The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty (28 page)

The Husaynis were actively involved in building this buttress, but they did not look only to the Christians. They were willing to regard the Jews, too, as partners in the construction of a new future. While the executioners went about their grisly business, Muslims and Jews met in a gathering which would be unmatched for many years to come.

The inspiration behind the meeting was Zaki Bey, the city’s military commander, whom Jamal Pasha’s regular visits had left without employment. Zaki Bey was popular with Jews and Muslims alike, thanks to his generous donations to religious institutions and to the citizens’ welfare. One day in mid-December 1915, a ceremonious delegation of Husaynis came to call at the Jewish teachers’ seminary on Abyssinia Street. Among them were Muhammad Salih al-Husayni, owner of the Rawdat al-Ma’arif (‘The Educational Garden’); the headmaster of that school, Abd al-Latif al-Rajab (who took the name Husayni after his appointment to the post); and Fakhri al-Husayni, al-Hajj Amin’s younger brother (who would die prematurely in Istanbul soon after this). Eliezer Ben-Yehuda received the guests warmly and opened the meeting with the words, ‘The time has come for Muslims and Jews to come together … We have a common enemy … We have been slandered …’ and so on. Young Fakhri responded by reading out a letter from Jerusalem mayor Hussein al-Husayni, welcoming the initiative, which he saw as a call to create a joint homeland. Hearing this, the Jews – including David Yellin, Albert Antebi, Yaacov Thon and others – burst into loud applause and were joined by the Husaynis.

The most astonishing appearance was that of Sheikh Abd al-Qadir al-Muzafir, who accompanied the family. In times to come, he would be known as an eloquent orator against the Zionists and a confidant of Amin al-Husayni. He owned a good deal of land in the vicinity of Hulda, some of which he sold to the Jews. He began by saying he was
sorry he did not speak Hebrew and advised the Jews to learn Arabic and Turkish, especially at a time when tens of thousands of their brethren had come to the country. Since the first and second wave of Jewish immigration, he said, ‘it had become evident that something was happening and taking shape between the two peoples who are racially related, but far apart in their development’. Moreover, the
sheikh
added, ‘there is no denying that the Jewish settlers have brought much that is good’.

He was followed by Muhammad Salih al-Husayni, who exclaimed warmly, ‘How delightful is this scene, a gathering of the Children of Israel (
Banu Israil
) and Arabs together under the picture of our dear sultan … This evening ties Muslims and Jews together with love.’ David Yellin delighted the Husaynis by speaking the purest Arabic and expressing similar sentiments. A similar meeting was supposed to take place in Jaffa, but the Ottoman authorities prevented it.
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Strange are the vagaries of local history. In 1915 the Husaynis led the initiative to create a
watani
, a local patriotic consciousness, under the Ottoman aegis. Most of the leaders of the Jewish community were willing to regard it as a temporary but acceptable solution. Two years later, following the British conquest and the Balfour Declaration, most of the participants on both sides would adopt a sharp nationalistic stance, and hopes for sympathy and cooperation would be dashed.

At the end of December 1915 they met again, this time hosted by Salim al-Husayni. The Jewish group was led by David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. Dreams of a joint homeland under the Pax Ottomana were still discussed, but by now Jamal Pasha had become alarmed: he dismissed the organizer Zaki Pasha, exiled Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi and accused the Husaynis of pro-French sedition.

The family grew very cautious and wondered if they ought not follow the example of the al-Shuqayris. A well-known religious scholar who lived in Acre, Sheikh As’ad al-Shuqayri (the father of Ahmad al-Shuqayri, a future head of the PLO) decided to deal with Jamal Pasha’s rage by means of gentle persuasion. He organized a delegation of religious scholars and notables from Syria, Lebanon and Palestine to try to pacify the Ottomans after the executions. To demonstrate their good intentions, the group visited the Ottoman forces in the Dardanelles and distributed gifts. The story was covered extensively in the press, as the group included the
muftis
of Damascus, Homs, Beirut and Haifa, the
naqibs
of Nablus and the Shafi’i
mufti
of Jerusalem – every major city was represented by a
mufti
or
naqib
. The Hanafi
mufti
of Jerusalem, Kamil al-Husayni, had been strongly urged to join, but no one in the family wanted to be unequivocally associated with the Ottomans, who represented secularism, anti-Arabism and above all erratic, unstable policies. The only one willing to consider joining was Shukri al-Husayni, who told the family that he supported the action of Sheikh As’ad, even the latter’s willingness to become
mufti
of the Fourth Army – that is, Jamal Pasha’s own
mufti
. The newspaper
Filastin
published Shukri’s statement in support of al-Shuqayri, mocking those who sought to break away from Ottoman rule: ‘The Arab nation must not part from the Ottoman nation, or it may find itself outside Islam.’
⁶⁶
Kamil, too, realized that he had to pay lip service to this position, and in February 1916, when Jamal Pasha brought Minister of War Enver Pasha by a special train to Jerusalem for a ceremonious dedication of Jamal Pasha Street, Kamil al-Husayni invited the important visitors to the Haram al-Sharif and presented them with valuable gifts.
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The Gaza Husaynis, who were vaguely related to the Jerusalem family, were badly hit. Ahmad Arif al-Husayni, the son of Gaza’s Hanafi
mufti
and the member of parliament for the city, was put to death by Jamal Pasha in 1916. The Jerusalem Husaynis knew Ahmad Arif’s father well, as he was in charge of the connection between Gaza and the Jerusalem representatives in the Ottoman Parliament. Ahmad Arif himself had sat beside many of the Jerusalem Husaynis on Jerusalem’s district council. Moreover, in 1913 the Jerusalem family supported his unsuccessful candidacy to the Ottoman Parliament, which he lost to the family that would bedevil the Husaynis – namely, the Nashashibis.

The execution of Ahmad Arif al-Husayni heightened the fear and anxiety in Jerusalem. Jamal ‘the Butcher’ did not even spare Ahmad Arif’s son. The charge against Ahmad Arif was that he had collaborated with the camp of the Hashemite
sharif
Hussein ibn Ali of Mecca, the ruler of the Hijaz region in the Arabian Peninsula. This Hussein – great-grandfather of the future King Hussein of Jordan – openly revolted against the Ottomans in the summer of 1916, and his high religious position as guardian of the holy places in Mecca and Medina made this a serious blow to the empire. At the time nobody knew about the
sharif
’s collusion with the British governor of Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, and his confidential agent T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia). Together they created an alliance that would serve British and Hashemite interests but would split the Arab world. When Albion’s perfidy became known, anti-British tendencies in the Middle East intensified. What worried the Husaynis most, however,
was that one of the charges against the Gazan’s son was desertion, and not all the Jerusalem Husaynis had obeyed the call-up (most of them were exempt in any case).
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The year 1916 was a gory one, stained with the blood of Arab notables. On the day the Hijaz revolt was proclaimed, Jamal Pasha put to death another group of activists who had been convicted by a military court in Aley, Lebanon. At least one historian maintains that Jamal Pasha considered executing the most outspoken member of the family, Jamil al-Husayni, but changed his mind at the last moment for unknown reasons.
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That year young al-Hajj Amin, aged twenty-one, returned to Jerusalem. Under the tutelage of his famous mentor, Rashid Rida, and after prolonged discussions with his friends Arif al-Arif and Khalil al-Sakakini, he began to seek volunteers to join the
sharif
’s revolt. Thousands put their names down but few would actually fight.
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Lloyd George, the future Prime Minister of Britain, deplored the fact that the Palestinian Arabs did nothing to help the war effort, and blamed most of them for joining the Ottomans in their fight against his own country. He counted only 150 Palestinians in the forces of the
sharif
of Mecca.
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Al-Hajj Amin’s efforts, which would be recorded in his favor, were conducted with the aid of Captain Brenton, a British military agent active in Palestine, and were much appreciated by the British government. Indeed, it has been argued that this helped his appointment as Grand Mufti of Palestine in 1921. But al-Hajj Amin was finding it difficult to rally actual support – while no one liked the Young Turks, certainly not after Jamal Pasha’s depredations, few were willing to betray Istanbul in time of war. The historian Philip Mattar states flatly that the
sharif’s
revolt did not arouse enthusiasm in Palestine and that the notable families remained loyal to Istanbul until 1918.
⁷²

A young intelligence officer in the Arab Bureau in Cairo – set up in 1915 to observe the political developments in the Arab world in preparation for the British takeover – noted al-Hajj Amin’s activities in a positive light, and his report described the young Husayni as a pro-British personage. Here is another of history’s ironies, as twenty years later al-Hajj Amin would become the bugbear of the British rulers in the Middle East.

Jamal Pasha’s continued presence in the region and his frequent visits to Jerusalem – from the summer of 1915, when he was planning his futile ‘Operation Lightning’ (
yilderim
in Turkish), in which he hoped to conquer Egypt with the German General von Moltke by crossing
the Sinai Peninsula, to his equally futile resistance against Allenby’s forces in 1917 – hung like a shadow over the family. They were in the position of the knife-thrower’s assistant, tied to the target and sensing the whistling of the knives flying past their ears. Even the Husayni children were exposed to the tyrant’s violent whims. One day Ottoman soldiers burst into St George’s School and ransacked it, having been told that a cannon was hidden there for the pro-British rebels. Though they did not find it, they shut the school down and the boys spent most of the war at home.
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The boys probably did not shed tears over this, but they were very reluctant to part from their much-loved teacher, Khalil al-Sakakini, who like other Christian friends of the Husaynis suffered greatly under Jamal Pasha. The latter was not always in the city, but the governor obeyed his orders to the letter. The persecution of Christian inhabitants began two months after the Ottoman Empire joined the war.

Khalil’s house was well-known in Jerusalem. It was called the
haririya
–
harir
is Arabic for ‘silk’, and the house on the little rise beside the railway station had once been a silk-processing workshop. (Today it houses the Khan Theater.) One Tuesday evening Sakakini and Mayor Hussein al-Husayni, Sakakini’s old schoolmate, had just finished supper and were about to settle on the rush mats for coffee, when suddenly they heard a clamor in the street outside. Rifles were fired, shattering the evening calm. Ottoman soldiers were running through the city proclaiming that Jamal Pasha’s forces had captured the Suez Canal and taken 8,000 enemy troops prisoner. Khalil did not believe it – ‘A war tactic’, he said. In fact, Jamal’s army had failed to cross the Sinai Peninsula.

Had someone overheard Khalil’s heretical statement? No one knows for certain. But some days later, on Saturday, 1 December 1917, the police rounded up Christians and foreign nationals and held them in the police station. The detainees knew from experience that the Ottoman authorities would deport them. Khalil al-Sakakini was one of the detainees, and his sister appealed for help from Hussein al-Husayni – ‘my pure-hearted friend’, as Sakakini called him in his diary. For a moment she feared she had lost her brother for ever. The respected teacher was sentenced to serve in the Ottoman porters’ battalion. Jamal Pasha had decreed that non-Muslims would no longer pay an impost for their exemption from military service – henceforth Jews and Christians would serve in non-combat missions. (Combat service was not considered because in Jamal Pasha’s eyes they were
all potential spies.) The mayor was moved by the sister’s appeal and, despite his usual prudence, pulled the necessary strings to get Khalil released from servitude, which he might not have survived since the non-combat missions were hard labor in the most difficult conditions. Instead, Sakakini was sent to the veterinary service in the town of Bisan (the Jewish development town Beit She’an is built on its ruins). But Hussein persuaded the governor to overrule this sentence too, and eventually got Khalil assigned to work in a Jerusalem hospital.
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This did not last, however and the teacher was arrested once again. To begin with, Jamal Pasha regarded Khalil al-Sakakini as a potential asset when he agreed to teach at the reformist al-Salhiyya College founded by Jamal Pasha. But the teacher again fell under suspicion as a supporter of Arab nationalism and possibly even of the British. Khalil tended to be reckless: three days after being released, he gave shelter to an American Jew who was wanted by the authorities. He was sent to prison in Damascus. However, the Husaynis and others of his friends in the empire succeeded in having him freed and smuggled across the lines to British-held territory.
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