The Great War for Civilisation (74 page)

Haj Amin now enthusiastically went to work for the Nazi propaganda machine. Arabs would later experience great difficulty and embarrassment in explaining these actions. In his biography of Haj Amin, Taysir Jbara devotes only four pages to his collaboration with the Nazis under the anaemic title “The Mufti in Europe,” arguing that Haj Amin had as much right to collaborate to save his Palestinian homeland from the British and Jewish immigrants as the Zionists had to collaborate with Germany to save Jewish lives. Israelis have sometimes exaggerated his collaboration in order to portray him as a war criminal. And it can be argued that a man may make a pact with the Devil. Two of Haj Amin's former comrades repeated to me that tired—and irritating—Arabic proverb that “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Churchill readily allied himself to one of the most murderous dictators of the twentieth century, Josef Stalin, transforming the monster into “Uncle Joe” until the defeat of Germany. The Lebanese Phalange militia, founded in 1936 after its leader had been inspired by the “discipline” of Nazi Germany, acted as Israel's militia allies in 1982. Anwar Sadat worked as a spy for Rommel yet he became, in later years, the darling of the West—though not of Egypt—for making peace with Israel. And it is true that the principal aim of Haj Amin was to gain the independence of Palestine after a German victory and, in the meantime, to prevent Jews from going to Palestine.

But amid the evil of the Holocaust, Haj Amin's moral position seems untenable. There is, too, in the archives of the wartime BBC Monitoring Service, a series of transcripts from Nazi radio stations that cast a dark shadow over any moral precepts Haj Amin might have claimed. Here he is, for example, addressing a Balfour Day rally at the Luftwaffe hall in Berlin on 2 November 1943: “The Germans know how to get rid of the Jews . . . They have definitely solved the Jewish problem.” And on Berlin radio on 1 March 1944: “Arabs, rise as one man and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion.” On 21 January that year, Haj Amin had visited Ante Pavelic's ferocious Fascist state of Croatia—which included present-day Bosnia— where he addressed Muslim recruits to the SS with these words, so sharply in contrast with sentiments expressed in his postwar memoirs: “There are also considerable similarities between Islamic principles and National Socialism, namely, in the affirmation of struggle and fellowship . . . in the idea of order.”

He even played a role in fomenting hatred between Bosnian Muslims and the largely Serb-led partisan force fighting the Germans in Yugoslavia, an anger that burst forth again in the atrocities of 1992. On 26 May 1944, the BBC Monitoring Service recorded Haj Amin describing Tito as “a friend of the Jews and a foe of the Prophet.” In 1943 he received from Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the Holocaust, a telegram recalling for him that “the National Socialist Party had inscribed on its flag ‘the extermination of world Jewry.' Our party sympathises with the fight of the Arabs, especially the Arabs of Palestine, against the foreign Jew.” Radio Berlin later reported that Haj Amin had “arrived in Frankfurt for the purpose of visiting the Research Institute on the Jewish problem.”

Did Haj Amin know about the Jewish Holocaust? According to his most meticulous biographer, Zvi Elpeleg—a former Israeli military governor of Gaza who is respected as a historian even by Haj Amin's surviving family—“his frequent, close contacts with leaders of the Nazi regime cannot have left Haj Amin with any doubt as to the fate which awaited the Jews whose emigration was prevented by his efforts.” In July 1943, when the extermination camps were already in operation in Poland, Haj Amin was complaining to Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister, about Jewish emigration from Europe to Palestine in the following words: “If there are reasons which make their removal necessary, it would be essential and infinitely preferable to send them to other countries where they would find themselves under active control as, for example, Poland . . .” Before his death, Haj Amin was to write that “the Germans settled their accounts with the Jews well before my arrival in Germany,” a statement that is factually and historically untrue.

Wassef Kamal would insist that Haj Amin did not encourage the annihilation of the Jews. “He was of course involved in stopping the emigration of Jews to Palestine but he had nothing to do with the extermination policy. When I was in Berlin with him, I saw many Jews. The only sign of foreigners there was that Russians would have an
Ost
band on their clothes and the Star of David was worn by the Jews. They used to move about. I think it was a secret then, what was happening . . .” Three months before he died, Haj Amin met Abu Iyad, one of Arafat's lieutenants, in Beirut. Of their conversation, Abu Iyad was to write:

Haj Amin believed that the Axis powers would win the war and would then grant independence to Palestine . . . I pointed out to him that such illusions were based on a rather naive calculation, since Hitler had graded the Arabs 14th after the Jews in his hierarchy of races. Had Germany won, the regime which it would have imposed on the Palestinian Arabs would have been far more cruel than that which they had known during the time of British rule.

Alia al-Husseini, Haj Amin's granddaughter, recalled for me how her grandfather, in his last years, spoke of Hitler's true aims. “He said that after the Jews, the Germans would destroy the Arabs—he knew this. But what could he do? You must understand that Haj Amin lived at a time when everyone was against him.” Rifaat el-Nimr, one of the founders of the PLO and subsequently a prominent Beirut banker, vainly tried to enlist the support of Haj Amin for the young PLO after the 1967 Arab–Israeli war. “I don't think it was a mistake he had relations with Herr Hitler,” he said. “In 1916, the British lied to the Arabs about independence. In 1917, we had the Balfour declaration. Would the British or Americans have given Haj Amin anything if he had
not
gone to Herr Hitler?” But el-Nimr admitted that Haj Amin “hated the Jews” because “they stole his homeland.”

As the Allies closed in upon Germany, Wassef Kamal and Haj Amin found themselves commuting between the ever more dangerous city of Berlin and the resorts of northern Italy that remained under Axis control. Kamal remembered one afternoon, standing on the lawn of an Italian hotel with Haj Amin, looking far up into the heavens and watching “thousands and thousands” of American and British bombers heading for Germany. Haj Amin returned to Berlin, travelled down to Obersalzburg and then decided to seek asylum in neutral Switzerland. The Swiss turned him back and so the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem surrendered to the French. He was briefly imprisoned in Paris before being, with French complicity and American ignorance, smuggled to Cairo under a false name on an American military aircraft.

For eight dramatic days in 1948, Haj Amin helped to create a Palestine government in Gaza before the final collapse of the Arab armies and the annexation of the West Bank by Jordan. This was Israel's “War of Independence” and Palestine's
nakba
—the “catastrophe” in which around three-quarters of a million Arab Palestinians were driven from their homes or fled into a refugee exile from which they would never return. “Haj Amin should have accepted the UN partition plan,” his former admirer Habib abu Fadel would say. “So many nations went along with it and the Russians were among the first. He did not think about the future.” Haj Amin's political life had been in vain. He courted and then disliked Colonel Nasser—whose troops now occupied Gaza—and he later hated and then courted King Hussein of Jordan, whose army occupied the West Bank. Returning in 1959 to Lebanon for his final exile, Haj Amin moved into a mountain villa, dispensing wisdom and memories to the Palestinians who came to see him, refusing to join any political movements lest he be dwarfed by them.

Chafiq al-Hout, who wanted the Grand Mufti's power to be enhanced among the Palestinian refugees of Lebanon, asked if he could advise the old man, but was rebuffed when he visited the villa at Mansourieh in the early Fifties and was later beaten up by Haj Amin's thugs in Beirut. “He was like all those tamed Ottoman subjects,” he recalls. “He spoke slowly, in whispers, listening, aware of himself twenty-four hours a day. He was like a man on the stage. He could not be interrupted. There were no jokes . . .” His granddaughter Alia remembers him as a family man, scolding her parents when they tried to stop her laughing with friends during the Grand Mufti's afternoon siestas. “He used to say our laughter was music,” she says.

Haj Amin spent his last years listening to the music of the Egyptian singer Um al-Khaltum and to the Arabic service of the BBC. Forgiving the past, al-Hout invited him as guest of honour to his wedding—to a young woman, Bayan, whose father was one of Haj Amin's early comrades and who would write her Ph.D. thesis on the Grand Mufti. Haj Amin's journey to Nazi Germany, Bayan al-Hout says, was “a very stupid act—he could have found someone else to take care of negotiations with Hitler. He used to believe that he was responsible for all Muslims in the world; he used to feel an Islamic responsibility. In Bosnia, they looked upon him as a great leader . . .”

Within two years of his death in 1974, the Christian Phalangist militia stormed into his empty villa, stealing his files and diaries—there is a rumour in Beirut that the Israelis possess them now—while fifteen Christian refugee families moved into the wrecked house. They were still there when I visited the house twenty years later, repairing cars in an underground garage beneath what was Haj Amin's study. He was more kindly treated by the latest of his biographers, Elpeleg, who wrote not just of his “enormous failures” but also his “impressive achievements for the Palestinian national movement.”

When he died of a heart attack, the Israelis refused Haj Amin's request to be buried in Jerusalem and it was left to al-Hout to arrange his funeral in Beirut. “To my surprise, I found that the new Palestinian leadership in the PLO did not regard this as a great event. I thought there should be some continuity in our history, that we should ‘close a chapter,' so to say. I told Arafat he should attend.” At the funeral, al-Hout praised Haj Amin as a “religious fighter.” Al-Hout remembers the speech. “We used then to look upon his grave as that of a martyr. But then the Lebanese war came and we had so many hundreds of martyrs' graves that we forgot about his.”

Not everyone did. Although the al-Husseini family tried to maintain the tomb, the Lebanese Shiite Amal militia—at war in 1985 with their PLO enemies in the Beirut camps—believed that Palestinian weapons had been hidden in Haj Amin's grave. So they chiselled open the marble lid and looked inside. There were no guns; just the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in a decaying white shroud.

The Arab–Jewish struggle, from the conflicting British promises of Bill Fisk's 1914–18 war—of independence for the Arab states, and of support for a Jewish national home in Palestine—to the establishment of the state of Israel on Palestinian land following the Jewish Holocaust and the Second World War, is an epic tragedy whose effects have spread around the world and continue to poison the lives not only of the participants but of our entire Western political and military policies towards the Middle East and the Muslim lands. The narrative of events— both through Arab and Israeli eyes and through the often biased reporting and commentaries of journalists and historians since 1948—now forms libraries of information and disinformation through which the reader may wander with incredulity and exhaustion. As long ago as 1938, when the British still governed Palestine under a League of Nations mandate, the eminent historian George Antonius was warning of the dangers of too much reliance on the vast body of literature already in existence, and his words are no less relevant today:

. . . it has to be used with care, partly because of the high percentage of open or veiled propaganda, and partly because the remoteness of the indispensable Arabic sources has militated against real fairness, even in the works of neutral and fair-minded historians. A similar equality vitiates the stream of day-to-day information. Zionist propaganda is active, highly organised and widespread; the world Press, at any rate in the democracies of the West, is largely amenable to it; it commands many of the available channels for the dissemination of news, and more particularly those of the English-speaking world. Arab propaganda is, in comparison, primitive and infinitely less successful: the Arabs have little of the skill, polyglottic ubiquity or financial resources which make Jewish propaganda so effective. The result is, that for a score of years or so, the world has been looking at Palestine mainly through Zionist spectacles and has unconsciously acquired the habit of reasoning on Zionist premises.

Most of the last thirty years of my life have been spent cataloguing events that relate directly or indirectly to the battle for Palestine, to the unresolved injustices that have afflicted both Arabs and Jews since the 1920s and earlier. British support for an independent Arab nation was expressed when Britain needed Arab forces to fight the Turks. The Balfour declaration giving support for a Jewish national home was made when Britain needed Jewish support—both politically and scientifically—during the First World War. Lloyd George, who was British prime minister in 1917, would often fantasise upon the biblical drama being played out in Palestine, saying that he wanted Jerusalem for Christmas in 1917—he got it, courtesy of General Allenby—and referring in his memoirs to “the capture by British troops of the most famous city in the world which had for centuries baffled the efforts of Christendom to regain possession of its sacred shrines.” That Lloyd George should have reflected upon Allenby's campaign as a successor to the Crusades—“regaining possession” of Jerusalem from Muslims—was a theme that would run throughout the twentieth century in the West's dealings with the Middle East; it would find its natural echo in George W. Bush's talk of a “crusade” in the immediate aftermath of the international crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001.