivor of the hothouse world of Arab wartime Berlin society still alive was eighty-seven-year-old Wassef Kamal, who had been a supporter of Haj Amin in Baghdad and had made his own way to Nazi Germany via Vichy Syria, Turkey and Bulgaria in 1941. “Most of the Palestinians and Arabs in Germany gathered round Haj Amin and Rashid al-Gaylani, who had also reached Berlin,” he recalled for me in 1994:

  Most of them preferred the Grand Mufti. I became one of his senior assistants in Berlin and we decided to create an organisation, the “Society of Arab Students in Germany.” Haj Amin was considered almost a head of state by the Italian and German governments. There was an agreement— that the Axis governments would give temporary loans to Haj Amin and Rashid [al-Gaylani]—to be repaid by the newly formed Arab states after an Axis victory. The two men were given salaries. I was treated like a refugee, but we received four times the rations given to German citizens and were

  treated very nicely. But all the efforts of Haj Amin and Rashid to convince Hitler and Mussolini to make a treaty with Arab leaders guaranteeing a future independent Arab state and the destruction of the Zionist “national home,” failed. All they would say on German radio was: “We are with the Arab people and for their independence.” But they never agreed to a formal treaty.

  When Haj Amin finally met Hitler in November 1941, the Grand Mufti obtained a verbal agreement from the Führer that “when we [Germany] have arrived at the southern Caucasus, then the time of the liberation of the Arabs will have arrived—and you can rely on my word.” Disregarding the fact that Hitler’s “word” was often a lie, Haj Amin recorded how Hitler insisted that the Jewish “problem” would be solved “step by step” and that he, Haj Amin, would be “leader of the Arabs.” But Hitler refused publicly to recognise the claim to independence of the Arab states, partly because Mussolini was in no mood to lose his colony of Libya.

  Wassef Kamal was to recall:

  There was no agreement reached so we concluded we were more or less forced to work for the Axis. When Rommel began winning battles in Libya and was about to enter Egypt, the Germans came to us and believed the Axis would be victorious in the Middle East. Hitler and Mussolini approached Haj Amin and Rashid, saying: “Our armies will soon enter Egypt and also Iraq via the Caucasus. Rashid, you will go with our armies from Russia, Haj Amin, you will go with the Italian army via Egypt to Palestine.” Haj Amin called us together. He said: “Prepare yourselves, get military uniforms and be ready to enter Egypt with me.” But I said to him: “Your eminence, in the past Sherif Hussein [leader of the 1916 Arab Revolt against the Turks] had a treaty with the British—and, in spite of this treaty, the British betrayed us with the secret [Sykes–Picot] agreement with France. And now,” I said, “we have not even a treaty with these people. How can we go when we have nothing in our hands? I will not go. I will not be a party to this.” Three or four others agreed with me. But Haj Amin began to prepare himself—to go through Libya to Egypt. But slowly, slowly, the Axis lost.

  Haj Amin now enthusiastically went to work for the Nazi propaganda machine. Arabs would later experience great difficulty and embarrassment in explaining these actions. In his biography of Haj Amin, Taysir Jbara devotes only four pages to his collaboration with the Nazis under the anaemic title “The Mufti in Europe,” arguing that Haj Amin had as much right to collaborate to save his Palestinian homeland from the British and Jewish immigrants as the Zionists had to collaborate with Germany to save Jewish lives. Israelis have sometimes exaggerated his collaboration in order to portray him as a war criminal. And it can be argued that a man may make a pact with the Devil. Two of Haj Amin’s former comrades repeated to me that tired—and irritating
—Arabic proverb that “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Churchill readily allied himself to one of the most murderous dictators of the twentieth century, Josef Stalin, transforming the monster into “Uncle Joe” until the defeat of Germany. The Lebanese Phalange militia, founded in 1936 after its leader had been inspired by the “discipline” of Nazi Germany, acted as Israel’s militia allies in 1982. Anwar Sadat worked as a spy for Rommel yet he became, in later years, the darling of the West—though not of Egypt—for making peace with Israel. And it is true that the principal aim of Haj Amin was to gain the independence of Palestine after a German victory and, in the meantime, to prevent Jews from going to Palestine.

  But amid the evil of the Holocaust, Haj Amin’s moral position seems untenable. There is, too, in the archives of the wartime BBC Monitoring Service, a series of transcripts from Nazi radio stations that cast a dark shadow over any moral precepts Haj Amin might have claimed. Here he is, for example, addressing a Balfour Day rally at the Luftwaffe hall in Berlin on 2 November 1943: “The Germans know how to get rid of the Jews . . . They have definitely solved the Jewish problem.” And on Berlin radio on 1 March 1944: “Arabs, rise as one man and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion.” On 21 January that year, Haj Amin had visited Ante Pavelic’s ferocious Fascist state of Croatia—which included present-day Bosnia— where he addressed Muslim recruits to the SS with these words, so sharply in contrast with sentiments expressed in his postwar memoirs: “There are also considerable similarities between Islamic principles and National Socialism, namely, in the affirmation of struggle and fellowship . . . in the idea of order.”