Icon of Evil: Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam (5 page)

The British police arrived at the Wall during Yom Kippur worship services on the following day. No Jewish police officer was present, because it was the Day of Atonement. Upon arriving, the police ordered members of the Jewish congregation to remove the screen, which they refused to do. To do so, according to traditional Jewish law, would be a form of work, and the Jewish worshippers at the Wall understandably refused to work on this holiest of Jewish holy days. In the middle of the concluding prayers of Yom Kippur, a British police officer interrupted the worship services and began forcibly to remove the screen. As he did so, members of the congregation, both men and women, resisted. A scuffle ensued, during which an elderly Jewish woman attacked a policeman with her umbrella,
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and several Jewish worshippers were hurt. The screen was torn and then taken away. Jews around the world protested the action.

The mufti exploited the incident at the Western Wall, transforming a relatively minor dispute into a violent political struggle, instigating a local Islamic war against the city’s Jews. Incited by al-Husseini’s inflammatory rhetoric, the Muslims of Jerusalem were jubilant that the screen had been taken down. Inspired by the mufti, rumors spread that the real intention of the Jews was ownership not just of the Western Wall, but ultimately of the entire Temple Mount, with the goal of tearing down the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque in order to rebuild the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. Speaking in the name of the Supreme Muslim Council, following the violence, the mufti declared: “The Jews’ aim is to take possession of the Mosque of al-Aqsa gradually.” At his urging, the Supreme Muslim Council subsequently passed a resolution opposing “the establishment of any right to the Jews in the Holy Burak area.”
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The anti-Jewish violence of 1929 had been in preparation by the mufti for nearly a year. On October 28, 1928, in a memorandum submitted to the Supreme Muslim Council, al-Husseini falsely claimed that the Jews were planning to take possession of Haram al-Sharif, site of the ancient Jewish Temple, an area sacred to the Muslims that is located a short distance from the Western Wall.
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At the instigation of the mufti, the city’s Muslims changed the cul-de-sac in front of the Wall into a thoroughfare by knocking down an old wall at one end of the area. They also organized noisy Muslim calls for prayer from a nearby rooftop, timed perfectly to disrupt Jewish worship services at the Wall. Nor were these the only anti-Jewish provocations. Even more inflammatory, photographs were fabricated and distributed to the Muslims of Jerusalem displaying the blue-and-white Jewish flag, with the Star of David at its center, flying from the top of the Dome of the Rock.
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Faked pictures were also widely disseminated among the Arabs of Jerusalem showing the Dome of the Rock in ruins. The caption beneath declared that it had been destroyed by Jewish infidels who were now seeking to rebuild on its site the ancient Jewish Temple.
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Discussions continued throughout 1928 and into 1929 about the status of the Western Wall. Clashes broke out periodically in Jerusalem. It was a situation fraught with danger, an explosion waiting to happen. On August 15, 1929, a group of young Jews marched to the Western Wall through the Muslim Quarter of the Old City, carrying the Zionist flag.
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As they marched they sang “Hatikvah,” the Jewish national anthem. They demanded the restoration of Jewish rights at the Western Wall. That same evening, a group of the city’s more radical Islamists, calling itself the Protection of the Mosque Al-Aqsa Association, responded in the Arab press, stating, “The Jews at 3:30 on this day, at the Wailing Wall itself, held a severe demonstration against the Moslems. Resentment is great and general. Do what ought to be done of protest and disapproval.”
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On the following day, by way of retaliation, the mufti ordered a counterdemonstration that was held at the Western Wall itself. In mosques throughout Jerusalem, Muslim clerics gave inflammatory sermons, inspiring Arab mobs to march to the Western Wall and to carry on the mufti’s holy war against the city’s infidel Jews. In leading this violent counterdemonstration, al-Husseini’s preachers advised their flock that “he who kills a Jew is assured a place in the next world.”
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The few Jewish worshippers present were forced to flee for their lives, Jewish religious symbols were openly desecrated, and Hebrew prayer books were torn up and burned.
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A day later, on August 17, Abraham Mizrachi, a young Jew, accidentally sent a football flying into an Arab garden. While retrieving the ball, he was attacked and stabbed. He died in the hospital three days later. In the days following the Mizrachi boy’s murder, tensions rose throughout Jerusalem. Incident followed incident, culminating in the violent events beginning on Friday, August 23, and concluding on Thursday, August 29. A Jewish response to the attack was summarily stopped. The Jews were prevented from entering the Old City of Jerusalem by the British police, and twenty-four of the Jewish youths in the demonstration were injured. Later the same day, after services at mosques in the Old City, hundreds of armed radical Islamist demonstrators, incited by al-Husseini, entered Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter. Jews were assaulted, 133 Jews were killed, and 339 were wounded.

Anti-Jewish violence escalated as the Jews of Jerusalem fell victim to a new intifada, the second in less than a decade. The entire Jewish community in Hebron was forced to flee; 67 Jews were murdered and 60 were wounded, while 116 Arabs lost their lives (most of the Arab casualties were the result of British actions to contain the violence). More than five decades later, Chaim Herzog, who would subsequently become president of Israel, could not erase the horrific memory of the riots he had witnessed as a child. With great emotion, he would later recall the vicious attack on his own eighty-year-old great-grandmother by the Arab rioters in Hebron. Helpless as the mufti-inspired carnage engulfed the Jews of Hebron, she was “cut down by a dagger.”
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Later the same week, the Hebron tragedy was repeated in Safad, where 45 Jews were killed,
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on the orders of al-Husseini.

News of the 1929 riots in Jerusalem made headlines throughout the world,
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and the British government in London set up a commission of inquiry to examine the causes of Arab unrest that led to the violence.
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Despite the politically inspired findings of the Shaw commission, the official commission of inquiry that had been appointed by the British government to investigate the causes of the violence, the mufti’s responsibility for the murders and other anti-Jewish crimes that occurred could not be denied. He and he alone precipitated the controversy over the Western Wall. In his testimony before the Shaw commission, the mufti publicly affirmed that Arabic translations of the notorious czarist forgery
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
had, with his encouragement, been widely distributed throughout Palestine. He was convinced, he declared in his commission testimony, that the
Protocols
provided evidence of a Jewish plot, or conspiracy, in Palestine “to take possession of the Buraq [Wall]” and other Muslim holy sites and “then restore the Temple.”
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The Shaw commission, while rejecting al-Husseini’s charges of alleged Jewish plots, exonerated the mufti of responsibility for any of the bloodletting of 1929 by assigning it to the general cause of Arab opposition to increasing Zionist immigration and land purchases.
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The immediate source of the anti-Jewish violence, the mufti’s inflammatory anti-Jewish rhetoric and the mob violence perpetrated by his willing followers, was not mentioned in the Shaw commission report, which seemed to uncritically accept al-Husseini’s biased explanation.

To further radical Arab concerns and to assuage Arab opposition to Jewish immigration to Palestine in the future, the Shaw commission recommended greater regulation and curtailment of Jewish immigration and land sales to Jews,
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a policy proposal that the British Foreign Office in London eagerly adopted. The commission report was followed by the British government’s swift adoption of the Passfield White Paper, which appeased growing Arab fears about increasing Jewish immigration and the Balfour Declaration’s promise of a Jewish national home by recommending that all Jewish immigration and settlement in Palestine be suspended.

The Mufti, the Arab Revolt of 1936–1938, and the Jews of Palestine

In 1936, Haj Amin al-Husseini incited yet another Arab massacre of Jewish settlers in Palestine, one that came to be widely known as “the Arab Revolt.” It might also be referred to as “the third intifada.”

Between 1933 and 1936, the Jewish population of Palestine increased from 234,967 to 384,078, from just over 20 percent to just under 30 percent.
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On April 15, 1936, in protest against any further Jewish immigration, Arab leaders in Palestine, inspired by the mufti’s rhetoric, began a general strike, calling for the nonpayment of taxes and a nationwide strike of Arab workers and businesses. This strike, the mufti proclaimed, would continue until all Jewish immigration to Palestine was halted. Several days later, the mufti persuaded several Palestinian Arab leaders to establish an Arab Higher Committee for Palestine, with himself as president.
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The Arab Higher Committee, whose presidency al-Husseini would hold until his death in 1974, would become the political voice of the Arabs of Palestine.

The mufti’s call for a general strike led to violence. That same day, Arab rioters attacked a bus, murdering two of its Jewish passengers. In an act of retaliation, the following night, two Arabs were killed by Jews. Within forty-eight hours, Arab gangs were searching for Jews throughout the towns of Jaffa and Tel Aviv, attacking them and setting fire to Jewish-owned shops. In the days that followed, the violence escalated into a murderous rampage.

By midsummer of 1936, the intensity of the fighting mounted as Arab rioters and terrorists attacked Jewish homes, farms, and villages throughout Palestine. A majority of the Arab terrorists were local Palestinians recruited by the mufti and his agents. Before long, however, Syrian and Iraqi volunteers began arriving in Palestine at the rate of two or three hundred a month.
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Their leader, Fawzi al-Kawukji, who would become a close friend and political ally of the mufti, played a major role in the Arab Revolt. Like al-Husseini, al-Kawukji had served in the Turkish Ottoman army during World War I; after the war, he accepted a commission as an officer in the Iraqi army, and in 1936 he resigned his Iraqi command to help al-Husseini organize and carry out his Palestinian Arab rebellion.

The first year of the Arab Revolt resulted in a veritable reign of terror against the Jews of Palestine—murder, bomb throwing, looting, torture, night assaults on Jewish homes and farms, and the destruction of cattle and crops. During the summer of 1936, thousands of Jewish-farmed acres were destroyed and fruit orchards cut down in deliberate acts of Arab vandalism. More and more Jews were murdered. Despite denunciations of the violence by the British mandatory government, which tried without success to keep the peace, Jews continued to be killed, resulting in a death toll of 80 by October. British troops killed more than 140 Arabs, while 33 British soldiers died in armed clashes with Arab bands.
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Pressure mounted for some resolution. On May 18, 1936, the British House of Commons announced that a royal commission would be set up to investigate the causes of the unrest. Lord Robert Peel, who had served as Great Britain’s secretary of state for India, was appointed the commission’s chairman, with Sir Horace Rumbold, a former British ambassador to Berlin, as his deputy. When the Peel commission arrived in Palestine on November 11, 1936, exactly eighteen years after the end of World War I, the country was in turmoil. In his testimony before the Peel commission on January 12, 1937, as chief witness for the Palestinian Arab community, Haj Amin al-Husseini reiterated his long-standing demand for the cessation of all Jewish immigration to Palestine and called for the removal of 80 percent of the Jews already in the country (four hundred thousand), to bring their total number back to the level that prevailed prior to World War I (eighty thousand).
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He also demanded an immediate and complete prohibition against the sale of Arab-owned land to Jews. In response to the Peel commission’s subsequent report, the mufti and his Arab Higher Committee unequivocally rejected the commission’s recommendation that Palestine be partitioned into two independent states, one Arab and one Jewish. Instead, he called for an end to the British Mandate and the creation of only one state, an independent Arab state, in its place.

During the summer of 1937, after the Arab Higher Committee’s rejection of the Peel commission report, full-scale violence was unleashed by Arab terrorist bands in Palestine. After an Arab terrorist assassinated Lewis Andrews, the British district commissioner for the Galilee, the British government finally took decisive action. On September 30, the British outlawed the Arab Higher Committee, stating that the goals of the committee were antithetical to those of the British mandatory government. The mufti and several of the committee’s other leaders were banished from Palestine.

Disguised as a woman, al-Husseini escaped by boat to Beirut, Lebanon, on October 15, 1937. Clean-shaven, he wore the plain flowing black dress of an observant Muslim woman, appropriately modest female attire that enveloped his entire body from head to toe. His face was covered by the
niqab
(the traditional full-faced veil allowing only a narrow slit for the eyes), which was worn by all Muslim women who were obedient to Islamic religious tradition. As he fled Beirut by boat in the dead of night, no one suspected his true identity.