The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty (62 page)

But neither the death of Abd al-Qadir nor Jamal’s firm stance
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which had been so sorely lacking during the UNSCOP investigation
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could save the Palestinian people from catastrophe. And when it came, it swept them all away: villages and towns alike, fields and houses throughout Palestine, including even the Husayni homes in the Husayniyya quarter in the city of Jerusalem.

THE NAKBAH: THE DEMISE OF THE LOCAL ARISTOCRACY

During the Nakbah, many of the Husaynis were living in the strategically important Husayniya neighborhood. Volunteers from the Arab world who came to save Palestine, together with the remnants of Abd al-Qadir’s fighters under the command of another nephew of the
mufti
, Khalid al-Husayni, took up positions in some of the neighborhood houses – not Husayni residences, incidentally, but Nashashibi ones, notably Raghib’s house. As early as March 1948, the Jewish armed force, the Hagana, tried to capture the family’s stronghold but was foiled by British intervention. The neighborhood overlooked the road to Mount Scopus, and it was from there that a Zionist convoy to the Mount – the site of the Hebrew University and Hadassah Hospital – was assaulted in April 1948.

On 15 May, the Israelis launched a forceful attack on the neighborhood. Five houses were totally destroyed, but the Husayni homes remained standing. The Nuseibah family living nearby felt they had been abandoned. ‘We were unarmed and undefended,’ they wrote in their memoirs.
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A British force was not far, in the
mufti
’s old house in Sheikh Jarrah – the house that had been built by Jewish contractors, which was now occupied by Katie Antonius, the widow of George Antonius, who had been renting it since 1943. The neighborhood’s inaction made it look useless, yet it was kept inside the Arab territory by the Transjordan Arab Legion.

Not so with the Arab neighborhoods on the western side of the city, among them Baq’a, Talbiyyeh and Malhah, which fell to the Jews. Jerusalem fell, and with it most of Palestine. With Abd al-Qadir gone, the Husaynis took no part in the Palestinian armed struggle during the war, which was in any case feeble compared to the Jewish or the pan-Arab efforts. Khalid al-Husayni was not a charismatic figure, and al-Hajj Amin did not approve of his appointment as Abd al-Qadir’s successor. In each neighborhood a different commander stood out – most of them from Iraq and Syria, or from the poorer classes, as for example the commander of Katamon, the above-mentioned Kamal Iraqat, aka Abu Da’aya.

For the leading figures in the family, Jamal and al-Hajj Amin, the war was entirely a political campaign, since they did not experience the fighting and did not become refugees, much less survivors of massacres. To many this meant that they had lost the moral and political right to lead the Palestinian people. This reversal did not happen all at once and was not perceived during the war, but by 1951 there was a man who thought of himself as the
mufti
’s legitimate successor – a young student of engineering in Cairo, a member of the al-Qidwa family of Gaza, named Yasser Arafat. Another man, Ahmad, the son of the
mufti
of Acre As’ad al-Shuqayri, whom the Husaynis had known in the late Ottoman period, waited a few more years before he became the leader of the Palestinian people in the eyes of the Arab League. But that is a subject for another book and other studies.

During the war, al-Hajj Amin spent most of the day in a small office at the Arab League. He was profoundly embittered and probably did not believe the optimistic reports from the front that appeared in the Cairo newspapers in the first days of the war. In the winter of 1947, he had realized that the Arab states were either not interested in saving the Palestinians as much as in fulfilling their territorial ambitions, as in the case of Jordan, or unable to do so, as in the case of Syria and Egypt.
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But though he probably did not expect a miraculous redemption, he had not imagined that the downfall would be so catastrophic.

His first secretary in Cairo was Dumiyya al-Sakakini, the daughter of Khalil al-Sakakini and the source for this part of the account.
⁶⁶
Her father had left his house in Katamon when the fighting broke out and settled in Cairo. The connection between the Sakakini family and the Husaynis was renewed on 20 June 1948, this time as exiles. Dumiyya, her sister Hala and their brother Sari had been living in the Heliopolis Quarter of Cairo since January, not far from al-Hajj Amin’s first
residence in the city. One evening al-Hajj Amin visited the Sakakinis, and they talked about unsung heroes. Al-Hajj Amin told them about a Palestinian fighter known as Abu Da’aya, who had been badly wounded in the battle of Ramat Rachel, south of Jerusalem, and had been airlifted from the battlefield straight to the Cairo military hospital. Abu Da’aya was a skinny young leader whose men told stories about him fit for the annals of any war of liberation. He was a goatherd from the village of Suraif near Hebron. This village had already played a part in the fighting
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for example, in the attack on the Etzion Bloc convoy (he should not to be confused with the first Abu Da’aya, Abd al-Qadir’s deputy). His bravery had been so impressive that the Jordanian commander of the Jerusalem sector mentioned him in the book he wrote about the war. When Khalil joined the conversation, his daughters urged him to go and visit the wounded fighter, who was completely paralyzed. Consequently, after al-Hajj Amin’s visit, Sakakini took his daughters to visit Kamel Iraqat, who was the deputy of Abdul Qadir in Qastal, and took over command from him. A warm friendship grew between them. But the patient was transferred to Beirut, where he died from his injuries. Khalil began to write a book about him but did not finish it. Such was the encounter between al-Hajj Amin and the man who had fought in his name and had tried in vain to defend Palestine.

During the war some 750,000 Palestinians ended up in refugee camps. Some remained in Palestine, either in the territory seized by Egypt, in the State of Israel or in the West Bank. They were victims of what would today be called ‘ethnic cleansing’. Behind them they left properties, villages and a homeland. By 15 May, al-Qawuqji’s Arab Salvation Army and the thousands of volunteers had failed to defend the mixed cities and the main roads. Nor could they stop Jewish forces from seizing the centers of power, such the customs, the ports, the treasury and most of the British army bases in the country. Now and then they managed to inflict heavy damage on isolated Jewish settlements and convoys making their way to besieged outposts north and south of the country.

After the Jewish state was declared, Arab armies invaded the country, raising the hopes of the population. (It also raised their concern about hasty surrender to the Jewish forces; they feared that a victorious Arab army would punish those who gave in too readily.) Most of the Palestinian inhabitants were unarmed and did not fight very hard, hoping that the Arab states would come to their aid.

In the first week of the war, Syrian units crossed into the north of
the country and surrounded some isolated Jewish settlements but were unable to break through. The Arab Legion captured the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City and Gush Etzion in the central sector, but, abiding by an unwritten agreement with the Israeli army, it did not advance beyond Jerusalem and the nearby villages.

In the following weeks the legion held back, abandoning the towns of Lydda and Ramleh, with their tens of thousands of inhabitants, to the Israeli forces. In Lydda the expulsion was accompanied by a massacre of the young men in the city’s mosque, prompting the rest of the population to join the thousands from nearby Ramleh who had already been driven out of their houses in a march of death toward the West Bank.

The Legion also abandoned the Egyptian army, which became trapped in the Falluja enclave. This army was made up of Muslim Brotherhood volunteers, Sudanese troops and a regular Egyptian division. During the first week of the fighting, it made some impressive gains. It came close to Tel Aviv, having captured several kibbutzim en route. But its lines of supply became too stretched, its ordnance ran out and it could not fight off the Israeli forces. During the truce, the Israeli army recovered, rearmed itself with weapons from the Eastern Bloc and drove the Egyptians back onto the Sinai Peninsula.

The central part of Palestine fell in July. The north was lost in September and October, and by January 1949 the south of Palestine had also been occupied by Israel. Some 800 villages, six towns and more than a million Palestinians were divided between Israel, Egypt and Transjordan. The finger of blame was pointed not only at those who expelled them, or those who had promised to help and instead betrayed, but also at those who had insisted on leading and failed.

In the summer of 1948, while the Palestinian social and cultural life was totally destroyed, an absurd drama took place, involving many Husaynis. That July, the Arab League proclaimed the formation of a Palestinian Arab government. When Palestine had still been in one piece and al-Hajj Amin wished to establish such a government, he had been rebuffed. Now the League defied the harsh reality with a meaningless act of desperation. The inspiration behind this initiative was Jamal al-Husayni. He went to all the Arab capitals, and this time, unlike the months before May 1948, he was fully supported – except in Amman, where King Abdullah would not hear of it. Abdullah already knew that he stood to acquire a fair chunk of Palestine, not because he fought to save it but thanks to his agreement with the Jewish Agency before the outbreak of war.
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Only in October was the Arab League able to keep its promise to the Palestinians and call on the leading figures in Palestine to form a government in Gaza. These were al-Hajj Amin’s last days of grace, though in fact he was functioning in an imaginary reality unrelated to the disaster on the ground. The eighty-five men who took part in the opening session on 1 October formed the Palestinian National Council, which elected the All-Palestine Government. Al-Hajj Amin headed the council, and the government was led by Hilmi Pasha, one of al-Hajj Amin’s men in the Higher Arab Committee. All that this futile exercise left behind were phrases and symbols. Al-Hajj Amin’s opening words in Gaza were: ‘Based on the natural and historical right of the Palestinian Arab people to freedom and independence, we hereby declare ...’ – which would remain the central motto of all the Palestinian documents up to the Palestinian Declaration of Independence in November 1988.
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The symbol that has survived from that time is the Palestinian flag, whose colors derived from the banner of revolt raised by Sharif Hussein in 1916. The black, white and green flag, with a starless red triangle on the left-hand side, has rallied Palestinians to their national struggle up to the present time.

There were several Husaynis in that virtual government: Jamal, in recognition of his deeds and abilities, was named Foreign Minister, and Said’s son Raja’i, who had been active in politics after First World War but then withdrew to the sidelines, returned to the arena as Minister of Defense. On the face of it, these were the two principal ministries, but in reality they were of no importance whatever, as this government vanished in history’s oubliette as abruptly as it had appeared.

King Abdullah swore to oppose this government to the end, and the British government instructed all its representatives in the region to do all they could to destroy it.
⁶⁹
But it was the Egyptians who gave it the
coup de grâce
. Egyptian premier Mahmud Nuqrashi ordered al-Hajj Amin to return to his exile in Cairo. When he refused, an armed Egyptian officer came to his house and took him away by force. With al-Hajj Amin’s political demise, the government fell apart. Raja’i, who became addicted to politics, accepted the post of Saudi Minister of Transport in 1949, perhaps the clearest signal of the family’s disappearance from the country’s leadership after the Palestinians had lost Palestine.
⁷⁰

Of course, the Husaynis did not cease to exist in 1948. While al-Hajj Amin lived, he was first at the heart of Palestinian activity, then on its margins. After his death in 1974, there were still some prominent
Husayni public figures – for example, Dr Hatem al-Husayni, the director of al-Quds University, and the first lady of Palestinian nationalism, Amina al-Husayni, the widow of Abd al-Qadir and mother of Faysal al-Husayni. Faysal would make his appearance as the last remaining Husayni in Palestinian politics after the war of 1967. He soon discovered that to join the new leadership it was not enough to flourish the family’s ancient lineage. The key to success was a faded document testifying to membership in Fatah – proof of personal sacrifice in the national cause.

In this history of the family, however, 1948 does mark the end. For in that year the curtain came down on the Husaynis as a social and political entity. When the war ended, it became clear that as well as losing their homeland, houses and properties, the Palestinian people had also lost their aristocracy. Other Arab nations lost their aristocracies as well, but under very different circumstances resulting from local radicalism, whether socialist or nationalist.

The author is no admirer of aristocracy – a leadership based on blood relations, enjoying many privileges and in almost complete control of the society’s resources. But at a certain stage in the history of every nation, even opponents learn to appreciate the ‘grandees’ and ‘notables’. Forming a bridge between past and present, between power and the people and between tradition and change, they enable social transformation to occur in a moderate fashion, and their destruction provokes revolutions. Their premature annihilation, before an alternative leadership has had a chance to arise, before the society has adjusted to a new reality, results in disaster.