The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty (35 page)

Not everyone in the family agreed. Al-Hajj Amin’s nephew Jamil al-Husayni strongly opposed this tactic. When the six boys were at school they were very close, but during the war they parted ways and their views of the world began to differ greatly. Both Jamil and al-Hajj Amin were members of the Arab Club, but Jamil antagonized al-Hajj Amin by joining the Literary Club of the Nashashibis as well. Now Jamil used Arif al-Arif’s paper,
Suriya al-Janubiyya
(Southern Syria), to call on the associations not to use the Nabi Musa celebrations as an
occasion for rioting and to respect the holiday’s sanctity. Arif al-Arif agreed with this line, though later he was accused of having planned the unauthorized demonstration.
⁷
He was probably innocent of the charge but was compromised by his friendship with al-Hajj Amin.

At the end of Easter Sunday, 4 April 1920, Ronald Storrs wrote in his diary:

The Nabi Musa celebrations turned into a riot aimed against the Jews. A man by name of al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the Mufti’s brother, was responsible for the riot. Like all men who instigate riots, having incited the mob, he himself vanished.
⁸

Storrs was convinced that the
mufti
had had a hand in organizing the event from start to finish. Like other British officials, he was ambivalent about Kamil. Though they suspected him of secretly working against them, at the same time they were charmed by his incredible generosity. When they first occupied the city, some hungry soldiers broke into the
mufti
’s house and stole two chickens and some other foodstuffs. General Allenby was furious and asked the
mufti
to make a formal complaint against the marauders. To which the mufti replied in a letter: ‘The damage done is insignificant compared to the kindness shown me by your highness, so that the soldiers’ actions are no more than children’s misbehavior in their father’s house.’
⁹

Kamil was not blamed directly for the April events, but Storrs had no doubt that he had been the instigator. Yet the family did not consider the event of great importance and did not view it as a crisis with the authorities or even with Zionism. After all, the Nabi Musa celebrations had always occasioned religious riots. The only one who considered the event highly significant was al-Hajj Amin, but even he admitted later that the celebrants had gone too far and that it was necessary to find a way of cooperating with the British.
¹⁰

The Nabi Musa celebration had become especially charged after 1910, when the Orthodox community began to mark its Easter with a procession from the Roman Patriarchate to the Church of the Resurrection. In 1920, it coincided with the Muslim procession. Large numbers of Muslims and Christians thronged the narrow, stepped alley of the Via Dolorosa while many spectators watched from above. The Old City was simply too small to contain such numbers. The crowd was augmented by a group of Jews making their way, though not in a procession, to the Wailing Wall. They were protected by a number of
armed supporters, who served to heighten the tension more than they guarded the devout Jews. In 1920 the Orthodox Good Friday coincided not only with the Muslim holiday but also with Passover and, for good measure, with Good Friday on the Western churches’ Gregorian calendar.
¹¹

George Napier Whittingham, an English travel writer, was an eyewitness and could later tell Storrs what really happened. That Friday, on his way to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, he ran into the traditional Nabi Musa procession in David Street. At its center, he saw a member of the Husayni family doing a dervish dance, which the crowd accompanied with encouraging cries and prayers. Flags and religious banners intermingled, and the procession moved like a tornado capable of swallowing up everything in its path. Whittingham hastily retreated into an open doorway and saved himself. Women on the balconies threw down colorful kerchiefs, which one of the dancing dervishes picked up and tied to the staff of the Prophet’s green banner.

Whittingham followed the procession, which advanced towards the Haram al-Sharif forecourt, where speeches were made in Arabic and English. Kamil and al-Hajj Amin addressed the crowd in Arabic, inveighing against the Balfour Declaration and Jewish migration to Palestine. From there the procession turned towards Jericho. Whittingham spent the evening in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and Friday passed peacefully for him. But like everyone else, he felt that this would be an unusual Easter.

Meanwhile the Muslim celebrants continued on their way. That year they did not walk all the way to Jericho, but stopped on the last hill before the descent to the Dead Sea, where they waited for the groups from Nablus and Hebron to join them before proceeding together to Nabi Musa’s tomb. On their way they passed through the neighborhood of Ras al-Amud, which lies on the way to Abu Dis and the villages east of Jerusalem. The village children watched them from the flat roofs of their houses, some dancing in circles while their parents watched the procession from the roadside. April being a month of sunshine and rain, many carried umbrellas, which is why the Christians dubbed Nabi Musa the umbrella festival. Only men carried umbrellas, and for most of the route the men and women were separated; only in the Bedouin areas did they mingle freely. Peddlers also lined the road and sold their wares, falafel and drinks. Every neighborhood and village flourished its own banners and placards, and the deafening noise was accompanied by the trilling of shepherds’ flutes.
¹²

The procession was expected to reach the big encampment that had been prepared near Nabi Musa’s tomb, where they usually stayed from Friday until the following Thursday. This time they waited until Sunday for the other groups to arrive before going on to the prophet’s tomb.

On Easter Sunday, Whittingham again walked to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where he encountered a large company of British military police sent there to forestall Christian interdenominational outbreaks. It consisted of almost the entire military police force available in the Jerusalem area, and only later did it become clear that it would have been better deployed to separate Muslims and Jews. A large crowd packed the church’s rounded interior, watching the Patriarch hand torches blazing with holy fire to the young priests. By the light of the torches, Whittingham saw that an untraditional circle had formed around Captain Adamson, the commander of the military force, and the image of a British officer illuminated by Latin holy fire made him smile. It was his last smile that day.

After a while, Whittingham left the crush and went out to the Via Dolorosa, where he found himself flanked by the Latin-Catholic procession and that of the Eastern churches. The two circled the tomb in impeccable order, until a pilgrim from the Syrian Church moved a chair belonging by tradition to the Coptic Church. Then, as Whittingham put it, ‘all hell broke loose’. Women and children screamed, and amid the blows and curses it was impossible to tell who had the upper hand. Suddenly the church door caught fire, which Captain Adamson succeeded in putting out. Whittingham fled the scene and hurried to the Jaffa Gate, where he ran into the main drama of that Sunday.
¹³

When Storrs heard the description he sighed. He had received warnings some days before the Nabi Musa celebration that this time there would be riots. Learning that the procession had not gone on to Jericho heightened his anxiety. General Allenby had ordered him to ensure that the Jewish Passover morning worship did not coincide with the sacred fire ritual at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but he had not expected clashes to erupt in connection with the Nabi Musa celebration. Oddly, no one reported to the general what had happened near the church, much less the attempted arson. As far as he was concerned, fights between Jews and Muslims were tolerable, but any attack on Christianity’s holy shrines was unforgivable. Adamson, who had kept that information from Allenby, found the courage to tell him about it only in 1922, when he was a guest of the general (by then
a field marshal) in Egypt, at the uncovering of Tutankhamun’s tomb.

In those days the Nabi Musa celebrations were the only official event on the Palestinian calendar. At its center were the two Husaynis, Mufti Kamil and the mayor of Jerusalem Musa Kazim. Being an official event, it was incumbent on Storrs, as head of the British administration in the city, to help make it a success. Under Ottoman rule, the governor of Jerusalem had the honor of receiving the sacred banners before the procession went to Jericho and was present when the
imam
in the Haram al-Sharif proclaimed the opening of the festivities, usually with a single cannon blast. The British army took over this function and provided the cannon and the band that played during the ceremony. (Storrs’s subordinates and superiors alike were opposed to the British army taking such an active part in the festival, but he persuaded them that it would encourage the population to accept the change from Muslim to European rule.) Storrs kept it up because in 1919 the Nabi Musa celebrations had passed peacefully. The celebrants had spent a week in Jericho, where he had visited them and observed some ceremonies that mixed tradition with modernity (circumcisions alongside a performance by a ventriloquist and a Punch and Judy show). Presumably he expected the carnival atmosphere to prevail again, but it did not.
¹⁴

On Sunday morning, Storrs received a report from the Jerusalem chief of police, an inexperienced young lieutenant, that all was well. The government understood later that too much responsibility had been placed on this officer, given his inexperience and the small number of men at his disposal. Storrs’s parents were visiting him that Easter, and together they walked to St George’s Cathedral to attend the midday service. He asked to be informed when the Hebronites arrived for the Nabi Musa festivities, because he feared that as usual they would scuffle with the Nablus group. ‘Let me know when you see the Hebronites about an hour-and-a-half distance from the Jaffa Gate,’ he said to one of his aides. When he was about to leave for the church, his personal servant Kamil told him, in a low voice in Arabic to avoid alarming his parents, that there was trouble at the Jaffa Gate. ‘I felt as if Kamil had thrust a sword into my heart,’ Storrs later wrote in his diary.
¹⁵

He realized that the forces at his disposal were inadequate and again grew angry with the military commanders, especially Allenby, who had ignored his warning and had not sent a company of soldiers or policemen to accompany the procession from Hebron. The small
force was concentrated around the outbreak at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

According to Whittingham, the cause of the riot at the Jaffa Gate was the Hebronite group joining the Jerusalem celebrants. They had left Hebron early in the morning and headed for the municipality building outside the city walls, where the Jerusalem and Nablus contingents were waiting. The excited crowd proceeded to the Arab Club near the Jaffa Gate, where they listened to speeches. Musa Kazim and al-Hajj Amin were the main speakers, but the most passionate speech was delivered by Khalil Baydas, who was already known as ‘
Raid al-Qissa al-Filastiniyya
’ – the pioneer of the Palestinian story. He concluded by saying: ‘My voice is weakening with emotion, but my national heart will never weaken.’
¹⁶
The crowd listened to the speeches and quenched their thirst with lemonade, handed out freely by the young men of the club. Then they went on to the Jaffa Gate to welcome the Hebronites. Reaching the plaza in front of the gate, Musa Kazim addressed the new arrivals, while behind him young al-Hajj Amin held up King Faysal’s picture and cried aloud, ‘O Arabs! This is your king!’

That day Storrs heard from Khalil al-Sakakini that Kamil al-Husayni had been one of those who incited the Hebronites and instigated their riot. There were several Jewish-owned shops near the municipality, which the mob began to smash and loot. Like an arson fire that is started in a number of places and spreads until the flames engulf the whole building, this outbreak soon converged with the fight between the Hebronites and the Jews that was already raging near the Jaffa Gate.

At the Jaffa Gate, the crowd was inflamed by the sight of the Jewish armed men led by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the mentor and future founder of the rightwing bloc of Zionist parties, and the fight broke out when a Hebronite attacked a Jewish boy.
¹⁷
Before long, troops arrived and put an end to the riot.

What happened afterwards Storrs knew firsthand. He kept the city under martial law for several days, and guards examined every person going in or out of the city. He stationed Indian Muslim troops at the gates of the Muslim Quarter to examine women, claiming this would not cause any offense. Robert Adamson, who was responsible for the Jaffa Gate, reported to Storrs that many of the women were found to be carrying all sorts of weapons. Storrs sent the collection to England, where it remains on display in the Royal Military Police Museum in Chichester. Anyone found carrying a weapon was fined one Egyptian pound. One day the city was shaken when an Indian soldier accidentally
shot an old Palestinian woman at the Jaffa Gate. The sound of the shots gave birth to a rumor that the Orthodox Patriarch had been killed, and Adamson had to work hard to persuade the people that there was no truth in it and that the Patriarch was safe inside his church.

Whittingham himself was convinced that Kamil al-Husayni had had no hand in provoking the riots. A few days after these events, he called on the
mufti
at his house below the Mount of Olives and talked about the situation. They sat in the spacious sitting room, where a few months earlier the
mufti
had entertained McCracken and Ms McQuin, and talked in French. After a while, they switched to English with the help of Khalil, the son of Sheikh al-Haram Bashir al-Husayni. (This ‘
Chef de Mosque
’, as Bashir was designated on his visiting card, belonged to the Umari branch of the family, which had lost its wealth and status in the wake of the political upheaval in Palestine.) The timing of the visit was significant: that morning Whittingham had heard at his hotel that the previous day the ten victorious states had confirmed the British Mandate of Palestine, and its terms included the Balfour Declaration.