The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty (44 page)

The
mufti
was pressured to stop the Sufi performances near the Western Wall, and when he gave in, he was accused by his opponents, notably the Nashashibis, of surrendering to the British. Seeking to counteract these charges, he started a restoration of the Wall near the section where the Jews prayed. Young Beitar men stopped the work and were praised by the chief rabbi, Abraham Kook. However, the leaders of the sixteenth Zionist Congress in Zurich were less impressed. They asked Jabotinsky to moderate his followers’ aggressive behavior, but it only grew worse. Two thousand young Beitar men led by Yosef Klausner circled the city walls, proclaiming that they were the ‘Western Wall Defense Committee’.
⁶⁹

In the summer of 1929, al-Hajj Amin began to feel the ground rumbling beneath his feet. He was less occupied with the Western Wall, but the young men and many other Palestinians anxiously followed the developments there, waiting for the
mufti
and other leaders to take firm action. Just before the outbreak, al-Hajj Amin met again with John Chancellor, who expressed the hope that the
mufti
was satisfied with the government’s position. Al-Hajj Amin responded that he was loyal to the government but added that if the Muslim community did not receive any substantive proposals, he could not vouch for
continuing law and order. At this point Chancellor, who had hitherto been pleasant, frowned and said sharply, ‘You need not worry about law and order. These matters are my responsibility.’ This arrogance was one of the reasons the British were taken by surprise in the summer when, for the first time since they had occupied the country in 1917, violence erupted on a large scale.
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In August 1929, the seeds of disaffection sown the previous winter sprouted a venomous crop. On a Thursday in the middle of the month, a group of young Beitar men gathered in front of Government House and began to march towards the Western Wall. Facing the Haram al-Sharif, they raised the Zionist flag, sang ‘
Hatikvah
’ and shouted, ‘The Wall is ours!’ Rumors about the Zionist demonstration in the Mughrabi neighborhood spread quickly, inflated with a claim that Muslims had been beaten up. Tensions grew higher.

The following day, during Friday prayers, they reached an intolerable point. Muslims held an anti-Jewish demonstration, and a Jewish boy who had kicked a ball into his neighbor’s tomato patch was murdered. The next day, a Muslim boy was stabbed. The funeral of the Jewish boy was large and forceful. It was organized by the Jewish Agency, which the Arabs of Jerusalem regarded as a particularly intimidating, rich and powerful body.
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The following week, Beitar held another demonstration, which was met with a mass counterdemonstration by villagers from the vicinity of Jerusalem, to whom al-Hajj Amin addressed a fiery speech. Unable to contain their rage, the crowd broke into the area in front of the Western Wall. In the following few hours, they also burst into most streets in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City.

That Thursday the
mufti
consulted with his associates about the developments. He had not forgotten the British persecution of him in 1920 and tried to obtain a visa to go to Syria, but the local consul refused to give him one. In any event, he did not have to confront the British authorities. Testifying before the commission of inquiry that would investigate the events of 1929, al-Hajj Amin stated that he had not asked for a visa to flee the scene but for his regular summer vacation. He had been accustomed to go to Turkey every August, but since he suffered from seasickness, he had decided on an overland holiday.
⁷²

That Thursday Jamal called on Harry Lock, the government secretary, who was trying to arrange a Jewish-Palestinian meeting to cool the atmosphere. But the two sides could not agree, and they decided to hold another meeting the following Monday. By then, however, scores of Jews and Palestinians had paid with their lives for the aborted reconciliation.

That Friday a wave of violent unrest swept over the country, lasting a whole week. Al-Hajj Amin was urgently summoned from home by Alan Saunders, the acting commander of the Jerusalem police and deputy commander of the mandatory police. Thousands of Muslims armed with clubs and knives and a few rifles had gathered on the Haram al-Sharif, claiming that the
mufti
had told them to wreak vengeance on the Jews. In reality, the
mufti
was not responsible for this rumor. When he reached the plaza, he heard the cry
‘Sayf al-din, al-Hajj Amin!’
(‘The Sword of the Religion, al-Hajj Amin!’). He and Said al-Khatib, the
imam
who conducted the Friday worship, agreed that the sermon that day would be a moderate one, to calm the atmosphere.

On Saturday al-Hajj Amin and Musa Kazim were summoned to the house of the High Commissioner, who demanded that the
mufti
do more to defuse the tension. Al-Hajj Amin replied that there would be no point in his issuing such a call unless the Jewish leaders did the same. ‘It’s Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath,’ Deputy Governor Keith-Roach said. ‘They can’t be reached by telephone.’

That day al-Hajj Amin invited the headmen of the surrounding villages and asked them to calm their people. ‘The government is looking after the interests of the Arabs,’ he assured them. But neither there nor on the Haram, nor later at the Nablus Gate, was the
mufti
able to stem the irate human tide. Jewish attacks on Sur Baher and an attack on the Nashashibi house at Bab al-Sahra ignited an all-out Arab assault. A baseless rumor that a Palestinian had been lynched in the Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Meah Shearim made it into the arena. Thus the first casualties were non-Zionist Jews of that neighborhood, and later of Yemin Moshe, who had always been on good terms with their Arab neighbors.

The
mufti
’s call, ‘Arm yourselves with compassion, wisdom and tolerance, because Allah is always with the tolerant!’ fell on deaf ears. Together with his friend George Antonius, he addressed the crowd:

Calm yourselves, go home and leave me to do all I can. The government is not against you, nor the police. It is the duty of the government to maintain order. You know my feelings and views – I have always advised you to trust your leaders.

But his voice was drowned out by the roar of the crowd. Antonius saw that the
mufti
’s presence stirred the people rather than calmed them, and at his urging al-Hajj Amin went home.
⁷³

Al-Hajj Amin held talks with the leaders of Nablus and Hebron, but
failed to pacify them. This was especially true where the Hebronites were concerned, since al-Hajj Amin’s standing in that town was shaky and they would not listen to him.
⁷⁴
There the Nashashibis were better entrenched, a fact that contradicts Israeli historiography’s dichotomous depiction of the Husaynis as ‘militants’ and the Nashashibis as ‘moderates’. They incited the mob against the Jewish community, with the result that sixty-four Hebronite Jews were massacred.

The same thing happened in Safad, where twenty-six Jews were murdered. The opposite camp, Zionist and British, was no less ruthless. In Jaffa a Jewish mob murdered seven Palestinians, and all in all 133 Jews and 116 Muslims perished during that bloody week.

Most of the Palestinians were shot by British policemen and soldiers. By 24 August, the government had decided to arm 500 Jews, and this contributed to the deadly score. Three days after this decision, a furious crowd surrounded al-Hajj Amin’s house demanding weapons. Al-Hajj Amin lost his head for the first time. He telephoned Harry Lock and asked him to receive a delegation led by Musa Kazim. Al-Hajj Amin sent Musa Kazim reluctantly, but he felt he was under pressure and in grave danger. At the urging of the delegation, the authorities agreed to disarm forty Jewish policemen as a countermeasure to the arming of 500 Jewish civilians.

As soon as the violence subsided, the mandatory government took harsh measures, blaming the
mufti
and the Palestinians for what had occurred. High Commissioner John Chancellor had returned from home leave the day before the bloodshed in Safad. It was 1 September 1929.
⁷⁵
He published an announcement placing all the blame on the leaders of the Muslim community. Later the Commission of Inquiry would exonerate the
mufti
and place the blame on both sides, but by then a gulf had opened up between the Palestinians and the British. Thereafter the Palestinian population would judge al-Hajj Amin by his anti-British as much as by his anti-Zionist position.

By November 1929, there were indications that the violent eruptions were due to a mistaken British policy rather than ‘inherent Muslim aggression’, as the Israeli and pro-Israeli historiography would have it. The High Commissioner thought as much, and so did the government in London. On 19 November the Colonial Secretary issued a statement promising the Palestinians that the Haram al-Sharif would be restored to its former situation. But this was no longer sufficient: the Palestinians, or at least their political elite, expected a more substantive change in Britain’s Palestine policy.
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CHAPTER 9

The Great Revolt

The Family as Revolutionary Aristocracy

FAMILY STATESMANSHIP: THE FIRST CHAPTER

The events of 1929 strengthened the standing of al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni and opened the way to his becoming the leader of the entire Palestinian nation. A British poll published in 1931 showed him to be the leader of nearly a million Palestinians. He was depicted as the captain of the 1929 Intifada and the one who had successfully defended the Haram al-Sharif and its shrines.
¹
The large number of Muslim casualties obliged the Supreme Muslim Council to organize aid for the victims, and al-Hajj Amin administered the welfare program. The opposition claimed that he did not do enough with the funds at his disposal, and later historians, albeit Israelis, found disorder and forgeries in the council’s bookkeeping. The old pattern of mixing private and public finances apparently persisted.
²

Looking back on this period in the 1950s, al-Hajj Amin described himself as a fearless opponent of the British, but in reality he was happiest when he did not have to confront them head-on. Even after the outbreaks, he continued to regard them as allies. They might have been at fault, but they were indispensable. This was very different from Ben-Gurion’s outlook, which was beginning to take shape at that time: if it became necessary, as it probably would, the Zionist enterprise would succeed even at the expense of a struggle against Britain.

Having become a political leader in the mandatory regime, al-Hajj Amin had two tasks before him. Besides material concerns, he had to represent the interests of the Palestinians before the Commission of
Inquiry chaired by Sir Walter Shaw, which began its work in March 1930. Now al-Hajj Amin discovered the value of having Jamal at his side as a kind of Palestinian foreign minister when dealing with such British forums.

The four members of the Shaw Commission arrived by train from El-Qantara on 24 October 1929 and were whisked off unceremoniously to the Fast Hotel in Jerusalem. Prisoners, Jews and Palestinians were at once sent to repair the road leading to the court, where the judge Muhammad Yusuf al-Khalidi presided. A company of armed British policemen guarded the entrance to the court, but there were no demonstrations. The only people who gathered in front of the judge’s office were journalists, both local and foreign. Four chairs were placed on the dais for the members of the commission and a secretary, and representatives of the Zionists and the Palestinians were ushered into the court. Al-Hajj Amin made sure that most members of the Supreme Muslim Council were present at his first public diplomatic confrontation with the Zionists and the British.

Later sessions were held in the Customs House in Jerusalem, where the future of Palestine was debated in a small office. Each side had hired expensive and well-known British lawyers to advise them. That was the way of the world in those days: command of British law became a major weapon in the national struggle. Having toured the country, the members of the commission began to realize the magnitude of their task and had the walls of the stuffy little office knocked down to create a proper hall.

The
mufti
was invited to testify at the forty-sixth session. In fact, the commission met in his office, and his testimony went on for five sessions. Al-Hajj Amin replaced the Christian interpreter Khalil al-Sakakini with the Muslim Musa al-Alami – not because of any doubt about the trustworthiness of the family’s great teacher and loyal friend but to indicate that the central issue, the fate of the Haram, was a purely Muslim matter.
³

Al-Hajj Amin used these sessions to conduct a historical review of the injustice done to the Palestinian people by the discriminatory British policy. For example, he noted that the mandatory government paved roads leading to Jewish settlements but refused his request to pave a two-kilometer road to Nabi Musa. But his main complaint was that the government regularly broke its promises – first the pledges made in the Hussein–McMahon correspondence, then the government announcements made during the 1920s. The lawyers for the
Jewish side questioned his claim that there was a Jewish plot to seize the Haram.

The
mufti
’s British lawyer was Henry Stalker. A corpulent man who sported a monocle in his right eye, Stalker was over seventy but looked ten years younger. Stalker got al-Hajj Amin entangled with
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, which did him no good. He had brought a copy of the book in Arabic and French with him, and the
mufti
was seen reading it during the sessions. The lawyers for the Jewish side made the most of the apparent connection between the book and the Palestinian claims that the Jews were conspiring to seize the Temple Mount.
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