The Jew is Not My Enemy (10 page)

The mufti’s leadership in 1922 should be seen in contrast to the anti-British home rule movement in India, where in 1921, after assuming leadership of the Indian National Congress, Gandhi led nationwide campaigns to achieve swaraj, or self-rule. While Gandhi led Indians from the front, the mufti sabotaged Palestinians from the rear. Gandhi was arrested in March 1922, tried by the British for sedition, and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment. By contrast, the mufti put himself and the interests of the elites above those of the ordinary Palestinian.

The mufti’s instinct for self-preservation was the dominant motivating factor during the 1920s. When the British offered to create an elected representative assembly in 1922, al-Husayni turned it down. In contrast, in India, Gandhi, as well as the Muslim leadership, embraced the idea and laid the foundations for a democracy that today is the largest in the world. Said K. Aburish, author of
A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite
, writes, “Beyond acting as an instrument of appeasement and neutralizing both the people’s passions and their passive resistance plans, the Mufti’s activities between 1922 and 1927 appear to have centered on enhancing his position and that of his already powerful family.”
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In 1928, a Jew placed a religious exhibit in front of the Wailing Wall in a way that was objectionable to a nearby Muslim. The minor altercation developed into large-scale clashes between Arabs and Jews. These riots seem to be the turning point for the mufti. The controversy involved the question of sovereignty over the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome on the Rock, both built over the Jewish Temple a millennium earlier and under the administration of Muslims. Arabs feared a Jewish takeover of the site they consider the third-holiest shrine in Islam.

While the British worked on yet another White Paper, the mufti turned the issue into an international Islamic campaign, asking Muslims worldwide to help him save the Dome from the hands of the Jews. If he had any illusions that the British would honour their private promises to him, an exchange in London in May 1930 revealed the true attitude of Britain towards Palestine. The mufti and a number of Palestinian “notables” met with Labour prime minister Ramsay MacDonald and his socialist secretary of state for Dominion affairs, Lord Passfield (formerly Sidney Webb, the well-known Fabian and author), to review the ramifications of the bloody clashes between Jews and Arabs that had occurred in 1928–29, and look at the options available to resolve the Palestine Question.

The mufti and his team argued their case on the basis of Article 4 of the League of Nations Covenant, under which the British were awarded the mandate in Palestine. Article 4 recognized the mandated territories as “independent states,” yet the British wouldn’t budge on the question of creating a Jewish national home in Palestine. In fact, MacDonald brushed aside the Arab argument as “irrelevant.” Lord Passfield rubbed salt into the wound by lecturing his Palestinian guests: “Your position is inferior to that of a colony and it is our duty under the Mandate to endeavour that you should rise to the point of a Colony.” Shocked, the mufti asked, “Do you mean we are below the Negroes of Africa?” Passfield reassured him that they were not, but that they were “less than” some other colonies. Raghib al-Nashashibi lamented, “We had a government of our own in which we participated. We had Parliaments” (referring to the Ottoman Parliament before the British occupation). Sitting next to him was Hajj al-Husayni, the very man who had contributed to the defeat of the Parliament the two Palestinians were now moaning about. The arguments of the Palestinians fell on deaf ears. They were admonished by the British prime minister to “get back into the Iron Cage.”
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However, when Lord Passfield came out with his White Paper, the Arabs were overjoyed. To the outrage of the Zionists in the cabinet and among the Jewish population, he recommended that all Jewish immigration to Palestine be suspended. Prime Minister MacDonald was forced to distance himself from the paper in a “letter of clarification” to Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organisation. Among Arabs the letter became known as the “Black Letter” that killed the White Paper. Seeing a dead end, the mufti turned to the Muslim world and organised an International Islamic Conference to drum up support for his cause.

In December 1931 the General Islamic Congress met in Jerusalem. Prominent among the delegates were Rashid Rida, the Egyptian
Salafist; Muhammad Iqbal, the Indian philosopher-poet; and Shawkat Ali, the head of India’s Khilafat Movement that had rallied in defence of the Ottoman caliphate, the very institution the mufti had helped defeat. Turkey and Saudi Arabia stayed away. But even after days of deliberation, the only thing that emerged beyond rhetoric was the decision to establish an Islamic university in Jerusalem, as if Al-Azhar and the countless other madrassahs were not enough. While the frustrations of the Palestinian people grew, the conference of world Muslims offered them mere platitudes and prayers. The delegates had obviously forgotten that a large number of Palestinians were Christians.

By the time the Palestinian uprising began in 1936, the Nazi hatred of the Jew had been incorporated into the existing Muslim narrative that the Jews were untrustworthy and rejected by God himself. The spurious Jew-hating Hadith were being blended with
The Protocols
, and Muslims were picking up the nastiest strains of Christian anti-Semitism from the scores of Muslim-Christian associations that had sprouted up to counter the Jews.

As early as 1933, there are records of the mufti visiting the German consul in Jerusalem and assuring him, “The Muslims inside and outside Palestine welcomed the new regime of Germany.”
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In return, Germany helped out the mufti with funds.

In September 1937, Adolf Eichmann and two SS officers carried out a mission to the Middle East accompanied by the head of the Hitler Youth, Baldur von Schirach, who later funded an “Arab Club” in Damascus where German Nazis trained recruits for the mufti’s growing army of insurgents. In his seminal study on the mufti, Klaus Gensicke writes, “The Mufti himself acknowledged that at that time it was only due to German funds he received that it had been possible to carry through the uprising in Palestine. From the outset, he made high financial demands which the Nazis to a great extent met.”
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In the 1930s, about two decades after the Balfour Declaration, there was growing evidence of a convergence of German and Arab enmities that allowed for Nazi-style anti-Semitism to penetrate the Arab world. Although technically the Arabs were also Semites, the Arab hatred for the British and the French was good reason for the Nazis to accommodate them. Soon, a covenant between anti-Zionist Arab leaders and the Nazis began to emerge. Leaders on both sides chose to either finesse or ignore the implications of the kind of anti-Semitism featured in Hitler’s
Mein Kampf
. An article in the Nazi Party newspaper in 1937 explained that Arabs had been at least partly “Aryanized” through mixing with Armenians and Circassians, while some Nazis went on to suggest that
Mein Kampf
be amended to clarify that only Jews, and not Arabs, were meant as objects of Hitler’s rage and disdain.
¹³

The Nazis also used radio propaganda in the Arab world, where attacks on their common enemy, the Jews, were a major feature of broadcasts. Murderous anti-Jewish riots in Iraq in 1941 and in Egypt, Syria, and Libya in 1945, and massacres in Aleppo and Aden in 1947 demonstrated how the anti-Semitic propaganda of the Nazis, the activism of the mufti, and increasing tension over the emergence of a Jewish state in Palestine combined to completely erase the distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. New forms of Arab nationalism also left less room for tolerance of minority groups than had existed in the Ottoman Empire.

In addition, the odd relationship that had developed between the Nazis and some Arab countries continued after the war. Egypt, for one, became a refuge for runaway Nazis. Nazi war criminal Johann von Leers, an expert in anti-Semitic literature, was one of a number of Nazis welcomed by Egypt for their “expertise in Jewish affairs.” Von Leers was warmly received by none other than Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husayni. In his welcome speech the mufti remarked, “We thank you for
venturing to take up the battle with the powers of darkness that have become incarnate in world Jewry.”
¹⁴

The much talked about Arab Revolt in Palestine between 1936 and 1939 was multifaceted and was triggered by a growing frustration among the Palestinians about their future. The immediate trigger for the revolt was the killing of two Arabs near Petah Tivka on April 15, 1936, in retaliation for an ambush by Palestinians on a Jewish convoy in which two Jews had died.

As time passed, the British asked their allies in the Arab world to intervene, seeking help from the leaders of Transjordan, Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia to help end the strikes that had paralyzed the economy. Notwithstanding the harsh measures taken by the British authorities, the mufti chose to come to the table to highlight the plight of the most vulnerable among the Palestinians. The economic interests of Arab orchard farmers played a role as well. The Spanish Civil War was at its peak, causing citrus prices to soar in Europe. If the strike by Palestinian farmers continued, they would not benefit at all from the shortages created by the war in Spain.

As soon as the hostilities ceased, the British acted. Within a month, a royal commission was set up to examine the underlying causes of the disturbances in Palestine. William Robert Wellesley, Earl Peel, who had been Britain’s secretary of state for India in 1922, headed the commission. The earl arrived in Jerusalem in November 1936, got down to work immediately, and stayed in Palestine less than three months. For most of his stay, the Arabs boycotted the commission, feeling it had come with a preconceived notion about the conflict. However, the 400-page Peel Commission report contained a surprising admission. It stated in unequivocal terms that the British Mandate could no longer be maintained and needed to be replaced by new treaty arrangements
between the parties. For the first time, the notion of a single state based on the Balfour Declaration was abandoned. The report described the dilemma faced by the British in unflattering terms.

“An irrepressible conflict has arisen between two national communities within the narrow bounds of one small country. There is no common ground between them. Their national aspirations are incompatible. The Arabs desire to revive the traditions of the Arab golden age. The Jews desire to show what they can achieve when restored to the land in which the Jewish nation was born. Neither of the two national ideals permits of combination in the service of a single State.”

Instead, the Peel Commission proposed a “partition” of Mandate Palestine into an Arab state and a Jewish state. In hindsight, this was a bonanza for the Arabs. Most of Mandate Palestine (70 per cent) was to remain in the Arab state, including all of the Negev to Nablus in the north and Gaza in the west. The Jewish homeland (20 per cent) was restricted to the northwest and included the Galilee, Tel Aviv, and Haifa, while a corridor from Jaffa to Jerusalem would remain under a fresh British mandate. There was one catch: the Arab area was to be merged with Transjordan, which was originally part of the Palestine Mandate and had been carved out as a separate kingdom in 1922.

Surprisingly, the Zionists gave the proposal a qualified approval, but true to tradition, the Arab leadership rejected the plan. Hajj al-Husayni, who presided over the Arab Higher Committee, called for a wholesale rejection of the plan and the creation of an Arab state in all of Palestine. (Hamas still clings to this hope.) With war clouds gathering in Europe, terror was introduced for the first time as a weapon in the conflict. On September 26, 1937, a senior British civil servant, Lewis Andrews, was assassinated in Nazareth. Although the Arab Higher Committee condemned the killing, the British administration outlawed the group and all the strike committees across Palestine. Leading politicians were arrested and some were deported to distant Seychelles in the Indian Ocean.

The mufti went into hiding in the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound while the British proscribed the Supreme Muslim Council, dismissed him from his positions, and impounded all the endowments that al-Husayni represented. The mufti’s remarkable double role as a spokesman for the Arab cause and a salaried official of the British Crown had come to an end.

Within weeks, Hajj al-Husayni scurried off to Lebanon – disguised as a woman – escaping the British dragnet in much the same way as, decades later, Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden wore burqas and gave the slip to the Americans. From Lebanon, where he was briefly arrested by the French, al-Husayni tried to control the uprising in Palestine, but the movement had fallen from the hands of the “notables” to the peasantry and working class. The mufti became less relevant, and the movement even more incoherent than before. Leadership passed into the hands of local committees that had little direction. The rebel leadership lacked a coordinated, detailed program.

Many Palestinians were caught between the rebels and their enemy, the British army. Among the wealthy families, it was fashionable to escape to neighbouring countries to avoid facing a political rebellion. This time-honoured practice of the Arab bourgeoisie’s bailing out in times of difficulty was repeated in 1947–48 with devastating consequences. Others, like Fakir al-Nashashibi, would create the Arab Peace Corps to fight the rebels with British assistance. Palestinian-on-Palestinian violence was on the rise, much like the ongoing Hamas vs. Fatah brutality of today.

Some of the mufti’s rebels tried to silence any opposition from within the community. Brutal measures were adopted, and it is said that Palestinians killed more of their own people in the 1936–39 rebellion than the British or the Jews did. Thus, a new dimension was added to the Palestinian narrative during this uprising. In the areas controlled by the mufti’s men, sharia laws were introduced, along with strict
dress codes that were enforced with unreasonable harshness and zeal. Any Muslim Palestinian declared “un-Islamic” by the mufti’s rebels was dealt with with insane violence. Anyone professing opposition to the rebellion was declared a traitor; anyone who argued in support of the Peel Report’s partition plan was targeted in worse ways than used by the Taliban of today.