The Jew is Not My Enemy (11 page)

In Yehoshua Porath’s painstaking study of the Palestinian rebellion, he gives a disturbing account of the brutality faced by any Arab considered sympathetic to either the British or the Jews. He writes that Palestinians who sought a compromise with the Jews “were not always immediately murdered; sometimes they were kidnapped and then taken to the mountainous areas under rebel control. There they were thrown into pits infested with snakes and scorpions. After spending a few days there, the victims, if still alive, were brought before one of the rebel courts and usually sentenced to death, or a special dispensation if not severe flogging. The terror was so daunting that no one, including the ulema (clerics) and priests, dared to perform the proper burial services.”
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The Muslim Brotherhood and the Nazis were also involved, providing financial and military support and supplying the ideological and theological justification for the movement, whose failure was a result of the “all or nothing” goal of the Islamists and the anti-Jewish agenda of the Germans. The real victims of this lawlessness and lack of restraint were the Palestinian people, a condition that haunts their lives even today. An inept leadership that so easily brutalizes its own people and is driven by hate of “the other,” in this case the Jew, rarely succeeds. In the case of the Palestinian rebellion, lawlessness led to a fascist stream that at one stage enforced how people dressed or covered their heads. A good illustration of this is found in a biography of the mufti published in Germany in 1943. The Nazi author talks about the Palestinian “liberation struggle.”

In his account of the Palestinian struggle for a homeland,
The Iron Cage
, Arab-American scholar Rashid Khalidi writes about how the rebellion was also a rejection by the freedom fighters of the Palestinian elites. “Hajj Amin al-Husayni was acting out of fear of forces he did not fully control, but that his actions, and his earlier inaction, had helped to unleash: these were represented by the scattered rebel bands in the hills of Palestine.” In a statement issued by these rebels, they say the Palestinians were subject neither “to the Nashashibis or to the Hosannas, nor to the Arab kings, who ruled by the grace of Britain.”
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Khalidi outlines how the Palestinian leadership became so weak that they were soon being dictated to by the defeated rebels. While others in the Arab Higher Committee counselled the mufti to accept the British initiative, he sided instead with the ragtag army of hill-bound rebels that were assaulting fellow Palestinians who showed any opposition to them. By the time hostilities broke out in Europe, the Palestinian uprising had petered out into an aimless enterprise, while the Jewish
community had consolidated their gains, with steady immigration and a zealous self-sufficiency in their economy, as well as military strength.

When Nazi tanks rolled into Poland in September 1939, France’s coy relationship with the mufti, which had allowed him to needle the British in Palestine, had to change. Both France and Britain declared war on Germany, and the two countries were now allies. The French conveniently drove Hajj al-Husayni to Iraq under a promise made to Baghdad that he would not meddle in the fractious politics of that country.

By 1941 the Nazi juggernaut was knocking on the doors of the Middle East. From the north Hitler was aiming to break through the Caucasus and enter the Muslim Soviet republics where Turkey and Iran meet. From the south he was hoping Rommel’s Afrika Korps would be able to take Egypt and Palestine. The disastrous Nazi defeat at Stalingrad and the mauling of Rommel at El Alamein had not yet happened. In this environment of heady Nazism, pro-German Arabs staged a coup in Iraq, putting Rashid Ali al-Kaylani in charge, displacing the pro-British prime minister Nuri Said. For Hajj al-Husayni, the stars had aligned as he had hoped. The mufti’s home became the mecca of the pro-German Iraqi army officers and their political allies. The rebellion was short lived, however, as British and Transjordanian troops invaded Iraq in May 1941 to ensure that the Nazi-inspired government in Baghdad had no time to consolidate.

The daunted Iraqi army was routed by the British forces. While the Iraqi officers were charged and executed, the wily mufti escaped. He and Rashid al-Kaylani sneaked into Iran and then across the border to Turkey, where they found favour with the German ambassador. By November that year, both the Grand Mufti and al-Kaylani were safe in Berlin as guests of the Führer. The rest is history.

In Germany, the mufti befriended senior members of the Third Reich. That he was ultimately the only person to live to make a political comeback suggests he learned nothing from the events of the Second
World War. Back in Egypt, he restarted the engines of hate as if nothing had happened.

With no sense of guilt, and not being held accountable for the deaths of thousands, the mufti in the Cairo of 1945 was ready for his second act, in which he worked to turn the genuine national aspirations of the Palestinian people into the Jew-hatred he had learned in Berlin.

In postwar Egypt, Hajj al-Husayni was able to inspire other Islamists to take up the cause of anti-Semitism, chiefly through the Muslim Brotherhood and the work of the young Egyptian radical Islamist Sayyid Qutb, who would describe Hitler’s coming to power as an expression of Allah’s will and a reflection of the Divine’s decision to punish the Jews. In his essay “Our Fight against the Jews,” Qutb wrote: “And the Jews did indeed return to evil-doing, so Allah gave to the Muslims power over them. The Muslims then expelled them from the whole of the Arabian Peninsula.… Then the Jews again returned to evil-doing and consequently Allah sent against them others of his servants, until the modern period. Then Allah brought Hitler to rule over them.”
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Since Israel is held responsible for all the ills of the Muslim world, we Muslims need to come to terms with whom we hold responsible for the creation of Israel in its current form. We are told that even if a Palestinian state is created, it will be no more than a Bantustan country, a mere fraction of what the Palestinians deserved as a reward for their leaders betraying their fellow Muslim Ottomans and helping the British conquer Jerusalem. There is no doubt that the global Zionist movement worked methodically on a long-term plan to create a Jewish state, but its current borders are more a result of Palestinian obstinacy than Jewish “cunning” or their supposed stranglehold on the world.

This idea needs some examination. To begin with, from an Islamic perspective, it is the Palestinian leadership that should face the wrath of
all Muslims, because it is they who chose not to fight the “kuffar” army of the latter-day “crusaders” – the British – as they advanced to occupy Palestine. The fact is, in 1917, the invading British were welcomed by the leadership of the Palestinians as they conquered Jerusalem and the rest of Palestine, which then came under the British Mandate. If Muslims around the world wish to get to the cause of the current mess, they should examine the role of the men who betrayed the Ottoman caliphate and helped the British occupy Palestine. If there are Muslims who are willing to admit this was a monumental mistake that is at the root of the problem today, then those voices have not yet been heard. Applying Islamist logic, if Jerusalem is as holy to Islam as we Muslims claim it is, shouldn’t we be willing to consider the thought that our suffering today is the wrath of Allah for facilitating the occupation of Jerusalem by a European Christian power?

Staying with Palestine, let us examine how the Muslim leadership dug one grave after another, kept falling into them, and kept blaming others for our demise. After facilitating the defeat of the Ottoman army by the invading British, the Arab leadership in Palestine was in for a rude shock. On November 2, 1917, the British government issued the Balfour Declaration, which stated, “His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

Overnight, the Arabs of Palestine had been demoted. They were now not who they were, but who they were not: the “existing non-Jewish population.” The reward for betraying their fellow Muslims of the Ottoman army was delivered to the Arabs even as the war was progressing and European powers were hovering over Turkey like vultures
ready to feed on the carcass of a wounded lion. While Muslims in India rallied to save the Turks from a calamity, Muslims of the Arab world celebrated the defeat of the Turks. The Arab leadership had aligned themselves with the British and French and were now waiting to grab a share of the war booty. The most they would get, though, was borders drawn with geometry sets of the Anglo-French colonizers who came up with a treaty known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement that fathered the French Mandate of Syria and British Mandate of Palestine.

Once the League of Nations awarded Britain a mandate over Palestine, the writing was on the wall. Britain was bound by the Balfour Declaration and a commitment to the creation of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine, while the Arabs, who had relied only on oral promises, woke up to the realization that they had been had. However, before a Jewish homeland could be carved out of Palestine, Britain had other matters to settle. It would lop off more than three-quarters of the Palestinian territory east of the Jordan River and create a country called Transjordan (now Jordan), which it would then hand over to the runaway royal family of the Kingdom of Hejaz as a gift for their services in defeating their fellow Muslims, the Ottomans. The Palestinians who lived east of the Jordan River suddenly ended up with a new king and a new nationality.

From then until the creation of Palestine in 1948, and until today, many opportunities that could have brought about a functional, sovereign, dynamic Palestinian state were missed or squandered via a policy of “all or nothing” that is even today the doctrine of Hamas and Iran. Let us have a look at three of these.

The Faisal-Weizmann Agreement of 1919:
This agreement was signed on January 3, 1919, by Chaim Weizmann, later president of the World Zionist Organization, and Emir Faisal, son of the king of Hejaz, as part
of the Paris Peace Conference. (The two men had met in June 1918, when Arabs were helping the British advance from the south against the Ottoman Empire.) Weizmann and Faisal agreed to a Jewish state in Palestine alongside an Arab kingdom that Faisal hoped to establish. However, Faisal attached a handwritten note to the agreement saying it was conditional upon the acceptance of British wartime promises to the Arabs of independence in a vast area of the Ottoman Empire. A few weeks before Faisal signed the agreement, he had stated:

As news reached Damascus, violent protests broke out among the Palestinians. Protest notes were sent out from Nablus and other cities to the Arab delegation in Paris, rejecting any agreement with the Zionists regarding the creation of a Jewish homeland. The possible rapprochement between Muslim and Jew was snuffed out before it could
even be discussed. Faisal, and, in future, his transplanted royal family, would have to live with the label of “traitor.”

The Peel Commission Plan of 1937:
After the Arab revolt in Palestine erupted in 1936, it became clear to the British that the possibility of implementing the Balfour Declaration, as it stood, was an impossible task. The Arabs were not simply the “other” – the “non-Jewish” residents of Palestine. Rather, they were the overwhelming majority of its population. The maxim “Palestine is a land without people for a people without a land” turned out to be no more than a slogan, devoid of any truth. By rebelling against British colonial rule, and with acts of violence against the Jews, the Palestinians had succeeded in demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that without their consent, no solution would have any chance of success.

As violence abated in late 1936, the British appointed a royal commission of inquiry headed by Earl Peel to examine the underlying causes of the Arab revolt and to make policy recommendations to London. The Peel Commission was mandated to propose changes to the British Mandate of Palestine.