The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty (59 page)

It was not only Jerusalem politics that eroded the Husaynis’ standing. The Judaization of Jerusalem continued apace, and the Husaynis fought in vain along with other Palestinians to block it. The struggle climaxed in 1943, when the municipality under Daniel Auster presented its comprehensive city plan. It included massive construction and the development of services, mainly on the Jewish side, and the expansion of an area near Mount Scopus that was designated a nature reserve at the expense of Palestinian landowners.

That year the municipality also wanted to assign enormous tracts in the Jerusalem area to housing for poor Palestinians. Said al-Husayni, honorary president of the Association of Palestinian Architects, led the opposition to the scheme and thwarted the publication of a tender
for an alternative plan for those areas based on socialist and egalitarian principles instead of the interests of an aristocratic regime. Any move that could improve conditions in the overcrowded Palestinian neighborhoods was seen by the urban notables as a direct attack on their estates and their wealth, and as imposing a Jewish ideological character on the city.
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The Husaynis viewed these proposals as continuing the plans of the 1930s, which discriminated against the Palestinian neighborhoods.

The aged head of the family, Ismail al-Husayni, had died in 1945. He had refused from the start of the British Mandate to play any part in local politics. He was the last of the Arab-Ottoman notables of Palestine, but this aristocracy was not viable under British rule, let alone under Zionism. Ismail had never become a notable of nationalism
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its world was entirely alien to him. His one contribution to national Palestine was to found the Palestine Commercial Bank. But he died before it opened, and it had done little before the downfall of 1948.

Though they lost Jerusalem, Palestine was still predominantly Arab and the leadership was still the Husaynis. For two years after the war ended, Jamal was the central figure in Palestinian politics as a whole. With Ismail’s demise, Jamal became the head of the family, as well as the head of its Tahiri branch. As has already been said, the political significance of the branches had ended with the Ottoman Empire. During the mandate they retained their meaning only in connection with marriages: wherever the family could impose its will, it ensured that the matches took place not only within the family but within the particular branch.
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After World War II, Ishaq Musa, who had always embodied the apolitical tendency in the family, began to take a greater interest and more involvement in the struggle for Palestine. He agreed to direct the Palestinian Cultural Committee. Launched in the summer of 1945, it mainly organized lectures to promote cultural awareness in the community and cooperated with similar bodies elsewhere in the Arab world. At this time, Ishaq Musa arranged an exhibition of Palestinian literature at the Orthodox Union in Jerusalem and published an extensive bibliography of the Palestinian literary contribution to Arab culture. The exhibition contained some two hundred works by Palestinian authors written during the mandate. Raja’i al-Husayni and eight other Palestinian intellectuals were members of the committee.
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But this was not the time of the intellectuals; it was chiefly the time of external diplomacy and internal organization. Jamal understood
both missions. But to complete them he had to be released, which was not easy to achieve. Egyptian prime minister Nahas Pasha believed that the British would agree to release Jamal in time for the launch of the Arab League in December 1944. But they did not, and Musa al-Alami was appointed to represent the Palestinians on this important occasion. Jamal was finally freed at the end of November 1945.

In Palestine at this time, local and regional politics intermingled. It is doubtful whether the Husayni heritage, based as it was on ‘politics of notables’, could safely have guided the people’s destiny in such a complex situation. Palestine’s fate was about to be decided on the international stage, where the Nazi horrors had been exposed. The Palestinians had to present their case before international public opinion, through the new international organization, the United Nations, where Zionist positions were clearly favored. Now it was the United States and the USSR that determined the rules of the game. Since 1942 David Ben-Gurion had been busy rallying the Jewish vote and American sympathy, while al-Hajj Amin was courting the Nazis and Jamal was out of action in prison. Jamal returned to Palestine just before the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Jews to reinforce the Zionist community.

Together the newcomers and the more veteran settlers constituted a well-established and determined community. Its leadership had used the war years to build up an army and acquire experience in warfare, and it would be ready to take over the country once the British Mandate ended. Moreover, there were many indications that Britain would not be able to hold out much longer in Palestine, or in the Middle East as a whole. Worse, the Zionist leadership at that point had decided on its future policy toward the native Palestinian population. Vague past ideas about massive expulsions and ethnic cleansing began to transform into real plans and an overall strategy that would result in the expulsion of half of Palestine’s indigenous population and the destruction of half of its villages and cities in 1948.

None of the Husaynis seemed to sense the pending catastrophe. Palestine in 1945 was dominated by the Arab League, a regional body that failed to achieve the goal of Arab unity but enabled its secretary general, Azzam Pasha, and other Arab leaders to use Palestine as the touchstone of the members’ pan-Arab patriotism. In reality, it became the arena in which the Arab countries jostled for prominence in the Arab world, either with rhetoric or by actually grabbing chunks of Palestine.

Palestine 1946: Districts and District Centres during the Mandate Period

The league’s first act was to try to create a representative body for the Palestinians, because the end of the war revived an attempt by the new Labour government in Britain to reach an agreed solution to the problem of Palestine. Prime Minister Clement Attlee and Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin had promised Labour voters to solve the problem, but having no clear plan they could only react to events on the ground and did not initiate any forward moves. The effects of the war
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acute
economic hardship and widespread devastation
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dictated the answer, which was to quit Palestine. Before doing so, the British made one last diplomatic effort, motivated by Bevin’s desire to involve the Americans in the solution. (He wanted to obtain their commitment to a British presence in the Middle East and believed they could put pressure on the Zionist movement.)
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As a first step towards this last attempt, the British government released Jamal to enable the formation of a local leadership, which was needed to turn over a new leaf.

When the war ended, the Arab League tried to unify the warring Palestinian camps by setting up a new Arab Committee. It passed a resolution at its first conference impelling the Arab nations to discuss the future of Palestine. In November 1945, even before Jamal’s return, a League delegation led by Jamil Mardam, Syria’s representative in Cairo, arrived in Palestine. The delegation set up a twelve-member committee consisting of five Husaynis (including Jamal), five leaders of other parties, and two independent members, Musa al-Alami and Ahmad Hilmi (an economist affiliated with Istiqlal). Jamal returned to Palestine in February 1946 and became the head of the committee and its dominant figure. By the end of March 1946 the five delegates from the other parties refused to recognize Jamal’s position and conducted separate negotiations with the league. Then they formed their own Higher Arab Front as a kind of alternative to the Higher Arab Committee.
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During this predicament, Jamal needed al-Hajj Amin and kept the
mufti
in the picture. Working from his residence in Cairo, al-Hajj Amin and Jamal tried to rally diplomatic and military support to counter the growing Jewish power in Palestine and to fight the battle for Palestine when the Mandate ended. When their appeals to Arab governments failed, they tried to stir Arab public opinion. Though they received a great deal of support, it was not sufficient to save Palestine.

While the leadership of the Jewish community actively prepared for the takeover of Mandatory Palestine and the associated diplomatic struggle, strove to increase the influx of Holocaust survivors and made a fairly successful effort to build up a military force, al-Hajj Amin, Jamal and the rest of the Palestinian leadership continued to tread water. The international arena was left to Arab diplomats, who retreated before the moral vindication of Zionism provided by the Holocaust. Whereas in the past the Palestinian position had been listened to and its arguments in favor of protecting the natural and legitimate rights of the majority native population in Mandatory Palestine seen as valid,
after the war Zionist diplomacy skillfully linked the tragedy of the Holocaust with the problem of Palestine and its solution, winning sympathy in quarters that had previously been indifferent or hostile. Europe wished to atone for Nazism at Palestine’s expense, and the local political leadership, the Husaynis and almost everyone else did not possess the skills to face this travesty.

Nevertheless, one might have at least expected Jamal to concentrate on preparing Palestinian society. In contrast to the early discussions on the Jewish side about possible scenarios at the end of the mandate, Jamal began very late and covered little ground. In May 1946, he raised the possibility that war might break out in Palestine and suggested that serious consideration be given to evacuating women and children.
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But the women and children were not evacuated, and the men were not conscripted.

Jamal was also responsible for the failure to create a wider Palestinian front, and he overlooked the significance of the split in the local Communist Party. The Palestinian members who quit that party and formed the National Liberation League might have been deluding themselves about separating the Jewish laboring masses from the Zionist leadership, but they knew the Palestinian working class and had good connections with it. Instead Jamal accused Communist leader Jamal Nassar of collaborating with the Zionists, and so the Husayni leadership had no channels to the peasants or the urban workers.
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Jamal also tried to break up the close relations between the Liberation League and the Arab Workers’ Congress, the largest Palestinian labor union, organized in 1925. He suggested that Sami Taha, the union’s leader, form an alliance with him and offered to include him in the new Higher Arab Committee
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showing that he was aware of the national leadership’s disjunction from the workers. But Taha remained faithful to the principle of class solidarity and refused to forgo relations with the Jewish trade unions.

The series of dramatic events that began in 1947 with the British decision to quit Palestine put the kibosh on the delicate contacts between those diverse social forces, the Husaynis and the labor unions. By the summer of 1947, anyone who did not obey the Higher Arab Committee was regarded as an enemy. Thus on 12 September 1947 Sami Taha was murdered near his house in Haifa. The assassins were never caught, but no one had any doubt who had paid them.
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A few weeks later, when the UN had passed the Partition Resolution and Zionist forces began the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the relations
between the Husaynis and the union leaders improved, largely thanks to Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni. When he fell in battle, the head of the Arab Workers’ Congress wrote al-Hajj Amin a letter of sympathy. But this improvement of relations, so vital to the Palestinian interest, came too late.
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Jamal was also hampered by the absence of a clear division between the internal and external authorities, such as that which existed on the Zionist side. Consequently, he had to concentrate on repulsing the final diplomatic campaign in the country’s history: the Anglo-American commission sent to study the situation in Palestine.

The commission was one of Ernest Bevin’s worst failures. This British foreign secretary, who at his first press conference confidently declared that he would gamble his political future on a successful solution being found to the conflict in Mandatory Palestine, began to despair about Britain’s involvement in the Holy Land. He enlisted the help of the United States, but misjudged President Truman’s Zionist commitment following the Holocaust and the effectiveness of the pro-Zionist lobby surrounding the president. The result was that the Anglo-American commission, which was supposed to replace all the previous commissions and propose a solution to the problem of Palestine, did not reflect British interests and sang the tune composed by the Jewish Agency. The repeal of the White Paper and the recognition of the Jewish claim to a state were only two of its pro-Zionist recommendations.