The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty (47 page)

In April 1932, a British official by name of Lewis French was appointed to study what could be done to develop the country and help those who had been hurt by the sale of land to Jews. He did not find many such cases and was not persuaded that there was strong resistance among Palestinian landowners to these sales. But he deplored the lack of development plans for rural Palestine and demanded that the economic discrimination in favor of the Jews be stopped. French’s report stunned the Palestinian leadership, historian Yehoshua Porath asserts in hindsight. If that was so, then the leadership overlooked the most significant passages in the report. French was supportive of the Palestinian cause and tried to awaken the leadership to the realities it ignored. But instead of rousing and stopping the sale of land, the leadership was paralyzed, and
the executive was not convened until October 1933. When it did, it was dominated by unprecedented hostility towards Britain.
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The public at large may not have been aware that the Husaynis, too, sold land, though it was an open secret to the family. Even Musa Kazim sold the land of Dalab (on which the kibbutz Kfar Anavim would later be built). Jamal’s brother Tawfiq sold the Jews whole orange groves in Nes Ziona.
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But this practice ended in 1929 and was not revived.

It took the
mufti
three years to acknowledge that the 1929 revolt had not made a noticeable difference in the plight of the Palestinians: the Zionist presence in Palestine kept expanding and the British policies remained unchanged. In the 1930s, al-Hajj Amin was not only a social and religious leader but also the head of an important political movement. He became a nationalist politician motivated by considerations of political survival as much as by his commitment to the national cause. It is possible that at this time a kind of Husayni nationalism was developing that guided not only al-Hajj Amin but Jamal and other members of the family as well.

The hardening attitude of many members of the family was mainly a reflection of the dramatic changes in the character of the country and that of its Arab population rather than any private initiative. In the early 1930s, Jewish immigration became an oppressive reality, and the lack of appropriate action by the British government heightened the feeling of the Palestinian leadership that Palestine could be saved only by extreme measures. But the growing extremism was also indicative of the internal conflicts in the Palestinian camp, which intensified due to the financial straits of the political structure.

None of the political players could raise sufficient funds to act independently. And even the Husaynis were struggling to raise the necessary budget for the new all-Palestinian conference they wished to convene in the early 1930s. The attempt to revive the annual conferences that had taken place before 1920 was largely a failure.

LEADING THE RESISTANCE: MUSA KAZIM AND HIS SON ABD AL-QADIR

For the first time since the family had become a social and political force in the age of nationalism, or perhaps even since the eighteenth century, its members were challenged by popular leadership. The encounter between the high and the low did not go well, and the historians of the
Palestinian Left would later denounce the family for its alleged haughty and heartless treatment of the lower strata of Palestinian society.

The first signs of political organization from below could be discerned in 1932, when Palestinian merchants refused to take part in a government-organized regional trade fair, the Levant Fair, held in Tel Aviv. Employees in the Departments of Education and Transportation resigned their posts. These were sporadic and spontaneous actions, and to some extent the revived activity at the popular level reflected changes in Palestinian political life.

The Husaynis, Nashashibis and other leading families launched political parties. Some of these took on an independent dynamic that did not always harmonize with family interests, though their agendas were usually factional rather than national. But this was not true for all of the parties. For example, Istiqlal, which came into being in 1932, rose above the clans, calling for unity in the Arab world and protesting its breakup into small states that it regarded as colonialist creations. Perhaps this is why Istiqlal soon fell apart.

The Husaynis supported the National Youth Party inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, both of which came into being in 1932. In 1934 the opposition, led by the Nashashibis, launched the National Defense Party, while the Husaynis launched a party of their own in March 1935 that will be discussed later. Palestinian society was beginning to develop forms and organizations that might have led it, like other Arab peoples in the region, to political independence but for the presence of a settler movement that coveted their homeland. Such a reality required unity, not pluralism – a solid national movement, not a national society in its infancy.

The opposition built itself power bases among the rural population and launched an affiliated village party. Many village headmen wrote al-Hajj Amin begging him to honor them with a visit and to involve them in his activities, but the replies sent back in his name offered various excuses (including a broken leg and a sudden illness). He and his family thus failed to acquire a popular power base.
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In addition to the formation of political parties, there were numerous unofficial conferences, beginning in Nablus. Jamal and his cousin Munif observed the developments and concluded that such spontaneity might eventually restrict al-Hajj Amin’s control over Palestinian politics.

Jamal set out to channel the radical dynamism of the young men of Nablus. Early in January 1933, he held the first conference of young Palestinians in Jaffa. This meeting was marked by anti-Christian fervor
that cooled only after strenuous efforts by Musa Kazim’s young son Abd al-Qadir, at his father’s urging. After all, the Husaynis had traditionally cooperated with the Christians and his father’s nationalism was based on secular Muslim-Christian cooperation.
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This was an uncharacteristic action for Abd al-Qadir, who represented radicalism in the family – though he never acted against them. Only in 1933 did he appear on the scene as a distinct political figure, and he very quickly made his mark on the Palestinian struggle. In that year, he returned from Cairo, where he had won his spurs in a national struggle alongside the young Egyptians.

His first political activity had been in 1932, when he helped to organize a boycott against Fuad University in Cairo, which was believed to have been collaborating with the British. Abd al-Qadir himself had been sent to the American University in Cairo, and though the Americans were not viewed as colonialists, it was a Western institution and thus in his eyes a foreign presence on Arab soil. Abd al-Qadir’s protest became progressively radical. At first he was content to design an individual course of studies with the emphasis on Islamic subjects. His favorite subject – ‘Sport and Religion in Arab History’ – foreshadowed his destiny, but he also read extensively about armed struggle in history and religion. Most of his tutors were Western ‘Orientalists’ who believed they had cracked the Islamic code and were now teaching Islam to the Egyptians. When the university diplomas were given out, young Abd al-Qadir’s piercing eyes did not betray his animosity or his intention to embarrass the alien establishment at its most ceremonial.

The official graduation ceremonies in the summer of 1932 on the university’s splendid campus were expected to run their usual course. The heads of the university, with leading figures in the expatriate community and the Egyptian administration, were all in attendance as the graduates were called one by one to come to the stage and receive their diplomas. Leading the ceremonies was the president of the university, Charles Watson, flanked by heads of departments, including the head of the Department of Oriental Languages, unwittingly destined to become the hero of the day. When Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni was called to the dais, he asked to say a few words to the audience.

To general astonishment, he launched into a fiery speech against Western policies in the Middle East and against the part played by the American University in implementing them. He accused the institution in which he had studied of consciously and deliberately undermining the Muslim religion and its traditions and supporting the
Christian mission. The aim of the Christian mission, he said, was to sow dissent between Christians and Muslims, whereas the Muslims aspired to pan-Arab solidarity. He stopped, raised the diploma he had just been given and declared, ‘This is your diploma. Take it away. It’s nothing to do with me!’ Then he tore the thick document before all the dignitaries, local and foreign, sitting on the terrace.

The university was all agog, and its administrators appealed to the local authorities as well as to the American and British embassies. That evening they resolved to expel Abd al-Qadir from Egypt within twenty-four hours. During that time, the young man managed to tell his version of the event to the Egyptian press, preventing the university from denying the occurrence, as its directors were naturally inclined to do.
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Abd al-Qadir returned to Palestine a national hero, and the young revolutionary became a journalist. At first he joined the newspaper of the Muslim Brotherhood,
Al-Jamaa’ al-Islamiyya
. Before long he realized that his articles were not published, and he suspected that the paper was succumbing to British pressure. He then began writing for the family-owned newspaper,
Al-Jamaa’ al-Arabiyya
. Every day he made his way to the editorial offices, located in what is today the Clark Building on Mamoun Allah Street, to hand in a fervent column that would stir the young nationalists of Jerusalem. Often it was not published but rather distributed in secret to the young people. When he felt that here he was being thwarted again, he made one final attempt to work through the press by joining the board of the newspaper
Al-Liwa
, edited by Jamal al-Husayni, whose offices adjoined those of
Al-Jamaa’ al-Arabiyya
. The latter publication represented the Supreme Muslim Council, and the former the Husayni party. But Abd al-Qadir soon realized that here, too, most of his columns were not printed, for fear of British reprisals.

Thus ended his short career as a journalist. Helped by his family connections, he obtained a post in the Government Lands Office. One of his biographers, Muhsin, describes this as an impressive achievement. First he agitated against the government’s practice of preferring to hire Christians rather than Muslims, then he formed an organization named the Association of Educated Young Muslims, which pressured the High Commissioner Wauchope to give twenty-five Muslims jobs in the administration. The twenty-sixth post, with a handsome monthly salary of 25 Palestinian pounds, went to Abd al-Qadir.

At first he was satisfied with the clerical post in Jaffa, but he advanced quickly and became chief of the Land Registry in the district of Ramleh.
Here he became aware of the extent of Jewish land acquisition and the growing Palestinian distress, and he wrote to his friends in Egypt that he was using his post to tackle these issues. He claimed to have stopped the sale of many tracts in the center of the country and to have increased the number of Palestinians in high government posts. There is no external evidence for these claims, but this may well be the case. His committed biographer highlights these achievements in order to justify Abd al-Qadir’s willingness to work in the very government department that enabled the Zionists to buy more land (that is, he wished to work from within the system to curb the Zionist enterprise).
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His energy and working pace were noted by the family. Not content with his newspaper and government work, he labored indefatigably to organize support for the family and opposition to the British and the Zionists. We have mentioned his creation of a group dedicated to fighting the growing unemployment among educated Muslims. Only a few months after his return from Egypt, he convened in Jaffa a conference on unemployment that called on the government to sack its British and foreign staff and to pass a law requiring companies to hire Muslims in proportion to their profits from the Muslim community. If these demands were not met, the conference threatened to call on Muslims to boycott those companies.

But the government did not meet the demands. Abd al-Qadir failed to rouse the public to tackle this issue, since the breach with the opposition prevented large-scale action. Moreover, the opposition newspaper
Mirat al-Sharq
charged that Abd al-Qadir always acted in a Muslim context and was therefore anti-Christian. It was a difficult charge to refute, but a search through the opposition’s leaflets and publications has produced no tangible evidence of such discrimination on Abd al-Qadir’s part.

Like other members of the Husayni family, Abd al-Qadir needed a government post in order to survive economically and to maintain a strong political stance in society. This created a dilemma similar to the one faced by the notables under the Young Turks – except that they had not been strongly opposed to the government and certainly did not aspire to replace it with an independent national entity. In the 1930s, the family was troubled by the question of whether to resign from or remain in government posts. Abd al-Qadir was the first to resolve it, and his determination spearheaded the Husaynis’ clash with the British and the Zionists. For this he eventually paid with his life. In 1934 he proclaimed that he was resigning his post in the mandatory
government’s land registry because it was helping the Jews to take over the land.
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The bravest of the family, however, was the aged Musa Kazim. He accepted the invitation of young Jaffaites to lead a demonstration they were organizing. The eighty-year-old Husayni thrilled the young men as he faced the mounted police and was knocked down by the horses. The newspaper
Filastin
reported that the old man was miraculously spared when a bullet fired at him struck one of the other demonstrators.
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