"Der Groẞmufti von Jerusalem"by Mikhayah ben David

בשם יהוה הרחמן הרחם/بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

The Activities of the Nazi Palestinian and the Origins of Jewish Antipathy towards Arabs

Noted scholar of Near Eastern Studies, Bernard Lewis, argued that the rage against Israel has been disproportionate in relation to any other catastrophe (nakbah) or injustices facing the Muslim world.¹ This synopsis was in contrast to those atrocities committed by Muslim hands, as in the recent genocide in Darfur. It was also exemplified in the relatively downplayed Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan which never resonated with the sort of rhetoric matching that against Israel and often a broader Jewish enemy. More comparable to the situation with Palestinian refugees, the displacement of 100,000 Sahrawi refugees by Morocco is virtually unknown to much of the Muslim world and is regarded as a political spat between Algeria and Morocco (formerly between Mauritania as well). Cries of “collective punishment” and forced disappearances of political dissidents are written off as “treason” and the rhetoric of the Frente Polisario which Morocco regards as terrorists.²

The Muslim world, in its fixation of Zionism, has similarly ignored the far greater violence during the Hama massacre of up to 39,000 civilians in Syria (1982), the Algerian civil war (1992–98) which yielded a death toll of 150,000 and 200,000 innocents, and more well known to the West, the war between Iran and Iraq (1980–88). It would sweep under the rug the long history of Islamicate³ oppression of the Jewish people under the Abbasids, who responded to Isfahani assertions of Jewish independence movements with military force. It would do the same with the forced conversions and accompanying violence and murder of the Al-Mohades in Andalusia.⁴Also, the tarnished record of the Shi`ah Fatimids in North Africa, the Zaydi “Fivers” in Yemen, and later the Alladad era legislation designed to humiliate and oppress Persian Jews, finally culminating in the Meshad massacre (1839).⁵ This, of course, is to say nothing of early massacres against Jewish natives and immigrants alike in Ottoman Palestine.⁶ On one hand we have a historically rocky relationship between Jews and Arabs since the birth of the Dynastic Caliphate system and the trademarking of “Islam” as a separate religious identity.⁷ On the other hand – which will be the focus of this paper – we see the birth of new hybrid form of Salafi- Wahhabism that was grafted onto the previously secular Arab nationalism.

The man who grafted these previously conflicting ideologies was Rashid Rida. The disciple of Salafism’s founder, Muhammad `Abduh, Rida had a number of prominent disciples. One of the most infamous of these was the “Grand” Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj `Amin Al-Husayni. As we will see, Hajj Amin first rose to power offering compliance with the British Mandate. In an apparent pattern of deceit, which will be detailed in this paper, he quickly emerged as a constant saboteur of peace between Arabs and Jews during the Mandate era.⁸ The purpose of this paper is not to biographically sketch the full life of the man who, in his dealings with the Third Reich, was known as der Groẞmufti. It is neither intended to map the better known facets of his life (nor of his uneventful demise). Instead, the purpose here is to highlight aspects that often go completely unreported to both Jews and Muslims alike. As a result of this information vacuum, each is left with the impression of popular Palestinian animosity towards Jews in the Yishuv.⁹ The reality was that the Mufti represented an undercurrent emanating from the aforementioned heterodox ideological hybridization.¹⁰

This paper will thus examine the relationship between Hajj Amin and the Third Reich. It will show how the Mufti’s activities directly turned the general attitude of the Zionists against the Palestinians, ranging from general apathy to cases of outright antipathy. It will leave the reader with an idea of the relationship that could-have-been between Jews and Palestinians, highlighting the Palestinian opponents of the Mufti. Palestinians who were friendly to the Jewish immigrants (and existing communities) were systematically terrorized, murdered and otherwise intimidated into complicity with the Mufti’s program. Through documenting this I will provide a historical alternative to Husayni’s Neo-Salafism, which can help shape a future model for peace between Jews and the Arab world. Further, we will recognize a direct line from Hajj Amin to the dominant Palestinian narrative today.¹¹

PART I
A New Historiography for both Israel and Palestine Studies

Until 1948, very few documentary sources of the period before World War I were available for public scrutiny in the Ottoman State Archives. Many state papers were “closed to public scrutiny” in the British Foreign Office, the Colonial Office, and the War Office, as well as other agencies.¹² Author Taysir Jbara notes in Palestinian Leader Hajj Amin Al-Husayni that following Britain’s withdrawal in 1948, “some memoirs and personal accounts of men and women who had participated in the affairs of the mandate were made accessible” to the public. This was due to the expiration of classified status – the “thirty year rule” – which Israel maintained.¹³ Avi Shlaim, on this flood of new information, which helped catalyze the approach of New Historians like himself and noted Israeli scholars such as Benny Morris and Tom Segev, writes the following:

"The upsurge of new histories would not have been possible without the declassification of the official government documents. Israel adopted the British thirty-year rule for the review and declassification of foreign policy documents. If this rule is not applied by Israel as systematically as it is in Britain, it is applied rather more liberally."¹⁴

Jbara, writing from the perspective of the Palestinian narrative is willing to employ these in his attempt to craft a more balanced account of the events in the Yishuv. Indeed, historians such as himself, Philip Mattar, and Nur Masalha do express more criticism of the Mufti’s early activities than one would find amongst the general Arab masses (when he is known at all). However, when it comes to the more ugly aspect of his life, they try to downplay the severity, justify them or simply ignore the tough questions. As this paper strives to be more than simply a New Historiographical survey of the data on the Mufti, it will draw largely from primary sources, Arab biographers of the Mufti (like Mattar and Jbara) and on the issue of Palestinians friendly to Jewish immigrants, New Historian Hillel Cohen, Nasser Eddin Nashashibi’s documentation of his family as Jerusalem’s Other Voice, and Arab accounts of the Mufti’s terrorism towards Muslims who ignored his calls to racial division, and alliance with Nazism.

Jewish Antipathy Towards Arabs in the Yishuv: Fact and Fiction

The information we have available today evidence abuses from elements of the Haganah and certainly from more ominous groups like the Irgun Stern gang. We find candid statements, in Menachem Begin’s autobiography for instance, that Ben-Gurion regarded this future Prime Minister as nothing short of “Hitlerite.” Ben-Gurion lamented that “I have no doubt that Begin hates Hitler-but this hatred does not prove that he is different from him, and when for the first time I heard Begin on the radio, I heard the voice and the screeching of Hitler.”¹⁵ If Israel’s first Prime Minister could be this blatantly honest with himself, about its later 6^th Prime Minister then certainly we all can be.

To be sure, the Yishuv was not angelic. There were a minority of brutal men who were happy to carve out a place for themselves at the expense of whoever got in their way. While such abuses, when they occurred, do challenge an uncritical Israeli founding myth, they do not (in most cases) confirm the narrative which conversely demonizes the Zionists. In his epic debate with Nur Masahla and Norman Finkelstein in the Journal of Palestine Studies, founding New Historian Benny Morris reasons that, “you can’t have a ruthless and systematic blanket policy of expulsion and yet ignore the (mainly Muslim) villages of Khirbet Jisr, az Zarka, Al Fureidis, and Abu Ghosh,” which remained intact, with their Arab populations in place. “If there was a systematic, efficient policy of expulsion,” Morris asks, then why had the authorities left “troublesome or potentially troublesome minority Arab communities in Haifa, Jaffa, and Acre, not to mention smaller sites such as Lydda, Ramle, and Trshiha,” when they were in the position to “easily have expelled them?” Finally, he asks “why, at war’s end, were 100,000-160,000 Arabs, most of the Muslim [today over 700,000] left in Israel,” at a time when Jews numbered only 700,000-750,000 in the region? Morris’s detractors still have no answer to these questions.

Morris notes the IDF order from July 6, 1948 which prohibited expulsion or destroying towns and villages without Ben-Gurion’s “expressed order.”¹⁶ Finkelstein acknowledged that “the civilian [Zionist] authorities [said] one thing and the Haganah” decided on their own to do “something else altogether.” This realization then cannot damn the entire enterprise as having universally designed a systematic Arab expulsion. Can the Zionist authorities necessarily be blamed for the limited ad hoc actions of rogue elements, acting without – even against – orders in the Haganah?

Even a man of such rough reputation as Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Efraim Karsh clarifies in critique of Morris, did not believe Israel could or should be rid of the Palestinian Arabs. Instead, they should be on “equal footing” and integrated “throughout all sectors of the country’s public life,” sharing both military and civil service duties, as well as the benefits of citizenship: “in every cabinet where the prime minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership shall be offered to an Arab and vice versa.”¹⁷

We must thus be careful of attempts to rewrite history, in hindsight of later polemic, painting historical figures with modern assumptions. It is with this word of caution that this examination of the Mufti proceeds, as a new New History; employing the research of both Arab and Jewish perspectives seeking to strip away the passions and biases.

The Early Life of Hajj Amin ibn Tahir al-Husayni

Amin was the third son of Tahir al-Husayni, who died in 1908 after having been the Mufti of Jerusalem himself.¹⁸ Amin would become the Mufti in 1921 and remain until 1937 during the Arab Revolts, when he was exiled.¹⁹ The political significance of this position cannot be understated. The two highest offices in the local Ottoman administration, had been naqib alashraf and the office of the Mufti.²⁰

The naqib al-ashraf post was valid for one year, though it would be extended beyond this. The naqib would frequently accomplish this by sending gifts to important Ottoman dignitaries and to the naqib seated in Istanbul. It was to this end that the Husayni family opened a factory producing highly-valued olive oil soap. Soap was sent, along with other gifts, to various officials to ensure the renewal of the Husayni family to the post.²¹ The family maintained the position from 1791 until 1937 with what were, in hindsight, only “minor interruptions.” Towards the middle of the nineteenth century, the family’s support of the Ottoman Empire during the antigovernment revolt, temporarily cost them the position.²²

In 1834 the former Mufti, Tahir al-Husayni, and `Umar al-Husayni, the son of `Abd al- Salam, the naqib al-ashraf, fled to Cairo when they sided against Muhammad `Ali’s son Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt.<sup>23</sup> The family’s influence remained weak until 1876 when they recaptured power from the Khalidi family.<sup>24</sup> The positions of Mufti and naqib al-ashraf were first given to the `Alami family and then to the Jarallah family.²⁵ Along with the Nashashibis, these families formed a rivalry and tangible threat to the power of the Husayni clan that would continue into the Mandate period.

The Husayni clan often resorted to the prestige of their claim to be saddat, the “nobles” descended from Mudammad. A manuscript written in the eighteenth century (1718-19) by Amin’s ancestor, the Mufti Hasan al-Husayni, is the basis of these claims about the family’s history.²⁶ Today, we can find the Husayni family living in the West Bank. Still very proud, they describe their family as “the oldest and most-honorable” family in all of Palestine.²⁷ The status of unofficial nobility commanded great respect for the family, in part enabling their arousal of the Pan-Islamic Ummah.

In 1911, Kamil al-Husayni, Amin’s brother, dispatched him to Cairo’s to Al-Azhar University.²⁸ Amin didn’t graduate, as he first went on Hajj in 1913 followed by the interruption of the First World War²⁹ Shortly after his return to Jerusalem in 1913, he was recruited into the Ottoman army. In 1914, when Turkey entered World War I, Amin went to Istanbul, where he was trained at the military college to fight on behalf of “Greater Syria.”³⁰ As a Pan-Islamist under the tutelage of Rashid Rida, he influenced fellow soldiers to accept Salafi ideas of al- Afghani, the teacher of Rida’s own mentor, Muhammad `Abduh.³¹ Amin “prayed with them as an imam,” gaining an eager audience of both Turks and Arabs as a story teller.³² Amin’s journal attests that after serving as an officer for three months, on November 14, 1916 he came down with chronic diarrhea and returned to Jerusalem by February 26, 1917.³³

In spite of his Ottoman service, and his family’s historical loyalty to the Empire, Jbara tells us that the “continued British opposition to the Turks matched with their desire to liberate the Arabs,” resulted in Hajj Amin’s support for the Mandate.³⁴ The Foreign Office records that Captain C.D. Brunton recruited Ottoman opposition “with a Sharifian³⁵ named Hagg Ameen al- Husayni, who is described as being at that time very pro-British…”³⁶ Jbara notes that the Mufti “was active recruiting and training Arabs before the Arab revolt of 1916 against the Turks,” after his convenient case of diarrhea. He recruited “more than 3000 men from the Jerusalem and Hebron districts”³⁷ for Faisal’s army³⁸ The British claimed that in establishing the Mandate, they “were indebted to the al-Husayni family,” as they had “directed that the people should cooperate,” with Britain. Amin’s older brother Kamil in particular was seen as useful. For him the British concocted the title Al-Mufti al-Akbar, the “Grand Mufti,” a new title which would pass to Amin.

Pan-Islam and Arab Nationalism

It is thus not difficult to see why the Mufti’s critics, amongst both Arabs and Zionists, “accused him of cooperation with the British.” Cohen notes that Amin’s public view was that the Palestinians should not revolt against the British rule, “which was too strong and, in any case, ephemeral.” Instead, he argued that they “should concentrate on opposing the Zionists.”³⁹

Amin reasoned that the Arab population of Palestine “could not hope to combat the Zionist influence,” without the support of the Muslim Ummah at large. It was not long before Amin turned against the British, after having first turned on the Ottomans.⁴⁰The British eventually came to realize that “it was due to Hajj Amin’s effort that the Arab and Muslim countries were induced to interest themselves in Palestine.” This led to Amin employing propaganda tactics mirroring those of the Salafist Muslim Brotherhood. Emanating from the ideology, the Husayni approach blended Arab nationalism, which had up till then been associated with secularism, and an emerging, even conflicting, idea of Pan-Islamic Nationalism. This became increasingly relevant and attractive after the abolition of the Caliphate in 1924.⁴¹

The marriage of this Pan-Islamism to Arab Nationalism played a critical role in an emerging Palestinian identity. Haim Gerber acknowledges that the Roman term “Palestine,” or Filistin, ceased usage in 1250 by the Mamluk state, followed by Ottoman disuse from 1517. He cites a handful of examples over the next few centuries, of what could at best be considered a quasi-national identity that never seems to have developed amongst the rural class. Citing Rashid Khalidi, Gerber acknowledges that the term was “propelled” from about this time “mainly by Zionism.”⁴²

The reaction of Arab Nationalism to Zionism, and the subsequent crystallizing of a Palestinian identity took on a new life after the abolishment of the Caliphate in 1924. Many `ulama’ maneuvered to ascend to the Caliphate. In order to gain further support for his objectives, Hajj Amin accompanied by muftun and qadah (plural of qadi) from Palestine met King Sharif Husayn at Al-Shuna in March of 1923. The Supreme Muslim Council of Jerusalem endorsed Husayn as the Caliph which he accepted in 1924.⁴³Many, including the Muslims of Nablus, vehemently objected to Amin’s favor towards Husayn and his belief that the Council could appoint him as the leader of the entire Muslim world. Husayn would nevertheless rationalize that, “the Great Imamate of the Grand Caliphate… was passed to us in their form and status… we would not have interfered in this matter had it not been for the adventurous step taken by the government at Ankara in interfering with the dignity of the Caliphate.”⁴⁴

Competing with this fringe, most Muslims believed that the `ulema’ should choose the new Caliph. A congress was held in Cairo to this end in May 1926. Unable to reach a widely satisfying conclusion, King `Abdul `Aziz ibn Sa`ud called a meeting in Mecca that June 7 to July 5. It was contrasted with the unofficial Congress on the Caliphate in being comprised of “official delegations from Muslim countries with the intention of forming a world Muslim organization.” Lofty as this ambition was, Sa`ud seemed to forget his pledge to annually hold meetings for the organization.

The next meeting would not be called until five years later – in 1931 – by none other than Hajj Amin. By reviving the project, he centralized and fused the agenda of the emerging Palestinian nationalism with Pan-Islamic revival.⁴⁵ The Mufti had begun this maneuvering with a conference held on November 1, 1928. The focus of the conference was on the question of the Wailing Wall (Kotel). The “Societies for the Defense of the Mosque of `Umar were formed” and from this activity arose a dramatic increase in “politico-religious agitation…” It was determined that if the Jewish worshipers continued “violating the status quo,” by bringing chairs to the Kotel, the Muslims would “prevent them by force from praying at the Wall.” The British determined that the dispute had, with the Mufti, degraded into one that “was no longer a religious question” but now both of a “political and racial” nature.⁴⁶

From the new global authority that reviving the Sa`udi conference afforded him, Amin issued a request that the Indian leader Muhammad `Ali be buried at Jerusalem instead of India as a symbolic act of Pan-Islamic solidarity. He invited the Ummah to attend the funeral on January 24, 1931. Jbara explains that this was for the expressed purpose of “strengthen[ing] the attachment of Muslims all over the world to the sanctuary of Jerusalem by making it a sort of Muslim pantheon,” so that Muslims throughout the world would “look to Jerusalem as the seat of their religion equal to Mecca and Medina.”⁴⁷ Implicit in this statement is that the general Muslim population did not, prior to this politicization, regard Jerusalem as the “third holiest site in Islam…” That is, Jerusalem became exponentially more important to the post-Caliphate Ummah when consolidating Jewish power and resources were factored into the equation.

Jewish Immigration

The Husayni family, more than any other factor, were key in attempts to block Jewish immigration as far back as the 1890s.⁴⁸ As Jerusalem’s representatives in the Ottoman parliament, Sa’id al-Husayni and Ruhi al-Khalidi tried, and eventually succeeded, in urging the Ottoman parliament to pass laws making it exceedingly difficult for Jews to immigrate to Palestine.⁴⁹ They were particularly active in preventing Jewish immigration to what was well known as Judaism’s holiest city.⁵⁰ In 1897, Tahir al-Husayni, was authorized by a government order to approve all land sales in the district (mutasarrifiyyah) of Jerusalem.⁵¹

In the following generation, Tahir’s son Amin would come to lead the Youth People’s Party. One of two major political parties, the other being the Muslim-Christian Society, formed in response to General Sir Louis Bols’ statement that Jewish people would “return to their homeland.” While both groups opposed Jewish immigration, the Muslim-Christian Society called for an independent Palestinian state, “separate from Syria,” a notion which Hajj Amin would come to consistently opposed. He viewed Palestine instead as part of “Greater Syria” within a borderless Caliphate, which he was certain would soon be revived. Because of this belief, the Mufti helped to form policies whose aim was less Palestinian self-determination, and more about hating Jews than about empowering Arabs.⁵²

Influenced by nationalist newspapers as a youth and later penning in his personal journal the writings and speeches from the Persian proto-Salafist Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Hajj Amin and his relatives from the Dar al-Imam family⁵³ became opposed from an early age to what they considered the “Jewish foreign invasion.”⁵⁴ As we have seen, however, the Mufti’s older brother Kamil was not only regarded as pro-British, he was anomalous to his family in that he was relatively friendly towards the Jewish immigrants. Norman Bentwich, a Jewish leader wrote in his memoirs that Kamil was “a man of great dignity, courtesy and charm.” He wanted to see “all the communities together” and even “took part in the ceremony of 1918 laying the foundation of Hebrew University.” Bentwich claimed to “know of no occasion when he showed any enmity towards Jews.” He lamented that “Amin was altogether different” from his brother Kamil in his disdain for the immigrants.⁵⁵ Kamil assured Jews that under exclusively Muslim rule, Jews would “enjoy the same rights and bear the same duties as ourselves.”⁵⁶ This notwithstanding, both he and Amin would later walk out of a reception for the Zionist commission. It had become clear that Jewish thirst for autonomy from the Mandate, paralleled that of the Muslims, who increasingly desired self-determination.⁵⁷ In the years to come, Jbara surmises that the Mufti would use “Muslim fanaticism” for the purposes of rekindling “the dying embers of Arab nationalism into flames which was to make the Middle East too hot for Great Britain to hold.”⁵⁸

The Decimation of the Palestinian Opposition by the Mufti

The subject of Palestinian collaboration with the Yishuv is well documented. To some extent, an apologist recount of Raghib Nashashib’s nephew is found in Jerusalem’s Other Voice. Cohen documents the subject efficiently in his Army of Shadows, Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917–1948. Some of this material, which we will survey, points us towards an alternative conclusion, that perspective of the Mufti was not initially a widespread one, propagating itself though sheer brutality.

Before the rise of the Husayni family, the relationship between Jews, Christians and Muslims in Palestine was generally peaceful. Like Andalusia, there was relative coexistence. After liberating Jerusalem, like Umar before him, Salah ad-Din, even told his famous Jewish advisor and personal physician Moses Maimonides, that the Jewish leader should “announce to your brethren… our doors are open, come home.”

Prior to the propagandizing of Hajj Amin, the Palestinian masses were not generally opposed to their Jewish neighbors. Similarly, after the `aliyot (plural of `aliyah) the immigrants who were boosting the Palestinian economy and purchasing – what were more often than not – previously unused land, were viewed favorably by the general Palestinian population. Even during the immigration of poorer Jews during the 20s, the opposition to Hajj Amin – while far from pro-Jewish in many cases – was simply not interested in the path of violence that the Mufti was advancing.

A rival family, the Nashashibi’s offered an alternative towards the Husayni lack of compromise or empathy for the immigrants who were fleeing regions of intense persecution. Cohen cites that these “explicit calls to use violence against collaborators were first heard in the internal deliberations of the Arab national institutions in the early 1920s.”⁵⁹ June of 1920 saw the creation of the Muslim-Christian Association of Jerusalem, created in June of 1920, to infiltrate agents into “every village” who would then identify to the organization those numerous Arabs who planned to sell land to Jewish immigrants and natives alike. “The prospective sellers would be warned,” Cohen notes, “and if they did not heed the warnings they would be executed.”⁶⁰ Two of Husayni’s closest men, Hasan Tutanji and Ishaq Darwish implemented the take-over. Journalists too were to “expect the same treatment” if they published articles that portrayed Jews in a favorable light, or opposed the growing power of the Husayni gangs.⁶¹

A formal delegation was sent to London in July 1921 in a desperately attempt to argue against the Balfour Declaration’s commitment to continued Jewish immigration. The mayor of Haifa and president of the Muslim National Associations, Hasan Shukri sent a telegram with a dual purpose of arguing in defense of the `aliyot. It sought to portray Salafi-inspired nationalists as aligned with the Mufti – in Cohen’s words “unrepresentative and illegitimate,” of the Palestinian people – as well as promoting the ratification of the Mandate.⁶²

"We strongly protest against the attitude of the said delegation concerning the Zionist question. We do not consider the Jewish people as an enemy who wish to crush us. On the contrary. We consider the Jews as a brotherly people sharing our joys and troubles and helping us in the construction of our common country. We are certain that without Jewish immigration and financial assistance there will be no future development of our country as may be judged from the fact that the towns inhabited in part by Jews such as Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa, and Tiberias are making steady progress while Nablus, Acre, and Nazareth where no Jews reside are steadily declining."⁶³

During the period of growing terrorism against Palestinians by the Mufti’s faction, most families knew someone who was a victim of kidnapping and murder by the gang. Ghada Karmi recounts, in her book In Search of Fatima, that her father – like many Palestinians, and two of her uncles,⁶⁴ who did not side with Hajj Amin – was terrorized for perceived opposition to the Palestinian cause, at least as the Mufti defined it.

'A year before I was born, a man had come to our house. My mother had opened the door to him because it was safer – no one was after harming the women. He asked to see my father in a strange voice. He looked a rough sort of man, and when he came into the light, she could see that he had a bandoleer strapped around his chest. But before she could do anything, my father came out and the man suddenly said, “I was sent here to kill you by Hajj Amin’s men. But God help me, I can’t go through with it...” That very night he moved out, leaving my mother, sister and brother behind... he couldn’t even come to visit us at home because he knew they were waiting for him.'⁶⁵

From the Jerusalem Riots to the Hebron and Safed Massacres

The role of Hajj Amin in inciting the violence that led to the 1929 Hebron and Safed massacres is slightly better known than his role in the Jerusalem riots nearly a decade earlier. In his memoirs, Sir Ronald Storrs wrote:

"The immediate fomenter of the Arab excesses had been one Haj Amin al-Husayni, the younger brother of Kamel Effendi, the Mufti. Like most agitators, having incited the man in the street to violence and probable punishment, he fled."⁶⁶

Jbara notes the “interesting fact” that Hajj Amin is mentioned in very few of the newspaper articles published regarding the riots of 1920. Still, “the British and Jews believed that Hajj Amin ‘was stirring up the Arab element in Jerusalem.”⁶⁷ One might wonder why they would accuse Amin if there was so much blame to go around? Why focus on him when broader Arab blame could only benefit the Jews? Why not make the argument that all or most of the Arab leaders were causing violence?

In the aftermath of the riots Storrs, the military governor of Jerusalem, removed Musa Kazim al-Husayni from his office as mayor of Jerusalem and sentenced Hajj Amin and `Arif al- `Arif (the editor of the newspaper Suriya al-Janubiyyah) to ten years imprisonment in absentia for inflammatory speeches which had incited the rioters.⁶⁸Amin and `Arif fled to Jordan and then to Damascus.⁶⁹ William Ziff, in his book “The Rape of Palestine,” summarizes:

"Implicated in the [1920] disturbances was a political adventurer named Haj Amin al Husayni. Haj Amin, was sentenced by a British court to fifteen years hard labor. Conveniently allowed to escape by the police, he was a fugitive in Syria. Shortly after, the British then allowed him to return to Palestine where, despite the opposition of the Muslim High Council who regarded him as a hoodlum, Haj Amin was appointed by the British High Commissioner as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem for life."⁷⁰

Again, here we have testimony that the Muslim High Council, like the majority of Palestinians, opposed Hajj Amin. Mattar tells us, however, that Hajj Amin’s role in the violence of April 1920 “made him popular among the people.”⁷¹ For the period between March 21 and April 12, 1921, “petitions poured in” arguing that Amin was the “people’s choice.” Only a minority of the petitions came from ordinary Palestinians, but many were from prominent officials,”⁷² indicating that “the people” he was so popular among were the British and the landed Aristocracy. When Herbert Samuel was appointed High Commissioner, his first order of business was to grant a general pardon for all political prisoners⁷³ and to Hajj Amin.⁷⁴

Jbara provides no counter weight to Amin’s loss of the popular vote.⁷⁵ Still, Jbara has to admit that “many Palestinians and even some in the Transjordan,” supported Jarallah as well; not just the Nashashibi family.⁷⁶

In the April 12 elections, the Nashashibi backed Husam al-Din Jarallah. Jarallah won the most votes, followed by the `alim Khalil al-Khalidi, and Budayri. Jamal and Isma’il al-Husayni as well as Amin were indignant and the former two began organizing opposition “to influence the High Commissioner.” They attacked them as invalid since the committee that chose Jarallah “was neither the college of electors required by Ottoman law nor an approximation of one.” Thus, they argued the decision could not represent the Muslims of Palestine.<sup>77</sup> King Faysal and his brother Amir `Abdullah as well as `ulama’ and other notables from both Arab Muslim and Christian communities poured in to support a Husayni appointment, even though he was not even in the top three elected by popular vote.⁷⁸ Jbara provides no counter weight to Amin’s loss of the popular vote.⁷⁹ Even he is forced to admit that “many Palestinians and even some in the Transjordan,” supported Jarallah as well; not just the Nashashibi family.⁸⁰

Rumors were spread that Raghib al-Nashashibi, the mayor of Jerusalem, was working with “the Jews” to “manipulate the elections.” By April 19, anonymous anti-Jewish posters were hung in strategic locations of the Old City. Though they were removed the next morning, their presence had been noted and their removal seemed only to vest them with authenticity. “Within days” of the appointment of Amin, an echo of the previous Nabi Musa riots in Jerusalem repeated in Jaffa, during the same celebration.⁸¹“Spontaneously,” Mattar suggests, Muslim and Jewish quarters of Jaffa were engulfed in an exponentially intensifying conflict, which left 48 Arabs, 47 Jews dead and 219 injured. To Samuel this cemented his view that the Palestinian demands should be met.

Historian Elie Kedourie credits Ernets T. Richmond, the High Commissioner’s adviser on Arab affairs, with influencing Samuel’s administration to appoint Amin over the popular winner, Jarallah.⁸² Mattar tells us that “Samuel had in fact hoped Amin would win,” further conflicting with Hajj Amin’s complaint that the British were constantly favoring the Zionists. Jbara tells us that his family and supporters were “convinced” that he would win the majority of the votes. They must have been, because they hastily sent him back to Cairo, if not to finally get his diploma, then “at least a Shaykh’s turban, which was regarded as a qualification for the Mufti’s office.”⁸³ Yet Jbara notes that his family felt assured also “because Samuel had hinted to Hajj Amin that he would be the next Mufti.”⁸⁴

Indeed, Hajj Amin invited Herbert Samuel for dinner, on April 25, 1921; odd behavior for such an avowed enemy of Zionists. Yet at this dinner Amin proved that – all the street rhetoric aside – he was a deal maker, a politician. Samuel left convinced “that Amin would obey government orders in the future if he were appointed Mufti of Jerusalem.” Jbara suspects that “during the dinner, Hajj Amin doubtless intimated to Mr. Samuel that he would stop his political activities against the government.”⁸⁵

In the presence of Norman Bentwich, the civil secretary and one of only two Zionists in Samuel’s administration,⁸⁶ Amin pledged to Samuel “his earnest desire to cooperate with the Government,” believing in “the good intention of the Government towards the Arabs.” The Mufti assured him “that the influence of his family and himself would be devoted to maintaining tranquilly in Jerusalem and he felt sure that no disturbances need be feared this year.” The previous year’s riots “had been spontaneous and unpremeditated… they would not be repeated.”⁸⁷ Raghib al-Nashashibi withdrew his support for Jarallah, at the insistence of Samuel, who assured him that an appointment of Amin would quell the violence. Against the majority of his family, Raghib convinced Jarallah to withdraw. Subsequently, in Mid-May, Amin was appointed as Mufti in mid-May.⁸⁸

Jbara contends that the elections were manipulated by “Jewish influences” which made sure that Hajj Amin could not be elected.⁸⁹ While providing absolutely no evidence of these claims, he contradicts his previous statements, when he spells out that “Hajj Amin was appointed Mufti of Jerusalem by Herbert Samuel, although he did not get a majority in the elections.”⁹⁰ It then seems strange that Samuel would have been working to ensure Amin was not elected only to appoint him without the popular vote. If Jewish manipulation could make sure that Amin lost the election, why could it not stop Samuel from appointing him?

The massacres that occurred with the repeated Jerusalem riots, and those of Safed and Hebron, sent waves through both the Palestinian Jewish community and particularly galvanized support for the Yishuv amongst American Jews (who in the case of Reform Judaism had opposed the idea of Zionism). In all, 67 Jews were murdered on 23 and 24 August 1929 in Hebron. The attacks of the Mufti’s nationalists were perpetrated by a small but powerful minority. Opposing the genocidal violence, nineteen local Arab families hid 435 Jews who would have otherwise been murdered. These Palestinians would also have been subjected to murder by the Mufti’s faction, as would happen in the years to come.⁹¹ In addition to the main Jewish section being looted and burned, as in Hebron, the Safed massacre of August 29 added eighteen more Jews and eighty wounded to the toll.⁹²

While such massacres as Hebron, Safed and the Jerusalem riots were pivotal in turning the tide of Jewish antipathy towards Arabs, it was the general Palestinian `Arab population which came to the aid of the survivors of Hebron, hiding them from Hajj Amin’s gangs.<sup>93</sup> Palestinian Makhatir warned those friendly to Jews that “Islam does not forgive traitors.”<sup>94</sup> Shaykh Sabri `Abdin, an imam of the Aqsa masjid, sent many letters to shuyukh and a’immah in different countries of the Muslim world urging them to issue a fatwah against those who sold land to Jews. In Iraq, the Shi`i leader Kashif al-Ghata issued a fatwah that any Muslim who sold land to a Jew is to be regarded as a murtad (apostate)⁹⁵ and thus a kafir (disbeliever). Such fatawat were commonplace following the efforts of the Mufti. Amin invited a’immah and shuyukh from throughout Palestine to a conference on Friday, January, 25 1935 in Jerusalem.⁹⁶

The `ulama’ in attendance issued a unanimous fatwah that:

We the Muftis, the Qadis, the Readers, the speakers, the Imams, the Preachers, and all the Ulema and Men of religion of Palestine who are gathered today in this religious meeting held in Jerusalem at the Aqsa Mosque… declare as follows – Such brokers and mediators and sellers [of land] should not receive the prayers of the dead or be allowed to be buried in Muslim cemeteries; they should be neglected, boycotted, and humiliated, they should not be made friends with or approached, even though they be fathers, sons, brothers, or husbands and wives.⁹⁷

What this extremism tell us is that the “problem” of friendly Palestinian relationships with Jews was extremely widespread, even the norm. The selection, “though they be fathers, sons, brothers, or husbands and wives,” indicates that much like Karmi’s family, every Palestinian family was assumed to have a family member who was on friendly terms with the Jewish community and had sold land or brokered land-sales to them. This is a radically different conclusion than what has typically been presented by either side in the years subsequent to the revolts and battles which would follow. Cohen writes, similarly that:

"Insufficient scholarly attention has been given to the connections Hajj Amin’s opponents and other Palestinian public figures had with Zionist institutions and to the belief system they developed as a result of these connections. The premise that the Zionists could not be defeated, together with hostility towards Hajj Amin, certainly led many to take a passive stance, to support Emir `Abdallah of Transjordan, and in many cases to help the Zionists."⁹⁸

The Mounting Arab Opposition to Husayni Violence

In the area of religion the nationalists “had almost complete control,” taking advantage of their influence to marginalize and remove “the Jews’ friends.”⁹⁹ After successfully ascending to the of the Supreme Muslim Council Hajj Amin branded all opposition as “traitors.”¹⁰⁰ There were huge numbers of examples: Shaykh Sa’id al-`Uri, the Shar`i qadi of Jerusalem was the “leading opponent” of Amin. The crime of Shaykh Muhammad Adib Ramadan, of the Great Masjid al-Abyad of Ramla and principal of the Arab school there, was khutbat stressing nothing more than interreligious brotherhood and opposition to violence against Jews in the region. The operatives of the Mufti reported his “unIslamic” preachings and added, for good measure, that he was “receiving money from the Jews,” a charge that there is absolutely no evidence for. Like al- `Uri, Ramadan was fired and in this case forced to flee the city. Such false allegations were “a common tactic,” of the Mufti’s faction.¹⁰¹

Amin Khawajah of Ni’lin collected signatures for petitions which favored Jewish immigration, before the ratification of the Mandate. He was “arrested late at night by the British police after an informer told the authorities that he had married two people against their will two years earlier.” Shaykh Yusuf `Arsan of the Bani Saqer tribe of the Beit She’an Valley and a member of the town’s Muslim National Assembly – which opposed the Mufti – were locked up for twenty days after he was accused of being a cattle-thief. Not surprisingly, no evidence was ever mustered to support the charge.<sup>102</sup>Even neutral `ulema’ had been “purged” from positions of religious influence so that they could not give voice to the average Palestinian’s desire to live in peace with their Jewish neighbors. Arab nationalists Shaykh `Abd al-Qadir al-Muzaffar made a scathing statement which would have ironic implications for him:

"If [those who collaborate with Jews] do not repent their deeds and return to the bosom of nationalism, the nation will ostracize them, just as traitors are ostracized. They will have no forgiveness and they will not be treated as a brother treats a brother, so that they will serve as an example to others."¹⁰³

Two decades after he made this statement, al-Muzaffar would himself be accused of treason and attacked with a Molotov cocktail due to his criticism of the Mufti’s future alliance with the Third Reich.¹⁰⁴ Ibrahim `Abdin, a prominent member of the pro-Zionist associations, was one of those who received threats, as was reported later to the National Council. One day in September 1922 as he sat in a café in his hometown of Ramla, three men approached him and said: “The national home [of the Jews] has already been canceled. Soon the Turks will come back, and then we will slaughter you.”¹⁰⁵ Musa Hadayb was killed near the Jaffa Gate of the Old City on October 13 1929. Cohen writes that “both his family and the Zionist Executive claimed that the Husaynis and their minions were responsible.”¹⁰⁶

In the article “The Battle at the Gate,” the Mufti himself wrote that “the nation cannot be fooled. Its word is the word of Allah, and the word of Allah is that which decides.”¹⁰⁷The words were directed specifically against the municipal council in Jerusalem headed by Raghib al- Nashashibi.

"The writer gave nationalism (as he perceived it) religious force and equated not being nationalist with duplicity and dishonor. Furthermore, he blamed the mayors for the country’s woes, with the aim of depriving the Nashashibis of public legitimacy."¹⁰⁸

Quite savvy in his propaganda efforts, the Mufti published Hebrew diatribes against the Nashashibis as well, urging Jews to vote against them if they wanted credibility amongst Palestinians. Amongst the Greek Orthodox community Al-Husayni continued to be supported by Al-Jami`ah al-`Arabiyyah. An article demonized the Nashashibis who they said “rely on the Jews,” and have “reached an agreement with them and the agreement is treason (khiyanah).”¹⁰⁹

Despite appearances, the Mufti himself negotiated with the Zionist Executive in the period before the election, with the goal of gaining Jewish votes.¹¹⁰ In spite of the best efforts of the Husayni gang, Ragheb Nashashibi won the 1927 elections.¹¹¹ “Pretty soon,” Cohen writes, “the accusations against the Nashashibis became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The Kotel

Jbara notes that there were “no records of incidents between Muslims and Jews concerning the Wailing Wall before the nineteenth century.” In spite of this fact, and regardless of a continued Jewish presence there long before Hajj Amin saw it as his duty to prevent Jews from regaining the right to freely worship at the Kotel.¹¹² The incidents of violence at the site, which we will connect him with, enabled Hajj Amin “to give struggle against the Jews a religious dimension” thus widening urban and rural support amongst Palestinians who generally “had not been attracted by the secular nationalist slogans.”¹¹³

Contrary to claims that the British constantly favored the Zionists they initially acted in favor of the Mufti regarding the Kotel. In November 1928 police were ordered to remove fairly benign seats and benches, which Jewish worshipers had brought.¹¹⁴ Amin complained that the rights of Muslims “continued to be violated” through the placement of these chairs. An obvious Jewish assertion of a right to worship there, Amin threatened that a group of, “Muslims would initiate an uprising if the Jews persisted.”¹¹⁵ In a memorandum to British High Secretary Harry Luke, Hajj Amin submitted:

"Having realized by bitter experience the unlimited greedy aspirations of the Jews in this respect, Moslems believe that the Jews’ aim is to take possession of the Mosque of Al- Aqsa gradually on the pretence that it is the Temple."

The High Commissioner agreed to prevent Jewish worshippers from bringing chairs or benches, under the condition that Hajj Amin work to calm the spreading rhetoric against the immigrants in the Arab newspapers. The Mufti expressed his readiness to comply with the requests. In return, he wanted the High Commissioner to quiet the growing voice and influence of Hebrew newspapers in general. Once again, favoring the Mufti, the High Commissioner complied.¹¹⁶ Not content with this, Hajj Amin also sent a telegram on August 4, 1929 to the Colonial Office asking the British to enforce the agreement to legally prosecute Jewish worshipers who continued to bring chairs to the Kotel. He once again threatened that if the British did not enforce the order without fail, the Muslims of the world would riot against the entire Jewish community throughout Palestine.¹¹⁷

On August 8, Mr. Rutenberg, the managing director of the Palestine Electric Corporation, said that Jewish worshippers were becoming more distressed over the air of hatred growing over Jewish worship at the Kotel. He said that a group who felt unjustly discriminated against would march in protest in Jerusalem on August 15.¹¹⁸ When an armed group of Arabs arrived to confront the protesters, Hajj Amin assured Major Saunders, inspector general of the Palestine Police, that his stick wielding crowd was “not going to start any attack or disturbance sunless they were provoked to do so.”¹¹⁹Still carrying on a protest of words, some Jewish protesters subsequently “raised the Zionist flag and shouted that the wall was theirs.”¹²⁰ These words were the sort of “provocation” that the Mufti was apparently talking about. Jbara admits that the “Shaykhs and ulama attached to the Supreme Muslim Council” had “spared no effort to excite Muslim public feelings” in preparation for the protest. The armed Arab masses, conditioned to expect the worst from the “unlimited greedy aspirations of the Jews,” erupted at the sight. This finally culminated in full scale riotous violence on August 23.¹²¹ Hundreds from both sides were killed and injured on that day alone. By the following day, all out war had spread all over Palestine. A Western journalist described the events in stating that “the Holy Land seemed as near an approximation of hell on earth as I had ever seen.”¹²²

In the aftermath, the High Commissioner, John Chancellor determined that the Arabs which the Mufti had incited were in fact the initiators of the violence. The pro-Palestinian Shaw Commission also held the Arabs responsible for initiating the violence. Contrary to Hajj Amin’s claims that “Zionist propaganda” had sparked the revolt, Jbara tells us that “the fundamental cause of the disturbances was the fear and disappointment of Arab political and national aspirations and a fear by the Arabs.”¹²³

The violence from the Arabs changed the British attitude towards the arrangement. The High Commissioner issued permission on October 8, 1929 for worshippers to access the Kotel for prayer, to bring “a stand obtaining ritual lamps” and to be allowed to lock the southern door at certain times for prayer and devotion, so they would no longer be harassed or threatened with violence by the Mufti’s faction. These “new rights” as Jbara describes them – seemingly offended by the idea – were protested by the Mufti who saw the Kotel as “converted into a synagogue.”¹²⁴

On September 28, 1929 Musa Kazim al-Husayni threatened to Harry Luke, the Chief Secretary of the High Commissioner, that Hajj Amin would “incite disturbances in Syria, Jordan, and Iraq if the British did not resolve the problem of the Wailing Wall question.”¹²⁵ Hajj Amin and other Muslim shuyukh dispatched letters to Muslim leaders around the world, particularly Ibn Sa`ud and Indian `ulema’ requesting that they defy the findings and hold the Jews solely responsible.¹²⁶

"Ibn Sa`ud protested to the British king against Jewish aims on September 20, 1929. The king of Britain answered Ibn Sa`ud that ‘the report that certain Jews had outraged the al-Aqsa Mosques while the Moslems were at Friday prayer… did not take place."¹²⁷

The Egyptian, al-Nahas, the head of the Wafd party and later the Prime Minister in Egypt, urged Hajj Amin to fight both the Jews and British, offering the Mufti financial assistance to that end.¹²⁸ Amin told his closest friends after disturbances broke out that they needed “Arab helpers” (Faza`a `Arabiyyah) from the villages. In addition, `Izzat Darwaza, who was a close friend of Hajj Amin and the head of the Awqaf, revealed insider information. “To say the truth,” Darwaza elucidated, “Hajj Amin backed the revolt of 1929, and even before 1929 he encouraged people to go to war against Zionists.” Jbara clarifies the contradictory claims, saying that it was however, a “fundamental policy” of Hajj Amin to tell the High Commissioner “that he had tried to calm the Arabs,” in spite of privately disclosing contrary activities.¹²⁹

Before being buried in Jerusalem at the Mufti’s request, Mawlana Muhammad `Ali, the head of the Caliphate Committee of India, instructed the Muslims of India, “to take a solemn vow after their prayers… to sacrifice if necessary their lives… to keep the sanctity of Jerusalem inviolate…” The Indian Muslim leaders told Amin and the Secretary of State, that “if Great Britain failed to bring a just solution to the Wailing Wall problem,” the Indian Muslims would join the Mufti in “revolt against the British.” Khan Bahador Muhammad Isma’il of India “added that Muslims of India were ready to defend al-Buraq al-Sharif whenever Hajj Amin should call upon them”¹³⁰ Hajj Amin had succeeded in transferring the issue “from a local one into a Muslim and Arab one.”¹³¹

Representatives of various Muslim communities travelled to Jerusalem in droves, holding a conference in November of 1929. They decided to issue a formal demand to the chief rabbi that “…the Blessed Buraq is a purely Moslem spot.” They demanded that Jews be permitted only “a simple visit without any ceremony, installation of objects or raising the voice…”¹³² Naturally, the chief rabbi did not dignify the proposition with a response. Similar assertions, of exclusive Muslim rights over the site of the former Jewish Temple, were sent to Ahmed Zaki Pasha of Egypt and Shafiq Bey Al-`Adma of Syria in order “to propagandize in Eastern Muslim countries against Zionists.”¹³³

Believing that the rift forming between the Arabs and Jews could imminently be repaired, Sir Spencer Davis, the treasurer of the Palestine government, tried to convince Hajj Amin to actually sit down and meet with his Jewish opponents. Insisting that he had said all he was willing to say in the letter, Hajj Amin refused face-to-face discussions.¹³⁴ The Mufti told the Colonial Office on October 19, 1929 that Jamal al-Husayni,¹³⁵ his relative would travel to “explain the rights of the Muslims” to Parliament. Jbara writes that “the Mufti said that the British were wrong to allow foreign people to immigrate to Palestine” blaming the violence on anger towards immigration.¹³⁶ After failing in Geneva to successfully petition the League of Nations to stop Jewish immigration and worship at the Kotel, the Mufti was accepted as a member of the Arab Executive Committee. The Committee adopted a “new policy” on September 30, 1930 in Nablus; “they wanted the Palestinians to riot as they had” previously done, at the Mufti’s incitement.¹³⁷

From that point on, Hajj Amin rested his legal and propaganda strategy on a copy of the Iradeh of the Khedive from September 21, 1840. The document stated that the Ottomans only granted Jews the right to pray at the Kotel without tables or chairs. He also further argued that a copy of the Liwa’¹³⁸ actively “prohibited the Jews from praying or standing on the Muslim waqfs” at all!¹³⁹ This seemed to him the final word in the debate. To Hajj Amin, it was simply a matter of finding documentation that a violation the rights of Jewish worship, had occurred in the past from Muslim rulers. If this could be demonstrated, the Mufti seemed to believe that the Western world would agree to readopt these religious discriminations.¹⁴⁰

Nevertheless, when Hajj Amin heard that the League of Nations had decided to appoint a commission, “to study, define and determine the rights and claims of Jews and Muslims” at the Kotel, he seemed to intuit that the non-Muslim world would not likely see the Jewish worship at the Kotel as unreasonable (chairs and all).¹⁴¹ The British soon saw that their former ally had become “the principle obstacle to any compromise or rapprochement between Jews and Arabs.” They determined that the “waqf land should be returned to the control of the [Mandate] government” as it had formerly been under the control of the Ottoman government, not to the Mufti.¹⁴²

PART II
Der Grossmufti und Der Fuehrer: Odd-Bedfellows?

Among New Historians and traditional Israeli narratives alike, the Hajj Amin is an unavoidable factor in the events leading up to the alternatively described flight or deportation of Arab Palestinians. Finkelstein, otherwise quite in step with Arab scholarship on the matter, cites that on at least a limited scale, Arabs were the “cheerleaders and enablers of the Final Solution.” He agrees, even with his archenemy Alan Dershowitz, that “the most famous example was Haj Amin Husayni, the grand Mufti of Jerusalem (and uncle of Yasser Arafat), who took refuge in Berlin in World War II.” Finkelstein differs from apologists like Mattar, describing Husayni as “a rabid Nazi,” who “personally lobbied Hitler to kill as many Jews as possible.” Lest this commentary be discounted as a Jewish bias finally surfacing in Finkelstein, we need only consult the minutes of the Mufti’s first meeting with Hitler in November of 1941:

"The objectives of my fight (mein kampf) are clear… the Jews want to establish [in Palestine] a central government for their own pernicious purposes… It is clear that the Jews have accomplished nothing in Palestine and their claims are lies. All the accomplishments in Palestine are due to the Arabs and not to the Jews. I am resolved to find a solution for the Jewish problem, progressing step by step without cessation…It is true that our common enemies are Great Britain and the Soviets whose principles are opposed to ours. But behind them stands hidden Jewry which drives them both… This fight will not only determine the outcome of the struggle between National Socialism and Jewry, but the whole conduct of this successful war will be of great and positive help to the Arabs who are engaged in the same struggle…"¹⁴³

What must be highlighted in this powerful commentary to the Fuehrer is the Mufti’s explanation that Nazism and the Neo-Salafi Nationalists of Palestine were “engaged in the same struggle.” That is, their struggle was not against Jews stealing the land or homes of Palestinians. To date, Jews had only immigrated, purchasing property, homes and generally with the help of Palestinians. Instead, the Mufti explains that the fight, the kampf, the jihad was against world Jewry which he and Hitler mutually asserted was behind every ill in the world. Hard a pill as it might be to swallow for those who have traditionally seen only Arab victimization in this conflict, the Jews of the Yishuv were faced with only one choice: resist the Mufti or facing the same fate of the victims of the Shoah which had begun to extend, by this time, into the Arab world.

In his “Postscript: the Mufti in Exile,” during the years of 1937-1974, Jbara lists “the Mufti’s activities in Lebanon, Iraq and Iran.” Strangely absent is a focus on the years in Berlin, from 1941-45, as a guest of the Third Reich. He mentions Hitler only three times, two in relation to the Mufti. When discussing their dialogs, he only intimates that Hajj Amin requested Nazi assistance in creating a “Greater Syria” rather than a Palestinian State, and that Hitler promised to appoint him as leader of this Syrian nation, and even the entire Arab world.¹⁴⁴

Mattar believes that the Mufti’s alliance with the Third Reich, and stay in Berlin as a guest of the regime, was merely a marriage of convenience. Both views demonstrate the error of the scholastic hegemony in the post-Edward Said era. Said imagined, in his view of “Orientalism,” that Arab voices could somehow approach Arab issues with less bias than Jewish or Western scholars.¹⁴⁵ What Said ignored, borne of his own ironic bias, was that outsiders are often able to more dispassionately analyze situations that one might not want to take a hard look at in their own culture. Jbara and Mattar are both thus examples of the unwillingness of Arab scholarship to take a hard look at Hajj Amin’s Nazi years, from the primary sources.

Finkelstein’s describes one of many ongoing debates between himself and Dershowitz in the prologue of his Beyond Chutzpah. Though Dershowitz has made a number of factual fumbles himself in the exchange, Finkelstein’s political responsum made a number of inaccurate assumptions. Skeptical of Dershowitz’s devotion of “many pages” to the Mufti in his The Case for Israel, Finkelstein notes that on pages 54-60 Dershowitz draws from a “right-wing Israeli newspaper, and a false attribution to Benny Morris,” claiming “that the Nazis financed the 1936- 39 Arab Revolt.”¹⁴⁶

Finkelstein is correct that Morris does not comment to this effect. He is wrong, however, in asserting that the facts themselves are inaccurate. Finkelstein says of this claim – which he traces to the newspaper article by Sarah Honig¹⁴⁷ – that “none of the major academic treatments of the Arab Revolt… mention Nazi funding.”¹⁴⁸ Here too, Finkelstein is technically correct. Honig traces her source to “ample documentation” to the 42 volumes of the Nuremburg proceedings. Dubious as this sounds to Finkelstein, at the Nuremberg Trials, Eichmann’s deputy Dieter Wisliceny, subsequently executed as a war criminal, testified as follows:

"The Mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and adviser of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of this plan... He was one of Eichmann’s best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures. I heard him say, accompanied by Eichmann, he had visited incognito the gas chamber of Auschwitz."¹⁴⁹

More to the point of funding the Arab Revolt, which Finkelstein finds unbelievable, Jeffrey Herf’s Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World – in its extensive analysis of both the Arabic language Nazi radio broadcasts¹⁵⁰ – documents that Dershowitz (and ultimately Honig), was correct:

"In June 1939, Hans Pieknbrock, the director of military intelligence in the Abwehr, wrote to its chief, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, that “through his middle man, the Grand Mufti has conveyed his sincere thanks for the support given to him so far. It was only as a result of the money we gave to him that it was possible to carry out the revolt in Palestine.” The Germans sent arms shipments to Palestine by way of Iraq and Saudi Arabia with agreement of these governments. They sent money to finance the Palestine revolt and intensified contacts with anti-British military and circle close to King Farouk in Egypt. After the Munich conference of October 1938, the Nazi Party organized in Palestine aided Arab guerilla bands."¹⁵¹

The timing of the revolt is certainly curious in its coinciding with the rise of the Third Reich. Mounting evidence has demonstrated that the relationship between Hajj Amin and the Nazi regime was hardly a marriage of strange bed-fellows with common enemies. The Mufti asserted, in a speech to the Nazi SS Handschar Division in January 1944, that the Bosnian Muslims should join with the Nazis to fight “Islam’s principal enemy,” rationalizing the alliance as “my enemy’s enemy is my friend.”¹⁵² This was nothing but a sales pitch. Amin had been a guest in Berlin for years – even having witnessed the “Final Solution” first hand – by this time having a long history of mutual respect and admiration.

Robert Satloff comments that “to many Germans and their European partners, Arabs were only marginally less inferior than Jews.” He notes a particular German officer who warned an Arab “enjoying the comeuppance of Jews near Tunis,” that his “time will come. We will finish with the Jews and then we will take care of you.”¹⁵³

This officer, however, was wrong, not just in his assessment of a likely Nazi victory, but in his assumptions about Hitler’s evolving perspective on the Arab Semites. What Herf calls a “blizzard of memos” were sent from the Nazi leadership trying “to convince Arabs that the Nuremberg race laws were not aimed at those Semites.” German officials had the difficult task of clarifying to themselves “how an officially racist government could appeal to Arabs and Muslims.” In the Arab Higher Committee’s Documentary Record, we read Hitler’s initial reply from March of 1941, before the subsequent invitation of the Mufti to Berlin. Hitler’s favorable disposition towards the Arabs, contrary to the general German prejudices, is clear in the letter:

"Our view is that Arabs, who possess an ancient culture and have proved their administrative, judiciary and military maturity are capable of self-government. Germany recognizes the full independence of the Arab countries, or where this has not yet been attained, their right to it… Germany, traditionally friendly to the Arabs, and in accordance with the desires expressed to your private secretary, is ready to cooperate with you and to give you all possible military and financial help required…"¹⁵⁴

Egyptian and Iranians inquired about “the meaning of the concept artverwandt,” meaning “racially kindred.” The Egyptians wanted guaranteed protection of German-Egyptian marriages and the Persians – of the newly named “Iran” – wanted official recognition of their “Aryan” status under the Nuremberg laws. While there was ambivalence towards these requests – Iranians being told that in spite of their heritage they could not be recognized as pure Aryans “lock, stock and barrel” – it was explained that they and the Arab peoples were “no worse off” than non- German European nations.¹⁵⁵ The Muslim world would be safe under the reign of a global Reich.

Moreover, Herf documents that “German racial legislation permitted marriage between Germans and non-Jewish Arabs and Muslims.”¹⁵⁶ German laws – he quotes – did “not regard foreign peoples as of less value than the German people.” Conversely, they honored “the peculiarities of alien peoples to the same extent as they place value on the preservation of German distinctiveness,” In the spring and summer of1936, “Nazi officials had reassured Arab diplomats that Nazi ideology and policy were directed against the Jews only, not non-Jewish Semites, which they explained had never referred to anyone other than Jews in German parlance. Nazism viewed Arabs and Muslims as different from the Germans but, in clear contrast to the racial hierarchy presented in Mein Kampf, not as racially inferior.¹⁵⁷

Herf writes, that “at least some Arab and Persian diplomats” had begun to incorporate the lingo of Nazism and “had become accustomed to thinking about peoples and nations in the racist categories emerging from the National Socialist regime.”¹⁵⁸ In spite of the Reich’s pledges, some of the language in Mein Kampf would prove problematic in courting the Arab and Iranian-Aryan world.¹⁵⁹ To intercept this potential problem, Fritz Grobba, ambassador to Iraq (1932-39), serving in the German legation in Kabul, Afghanistan (1923) urged a revision of certain passages. Grobba opined that a translation of the book into Arabic “would be met by Arab readers” throughout the Middle East “with great interest,” so long as a modification of certain passages, which detailed racial hierarchy, could be made “in ways that correspond to the sensitivities of the race conscious Arabs.” He suggested “replacing the term ‘anti-Semitic’ with ‘anti-Jewish’ and ‘anti-Semitism’ with ‘anti-Judaism’,” a trend which has stuck in the rhetoric of the region today.¹⁶⁰

Furthermore, Grobba suggested a disclaimer for the Arabic translation, which was published in 1936, and remains a popular best-seller in the Arab Middle East. “German racial legislation does not want to pass judgment on the quality and worth of other peoples and other races,” he offered to Hitler. The Nazi Fuehrer “had agreed to a translation” with these edits, “modify[ing] his racist arguments” as well as deleting “passages bound to offend Arabs and Muslims.”¹⁶¹

Ottob von Hentig, the head of Office VII, which dealt with the Near and Middle East in the Political Department of the Foreign Ministry, sought to render a version of the text for “educated circles of the Arabic-speaking peoples” as the first attempt at translation – by Arabist Bernard Moritz – still managed to let numerous problematic passages escape. “If a man of such cultivation and education,” versed in Arabic and a native German, could be found in Berlin, Hentig fantasized, then “a truly good Arabic translation of the Fuehrer’s work would have great propagandistic value,” and “would meet with extensive sympathy in the whole Arabic-speaking world from Morocco to India.”¹⁶² He asserted that the “tone of the book” should reflect one which “every Muslim understands,” recommending that “sacred flavor” of the Qur’an itself be perverted for their aims. He insisted that the completed text be reinterpreted by “a scholar of the Koran who will give it the sacred ton which will be understood and valued in the whole Islamic world,”¹⁶³ in order “to make connections between National Socialism and the traditions of Islam.”¹⁶⁴

Parallel to these efforts at the Nazification of the Middle East, Hajj Amin explained to Hitler that the German leader was becoming increasingly “admired by the entire Arab world.” The Arabs, he explained, “were Germany’s natural friends because they had the same enemies as had Germany, namely, the English, the Jews, and the Communists.”¹⁶⁵ The Arabs, the Mufti explained, “were therefore prepared to cooperate with Germany with all their hearts and stood ready to participate in the war, not only negatively by the commission of acts of sabotage and the instigation of revolts, but also positively by the formation of an Arab Legion” to fight alongside the German armies. In the coming years, as he set up the Bosnian-Muslim Handschar SS division, Hajj Amin would make good on his promise while still in Europe. ¹⁶⁶

Unlike Hitler’s German, Austrian, and European allies, Hajj Amin’s journey towards agreement with Hitler began in non-European traditions. His hatred of Jews, Communists, the British, and the Americans began in Neo-Salafism as well as the legacy of oppression towards Jews which was the trademark of certain strains of Islamicate thought. The meeting between the Mufti and Hitler on November 28, 1941, was not a “clash of civilizations” but rather a convergence from different starting points.¹⁶⁷

The Nazi propaganda, emanating from the Reich, deliberately targeted the Arab Middle East due to its own legacy of persecuting Jews. In the broadcast entitled “England’s Betrayal of the Arabs in Palestine,” on December 24, 1940, Germany composed the myth that “from pre- Islamic times”¹⁶⁸ to that very day, Palestine was “an undivided part of Arab land” and that “its inhabitants consisted of a pure race Arabs” (reinrassigen Araber). The Nazis unhistorically asserted of Umar’s liberation of Palestine, the Jewish population “finally had to leave.” In fact, however, Palestinian Jews of the seventh century called Umar “the liberator” and “a God-send from our brethren of the Children of Ishmael.”¹⁶⁹ The broadcast continued that from that conquest the Jews spread out to “stir up disorder and harm elsewhere in the world.” Like many of the broadcasts, this example relied heavily on Islamicate Anti-Semitic imagery, emanating from the Abbassid-Era Anti-Jewish literature in the aftermath of the second Hijrah century Jewish revolts. “The broadcast concluded with a verse from the Koran: “Memory serves the believers.”¹⁷⁰

Arabs Extending the Reach of the Reich

Malmann and Cuppers call Hajj Amin “the most significant collaborator” with the regime, explaining that he had established “the details of the planned murders”¹⁷¹ during several meetings with Adolf Eichmann. As the Neo-Salafism of Rashid Rida and the Mufti took root, existing animosity towards Jews manifested in further Arab championing of the Nazi cause. In North Africa, the birth place of Salafism, the hatred took on an intensified expression in support for the Nazis.

In Robert Satloff’s Among the Righteous, an author which Finkelstein references as “one of the world’s smartest Arabists,” the author reminds us of the movie Casablanca. In it, a Gestapo officer Major Strasser urges Ilse, the wife of the Czech underground leader, to persuade her husband to return to Paris.¹⁷² He explains her husband’s options, noting something quite interesting: “it is possible the French authorities will find a reason to put him in the concentration camp here.”¹⁷³ When this movie was released in December 1942, viewers did not miss a beat at the reference. Satloff explains “the existence of these camps – much like the terrible fate of Jews more generally – was known, certainly among those who were interested in knowing. Somehow, over the last sixty years, those stories have been lost.”¹⁷⁴

While penned in his book, aimed at documenting the numerous positive instances of “Righteous” Arabs coming to the aid of Jews facing Nazi persecutions, Satloff sadly came to realize that the Arab hand was not as passive as he had imagined prior to his research. Even Finkelstein, when presented with the research, is compelled to acknowledge Satloff’s words that “Arabs played a role at every level,” some going “door to door with the Germans, pointing out Jews for arrest.” Others leading Jews “on forced marches or served as overseers at labor camps.” Finkelstein surmises that Satloff “shows how the Nazis set up the machinery of death in North Africa. Although ‘only’ 4,000 to 5,000 Jews died before the Allies liberated the area in 1943, many more were consigned to forced labor camps in hellish conditions.” Satloff informs the reader:

"At every stage of the Nazi, Vichy, and Fascist persecution of Jews in Arab lands, and in every place that it occurred, Arabs played a supporting role. At times, Arabs were essential to the process. At other times, the Arab role was passive yet still critical. And there were those occasions when certain Arabs did more than just collaborate – they made an already trying situation intolerable."¹⁷⁵

“Go, go, I would wish to be with you, Hitler,” were the lyrics of one popular Berber song from the period.¹⁷⁶ Satloff importantly points out that there was no one forcing these Arabs to “work alongside the German authorities, host Gestapo officers – not just regular German army men – in their homes, track down Jewish laborers, break into Jewish houses to ransack property, or inform on their Jewish compatriots.” These Arabs, he laments, “were full partners” in the Nazi, Vichy, and Fascist brutality against local Jews.¹⁷⁷ Gad Shahar, a veteran of Tunisia’s Safsa and Sedjanane labor camps, recalled that the local Arab population cheered German soldiers on as they paraded Jews through the country’s capital. “Muslims applauded the Nazi forces that arrested the Jews and made them march through Tunis,” he told an interviewer. “Muslims smashed bottles at us, at the Mateur station, jugs from which [we planned] to quench the thirst of old and tired Jews.”¹⁷⁸

Yehoshua Duweib, another survivor of a Tunisian labor camp, testified that the “Arabs were gloating” when the Germans marched him and fellow Jews through town on the way to a work site. “They would say to us: ‘Push the shovel, ya Shalom,” a common Jewish name. By this, they meant: “Until now you were a merchant or a clerk, but now you’ll work hard.’” Even Arab women, broke with the local custom of remaining in their houses. They too came out to watch and laugh at the humiliated Jewish workers.¹⁷⁹

Victor Cohen, also from Tunis, reported that when the Germans herded Jewish laborers through the streets, the “true nature” of the Arab city was revealed. “They were happy… they would mock and laugh: ‘Take the shovel, pick up the shovel.’”¹⁸⁰ A British journalist, who entered the town of Gafsa with Allied troops just hours after it had been abandoned by the Germans, was shocked at the extent of the plunder. “All the Jews in the town have been pillaged by the Arabs acting under German encouragement,” wrote Philip Jordan in his wartime memoir. “Even the doors and windows have been stolen. It is horrible.”¹⁸¹

Thanks to the alliance with the Mufti, the Nazi reach into Arab lands had greatly extended. History would have taken a different course with only a few alternate victories. In 1942, if Erwin Rommel had defeated the British Field Marshal Montgomery’s troops in Egypt, and then pushed forward into Palestine as anticipated, the Einsatzkommando would have received the order to exterminate the Jewish immigrants.¹⁸² The editor of the Angriff, Schwarz van Berk, on his tour of Palestine in 1937, summarized his pragmatic views about Jewish immigration to Palestine in his letter to Dr, Von Hentig, head of the Near Eastern Division of the Foreign Ministry in this way:

"It is good that the Jews from Germany came to Palestine and spent their fortune here.... Palestine is a suitable place for German-Jewish immigration, they will not take root there, their fortunes will be spent and the Arabs will liquidate them… the Jews in Palestine are doomed, their end will be to leap from the frying pan into the fire."¹⁸³

Today, a new generation in the Arab world is beginning to free itself from the dogmas of religious institutions and their manipulation of politics and education alike. This is a path which all societies must tread down in their quest for progression and true autonomy. Indeed it is a path which Western freethinkers, scholars and skeptics alike had, and in some cases still have, to hack away the thorns and thicket from. As this shedding of the cocoon of `ulama’, taqlid (uncritically following a shaykh or `alim), and `Asabiyyah (Ethno-Nationalism) continues, the Arab and Persian Middle East must look at what Haim Gerber called the “hard truths” on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The language describing Zionism as a “colonial” endeavor, or Israel as “Nazi” in its relationship to the Palestinians is not something new, but an adaptation of the propaganda introduced by the Nazis and the Mufti during the Third Reich. Just as the Israeli New Historiography is opening the eyes of the Jewish people to transgressions which occurred in the wars of 1947-49, the Arab and Muslim world at large must accept what Morris modestly calls a “shared responsibility.” Only when both sides understand and empathize with each other – as human equals – can any lasting peace grow out of the excrement and blood that has soiled this conflict.

___________________________________________
¹ Martin Kramer, (1999). “Bernard Lewis”. Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing. Vol. 1. (London: Fitzroy Dearborn) 719–720.
² Ismail, Fadel. Akhbar Es-Sahra. N°2, Western Sahara Mission Newsletter, 2002.
³ This important term comes from the historian Marshall Hodgson who definedIslamicate as that which “...would refer not directly to the religion, Islam, itself, but to the social and cultural complex historically associated with Islam and the Muslims, both among Muslims themselves and even when found among non-Muslims.”(Venture of Islam, v. 1, p. 59). This designation for Andalusia is employed here as there was not a homogenous period permeating the history of Muslim Spain in such a manner that it can be characterized as “Islamic,” in a literal sense, as a whole.
⁴ Which notably forced the Maimonides family from Andalusia.
⁵ See Raphael Patai's Jadid al-Islam for a full treatment and record of these repressive laws and of the Meshad massacre of 1839.
⁶ Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror, (Modern Library, 2003), 90-91, 108, 110-111. Here we will find always a Husayni culpability in the violence.
⁷ That is, as a separate religion from the Jewish sectarianism existing in the aftermath of the Himyarite Kingdom that authors like Chaim Rabin, John Wansbrough, and many other scholars see Muhammad as participating in. It is also to differentiate the verbal usage of “Islam” in the Qur’an from its later use as a noun describing an institutionalized religion rather than a universal, pluralistic activity of submitting to God.
⁸ It is essential to our examination of the Mufti, to note that during this time no Jews had deprived Arabs of any land or homes, as would come to typify later complaints against Israel. Jewish immigration first bolstered the Palestinian economy until the global economic depression, arguing here, as C.A. Bayly does in The Birth of the Modern World 1780-1914, that “all local, national, or regional histories must, in important ways... be global histories.” (Baily 2) With an exploding Arab population during the industrial era, it became all too easy to blame the new impoverished Jewish immigrants for buying up precious Arab land. The key personality in this demonization would prove to be the Mufti, Hajj `Amin Al-Husayni.
<sup>9</sup> The term in Hebrew which refers to the body of Jewish residents in Palestine before the establishment of the State of Israel.
<sup>10</sup> A hybridization of Arab Nationalism, and Pan-Islamic Neo-Salafism which was (under Rida) mating with Sa`udi Wahhabism.Wahhabism would draw on the famous Hanbali teacher Ibn Taymiyyah, who was well known for his animosity towards the Jewish people, even defining it as a fundament of the religion of Islam for one to distinguish themselves in appearance from Jews.
¹¹ Emanating from this key figure and the daily broadcasts of the Third Reich, which funded him, to the Middle East and North Africa.
¹² These are available from the Public Records Office, the Colonial Office under number CO733, the Foreign Office under number FO 371 in the Israeli State Archives in the Zionist Archive and at St. Anthony’s College in Oxford. Taysir Jbara, Palestinian Leader Hajj Amin Al-Husayni. (Princeton: Kingston Press, 1985) 1
¹³Jbara 1
¹⁴ Avi Shlaim, The Debate About 1948, cited by Benny Moris, Making Israel (Ann Arbor, 2007) 126
¹⁵ Emphasis mine. From Said’s notes in Said, Edward. “New History, Old Ideas.” Al-Ahram Weekly, no. 378 (1998): The Revolt (1948, report. Los Angeles: Nash Publishing, 1972), 162. Red Cross figures for the massacre at Deir Yassin specify about 250 civilians, mostly women and children. Of this group, Begin has the following to say: “The fighting was thus very severe. Yet the hostile propaganda, disseminated throughout the world, deliberately ignored the fact that the civilian population of Deir Yassin was actually given a warning by us before the battle began. One of our tenders carrying a loud speaker was stationed at the entrance to the village and it exhorted in Arabic all women, children and aged to leave their houses and to take shelter on the slope of the hill. By giving this humane warning our fighters threw away the element of complete surprise, and thus increased their own risk in the ensuing battle.” Despite the Irgun’s humane warning these unfortunates were slaughtered. Of Begin, David Ben Gurion said in May 1963: “Begin is a thoroughly Hitlerite type, ready to destroy all the Arabs for the wholeness, who devotes all his efforts for a holy purpose ... and it has a clear meaning: the murder of tens of Jews, Arabs, and Englishmen-in the explosion of the King David Hotel, the pogrom in Deir Yassin and the murder of Arab women and children.... I have no doubt that Begin hates Hitler-but this hatred does not prove that he is different from him, and when for the first time I heard Begin on the radio-I heard the voice and the screeching of Hitler” (quoted in Israleft, # 108; the text is from a letter by Ben Gurion to Haim Guri). Perhaps one ought also to mention that the present Secretary General of the Jewish Agency (executive of the World Zionist Congress) is one Shmuel Lehis who was convicted as a criminal in 1948 for murdering at least 35 Arabs in cold blood in Hula village; Lehis was given an unconditional amnesty (his sentence was to have been 7 years), and rose to the top of the Zionist hierarchy. See “The Strange Case of Shmuel Lehis” by R. Barkan, Al Hamishmar, 3/3/78.
¹⁶ Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 163
¹⁷ Efraim Karsh, Benny Morris's Reign of Error, Revisited: The Post-Zionist Critique (Middle East Quarterly, Spring 2005: XII, 2) 31-42
¹⁸Jbara 13
¹⁹ Ibid 1
²⁰ Ibid 6
²¹ Ibid 8
²² Jbara 8
²³ Ibid 9
²⁴ Ibid 8
²⁵ Ibid
²⁶ It is today housed in the British Museum in the Library of Oriental Studies, no. OR3047: Tarajim Ahl al-Quds Fi al-Qarn al- Thani `Ashar. The Biography of People of Jerusalem in the Twelfth Century A.H. 1131.
<sup>27</sup> Their detractors would claim that they were from the Dair Sudan (“Black” Village), and were known as the “Al al-Aswad” (The Black Family). This is a dubious claim, however, and likely originates from anti-Black sentiments in the Arab world. Though the general treatment of Black Africans in the Middle East has been subpar since the commentaries of Al-Jaahizh, over a millennium ago, many Arab extended families have a distant black relative. The images that survive of the more recent members of the family, including Amin, show instead a light haired, blue-eyed Arab who would be greeted with open arms by the Nazis in the decades to come. Perhaps his adversaries intended to imply some “corruption” of the sayyidi bloodline, but it is unlikely that a sayyid family would marry outsiders then or today. Jbara 6
<sup>28</sup> Jbara 14
<sup>29</sup> Ibid 15
<sup>30</sup> Ibid
<sup>31</sup> Ibid 16
<sup>32</sup> Ibid
<sup>33</sup> Ibid 17
<sup>34</sup> Ibid 26
<sup>35</sup> A Hijazi designation for “sayyid.”
<sup>36</sup> Jbara 26
<sup>37</sup> Ibid
<sup>38</sup> Ibid
<sup>39</sup> Cohen, Hillel. Hillel Cohen, Army of Shadows, Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917–1948. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008) 26
<sup>40</sup> Ibid 25
<sup>41</sup> Jbara 2; Tegart Papers, St. Anthony’s College, Box 1, file 3a, Oxford
<sup>42</sup> Gerber, Haim. “Zionism, Orientalism & the Palestinians.” Journal of Palestine Studies 33, no. 1 (2003): 31-41.
<sup>43</sup> Jbara 103
<sup>44</sup> Ibid 65
<sup>45</sup> Ibid 103)
<sup>46</sup> Jbara 82
<sup>47</sup> Ibid 105
<sup>48</sup> Theodore Hertzl’s Der Judenstaat was published in 1896.
<sup>49</sup> Jbara 12
<sup>50</sup> Furthermore, it must be understood that in terms of religious exercise, there are many mitzvoth which are relevant only to Eretz Yisrael, and thus a Jew wishing to commit to those commandments could only do so through `aliyah (immigration, or “going up” to the ancestral Jewish home).
⁵¹ Jbara 12
⁵² Ibid
⁵³ Ibid 14
⁵⁴ Ibid
⁵⁵ Jbara 27
⁵⁶ Ibid
⁵⁷ Ibid
⁵⁸ Ibid 67
⁵⁹ Cohen 55
⁶⁰ Ibid
⁶¹ Ibid
⁶² Cohen 15
⁶³ Emphasis mine. Ibid
⁶⁴ Ghada Karmi, In Search of Fatima, (London, 2004) 9-10
⁶⁵ Ibid 10
⁶⁶ Sir R. Storrs, Orientations, Nicholson & Watson, London 1945 p. 331: cited also Yehuda Taggar, The Mufti of Jerusalem and Palestine Arab Politics 1930 - 1937, Garland Publishing, 1986; Ronald Storrs (reprint 1972) The Memoirs of Sir Ronald Storrs Ayer Publishing, p. 349
⁶⁷ Jbara 33
⁶⁸ The charge was for violating paragraphs 32, 57, and 63 of the Ottoman criminal code (dealing with incitement to riot). See E. Elat Haj Amin el Husseini, Ex Mufti of Jerusalem,Tel Aviv 1968
⁶⁹ Jbara 34
⁷⁰ Mattar, Philip. The Mufti of Jerusalem. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. 22
⁷¹ Ibid 24
⁷² Ibid
⁷³ Jbara 35; ZA/S25/10499
⁷⁴ Ibid 67. This was the result of the efforts of Amir `Abdullah and the Jordanian shuyukh who met Herbert Samuel at al-Salt in Transjordan. However, Hajj Amin decided not to return to Palestine until he had been granted a full pardon ZZ/24/2797/4; also ZA/ZA-5770/3/1
<sup>75</sup> “The majority of Muslims in Palestine wanted Hajj `Amin to succeed his brother,” he writes, “while the al-Nashashibi family supported Husam al-Din Jar-Alla,” as though it was only this rival family who the masses had nothing but a shared disdain for.
⁷⁶ Jbara 42, ISA file 245. The petitions from Transjordan were sent on April 18, 1921 to the high commissioner by representatives of Al-Balka, Al-Karak, al-Salt, amongst other places.
⁷⁷ Cohen 25
⁷⁸ Ibid
⁷⁹ “The majority of Muslims in Palestine wanted Hajj Amin to succeed his brother,” he writes, “while the al-Nashashibi family supported Husam al-Din Jar-Alla,” as though it was only this rival family who the masses had nothing but a shared disdain for.
⁸⁰ Jbara 42, ISA file 245. The petitions from Transjordan were sent on April 18, 1921 to the high commissioner by representatives of Al-Balka, Al-Karak, al-Salt, amongst other places.
⁸¹ Mattar 27
⁸² Mattar 26
⁸³ Jbara 41
⁸⁴ Ibid 43
⁸⁵ Ibid 44, Samuel: Momoirs, London, 1945, 169; Also Bentwich: Mandate Memoirs, 191
⁸⁶ Mattar 26
⁸⁷ Cohen 26
⁸⁸ Mattar 27
⁸⁹ Jbara 43, he cites ISA file 245 which does not demonstrate his case.
⁹⁰ Ibid 41
⁹¹ http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1106426.html Eli Ashkenazi, “Survivor of 1929 Hebron Massacre recounts her ordeal” Haaretz; “A rough guide to Hebron: The world's strangest guided tour highlights the abuse of Palestinians”, Independent 26 January 2008 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/a-rough-guide-to-hebron-the-worlds-strangest-guided-tourhighlights- the-abuse-of-palestinians-773018.html
⁹² Neil Kaplan, Early Arab-Zionist Negotiation Attempts, 1913-1931. (London: Routledge, 1983) 82.; “Arab Attack At Safed”, The Times, Saturday, August 31, 1929; pg. 10; Issue 45296; col D.; “The Safed Disorders”, The Times, Monday, September 2, 1929; pg. 12; Issue 45297; col D
⁹³ Ibid 74-5, citing Morris 128
⁹⁴ Cohen 55
⁹⁵ Apostasy regarded under Shariy`ah as punishable by death.
<sup>96</sup> Jbara 134
<sup>97</sup> Ibid
<sup>98</sup> Cohen 8
<sup>99</sup> Ibid 56
<sup>100</sup> Ibid 57
<sup>101</sup> Ibid
<sup>102</sup> Cohen 57
<sup>103</sup> Ibid
<sup>104</sup> Ibid
<sup>105</sup> Cohen 56
<sup>106</sup> Ibid 59
<sup>107</sup> Ibid 54
<sup>108</sup> Ibid
<sup>109</sup> Ibid
<sup>110</sup> Ibid
<sup>111</sup> Ibid 55
<sup>112</sup> Jbara 77
<sup>113</sup> Ibid 80
<sup>114</sup> Ibid
<sup>115</sup> Ibid 83
<sup>116</sup> Jbara 81
<sup>117</sup> Ibid 85
<sup>118</sup> Ibid
<sup>119</sup> Ibid 86
<sup>120</sup> Ibid
<sup>121</sup> Jbara 86
<sup>122</sup> Ibid 87
<sup>123</sup> Ibid 90
<sup>124</sup> Ibid
<sup>125</sup> Ibid
<sup>126</sup> Jbara 87
<sup>127</sup> Ibid 91
<sup>128</sup> Ibid
<sup>129</sup> Ibid 90
<sup>130</sup> Jbara 83
<sup>131</sup> Ibid 88
<sup>132</sup> Ibid 91
<sup>133</sup> Ibid
<sup>134</sup> Ibid 95
<sup>135</sup> Jamal, along with Amin, would in 1941 incite a pro-Nazi, and Nazi-funded revolt within Iraq.
<sup>136</sup> Ibid 92
<sup>137</sup> Jbara 93
<sup>138</sup> District of Jerusalem, dated November 12, 1909
<sup>139</sup> Jbara 95
<sup>140</sup> Ibid
<sup>141</sup> Ibid 94
<sup>142</sup> Ibid 95
<sup>143</sup> The Nation Associates, Inc. The Arab Higher Committee: Its Origins, Personnel and Purposes. The Documentary Record submitted to the United Nations, (New York City: United Nations, 1947),15
<sup>144</sup> Jbara 184
<sup>145</sup> In this way, Said painted all Western scholarship on Islam as “Orientalist” in the same way that centuries of primarily Christian polemic
<sup>146</sup> Norman G. Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History. Berkeley, (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005) 277
<sup>147</sup> Sarah Honig, “Fiendish Hypocrisy II: The Man from Klopstock St.” Jerusalem Post, 6 April, 2001
<sup>148</sup> Finkelstein 278
<sup>149</sup> Emphasis mine.
<sup>150</sup> As well as Nazi documentation of its financial and ideological relationship with Arab Nationalism of the era
<sup>151</sup> Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propagnada for the Arab World. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009) 32
<sup>152</sup> Cited in Richar Bonney, Jihad: From Qur’an to bin Laden (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) 275-76
<sup>153</sup> Satloff, Robert. Among the Righteous: Lost Stories From The Holocaust's Long Reach Into Arab Lands. (New York: Public Affairs, 2006) 74
<sup>154</sup> AHC 22
<sup>155</sup> Herf 21-22
<sup>156</sup> Ibid 23-24
<sup>157</sup> Ibid 24
<sup>158</sup> Ibid
<sup>159</sup> Iran’s name change coinciding with this period and the adoption of Nazi terminology in the Middle East.
<sup>160</sup> Herf 24
<sup>161</sup> Ibid 25
<sup>162</sup> Ibid
<sup>163</sup> Ibid
<sup>164</sup> Ibid
<sup>165</sup> Ibid
<sup>166</sup> Ibid
<sup>167</sup> Herf 76
<sup>168</sup> The Palestinian population soon came to see themselves as descended from the indigenous Canaanite period, “Arabized after the Arab invasion of Palestine” in 638 CE. (Mattar 24). There is, however, no evidence that Canaanite societies had continued to exist throughout the millennia. Whereas we have retained communities and writings from Samaritan alternative communities from the Second Temple Era, we see no references to Canaanites, their writings or their people throughout the ages. This belief then, must be regarded as utterly dubious, though it reflects a Palestinian self-understanding that was emerging with the new nationalism.
<sup>169</sup> A Jewish document widely circulated during the first century of Arab rule described Islam as “an act of God’s mercy.” S.D. Goitein, Jews and Arabs, 63 Contrary to commenting upon supposed Islamic Genocide against the Jews of Yathrib, contemporary Jews of Palestine spoke appreciatively of the coming of Umar’s forces to the Holy Land. (1965), II, 501. Cf. T. W. Arnold, The Preaching of Islam (London, 1913), 132; and S. D. Goitein, Jews and Arabs, Their Contacts Through the Ages (New York: Schocken Books, 1964), 62 ff pp 8 R. Shimon bar Yochai, writing during the period of the Arab conquest, described `Umar (the one primarily responsible for launching the conquest), as “a lover of Israel who repaired their breaches. He went on to insist that “The Holy One is only bringing the Kingdom of Ishmael in order to help you from the wicked one (Christians).” S. W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews (New York, 1952), III, 93
¹⁷⁰ Herf 49, footnote 43
¹⁷¹ : Klaus Michael Mallmann, Nationalsozialisten planten Holocaust in Palästina, (Pressemitteilung Nr. 36/2006 vom 11.4.2006) Hätte Erwin Rommel 1942 die Truppen seines Gegners, des britischen Feldmarschalls Montgomery, in Ägypten geschlagen und wäre anschlieẞend bis nach Palästina vorgedrungen, hätte das Einsatzkommando den Auftrag erhalten, die Juden in Palästina zu töten. Das Einsatzkommando sollte nach dem Muster der NS-Einsätze in Osteuropa arbeiten; dabei waren hunderttausende von Juden in der Sowjetunion und anderen Ländern Osteuropas ermordet worden. Die Nationalsozialistischen Machthaber wollten sich die Deutschfreundlichkeit der palästinensischen Araber für ihre Pläne zunutze machen. ‚Bedeutendster Kollaborateur der Nationalsozialisten und zugleich ein bedingungsloser Antimsemit auf arabischer Seit war Haj Amin el- Husseini, der Mufti von Jerusalem‘, schreiben Mallmann und Cüppers. In seiner Person habe sich exemplarisch gezeigt, ‚welch entscheidende Rolle der Judenhass im Projekt der deutsch-arabischen Verständigung einnahm.‘ El-Husseini habe unter anderem bei mehreren Treffen mit Adolf Eichmann Details der geplanten Morde festgelegt.
¹⁷² Satloff 7
¹⁷³ Ibid 8
¹⁷⁴ Ibid
¹⁷⁵ Satloff 73
¹⁷⁶ Ibid 74
¹⁷⁷ Ibid 88
¹⁷⁸ Ibid 75
¹⁷⁹ Ibid
¹⁸⁰ In Benghazi, Libya, Yehuda Chachmon said that under Italian rule Arab street gangs grew so brazen and powerful that Jews were too afraid to leave their homes after dark. “Arabs would throw oranges, tomatoes, stones at us… Every Jew would hide in his house after five in the evening. The houses were closed [i.e., locked up] with bars and you could not leave until the morning.” Satloff 75
¹⁸¹ Ibid 89
¹⁸² Mallmann
¹⁸³ David Yisraeli, “The Third Reich and Palestine.” Middle Eastern Studies (Taylor & Francis, Ltd) 7, no. 3 (1971): 346; Files of Pol. VII (Near Eastern Division), Schwarz von Berk's personal letter to Dr von Hentig, dated July 9, 1937.

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