The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty (27 page)

Unlike him, al-Hajj Amin’s relatives in the Husayni neighborhood received clear indications about Zionism’s future plans but did not
know how to interpret them. The same year that al-Hajj Amin engaged in his first anti-Zionist activity, the Zionist leader Arthur Ruppin came to Jerusalem and visited Sir John Grey Hill. Hill was a pro-Zionist English aristocrat who in 1875 built himself a summer house on Mount Scopus, not far from the Husaynis. Some of them were present at the meeting and heard about Ruppin’s plan to buy the house and turn it into a Hebrew educational institution, but at the time they saw no harm in it. By the time it became the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, it was too late.
⁵³

To return to al-Hajj Amin – in Cairo he followed two parallel paths, the religious and the secular, and was wavering between them due to his mother’s influence. Zaynab realized that in the secular world established by the Young Turks the status of the
muftis
would be quite low. It had in fact been declining before the rise of secular rule. Now it was of less importance than other posts held by the family – mayor, parliamentary representative, senior positions in the Ottoman administration and even in the local chamber of commerce. Al-Hajj Amin’s father, Tahir II, had had to struggle to maintain a central position in the family, and his son and successor, Kamil, gave up the attempt. It would be the youngest son, al-Hajj Amin, who would achieve the impossible and not only restore primacy to the Tahiri branch and the centrality of the
mufti
’s post in the family, but also become, if only for a short period,
rais al-a’ala
, the supreme president of the Palestinian political structure under the British Mandate. A number of Palestinian historians would later argue that this achievement came at a very great cost to the Palestinian people.

As al-Hajj Amin set off on a religious career that would sweep him into the maelstrom of national politics, his kinsman Jamal, a scion of the mayoralty sub-branch of the Tahiri Husaynis (and son of Musa Kazim’s sister), chose a career none of his family had previously considered: that of medicine. Even in those days it was not easy to get into medical school. Jamal wanted to attend the best faculty of medicine in the Middle East, at the Jesuit college of St Joseph in Beirut, but the language of tuition was French, in which he was not fluent. Then in 1912 a telegram arrived at the house of Musa Kazim’s sister and was read aloud to the entire household as soon as the young man’s uncle came in. Eighteen-year-old Jamal, newly graduated from St George’s School, had been admitted into the Faculty of Medicine of the American University in Beirut.

Jamal arrived in Beirut in the autumn of 1912. His awed impressions of the city’s beauty and riches reveal the difference between provincial Jerusalem and the Lebanese metropolis. He was especially impressed by
the university campus where he studied – no such large and magnificent architectural complex could be found in Palestine. Built in 1866, it had previously been Beirut’s Protestant College and became a pantheon of the new Arab nationalism. The American pastor Daniel Bliss, the first Protestant missionary in the Middle East, had come to the Syrian provinces in 1820 and with his friends began to establish the first private schools. George Antonius ascribes to these schools a major influence on the rise of Arab nationalism, because as well as theological studies the students received a liberal education and heard much about the marvels of American independence and European democracy. The Americans brought the first Arabic printing press to Beirut in 1834, and it served the college students.
⁵⁴
Butrus al-Bustani and Nasif al-Yazji, two of the early thinkers of Arab nationalism, taught at the college alongside Bliss.

The college was situated in Ras Beirut, on the crest of the mountain overlooking the Mediterranean. On a clear day it was possible to see the snowy mountains to the south, Jabal Kanisa and Jabal Snin, and the plain below the Bay of St George; not far away to the north was the beautiful bay of Junieh. The college was full of students of various backgrounds, including Armenians, some Egyptians and Iranians and a few from Anatolia. Most of the teachers were Canadians and Americans, and the rest were local. The college had six wings or schools – literature and the sciences, commerce, medicine, pharmacology, dentistry and engineering. There was also the international college, attended by all first-year students, including Jamal al-Husayni. It did not take him long to find his way around the place, physically and socially. The college did not differ essentially from St George’s School, since both were Protestant missionary establishments. A student’s quality of life was determined, as in English public schools, by the students’ hierarchy, and perks and privileges were won by passing safely through the first year and into the second. As in the United States, good athletes enjoyed favorable treatment even in their first year, but Jamal was not an athlete. His claim to fame lay elsewhere.

When the First World War broke out, Jamal had been there for two years but had not yet begun medical studies. Like all students of medicine, he had spent the first two years in the College Hall in the Faculty of the Humanities doing general studies. The faculty building was an impressive two-storey edifice, with high windows and a square tower, in the style of Oxford and Cambridge. Jamal should have spent the next four years studying medicine, but this promising career was broken off by the war.
⁵⁵

THE OUTBREAK OF WORLD WAR I

Jamal is our first witness to the outbreak of the war. Early in December 1914, four months after the beginning of the war in Europe, during which the Ottoman Empire maintained its neutrality, the war came to Beirut. It was not only the empire’s close relations with Germany that involved it in the war against Britain and France, but primarily the need to resist the relentless territorial ambitions of Russia, which ever since the reign of Peter the Great had been seeking to dominate the Black Sea and its outlets to the Mediterranean, as well as the Slav lands in the Balkans. Two Balkan wars had intensified this struggle, and it was not surprising that the Ottoman entry into the war was triggered by an incident in the Black Sea in December 1914. The Ottoman government used the declaration of war to cancel all the Capitulations – that is, the special agreements between the Ottoman Empire and various foreign governments giving their citizens and subjects exemptions from the laws of the empire. This proclamation won the government some support among the Husaynis.

On the morning of 1 December 1914, the calm of the Beirut university was shattered. Ottoman guards invaded the School of Medicine and arrested every person suspected of belonging to secret nationalist Arab societies. The suspects were brought before Cemal Pasha (his Arabic name, Jamal Pasha, will be used hereafter as this is what the local people called him), the military governor of all the Syrian provinces, nicknamed
al-Safah
(‘The Butcher’), who without blinking an eye ordered their execution. Persons whose names appeared in the guest book of the French consulate were marked for death, since the consulate was suspected of aiding the nationalist associations. The terrified consul himself had escaped as soon as war was declared, but the police had a long enough list to satisfy Jamal Pasha. Jamal al-Husayni did not think twice about fleeing to the safety of the Husayni neighborhood in Jerusalem.
⁵⁶

But Jamal Pasha had gotten to Jerusalem well before December and the official entry of the Ottomans into the war. In August, after the war broke out in Europe, he had toured the cities of al-Sham – Greater Syria – where, according to Minister of War Enver Pasha, there was nationalist unrest. Driven by his own paranoia, which Enver’s warnings had exacerbated, Jamal Pasha started rooting out anyone suspected of nationalist activity or spying for the enemy.
⁵⁷
He was convinced that the Allies were planning an invasion of Palestine in order to foment an Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire, and his aides assured
him that the landing would be somewhere between Iskenderun and Haifa. Jamal Pasha began systematically crushing all the Arab nationalist associations and every sign of independence in the area under his control. But the massive operation produced few results. There was not nearly as much political activity as his aides believed, and they seized only a few dozen individuals from the regions of Syria, Lebanon and Palestine who may or may not have been involved with independence movements. By mid-August 1915 eleven Arabs had been hanged in Beirut – a mere handful in relation to Jamal Pasha’s imaginings. But the action was sufficiently ruthless to instill terror throughout Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, including of course Jerusalem, which Jamal Pasha frequently visited.

Although the Husayni family was lucky enough not to be picked on, it was a time of great anxiety. In fact, war had come to Jerusalem even before it reached Beirut. General conscription was announced in August 1914, and every day patrols scoured the city for likely recruits, or for suspects. Fortunately for the Husaynis, most of them were government officials and so far exempt from military service; nor did they appear on Jamal Pasha’s list of suspects. The secretaries of the national associations that had sprung up in reaction to the Turkification policy of the Young Turks – Al-Ahd, Al-Fata and the Decentralization Party – had given advance warning to the young Husaynis to cease their political activities. Later Jamal Pasha would execute people without any sound information, simply at his and his aides’ whims.
⁵⁸

But at the end of September, things came to a head and conscription reached the Husaynis too. Their friend Khalil al-Sakakini parted from them hastily on a searing hot Hamsin day near the Jaffa Gate. He had been standing beside the road, saying goodbye to some conscripts he knew who were about to be sent to the front, when he spotted among the dusty, sweaty crowd the sons of Musa Salih, nephews of Musa Kazim. Many months would pass before their mothers breathed freely again, but in the end the two returned unharmed from the inferno. Jamal, too, was conscripted, and some time later he was taken captive by the British forces.
⁵⁹

The war atmosphere would affect the rest of the inhabitants only from 20 December on. Ten days earlier in Mecca, the Prophet’s banner was taken out amid great festivities and carried to Damascus by train, and on the 20
^th
it reached Jerusalem. The banner was received by a huge joyous throng in front of the Dome of the Rock. But it was a strange event. When the loud rejoicing subsided, Jamal Pasha and
the
mufti
of his army sat on a raised platform in front of the crowd and began to answer questions concerning the religious aspects of the citizens’ duty to help the war effort. Jamal Pasha addressed the crowd in his own name and that of Mehmet Rashad V – the puppet sultan whom the Young Turks had placed on the throne of Abdul Hamid II – proclaiming, ‘The Amir of the Faithful has declared the great
jihad
!’ This was followed by mass prayers.
⁶⁰

Al-Hajj Amin was not one of the conscripts seen off by Sakakini. Bored with his studies, he had joined up just before the war, and when it broke out he began to attend the military academy in Istanbul and was made a junior reserves officer. His brigade was sent to the Black Sea shore, but he never saw action because the Ottomans did not send Arab officers or cadets to the front. He remained in the reserves, but his life was far from easy. The nights were cold, the food was insufficient and so was sleep. In August 1916 he was given a commission in the Forty-sixth Division and his situation improved. At first he served as assistant division commander to the governor of Smyrna, present day Izmir, then as an artillery officer on the Black Sea. But his battle experience did not go beyond exchanges of fire with Russian cannons.
⁶¹

The situation grew worse in 1916. Al-Hajj Amin would later say that he spent most of his time in arguments with the division commander about the rations and quarters given to the Arab soldiers, whom he believed the Ottoman commander was discriminating against. He could have ended up in jail, but in November 1916 he came down with dysentery and was sent to a hospital in Istanbul. Then he was given an exceptional three-month leave and went to Jerusalem. At the end of the three months he stayed home and did not return to his unit. The war had left al-Hajj Amin stronger and tougher.
⁶²

Despite everything, throughout his military service al-Hajj Amin never considered rebelling against the Ottomans. So long as he served in their army, he remained loyal to Istanbul. In later years he would explain that he thought of the war as a struggle between Muslims and infidels. His diary from the army period was full of longing for Palestine, with such lines as, ‘This is my country and the country of my forefathers, I shall defend it with my life for the sake of her children.’
⁶³
And this is probably why he decided to not to support the uprising against the Ottoman Empire, which erupted shortly after his return to Jerusalem.

Most of the Husaynis did not serve in the military and remained in the microcosm of Jerusalem. To use a typical historiographic
generalization, it might be said that most of them did not respond to the national Syrian and Arab call. Characteristically, however, neither did they join the opposition movement that Jamal Pasha was trying to organize. For a whole year, between August 1914 and August 1915, Jamal Pasha tried to rally Arab support, and when he failed he began a campaign of unprecedented persecution. The first mass hangings took place on 21 August 1914, the condemned prisoners being members of the Arab national movement. The newspapers published their names – Christians and Muslims were hanged side by side.
⁶⁴
This was Jamal Pasha’s contribution to that essential buttress of the national identity: supra-religious solidarity.