The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty (21 page)

It would seem that Salim did not distinguish between the influx of Jews and the growing foreign influence in Jerusalem. He regarded Jewish immigration as another aspect of the same problem. The British consul John Dixon reassured him. He had seen the correspondence between Beirut and Istanbul, which stated that very few Jews were arriving in Beirut and Haifa. Still, he admitted that it was extremely easy for a Jew to enter Palestine: ‘Five pounds are enough to ensure admission to a Jew of any nationality whatsoever’ (most were Austrian, Russian and American nationals). The influence of those countries’ local consuls meant that the authorities could not bar the entry of many of the Jews. Nevertheless, from time to time the Ottomans managed to put obstacles in their path, as when the 1880 decree forbidding Jewish visitors to stay longer than three months became law in 1901. After a while, Jews who were British nationals could evade the
law because their passports did not indicate their Jewish origin. In this way, the British emancipatory spirit assisted the movement that fought against Jewish assimilation in Europe.

An individual’s reaction to Zionism often depended on his official position. The mayor was ambivalent; the men of commerce and finance, far from opposing it, made business deals with the newcomers, while the Tahiri branch linked Jewish immigration to the European challenge to the city’s Muslim sanctity. Indeed, it was the British consul James Finn, not a popular figure in the Husaynis’ historical memory, who connected the arrival of the Jews with the restoration of Crusader glory. It is no wonder, then, that Mufti Tahir II led the opposition to this immigration, with a special emphasis on the sale of land, not only within the family but among the Jerusalem notables as a whole. He knew that possession of land indicated a prolonged stay and a claim of ownership, whereas immigration without settlement was transient pilgrimage. There is no point in searching for a non-national motive for this opposition to the permanent settlement of foreigners in your country. While it is true that it arises – as the scholar of nationality Anthony Smith has shown – from the desire to preserve the purity of the tribe, or the religious or geographic community, it is equally true that it is especially forceful when it bears a national character, as Smith’s colleague Benedict Anderson argues.
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Tahir al-Husayni II was the first national
mufti
to react to Jewish immigration. At the time, there were half a million inhabitants in the territory that would later be demarcated as the British Mandate for Palestine – 80 percent Muslim and only 5 percent Jews – yet Tahir saw every additional Jew as a threat to the holy city. He was especially incensed that the foreign consuls were unreservedly helping Jewish immigrants to buy land by enabling them to do so as European nationals unconstrained by the laws of the Ottoman Empire. Thus the Zionist presence began to establish itself in Palestine despite the Ottoman government’s hostility.

In 1897 the government responded to Tahir’s urging and appointed a committee to examine the question of land purchases. This was the year that the First Zionist Congress was held in Basel, Switzerland. The committee recommended that strict limitations be imposed on Jewish land acquisition, and the government adopted the recommendation.

But while Tahir was fighting to stop the process, Rabah was selling land to the highest bidder. In 1891, for example, he sold the lands of the village of Qaluniya, lying between Abu Ghosh and Jerusalem, to
the founders of the Motza settlement, led by Yehoshua Yellin. We have seen how Ismail al-Husayni had abused one of the villagers, and it seems that the relations between the villagers and the Husayni family had not improved since. Not only did Rabah sell the land, he helped the Jewish buyers evade the Ottoman law under which the tract in question, categorized as uncultivated, had reverted to state property after three years and was barred from sale. Rabah purchased the land from the village headman and promptly sold it to the Jews. Twenty years earlier Yehoshua Yellin had been one of the Jewish bidders who had competed with Musa al-Husayni for some land in the valley of Jericho, but the government had stopped the Jews from buying it.

It is difficult to determine to what extent members of the family grasped the future potential of Jewish immigration. No doubt they read the newspapers of the time and took in the insights they offered (namely that we cannot analyse how it was received only how it was produced). In 1897 the local press in Jerusalem and Gaza mentioned the opening of the Zionist Congress.
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It published a letter from Frankfurt reporting that a movement of Jews wishing to return to Palestine had been founded six months previously. The movement, which the letter said was viewed favorably by the United States, Britain and Germany, was called Zionism. It went on to say that, if given permission by the Ottoman Empire, the Zionists proposed to establish in Palestine
masakin
(housing) for Jews who were being persecuted in Russia, Bulgaria and Romania. They promised to develop the agriculture and industry in Palestine, reduce the number of poor people in Europe and promote trade between Europe and the Orient. A correspondent of the newspaper
Al-Muqtataf al-Mufida
reported that the British press was sympathetic to the idea, and stated that there was no reason for the Ottoman Empire to reject such support from Europe or for Europe to object to a reduction of its poor population. The Europeans believed that the Jews, being utterly loyal to the West, would spread its culture and expand its trade and industry.

This extended report came in response to frequent questions from readers in the Arab press about the significance of Jewish immigration. An editorial noted that the Jews who had arrived so far had not fulfilled the above promises. While they had indeed developed trade and industry, they had failed badly in agriculture – and no wonder, since they were not farming people. But the principal failure was that the Jewish capitalists were doing nothing to help. ‘We local people’,
the editorial concluded, ‘must hope that the situation of the Jews in Europe will improve.’
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The Egyptian newspaper
Al-Manar
was the most emphatic, calling on the local population to resist the vicious European decision to export the weakest of its peoples to Palestine. The indigenous people should rise up and fight for
watan
and
umma
(which some translate as ‘homeland’ and ‘nation’, while others argue that those concepts were far from clear at a time when the Ottoman and Classical Arabic discourse was turning into a national one). The newspaper urged its readers not to ignore the problem, but it also showed understanding for the plight of the Jews. It explained that the Jews had competed with the Europeans, which was why they were subjected to persecution. The Jews, it stated, were like the Japanese – ‘Orientals who successfully competed with Europe’ – whereas the Muslims were failing to do so, a theme that the Egyptian press had harped on repeatedly since the end of the previous century.
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But unlike Salim and Tahir II, the grandest member of the Husayni clan, Ismail Bey, did not understand what the fuss was all about. While some of his kinsmen were issuing public calls against the sale of land to Jews, in 1906 he himself sold an estate, a steam-driven mill and an olive press in the village Ayn Siniya, on the Jerusalem–Nablus road, to the family of Jacob Chertok, a member of the early Zionist Bilu group and the father of Israel’s future prime minister Moshe Sharett. As noted above, Ismail had inherited his father’s extensive properties, including the Ayn Siniya land and more.
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To begin with, Ismail’s brother Shukri regarded the Zionist issue as a purely economic one and offered the Zionists land near Petah Tikvah and Hulda. Representatives of the Jewish Agency used to visit him at his office in Istanbul, where he was a high official in the Ottoman Department of Education. He spent most of his life in the imperial capital and was a tower of strength for the family during the dramatic transition from Ottoman rule to the centrist national government of the Young Turks.
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He was there when Theodore Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, came to see the sultan, and heard that Herzl proposed buying Palestine for billions, though Abd al-Hamid II refused. To Shukri this was merely an amusing anecdote, but the future
mufti
al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni would speak of this episode – which occurred a year after he was born – as the most decisive event for him and his family, with the exception of the Balfour Declaration.
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The family could not tell whether Herzl was a serious person or a
mountebank, since in those days there was no shortage of charlatans who presented themselves as deliverers of Judaism and Christianity. The so-called Prince Emmanuel, for example, was an eccentric Jew who asked the Husaynis to help him set up an Anglo-Zionist college. Before receiving an answer he proclaimed that he had founded the first Zionist college in Jerusalem, then vanished as suddenly and mysteriously as he had appeared.
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Said al-Husayni’s attitude towards Zionism was unusual. His father, Ahmad Rasim, had sent him to study for some time at the Jewish school, the Alliance Israélite, where he learned Hebrew. This did not induce him to support the notion of the Jews’ return to their ancient homeland, but it seems to have prevented him from adopting an unequivocal anti-Zionist stance. Said had several Jewish friends from his school days, and perhaps these personal relationships gave rise to mixed feelings. His knowledge of Hebrew provided him with an unusual career as the local censor of the Hebrew press in Jerusalem, which entailed daily reading of the Hebrew newspapers that had appeared in the city since the middle of the century. Eventually his familiarity with the language and political trends led him to adopt an anti-Zionist, though not anti-Jewish, position.

His field of endeavor combined with his being a Husayni shaped Said’s attitude towards Zionism. In 1891, when he ran for the post of representative of Jerusalem in the Ottoman Parliament, he made public statements warning against continued Zionist immigration. It was not an easy position for him to take, since at the time his son Ibrahim Said was employed by ICA (the Jewish Colonization Association), the body created by Baron Edmond de Rothschild to supervise his investment and develop the economy and settlements of the Zionist enterprise in Palestine. When Ibrahim Said resigned from the company, it became easier for his father to come out publicly against Zionism. That year Said and Salim al-Husayni, together with some other Jerusalem notables, sent the sultan a telegram to that effect. It seems that Said’s eventual decision to oppose Zionism was taken in 1905, when he organized a conference against Jewish immigration and land purchases by the Zionist movement. The following year he said in an interview with
Al-Aqdam
that he and Salim had been rallying other Arab members of parliament to urge the sultan to take stronger action against Zionism in Palestine.
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It was also in 1905 that the first hostile incident took place between a member of the Husayni family and a Zionist representative. Salim
was visiting his nephew Abd al-Salam II, who was a government official in Jaffa, when David Lewontin, the manager of the local branch of Anglo-Palestine Bank, publicly insulted him. Abd al-Salam fired off an angry letter to the president of the bank in London, and the family noted another proof of the arrogance of Zionism and the dangers it represented.
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Yet a very different interaction took place the same year when Musa Kazim, then the
qaymaqam
of Jaffa, sent armed guards to protect the new Jewish neighborhood of Neveh Zedek, which adjoined Jaffa on the north and which had been founded by Eliezer Rokah at the beginning of the century. Rokah and Musa Kazim had been friends since childhood, and thanks to Musa Kazim the new neighborhood, which had been plagued by highway robbers, could now feel secure.
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The Husaynis had always been on excellent terms with the Rokah family, and the gesture was personal, not political (though in those days the difference between the two was not yet sharply defined).

Curiously, a much lesser-known member of the family, Sheikh Yusuf al-Husayni, was the family authority on Judaism. But he was interested in the Jewish religion and tradition, not in Zionism, so his insight did little to heighten the family’s political awareness. He was especially interested in the connection between Judaism and Islam, and in conversations with Jewish religious scholars he tried to convince them that the story of Abraham and Ishmael contained coded predictions of the future appearance of the Prophet Muhammad.
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But even this open-minded view of the two religions could not avert the forthcoming struggle for the country.

THE FALL OF ABD AL-HAMID II

Before the family could quite grasp the significance of the Jewish longing for Jerusalem and Eretz Israel that would become a vast colonialist project of dispossession, their world was badly shaken when Abd al-Hamid II lost his place in Istanbul and in history.

Though in terms of Western historiography Ismail al-Husayni was the most progressive (given his treatment of his daughters and his Western education), he regarded the sultan’s fall as an unmitigated disaster for the family. Throughout the Hamidi reign, Ismail had given his unqualified support to Ottoman rule, and of all of his family he was the most loyal to the ruler. Ismail had been largely responsible
for supervising and controlling the ‘new’ invention that most worried Abd al-Hamid II, namely, the printing press. The sultan recognized the power of the printed word and of the press to incite and spread unrest. Just as the clock is seen as one of the signs of the age in which the concept of a national community was born, theoreticians of nationalism consider mass printing to have been another technological and material innovation that contributed to the concept’s development.