The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty (51 page)

These charges of cowardice stemmed from al-Hajj Amin’s refusal to adopt extreme measures, including an anti-British strike.
⁸¹

The
mufti
did not support the strike and even managed to prevent government employees from striking. Nor did he support violent action, and until June 1936 he avoided inflaming the situation. Al-Hajj Amin also made a special effort to mitigate anti-Christian hostility, one of the bitter results of the fiery sermons of Izz al-Din al-Qassam. After the latter’s death his followers called for a
jihad
against the infidel Christians. Al-Hajj Amin had intervened and, by touring the mosques and speaking movingly about the Christians who had laid down their lives for Palestine, managed to nip that morbid growth in the bud.
⁸²

But in 1936, wherever al-Hajj Amin went the Nashashibis provoked outbursts that embarrassed him – whether in Jaffa, or at the Haram al-Sharif.
⁸³
Yet they did not undermine al-Hajj Amin’s election as chairman of the executive.

In June 1936, al-Hajj Amin began to move against his opponents. It was not weakness but rather a new sense of power that drove his campaign. The sense of power was born the previous month, when he summoned all the national committees that had formed that year and led the uprising in all the towns and cities in Palestine. The headmen of the surrounding villages came and swore loyalty to each of these committees, confirming their standing.

This gathering, representing all the Palestinians in the country, testified to al-Hajj Amin’s stronger position. He opened the meeting with the words, ‘In the name of Allah the merciful and compassionate, we open this national gathering with greetings to our wounded, and I ask you to stand up in remembrance of our fallen and say together the
fatwa
for their souls.’

Before the year ended, al-Hajj Amin had to repeat these words several times. He explained to his audience that Britain had broken
all its promises, notably the promise made by the British government in 1930 to implement the recommendations of the Hope Simpson Commission. The national committee from Hebron agitated for stronger measures, such as a boycott on Jewish products and non-payment of taxes, but al-Hajj Amin seemed more concerned to move against his opponents than against the British. After the spate of national rhetoric, he invited his friends among the Higher Arab Committee to dine at his house. Over his favorite dish of lentil soup, they planned a campaign that included violent acts of vengeance. At the end of the month, al-Hajj Amin took the members of the Higher Arab Committee on a tour of the country, and wherever they went they received an ecstatic welcome.
⁸⁴

Following the successful tour, al-Hajj Amin gave the green light to eliminating several of his opponents. This unprecedented fratricide lasted for two years, until the summer of 1938. Among the targets were Khalil Taha, one of the directors of the
waqf
in Haifa, who had supported the Husaynis before switching to Istiqlal. He was assassinated in September 1936.
⁸⁵
Hassan Shukri, the mayor of Haifa, narrowly escaped assassination, unlike other less fortunate opponents. This chapter in al-Hajj Amin’s biography marred much of what he had done before. It seems he was personally responsible for establishing internecine terror as a means of control.

Another casualty of the campaign was Arif al-Asali, who in the summer of 1937 published a booklet calling for Arab–Jewish understanding. He was abducted from his house by the
mufti
’s bodyguards, tried and condemned to death. Only after his father, a district governor in Transjordan, made certain that his son would never engage in political activity for the rest of his life did the
mufti
allow him to be taken out of the well in the courtyard of his office, where he had been held. He was expelled to Beirut, where he died in 1990.
⁸⁶

In the summer of 1937, Lord Peel published his recommendations to divide Palestine up into a tiny Jewish state, an Arab state and a British protectorate, and to annex the Arab state to the kingdom of Transjordan. The opposition accepted the idea of a Hashemi annexation but rejected the partition. The
mufti
refused to become a protégé of the Hashemite kingdom and represented Palestinian public opinion well when he rejected the commission’s recommendations outright. Most of the Husaynis agreed with him, but not all.

Unlike the
mufti
, Jamal had no objection to Abdullah. He had visited the amir in May 1936 and persuaded him to demand the
suspension of Jewish immigration as a precondition for his intervention in the Palestinian crisis. The amir’s consent increased Jamal’s confidence in the Hashemites. Indeed, the last time in the 1930s that Jamal was invited to a tea party at the High Commissioner’s, he told the guests that if the country had to be partitioned, it might be best for the Arab part to be given to Abdullah. ‘If only the Arabs and the Jews had known how to speak to each other,’ he said, ‘we would have reached an agreement.’ Al-Hajj Amin, on the other hand, adopted an openly anti-Hashemite attitude. In February 1937, he went on a
Hajj
in order to seek Ibn al-Saud’s help against Abdullah, and he even asked the Hijazi tribes to enter Transjordan.

Jamal spelled out for al-Hajj Amin the choices he was facing: either negotiations with the Zionist movement, forming a common front against the British, or an out-and-out fight against the British. Until August 1937 al-Hajj Amin allowed Jamal to try to get non-Zionist Jewish groups in the United States and the Brith Shalom group in Palestine to support voluntary Jewish restrictions on immigration and land purchases. That summer Jamal also tried to persuade the mandatory government to recognize the Palestinian leadership’s passionate opposition to immigration, especially illegal immigration. ‘It is especially curious’, he wrote to the government secretary, ‘that it is through the ports under government supervision that most of the illegal immigrants enter.’ In reply, the secretary decried the importance of the government-supervised ports.
⁸⁷

Almost without warning, the earth began to shake under al-Hajj Amin’s feet. It seems he was unaware how far the mandatory authorities were willing to go in their attempts to silence him. In July 1937, al-Hajj Amin saw the first indication that the British Empire regarded him as an enemy.

At daybreak on 17 July, armored vehicles of the British police surrounded the offices of the Higher Arab Committee, blocked all the streets leading to al-Hajj Amin’s house and encircled the entire neighborhood. The telephone lines were cut, and troops broke into the offices. Al-Hajj Amin had slipped out in time and was lying low at his former residence in the Old City, which adjoined the Haram al-Sharif and was an integral part of the main complex around the mosque of al-Aqsa. He sealed all the openings of the house except the tunnel that linked it to the mosque. Apparently the British authorities knew where he was hiding but decided not to act against him yet. He was still able to establish contact with the world at large and the Arab world in
particular, his last gambits before the mandatory government eventually resolved to act decisively against him.

His first move after this attack should be viewed in light of these efforts to survive. In August al-Hajj Amin again asked Nazi Germany for help (he had been refused before). The new German consul in Jerusalem, Wilhelm Dalle, was more interested in this contact than his predecessor had been. Rumors had been coming in from German embassies in the Arab world that the Nazis were changing their attitude towards the Palestine conflict, and Musa al-Alami went to Berlin to find out if they were true. He discovered that the Nazi government was showing no sign of support or even interest in the problem. For al-Hajj Amin this was one of several attempts to strengthen the Palestinians’ international position. Israeli historiography would claim, with very little evidence, that by this time the
mufti
endorsed the Nazi ideology and was therefore looking for closer ties with Berlin. This accusation would be accepted in the West in general and in Britain in particular.
⁸⁸

When all these efforts failed, al-Hajj Amin attempted once more to rally the Arab world to the Palestinian cause, this time with more success than in the past. The growing Arab interest in Palestine neutralized Abdullah’s involvement in the country, eliminated the Hashemites’ clients (the Nashashibis) as an influential factor on the domestic scene and allowed al-Hajj Amin to maintain his position as the national leader of most Palestinians. Using the funds of the Supreme Muslim Council, in September 1937 al-Hajj Amin convened a pan-Arab conference at the Syrian resort of Bludan. Its 400 delegates supported al-Hajj Amin, assured him that he was a regional leader and urged him to launch an all-out revolt against Britain. It even helped him prepare an ambitious scheme for broad Arab support for military action.

It was an unofficial conference – in part because Britain and France had pressured Syria to disallow an official one – but it marked the beginning of external Arab involvement in Palestinian affairs. This involvement, however, consisted of much verbiage and little action, an impotency that contributed significantly to the disaster of 1948. The British apparently followed the conference with interest. Their consul in Damascus, Gilbert McGrath, had an agent in place who sent in daily reports in which he described the
mufti
as one of the empire’s main enemies in the region. After the Bludan Conference, the rift between the Palestinians and Britain was irreparable, and it severely damaged the Palestinians’ ability to influence London in their favor.

Though there are Palestinian testimonies from the conference, it is interesting to examine it through the reports of the correspondent of
The Times
of London, who acted as if he were (and maybe he really was) a British intelligence agent. The conference was a successful demonstration of loyalty to al-Hajj Amin that had been staged by his former opponent, the Haifaite notable Mu’in al-Madi (who would later change his spots and become a loyal supporter of King Abdullah). He had succeeded in bringing 400 delegates to Bludan – they were crammed into the main hall at the Grand Hotel, which could only hold 250 of them.

Foreign journalists were not permitted to enter the conference, which was one of the highlights of al-Hajj Amin’s life even though it did not produce all the results he had hoped for. The
Times
correspondent managed to infiltrate the ranks of young members of Syria’s National Bloc and get past the flags of Lebanon, Egypt and other newly independent Arab states. Though most of the delegates moderated the
mufti
’s strong anti-British proposals, there was broad agreement to reject the Peel Report, to demand an unpartitioned Palestine, the repeal of the mandate and of the Balfour Declaration and a halt to immigration and land purchases. The conference also called for a boycott of Zionist goods, threatened to call a boycott of British products and denounced Arabs who sold their lands.
⁸⁹

Though suspicions about the way al-Hajj Amin used the funds of the Muslim Council have never been dispelled, it should be noted that in Bludan he spent 1,500 Palestine pounds – a considerable sum – of his own money to cover the expenses of the delegates and the costs of the conference. Nevertheless, some of the participants did not pay their expenses, and the
Times
correspondent described angry and petty exchanges in the hotel lobby.

Al-Hajj Amin did not have long to relish being at the peak of success. The conference took place in August, and the following month the British District Commissioner of Northern Palestine, Lewis Andrews, was assassinated. It was a local initiative and had nothing to do with the
mufti
: Andrews had been associated with the Peel Commission, and the assassins regarded him as tainted by its recommendations. The murder enabled the British authorities to do what they had contemplated doing since early 1936: remove al-Hajj Amin from the political scene before he could use his strong position to lead an all-out struggle against them. After the assassination, they disbanded the Supreme Muslim Council and the Higher Arab Committee.

Before the Peel Commission’s report, al-Hajj Amin had conducted a cautious policy. But his absolute opposition to the report led him to a head-on collision with the mandatory government. Though he did not launch an armed insurrection, his fate was sealed by the immense power of the British Empire. A month after the Bludan Conference, al-Hajj Amin had to flee Palestine accompanied by other leading members of the family – they would return, and he would not. Like a script with a foregone conclusion, it was the start of the political decline of the Husayni family as the Palestinian notables who were first among equals. However, this was a minor slide compared to the downfall of the entire Palestinian society a decade later.

CHAPTER 10

The Family in Exile

The Husaynis and the Armed Revolt, 1937–8

Al-Hajj Amin realized that the die had been cast: as far as the British government in Palestine was concerned, he was
persona non grata
. On 12 October 1937, he moved to the Rawdat al-Ma’arif, and from there out of the city.
¹
It is difficult in hindsight to know whether the British authorities in Palestine indeed contemplated arresting him that October. The documents show hesitation and indecision. The leading figures in the mandate knew that arresting the
mufti
might exacerbate the Palestine conflict. Yet they feared that if they allowed him to remain free, he could reinforce the leadership of the revolt. One way or the other, al-Hajj Amin had made up his mind to escape before he could be arrested.