The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty (40 page)

Five men went to London in the autumn of 1921. For most of them this was a first foray outside the Middle East. They made several stops in Europe. In Rome, they were received by the Pope, who, they were relieved to discover, was a warm supporter of the Palestinian cause. From Rome they went on to Geneva, the seat of the League of Nations, which had that year begun its debates – as it would go on doing until 1924 – on the nature and substance of the mandatory regimes in the Middle East. It seemed for a moment to Musa Kazim that it might be possible to stop the wheels of history and prevent the ratification of the British Mandate of Palestine and the French Mandate of Syria and Lebanon. This unrealistic notion was put to him by Michel Latifallah and Riad al-Sulh, leading figures in the Lebanese national movement who proposed holding a pan-Syrian gathering in Geneva and presenting a unified protest to the League of Nations. But after the United States had withdrawn into its ‘splendid isolation’, the international body fell under the unfettered control of the two colonial powers.
There was no chance whatsoever that the Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese could change the colonial map of the Middle East without resorting to forcible struggles for national liberation. Such struggles would indeed take place before World War II and grow fiercer afterwards.
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After these frustrating meetings in Switzerland, the first-ever Palestinian delegation finally arrived in London at the end of September 1921. Five notables, all born into the Ottoman world and shaped by it, were confronted by the smoothly functioning British political establishment. They also faced the new but highly efficient Zionist lobby, which had already scored some major achievements.

On 2 November 1921, four years after the Balfour Declaration, Musa Kazim sat in his room in the Cecil Hotel on the Strand, writing gloomy letters to fellow notables in Jaffa, Nablus, Hebron and Jenin. He was feeling alone and helpless in the face of the supercilious Britons and the efficient Zionists, but above all he felt the humiliation of a Husayni having to cope with the minutiae of conducting such a diplomatic mission without a proper organization to help him. In his letters, he begged his associates to send him additional funds, not for public relations for the Palestinian cause but simply to finance his and his friends’ stay in London. The small amount that had been raised in Palestine before their departure was running out.
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Despite this awkwardness, Musa Kazim tried to hold serious talks with the persons in charge of the Middle East at the Colonial Office. His primary request was for the Balfour Declaration to be reconsidered, but in this matter he and his fellow delegates ran into a brick wall. None of the officials would consider the slightest change of policy. The delegates also demanded the revocation of the Jewish ‘national home’, an end to immigration and for Palestine not to be severed from its neighbors. These three demands were raised in three meetings with Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill and were rejected outright.

Despite this disappointment, the British government managed to pacify the country for a considerable length of time. Unwittingly, while they themselves attempted with little success to create a unified national movement, the Palestinian leaders provided the Zionist movement with a period of calm during which to lay the foundations of the future state. Between November 1921 and August 1929 there were almost no violent clashes between Jews and Palestinians or between Palestinians and the British authorities. The calm was achieved thanks mainly to the creation of the Supreme Muslim Council.

AT THE PEAK OF POWER: THE CREATION OF THE SUPREME MUSLIM COUNCIL

At the end of 1920, Samuel asked a committee of Muslim religious leaders in Palestine led by Kamil al-Husayni to consult with government officials on how to transfer the administration of their religious affairs to the Muslim notables. In March 1921, the committee submitted its proposal to create a Supreme Muslim Council. The demand for the council grew even greater when Norman Bentwich, a pro-Zionist Anglo Jew, was put in charge of the judiciary in Palestine, including the Shari‘a courts.
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Having considered the matter for several months, the
ulama
proposed replacing the old Ottoman structure that oversaw the religious properties and the religious law with an autonomous council. Departing from its usual policy of preserving existing customs, the British government agreed, perhaps to placate Palestinian anger about the Balfour Declaration. The electors of the Ottoman Parliament – that is, the persons who elected candidates from the district of Jerusalem to the parliament – were asked to elect the council, which in turn would choose its president, the
rais al-ulama
.

It was a foregone conclusion that al-Hajj Amin would be chosen, and so he was in March 1922. Once again the Nashashibis tried to block the Husaynis’ growing power. Raghib al-Nashashibi called for a boycott of the election, but to no avail. The significance of this new institution was very vague. The prerogatives seemed so extensive that the British officials feared they would supersede the local administration. For a moment, it looked as if the young national movement was coming into its own, and everyone echoed Jamal al-Husayni, who declared that the council’s creation was ‘a triumph of the national movement’, since even opponents regarded the council’s head as the national leader.
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The council’s chief importance lay in its combination of political and financial power. With an annual budget of 50,000 to 65,000 Palestine pounds (drawn mainly from the religious properties), al-Hajj Amin was able to increase his influence throughout Palestine. He could give favored areas preferential treatment in development and welfare and neglect others where his standing was weaker, such as Hebron, Acre and Haifa. He also had the authority to hire and dismiss staff in the Shari‘a courts.

Twenty-eight members of the Husayni clan received handsome incomes thanks to the council. Al-Hajj Amin was well aware of the value of this new post. Immediately after his appointment he made
sure to inform all and sundry that it was a lifetime position, though this had probably not been the intention.

Future Israeli scholars would describe the new appointment as trickery, because the man chosen to fill the religious post was in fact a politician.
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But of course religion and politics have been intertwined since the dawn of history, and Mandatory Palestine was no exception. In fact, al-Hajj Amin erred in not expanding his political activity. Though he did bring in some members of rival families, he failed to recruit talented individuals into the system he ruled over, probably because his dominant personality could not tolerate disagreement or disobedience.

But politics was not the
mufti
’s only sphere of activity. As head of the council, he established an orphanage for 160 boys and girls, supported schools, renovated the school in the Haram and established a museum and library in the sacred precinct. He was probably inspired by Ismail’s extensive activity as head of the Board of Education in the late nineteenth century. On al-Hajj Amin’s initiative, 50,000 trees were planted on religious property, and the system of public clinics and other welfare institutions were expanded. To cap it all off, he renovated the shrines on the Haram al-Sharif.
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Though community welfare was not his main occupation, it should be included in the ledger of his career.

The creation of the council also enabled him to extend his influence over the educational system and to turn the Rawdat al-Ma’arif into a national college, an alternative to the system offered by the government and the missionary secondary schools. One of its first students was Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni, the son of Musa Kazim, and the father would later praise the new college for undoing the bad influence of the missionary Sahayun School on his son’s personality.

Nonetheless politics were the
mufti
’s main occupation. The Palestinian delegation led by Musa Kazim returned empty-handed from London. In July 1922, the mandate was ratified and renewed, and a month later an ‘Order in Council’ (an official government announcement) was published in London. Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill placed before Parliament a proposed constitution for Mandatory Palestine predicated on the Balfour Declaration. The only local body it proposed was a Zionist-Palestinian (or in the lingo of those days, ‘Arab-Jewish’) legislative council that would help the High Commissioner to administer the country. Palestinian disappointment ran high, and it was against this background that the fifth Palestinian Congress was convened in Nablus on 22 August 1922.
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Angry and frustrated, the conference resolved to boycott the elections to the legislative council, using the
imams
in the mosques and the village heads to spread the word. Among the Husaynis, the divisions once more came to the surface. Musa Kazim feared aggravating relations with Britain. Nor did he care to fight against the Zionists, whereas al-Hajj Amin was more determined than ever to resist the British government’s policy.

Throughout these years, Musa Kazim sought channels of communication and even reconciliation with Zionism. Still, he refused to meet Chaim Weizmann, because such a high-level meeting, especially if held publicly, would have been viewed as complete Palestinian submission to Zionist demands. It seems that Musa Kazim came to dislike Weizmann personally, though he had never met him. However, he maintained close relations with Haim Kalvarisky, who became head of the Zionist Federation’s Arab Department after the British occupation.

As noted before, Kalvarisky continued to believe that eventually Zionism would win over many Palestinians, and he persuaded Musa Kazim to regard him as a major figure in the Zionist movement. Musa Kazim promised him that there would be no anti-Zionist action. One historian argues that the understanding between the two was so good that Kalvarisky succeeded in turning Musa Kazim’s sympathies towards Zionism and sometimes even persuaded him to take certain actions.

Their understanding was at its peak in late 1922, when Musa Kazim and his fellow delegates were staying in Lausanne. The following year, Musa Kazim’s speeches revealed the influence of Kalvarisky, as he repeatedly called for cooperation between Jews and Muslims. Under the same influence, he was even willing to postpone the sixth Palestinian Congress.
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But even if there was a ‘Zionist’ phase in Musa Kazim’s life, it would pass without a trace, and later he was willing to act openly against Zionism.

Or at least this is how his son Abd al-Qadir remembered it. From his twelfth birthday on, Abd al-Qadir accompanied his father to almost every political activity in which he took part. This contrasted with Abd al-Qadir’s formal education, first in the Ottoman school, then at Bishop Gobat’s Sahayun on Mount Zion and even during his spell at Rawdat al-Ma’arif. But despite his generally Westernized education – which he continued at the American Universities in Beirut and Cairo – Abd al-Qadir was never ambivalent about Zionism like Musa Kazim and his contemporaries in the family who were politically active until
1929. Led by al-Hajj Amin, the younger Husaynis continued to ‘nationalize’ the family, and their objection to Zionism was unequivocal.

Jamal straddled the fence. In the summer of 1923, he was willing to accept the British proposal of a legislative council provided all its members were elected and it had genuine prerogatives, especially on immigration. British documents show that the local authorities suspected Jamal of duplicity: while he called on the people to obey the government, he secretly conducted a campaign of intimidation against Palestinian participation in elections for the legislative council. In the end, however, they concluded that he was a reasonable and pragmatic representative of the Palestinian leadership. In 1923 Jamal won an important concession from the British government: recognition of the legitimacy of a representative Palestinian body – namely, the Executive of the Palestinian Congress – alongside the Jewish leadership and the British authorities.

‘It was not a representative body,’ argues Orientalist Elie Kedourie in a book listing the mistakes made by the British government in the Middle East between the two world wars.
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But his argument is flawed, because the Jewish leadership was not a true representative body either – in fact neither community was especially democratic. With regard to the Husaynis, it may be said that although they were not democratic, they were certainly not antiparliamentary. Like all urban notables in the Arab world, the Husaynis welcomed the institution of a parliament, since for the past century and a half they had taken part in representative bodies and for the past fifty years in elected ones.

Kedourie’s comment is important not because it is correct but because it points to the Palestinians’ failure to create a more enduring institution. In October 1923, Sir Herbert Samuel informed a delegation of Palestinian leaders of the government’s proposal to set up an Arab Agency alongside the Jewish Agency. The delegation was headed by Musa Kazim, who rejected the proposal outright, saying that ‘it did not meet the aspirations of the Arab nation’. He suspected that if he consented, the Palestinian community would be expected to extend formal recognition to the Jewish Agency.
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An uncharacteristic remark from al-Hajj Amin stands out amongst the statements made during this period. He said that if it had not been for the Balfour Declaration, he would have consented to Jewish immigration and settlement. This idea was echoed in Musa Kazim’s speeches at the time, and it indicates that they were still uncertain then about their attitude towards Zionism. But this uncertainty vanished in the 1930s.