Al-Husaini’s importance as father of modern Arab and Islamist politics has never been properly understood for three reasons. First, because he was tainted by his connection with the Nazis, the humiliating Arab defeat by Israel in 1948, and his own subsequent political eclipse, al-Husaini’s historical role and regional influence have seemed of only limited importance.
Second, al-Husaini has been remembered as just a Palestinian Arab leader. Actually, however, he was the main chief of international radical Arab forces, both Islamist and nationalist, during the 1930s and 1940s. The later conflict between these two groups—when nationalists gained power and suppressed Islamists—hid the fact that they had worked closely together up to then. Al-Husaini was the man who fused that united front and set its strategy.
Third, even after being discredited as Palestinian Arab leader and shunned by the nationalists, al-Husaini played a central role in the Islamist movement’s survival during the 1950s and 1960s. This success made possible the movement’s revival in the 1970s to gain hegemony in Iran, Turkey, and much of the Arabic-speaking world and Iran by the early twenty-first century.
Why was al-Husaini so successful? Starting in the 1920s, he built his support base among Palestine’s Arabs. In the late 1930s, he launched a revolutionary uprising in Palestine and an international campaign to make himself the region’s Arab and Islamic leader. By that decade’s end, the fascist Italian and Nazi German governments became his patrons.
During these years, al-Husaini seemed to be everywhere and meeting with everyone. From Morocco in the west to India in the east, al-Husaini laid the foundation for a far-flung movement. In Geneva, he worked with Arslan to build a European base.1 He went to India to see Islamist leader Shaukat Ali and raise funds from Indian Muslims.2 In 1924 and 1933, al-Husaini was in Iran, where he gained support from both Islamist activists and the government.3
The holy city of Jerusalem, his personal base, was a mecca for visiting Muslims who recognized al-Husaini’s leadership and made alliances with him. Among them were Pakistan’s future founder, Muhammad Iqbal; Egyptian Prince Muhammad Ali Aluba,4 a sponsor of the Muslim Brothers; and al-Husaini’s old teacher, Rashid Rida. One of al-Husaini’s most important links was with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928,5 with Muhammad Mustafa al-Maraghi, al-Azhar University’s rector, as his prime contact.6
The breakthrough year for al-Husaini’s ambitions was 1931, when he organized the General Islamic Congress in Jerusalem.7 The Islamic World Congress, formed by the meeting, elected him president8 and created international branches, one-quarter of whose income went to the Jerusalem central office that he ran.9 Many of the key people in al-Husaini’s new radical networks were veterans of von Oppenheim’s operation, including the European-based Jawish, Shalabi, Arslan, and Abbas Hilmi, who would bring al-Husaini together with the Nazis.10 On one point, however, al-Husaini was cautious. Islamists wanted to restore the caliphate, but personal and national rivalries meant that no one could agree on who should be caliph. The rumor that al-Husaini aspired to that post would fuel opposition. To avoid this, al-Husaini neither highlighted the issue nor openly put forward his candidacy.11
Al-Husaini’s ideology was a modernized version of Islamism. Yet he now used that once conservative doctrine, developed to defend the Ottoman Empire and the social status quo, as a revolutionary instrument. In al-Husaini’s version, Islamism was broadened to encompass Arab grievances and, as Rida had taught him, to become a way to battle the West by building a strong, united state that would be simultaneously nationalist and Islamist. In short, al-Husaini would become the very man—the “Greenmantle” figure—whom earlier German strategy sought but never found.
While al-Husaini had strong credentials for leadership and even eventually claiming the caliphate—descent from Muhammad, influential family, and superior education—his personal qualifications at first were weak to be even an Islamic cleric, much less the world’s leading Muslim. He did not have systematic clerical training and had embarked on a career as soldier and secret agent. During World War I, he had deserted the legitimate caliph’s side to work for the British and French infidels. He had received his appointment as grand mufti from infidel British hands and had used the post for solely political ends.
Nevertheless, he was the right man in the right place and at the right time. His innovative use of Islamism helped him muster mass support from a passive, religious-oriented public that was not ready to accept secular nationalism. Playing both Islamic and nationalist cards, al-Husaini could claim power throughout the Middle East and even beyond to non-Arab, Muslim-majority lands. No Arab or Muslim leader since has come close to making such a serious bid.
Al-Husaini had no shortage of titles to bolster these claims. On the Islamic side, he was grand mufti of Jerusalem, which he soon changed into “grand mufti of Palestine,” and president of both its Higher Islamic Council and the Islamic World Congress, the latter giving him an international platform. On the political side, he was head of the Arab Higher Committee and undisputed leader of Palestine’s Arabs. Al-Husaini later cited all these positions and impressive networks in letters to Hitler and other Nazi officials, to portray himself as head of the world’s Muslims and Arabs. Given such credentials, it is not surprising that the Third Reich agreed.
A second tactic al-Husaini and the radical faction developed, which dominated Arab and Islamist politics thereafter, was to make militancy the test for legitimacy. The most extreme stance became the legitimate mainstream one; anything more moderate was portrayed as treason to Islam and the Arab people. Using this standard, al-Husaini and his allies could blackmail and intimidate Arab governments, threatening to discredit or even assassinate anyone who wanted to compromise with the West or to oppose their goals.12
Third, al-Husaini turned the Palestine issue into the trump card of Arab and Islamic politics. By being the man to decide the only proper course on Palestine, he forced stronger parties to bow to his demands. Arab leaders in Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Transjordan wanted part or all of Palestine for themselves. But by making Palestine a doubly sacred cause embodied in his own person, al-Husaini turned the tables on them, gaining veto power over the direction of Arab and Islamist policy.
A fourth innovation of al-Husaini and his allies was mass mobilization using mosque sermons, demagogic speeches, intimidating mobs, and demonstrations. Previously, Arab politics had been dominated by wealthy families that preferred to keep politics a private affair and had no interest in inflaming the masses. Al-Husaini and fellow radicals, however, inspired large numbers of people to challenge the oligarchical elite’s moderate policies though not its wealth.
Fifth, al-Husaini demonized the British, Jews, and Americans. Most Arab leaders had not been militantly anti-Western or anti-Semitic. They were anti-Zionist but often open to some compromise solution, at least a deal with the British to prevent the creation of a Jewish state. In contrast, the nationalists and Islamists insisted that conflict was inevitable with both Britain and the Zionists because they were sworn enemies of Islam and the Arabs. Anyone who did not support this policy was labeled a Zionist and imperialist stooge.13
The radicals’ stance in the 1930s and 1940s thus made diplomacy or compromise impossible even if a deal might benefit Palestinian or other Arabs. This approach allowed radicals to defeat moderates but failed miserably as an international strategy. Emphasis on hatred and struggle put the radicals on the losing side in World War II and brought the Arabs to defeat in the 1948 and every ensuing war. That orientation worked no better for the nationalist Saddam Husain or the Islamist bin Ladin. And yet its ideological hegemony has never been successfully challenged explicitly since al-Husaini and his allies developed it in the 1930s.
Finally, the radical nationalists and Islamists believed they could defy Britain and the Arab moderates precisely because Nazi Germany and fascist Italy offered alternatives. They could persuade others that total victory was inevitable since Germany would soon dominate the world. And if politicians in other countries wanted to be on the winning side, they needed to buckle under to al-Husaini’s demands.
While Palestine’s Arabs, Syrian and Iraqi nationalists, Egyptian Islamists, and others forged an alliance with Hitler’s new German regime, based on the German-Ottoman cooperation of earlier days, that new alignment was also fundamentally different in content. The German-Ottoman bond had been built on defending the status quo in the Ottoman Empire while destroying their rivals’ colonies. The new Nazi–Arab nationalist and Islamist alliance, however, sought revolutionary political and social change everywhere in the Middle East. In the 1950s, radical Arab nationalists would repeat this pattern with the USSR. From an Arab nationalist standpoint, Communism and fascism were equally ready to back revolution, expel the influence of Western democracies, and destroy a Jewish state. Both systems had features in common that Arab nationalist regimes wanted to adapt: statist economies, mobilized societies, intolerant ruling ideologies, and regime monopolies on every aspect of life. Islamists, however, could not embrace atheistic Marxists as partners, and that was one of the factors that split the nationalist-Islamist partnership.
In the 1930s and 1940s, moderate Arab politicians ultimately rejected the radicals’ ideas because they doubted a hardline strategy could succeed. They rightly foresaw disaster, based not only on their nonrevolutionary worldview but also on what experience had taught them. To cite only one example, when Faisal fought France to become Syria’s king in 1920 he was totally defeated; when he cooperated with Britain he quickly became Iraq’s monarch. Thus, they correctly viewed the British as too strong to defeat and preferred to gain as much as possible by step-by-step diplomacy, compromise, and gradual economic development, rather than bet all on total victory and risk losing everything. They also understood how the strategic situation in the late 1930s meant London was ready to give them big concessions to win their help in the coming war. Most importantly, they could have made a deal with Britain over Palestine that would give the Arabs victory if only they were patient.
The radicals’ totally different view saw violence and intransigence as the effective political tools. To them, flexibility was merely traitorous and cowardly. Instead, they preferred to make war on Britain, France, the USSR, even the United States, and expected to win. Disregarding the moderates’ cautious realism, al-Husaini’s Islamist ideology taught him that Allah was on the Muslims’ side; his radical nationalism told him that the Arabs united could never be defeated. On top of this, al-Husaini, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the radical nationalists were convinced that their invincible European protectors, Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, would win and hand them victory.
The Middle East’s future was thus determined starting in the 1930s when radicals set guidelines, and was made inevitable by their taking power in the 1950s and holding onto it in one form or other down to the present day. The basic approach of al-Husaini and his comrades continued through the careers of such leaders as Abd an-Nasir, Arafat, the al-Asad family, al-Qaddafi, Saddam Husain, and bin Ladin, as well as with Iranian Islamists like Khomeini and Mahmud Ahmadinejad.
The views of two alternative archetypes as leaders, Abdallah and al-Husaini, perfectly embodied the contrast between moderate and radical Arab camps. Regarding the Palestine Arabs’ uprising of the late 1930s, Abdallah concluded, “There is a lesson for men who want to learn” in its defeat by Britain. The Arabs had to make deals because they could not win wars. Al-Husaini’s view was the exact opposite, inaccurately claiming the uprising had triumphed. The Arab “terror of 1936 buried the mandate” and the uprising’s continuation, he said at the time, would ensure the Arabs would rule all of Palestine and the Zionists would be destroyed.14
This approach set the pattern for what might be called the counter-pragmatic tendency of Arab and Islamist politics that prevailed into the twenty-first century. Policies that produced repeated defeats were extolled because they fit the radical ideological template as proper, noble, and bound to succeed. Those urging pragmatism, caution, and compromise were made pariahs or even—as happened with an-Nashashibi, Abdallah, as-Sulh, and as-Sadat—murdered.
In this context, during the 1930s and through World War II, Nazi Germany’s ambitions and ideology made it attractive as an ally for radical Arabs. Al-Husaini and his colleagues, like Hitler and his followers, believed they now had a magic formula for victory: mobilizing the masses to a frenzy of passion; invoking unity through discipline, repression, and a compelling ideology; using the Jews, the British, the Americans, and the Communists as scapegoats; and providing infallible charismatic leadership.
Of course, the Axis collaborators were wrong and inflicted devastating damage on their countries and peoples as a result. The Palestine issue provides a good example of this point, as the hardline, inflexible, anti-British policy of al-Husaini and the radicals played a major role in bringing about Israel’s creation.
During the 1930s, Palestine’s Arabs had four choices:
• They could have made a deal with the British to partition Palestine, with the Arabs getting most of it—80 percent according to London’s 1937 Peel plan—and use that as a base to destroy the Jewish ministate later.
• They could have accepted the 1939 British offer to give them all of Palestine as an Arab state within ten years and taken control gradually during that period.
• They could have worked with Abdallah and the British to get an Arab-ruled federated state of Transjordan-Palestine.
• Or they could have accepted the strategy of al-Husaini and his camp to reject all of these possibilities, believing that an Axis victory (and later an Arab military victory in 1947–48) would get them everything without compromise, conditions, or Jews.
The radicals triumphed over more moderate forces among Palestine’s Arabs—the an-Nashashibi, al-Khalidi, and Jar Allah clans—and Arab governments—notably Egypt and Transjordan—that wanted to take advantage of the chance for a good deal. Al-Husain rejected a proposed agreement among Palestinian Arab factions not to use violence against each other,15 and his forces murdered hundreds of oppositionists. Fakhr an-Nashashibi was the most important moderate leader and victim of these killings.16 Leading a powerful clan, he was willing to negotiate with the Zionists, organized a counter-meeting against al-Husaini’s 1931 Islamic World Congress,17 worked with Abdallah to create a Transjordan-Palestine federated state, and demanded elections for a new Higher Islamic Council to remove the grand mufti as head.18
Success for al-Husaini depended on his alliance with Nazi Germany. But at the start of Hitler’s reign there was a potential conflict between them that could jeopardize this goal. Hitler had written in Mein Kampf that he wanted to murder all Jews, but in the Nazi regime’s first half-dozen years it seemed possible he might merely expel them. The audacity of genocide seemed to have given even the Nazis pause, concerned as they were at the international reaction. Thus, Hitler made a deal with the Zionists in 1933 to let sixty thousand Jews immigrate to Palestine for six years in exchange for receiving one-third of their property.19
Perhaps there might have been an entirely different kind of Final Solution for Germany, with emigration instead of firing squads and gas chambers. But al-Husaini did not want this outcome. He insisted on stopping all Jewish migration to Palestine. And since any European Jews let out of Europe might later go to Palestine, al-Husaini made it clear that if Hitler wanted Muslims and Arabs as allies he must close Europe’s exits to Jews. At the same time, al-Husaini and Arab rulers also told Britain that if it wanted to keep Arabs and Muslims from being enemies, it must close entrance to Palestine to all Jews. By succeeding on both fronts, al-Husaini contributed to the Holocaust doubly, directly, and from the start.
Predicting accurately in 1934 that Hitler’s “war of vengeance” would begin by 1939 and be more destructive than World War I, Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion tried to make a deal with Palestinian Arabs that would somehow permit Jewish immigration, no matter what other concessions that required.20 The man Ben-Gurion turned to for this purpose was Musa al-Alami,21 a man considered the model moderate. Once again, though, al-Husaini’s power blocked the way. Al-Alami’s sister was married to Jamal al-Husaini, the grand mufti’s cousin and chief lieutenant; al-Alami’s own wife was daughter to Ihsan al-Jabiri, who had worked closely with al-Husaini by promoting pro-German Islamism in Berlin. Rather than become leader of an alternative moderate faction, the Cambridge University–educated al-Alami threw in his lot with al-Husaini and the radicals. Al-Husaini sent al-Alami to Germany in 1937 to gain the Nazi regime’s help in foiling the British plan to partition Palestine into a large Arab and a small Jewish state.22 Starting in late 1938, al-Husaini sent al-Alami regularly to Europe to collect Nazi money, obtain German weapons for the revolt,23 and coordinate al-Husaini’s network of agents.24
As for what should be done to the Jews, al-Husaini was crystal clear, publicly advocating genocide even before the Nazi government did so. His 1937 “Appeal to All Muslims of the World” urged them to cleanse their lands of the Jews, and it was translated into German in 1938.25 Urging the use of force against all Jews in the Middle East, al-Husaini both gave his parallel version of Hitler’s doctrine and laid the foundation for the anti-Semitic arguments used by radical Arab nationalists and Islamists down to this day. A half-century later, every speech and sermon from Hamas, Hizballah, Iran’s regime, the Muslim Brotherhood, and al-Qaida echoed all of the grand mufti’s main points in his declaration.
Al-Husaini’s analysis combined traditional Islamic hatred of Jews with arguments framed by modern political concepts. According to al-Husaini, the Jews were a cursed and evil people. They had exploited Egypt in ancient times and that was why the pharaoh expelled them; an early Muslim historian had accused them of trying to kill Moses; and God had repeatedly punished them for their sins.26 Yet the Jews, al-Husaini continued, had become even worse. They had spread diseases and murdered Jesus.27 They had hated Muhammad and tried to poison him;28 Muhammad had responded by expelling them from Arabia. Even though this plot had failed (he only ate a little of the tainted lamb that the Jews had offered him) the poison had weakened him and led to his premature death.29 Therefore, al-Husaini concluded, Arabs understood why the Germans hated Jews.
It is wrong to see al-Husaini and his fellow radicals as merely importing European anti-Semitism or being influenced by the Nazis. The two groups’ ideas developed in parallel from their own histories and political cultures. Al-Husaini and other radical Arabs and Islamists were not merely seeking to please Hitler but fully believed these doctrines. The two sides came together on the basis of both common interests and similar worldviews.
In April 1936, al-Husaini ordered a general strike to force the British to end Jewish immigration and grant immediate independence to an Arab Palestine. He believed a show of strength, coupled with Arab state intervention and the looming threat from Germany and Italy, would quickly bring British surrender. Decades later, Arafat would launch two losing revolts, the “intifadas” of 1987–91 and 2000–2005, on similar mistaken premises. When the strike didn’t bring total victory, the grand mufti escalated to armed warfare in 1937. Arab guerrillas barricaded and mined roads, derailed trains, attacked Jewish villages, and burned crops and forests. The British responded with curfews, searches, and arrests.
Al-Husaini mobilized Arab rulers and radical groups, as well as Italy and Germany’s sponsorship, for his intifada. From March 1937 on, he led delegations to Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries for this purpose. Syrian and Transjordanian border guards looked the other way as arms were smuggled into Palestine. Guerrilla forces that retreated into Iraq and Syria were able to cross the border for more attacks.30
The grand mufti also made progress in building relations with Berlin and Rome. Starting in 1935, Mussolini financed him.31 By 1936, al-Husaini was sending envoys to Grobba, then German ambassador to Iraq, to request arms and money. One of them was Fauzi ad-Din al-Qawuqji. Born in Beirut in 1890, al-Qawuqji graduated from the Ottoman Istanbul Military Academy. In 1925 he fought in the Kurdish uprising against the French in Syria, and in 1932 he was a military instructor with Iraq’s army. During the revolt he led a two-hundred-man Iraqi-Syrian volunteer unit fighting for al-Husaini. Since Berlin sends Jews to Palestine, he told Grobba, it must also send arms to fight against them.32
Step by step, the Germans responded to al-Husaini’s courting. To investigate this potential ally, an obscure German official considered a top expert on the Jews, Adolf Eichmann, was dispatched to Palestine to meet al-Husaini. Eichmann arrived at the port of Haifa on October 2, 1937. But despite his having a tourist visa, the British authorities restricted his stay to forty-eight hours, after which he was put on a ship to Alexandria. Eichmann went to the British embassy in Cairo but couldn’t persuade that government to change its mind. Instead, Eichmann stayed in Cairo a while and met with the German News Agency man and al-Husaini’s representatives, who came from Jerusalem. He produced a detailed report whose theme was that while Arabs knew little about Nazi ideology, their hatred for Jews and other factors made this ideological difference no barrier to an alliance.
Al-Husaini was being hard pressed by the British at that time. They ordered his arrest in July 1937, so he hid in Jerusalem and in October, as police closed in, fled to Beirut. The French who ruled Lebanon did nothing to capture him, probably to discomfit their British rivals and perhaps due to his previous services to their government. The French would again save him from arrest after World War II.
As his rebellion failed al-Husaini’s efforts to gain German aid intensified. He was delighted by Hitler’s speech to the German minority in Czechoslovakia when he annexed their area following the September 1938 Munich agreement: “Take the Arab Palestinians as your ideal. With unusual courage they fight both England’s British Empire and the world Jewry. They have no protector or helper. I give you the means and weapons, and all of Germany is behind you.”33 Couldn’t al-Husaini expect that all of Germany would be behind him, too? He sent his nephew Jamal al-Husaini and the important politician Auni Abd al-Hadi to Grobba in Baghdad with a request for guns. Grobba answered that Germany wasn’t ready to back armed Arab uprisings lest that bring confrontation with Britain. But al-Husaini had a solution: the guns could go through the Saudis, whose king agreed to be middleman to hide German involvement.34 The Germans agreed.35 In September 1938, Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr (German military intelligence)—and thereafter contact man for al-Husaini’s military and espionage activities—provided Berlin’s first donation, £1,000 sterling, to Hamza, the Saudi envoy. Al-Husaini invested part of it in starting a new, radical Arab Club in Syria to organize support for him there.36
In mid-1939 Canaris provided four thousand rifles as a gift whose use, one of his aides explained, would create a pro-German “fifth column” in Palestine.37 In the end, the Germans bypassed the Saudis and secretly shipped the rifles through Greece to Lebanon, where they were loaded onto small boats for smuggling into Palestine.38 German involvement in Palestine quickly became so important that when U.S. intelligence analysts examined captured German records after World War II, they concluded that al-Husaini’s revolt was able to continue only because of Nazi funding.39 These weapons would also later furnish much of the Palestinian Arab arsenal during the 1947–48 fighting.40
While the British were, of course, angry about al-Husaini’s growing links to Germany, this strategy also gave them an added incentive to appease Palestine’s Arabs and Arabs in general. The British knew war was on the horizon. With Germany and Italy challenging their control of the Mediterranean and Middle East, London was ready for massive concessions to ensure the Arabs did not join their enemies. That, however, meant finding a way to undercut the radicals by empowering those who were more moderate. The problem was that the radicals understood this point and successfully countered that strategy.
The first effort was to make Palestine both Arab-ruled and governed by a moderate monarch. Traveling to London in April 1937 for King George’s coronation, Abdallah urged the British to give him Palestine. A British officer explained London’s ideal scenario. Abdallah would be king; Rajib an-Nashashibi would be his prime minister; the grand mufti would be pushed aside so he could cause no more trouble.41 Jewish leaders were unenthusiastic but said they could work with Abdallah. When Abdallah returned home on June 13, he received a spirited welcome from those who thought the British would make him king over Palestine.42
Even Berlin’s Foreign Ministry thought this plan would succeed and that the moderates would make a deal with Britain.43 Most Arab leaders—aside from al-Husaini and Iraqi leaders—wanted no quarrel with Britain, von Hentig concluded. The Saudis and Egyptians would do nothing; Transjordan would support the British. Thus, it made no sense to support al-Husaini with arms or money in a losing battle. Von Hentig was right in assessing Arab stances but wrong about British determination to impose a solution by force.44
The first British plan was based on the official Peel Commission proposal for a two-state solution in which 80 percent of Palestine would become an Arab state federated with Transjordan and ruled by Abdallah, while the remaining 20 percent would be a Jewish state. But most of Palestine’s Arabs opposed giving up any part of the country even as the price for getting the rest. Al-Husaini had nothing to gain from an Arab Palestine ruled by his rivals, Abdallah and the Nashashibis, and thus his Arab Higher Committee opposed the plan. Jealous and suspicious of Abdallah, not only Iraq but Saudi Arabia also rejected it.45
In contrast, Abdallah and his Palestinian Arab allies were pleased by a plan that would give them most of that land, $10 million from Britain, and a subsidy from the proposed Jewish state. Advocates of the deal whispered that the tiny Jewish state would be annexed when the chance arose. Abdallah’s subjects were delighted, while in the Palestinian town of Nablus, the an-Nashashibi stronghold, Britain’s flag was pulled down and replaced by Transjordan’s. When an Arab Higher Committee meeting rejected the plan, an-Nashashibi delegates walked out.46 Egypt’s moderate government refused to jeopardize relations with London. When several al-Husaini aides traveled to Cairo in October 1937, they were well received but their request to open a supply base for the revolt on Egyptian soil was rejected.47
The radicals fought back. Iraq’s militant leaders met with Grobba on July 15 to ask Germany for aid so as to escape from British influence and struggle against the Peel Commission plan. From that time on Iraq-German ties tightened. Berlin offered commercial credits, sent in more agents, and stepped up pro-Arab radio coverage.48
Figure 14. A 1942 German map of Arabia showing railroads, other main overland routes, and areas under British and French protection, including Palestine (1), Transjordan (2), and Iraq (3). But in that very year, Nazi ambitions in the region were decisively frustrated. Already in 1941, the British had defeated the Vichy forces in Syria and Lebanon and overthrown a pro-German regime in Iraq; in 1943, the Allies drove the Germans out of North Africa.
Fearing the radicals’ pro-German positions and the militancy of the Arab masses, the British soon retreated on the political front even as they increased military pressure on al-Husaini’s insurgency.49 When some of the grand mufti’s forces tried to spread the rebellion to Transjordan—even daring to place a bomb in Abdallah’s palace—the king’s well-disciplined, British-officered army wiped them out.50 As so often happened in Arab politics, the next generation of radicals would repeat the pattern. Thirty years later, the PLO would use Jordan as an involuntary Palestinian base to attack its neighbor, try to overthrow the monarchy, and again be defeated by Jordan’s army.
In 1938, with the Peel proposal defeated, war approaching, and radicalism growing, the British decided they needed an even more pro-Arab initiative in tandem with the concessions on Czechoslovakia—in effect, the European equivalent of Palestine—to appease Hitler. The same British government was equally ready to turn over Palestine to Arab rule and leave the Jews there to a dismal fate.51 Secretary of State for the Colonies Malcolm MacDonald and Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax contacted Iraq’s Foreign Minister as-Suwaidi, moderate Prime Minister Nuri as-Said, and Egyptian Prime Minister Muhammad Mahmud. If they could moderate the grand mufti’s hard line, an Arab-ruled, united Palestine was possible and a major conference would be held in London to discuss a solution.52
By this point, however, the grand mufti was even less interested in a deal. As British policy kowtowed to Germany, al-Husaini was even more convinced the Germans would win.53 He refused even to talk without a prior British guarantee that all of Palestine would become an independent Arab state and that the an-Nashashibi faction would not be allowed to participate in any meetings. Britain refused.
Events in Iraq reinforced al-Husaini’s confidence. On December 25, 1938, radical army officers seized power. Minister of Defense Taha al-Hashimi became president of the radical Palestine Defense Committee, whose fund-raising campaigns attained semiofficial status. Anti-Jewish violence escalated. Al-Husaini could fully depend on Iraqi support.54
Arab governments put together top-level delegations for the London meeting, sensing that it would be a last desperate attempt to settle the Palestine dispute peacefully. Ibn Saud chose his son and foreign minister, Prince (later king) Faisal and Deputy Foreign Minister Fuad Hamza, himself of Palestinian origin. Transjordan was represented by Prime Minister Taufiq Abu al-Huda, also born in Palestine. Egypt sent Ali Mahir along with al-Husaini’s Egyptian ally, Abd ar-Rahman Azzam as an adviser, while Yemen dispatched Prince Saif al-Islam al-Husain.55
The conference’s timing coincided with the height of Jewish desperation over the fascist persecutions in Europe. No country was willing to take Jewish refugees at a moment when new areas of oppression threatened to open in Italy and the Balkans. The Zionists knew that any Jew prevented from reaching Palestine faced the likelihood of death.56
Warning signals of coming war multiplied daily. The London Conference had been planned as Britain was appeasing Hitler. The Germans occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia during its sessions. The opening day, February 7, 1939, was marked by Italian threats to attack Egypt from Libya, coupled with a German general’s touring fortifications near the Libya-Egypt border.57 In this context, the Middle East’s immense strategic significance was at the center of British policymakers’ thoughts. This meant making the Arabs happy. British forces in the area, no matter how strong, would be insufficient if local populations revolted. But once Palestine was amicably resolved, they reasoned, they need not fear a pro-German Arab fifth column or Islamist rebellion.58
Yet the Arab stance made any solution impossible. During pre-conference Arab consultations in Cairo, the states agreed that Palestine’s Arabs would have the decisive voice in the London talks and governments would support whatever they—that is, al-Husaini—wanted. That enabled al-Husaini to set the guidelines to ensure that the talks failed. He demanded a total ban on Jewish immigration and land purchases plus rapid creation of an independent Arab Palestine under his rule. For al-Husaini, and thus for all of the Arab leaders, it would be all or nothing.59
In London, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, and MacDonald shuttled between Zionist and Arab delegations, which met separately except on three occasions. Making no secret of his desperation for appeasement, Chamberlain assured Arab delegations of Britain’s desire to maintain and strengthen friendship with them, while MacDonald noted that trouble in Palestine would echo throughout the region.
MacDonald frankly presented the reasons behind British policy. The likelihood of war necessitated surrender to Arab demands as long as such concessions made London feel more secure. Halifax was blunt: “Gentlemen, there are times when the most ethical consideration must give way to administrative necessity.” MacDonald gave the details. Egypt commanded the Suez Canal route to Asia; Alexandria was the only naval base suitable for defending the eastern Mediterranean. Iraq controlled air and land passage to Asia and was Britain’s main source of oil. A hostile Saudi Arabia would threaten British strategic routes. In the event of war, all of these places must be on Great Britain’s side.60
Moshe Sharett, a Zionist leader, tried to counter these arguments. If the Palestine question were settled, he said, Arab governments would merely raise more demands. In the event of war with Germany, Jewish support would be more reliable than Arab pledges. Ben-Gurion added that whatever happened in Palestine, Arab governments would follow their own interests. The Jewish leaders dismissed promises of being protected in an Arab-ruled Palestine, pointing out that the regimes did not even protect Jews in their own countries and insisting that events in Europe made it impossible for them to abandon demands for Jewish immigration.61
The British didn’t care.62 Instead, the British government, believing war would begin within months, offered to accept virtually all the Arab governments’ demands. It proposed a Palestine constitutional conference be held in six months followed by the creation of a Palestine executive council on which Arabs would have 60 percent of the seats. In addition, the council could stop all Jewish immigration in five years.63
While the Zionists considered walking out, Arabs celebrated this news, but that didn’t last long. The Palestine Arab delegation quickly rejected this plan. Instead it demanded the immediate establishment of a Palestine government and a ban on all Jewish immigration or land purchases, with full independence to follow within three years. The Arab states were frustrated, and even some of the grand mufti’s followers wanted to accept, but al-Husaini wouldn’t budge. Trapped by their earlier promises, Arab government delegations fell into line. Indeed, not trusting as-Said to concur, Iraq’s government recalled him and sent radical Foreign Minister Taufiq as-Suwaidi instead.64
In response to the Arab rejection, MacDonald embarked on another round of concessions to them. Not only would Jewish immigration be under Arab veto after five years, but even before that time it would be limited to a total of seventy-five thousand people. The proportion of Arabs on the executive council would be raised from 60 to 66 percent. There could be no doubt that the result would be an Arab-ruled Palestine. At this point, Ben-Gurion whispered to a colleague, “They have called this meeting . . . to tell us to give up.”65
The Arab side was on the verge of victory; no Jewish state could ever be created. Yet again the Arabs stood firm on rejection.66 On March 15, Hitler seized the rest of Czechoslovakia, marking another step toward international confrontation. Two days later the London Conference ended in failure.
Still, the European crisis, wrote British High Commissioner to Egypt Sir Miles Lampson on March 23, “makes it all the more essential that [a] rapid end should be put to disturbances in Palestine.” The Arab states, except for Iraq, also still wanted a quick deal.67 So despite the breakdown, Arab delegations again met in Cairo to propose a new basis for agreement. Arab leaders were still optimistic. How could such a favorable offer be turned down? Egypt’s ambassador assured the British Foreign Office that with his country endorsing this plan, the grand mufti could not interfere.
The Arab states proposed some changes in the British plan intended to assure that the result would be an Arab-ruled Palestine as soon as possible. According to this counteroffer, a Palestinian state would be established within ten years and consultations with Arab governments would be held if this schedule could not be met. Jewish immigration would be reduced and the Jewish population of Palestine would be frozen at 33 percent. Palestinian ministers would be chosen to prepare for independence.
The British gave in on almost every point. Chamberlain explained, “We are now compelled to consider the Palestine problem mainly from the point of view of its effect on the international situation. . . . If we must offend one side, let us offend the Jews rather than the Arabs.”68 It seemed as if al-Husaini’s radical policy and move toward Germany had succeeded in generating enough leverage to make the British surrender. But London wanted a long interim period. What would be the point of turning over Palestine immediately to al-Husaini only to see him support the Germans? So they wanted to make al-Husaini wait until the European crisis would be resolved. At that point, if he became the head of an independent Arab Palestine there would be little harm to British strategic interests.
On April 28, after talking with Arab negotiators, Lampson reported that the exchanges “are going more favorably than expected.”69 The main point still blocking a deal was the Arab side’s demand—which the British knew came from the grand mufti—that an Arab government would start running the country within three years.70
C. W. Baxter, head of the Foreign Office’s Eastern Department, wrote that the Arab states had come to terms “on all the most difficult outstanding points.”71 Lampson agreed that there was “substantial agreement . . . on all the main issues.” But, both men explained, the Arab states must persuade the Palestine Arabs to agree. The Egyptians were confident of success, with Prime Minister Mahmud claiming he would simply invite the grand mufti to Cairo and “make him toe the line.”72
On May 17, 1939, Mahmud and Ali Mahir, soon to be his successor, met the Palestinian Arab delegation to talk them into agreeing. Mahir told them that they should accept the British plan. The reason the Jews were so much against it was that it so favored the Arab side. This was a tremendous opportunity; the best deal the Arabs could ever obtain. Cooperation with Britain was better than being “at the mercy of the Jews.” Once the Palestine Arabs had a state, sympathetic Arab regimes would help ensure their total control.73
Winning an independent state, Mahir continued, required training administrators, preparing for defense, and achieving international “legitimacy.” A transitional period, Mahir suggested, was an advantage, not a trap. The best way to triumph was to advance step by step, as in a war in which “One army is vacating some of its front trenches. Would you refrain from jumping into them and occupying them?”
But the Palestine Arab leaders retorted, “If we accept, the revolution will end.”
So Mahir tried again to explain reality to them. “Do you believe,” he asked, “that Great Britain is unable to crush your revolution, with all its modern satanic war inventions?” Mahmud and Mahir knew the Arab revolt in Palestine had been defeated by the British. “Is it not better for you,” Mahir continued, “to come nearer to the British authorities and get them to forsake the Jews?” Then the Arabs wouldn’t have to ask London to stop Jewish immigration, they’d control it themselves and not even a single Jew could enter the country. Next Mahmud weighed in with a prophetic warning. If the Palestinian Arabs agreed right now, he insisted, they could have their way. But soon there would be a war that would put them in a weaker position. Britain would lose patience and invoke martial law. Arab countries would be too involved with their own problems to help.
Again the Palestine Arabs refused: “When the revolt started, we had aims in view to attain. We cannot now tell our people, ‘Stop the revolution because we got some high posts. . . .’”
“You can tell your people,” Mahir answered, “that you shall be able to control your country’s government; to stop [British] persecution, deportations, and harsh measures. You could set Palestine’s budget, limit the Jewish population to one-third, and justify accepting the deal on the basis of the Arab governments’ advice.” The Palestine Arabs would not even have to sign anything, but merely to agree verbally to cooperate with a British government White Paper setting the new policy. None of his arguments made any headway.
Mahir and Mahmud were right. The British wanted to satisfy Arab demands as much as possible and thus a little temporary compromise and patience would have achieved a total victory for the Arab side. Under these conditions, an Arab Palestine would have obtained independence within a decade, by 1949 and would have ruled the entire country from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.74 Once Palestine was independent, the Arabs could do whatever they wanted to Jews there including—as al-Husaini had made clear—killing them all. If the Palestine Arabs had accepted the British proposal, taken over the government, and worked with the British, Israel never would have existed.
Instead, the Palestine Arab leaders rejected the White Paper, sought total victory, collaborated with the Germans against the British, and in the end received nothing. This orientation made inevitable the Arab rejection of partition and a Palestinian Arab state in 1947; Israel’s creation in 1948; five wars; the delay of Israel-Palestinian negotiations for forty-five years; and the absence of a Palestinian state well into the twenty-first century, generations after the rejection of the 1939 deal.
But in 1939 it was possible to believe history would take a different course. A like-minded regime in Germany seemed the world’s strongest power, supported the radical Arabs, and might soon destroy all of the Arabs’ and Muslims’ enemies. The growing radical movement believed that millions of Arabs and other Muslims were about to revolt under its leadership, that soon it would seize control of Iraq and Egypt, Palestine and Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Syria. Believing total victory imminent, why should Palestine’s Arabs make any deal with the British, even one requiring the smallest compromise? Al-Husaini was set on a revolutionary approach depending on Germany. Already he was for all practical purposes the Arab world’s strongest leader. Such was the power of saying “no,” a lesson that would be fully absorbed by postwar Arab leaders.
While Arab governments generally understood that Britain’s offer was a great opportunity, they also knew that radicals would exploit any sign of compromise to inflame their own people against them. Moreover, they were trapped by their decision to grant al-Husaini total veto power. Indeed, many wondered whether the grand mufti might be right. Perhaps the Nazis were the wave of the future and a more useful ally than the British.75 As a result, even though all the Arab governments except Iraq wanted a deal with the British, al-Husaini’s men walked out of the talks, certain that their ambitions would be met more quickly and fully by violent Arab revolts combined with Axis victory in the coming war.
At long last, it was London’s turn to dig in its heels. It told the Arab states that unless further progress in negotiations was made, it would set its own policy. On May 17 the White Paper proposed that a united Palestine—which everyone knew meant an Arab-dominated Palestine—would be established in ten years. Jews could only buy land in a few areas; Jewish immigration would be strictly limited for five years, after which the Arabs would decide how many would be admitted, which meant none. Yet on the Arab side only Transjordan and the an-Nashashibi faction publicly said anything favorable about the White Paper.76
The Jewish Agency strongly protested the White Paper as contrary to the mandate’s provisions. Even the Soviets accused Britain of selling out the Jews for its own benefit. Despite the refusal of any Arab state to approve it, the British White Paper became the governing document for Palestine during the next six years. The restrictions on immigration would cost hundreds of thousands of Jews their lives.
Instead of making a deal with Britain, by the summer of 1939 virtually every Arab leader except Abdallah of Transjordan had secretly contacted Germany to offer cooperation. Most enthusiastic were the radicals in Iraq. When the relatively moderate Iraqi politician Rustum Haidar said British policy didn’t give the Arab side everything from fear of international Jewish financial power, a radical politician responded that it didn’t matter. Might made right. Force rather than more talk was the answer.77
Egypt’s government, the most ardent advocate for accepting the White Paper, was the first to denounce it. In line with the new Arab style of outbidding rivals in militancy, the Wafd Party—even more moderate and pro-British than the government—attacked its rejection as being too mild. The fascist Young Egypt Party started a bombing campaign against Jewish stores.78
Iraq and Saudi Arabia also rejected the White Paper. Iraqi Foreign Minister Ali Jawdat neatly showed the Arab governments’ ambiguity on the issue. On the one hand, he denounced the White Paper, claiming the transition period was too long and restrictions on Jewish immigration too mild. On the other hand, he called the White Paper a great Arab victory, and confided privately that he and as-Said had tried to convince Jamal al-Husaini to accept it.79 The Iraqi regime also tried to calm the passions the radicals were fomenting. Instructions were issued to newspapers not to publish anything that might damage Anglo-Iraqi relations. Still, Baghdad would not cooperate with a request from the moderate Palestinian Auni Abd al-Hadi to support a pro–White Paper group of Palestine Arabs.80 Only al-Husaini and his hardline stance would ever be allowed to represent the Palestine Arabs.
Blinded by bitterness toward the British and overestimating German power, the grand mufti had already taken the road to Berlin. In mid-1939, al-Husaini made his first request to Canaris to visit the German capital.81 When the grand mufti left Lebanon for Iraq in October 1939, his triumphalism was enhanced by his reception in Baghdad, where he was granted refuge and acclaimed a national hero. Every politician from the prime minister down, as well as all the political clubs and groups, threw parties in his honor, events that turned into Pan-Arab, anti-British demonstrations.82
Nor was this support expressed only in words. Iraq’s parliament granted the grand mufti £18,000 a month plus £1,000 a month from secret service funds and a 2 percent tax on government officials’ salaries. More contributions came from Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Although he promised as-Said not to engage in political activity, the grand mufti played political kingmaker in Iraq, helping first Taha al-Hashimi and then al-Kailani become prime minister. He strengthened the radical faction by placing militant Palestinians and Syrians in teaching jobs and in the government bureaucracy.83
The difference between radicals and moderates was well represented by the remark of the Palestinian Arab delegates in their May 1939 meeting with Egypt’s leaders, “We cannot now tell our people, ‘Stop the revolution because we got some high posts. . . .’” But that was precisely what moderate Arab politicians wanted: not a revolution in Palestine but a solution to Palestine. And they viewed that as having been achieved in the London negotiations because Palestinian Arabs would obtain “high posts” and thus would be running the country. The story of al-Husaini and the 1939 London Conference would be reenacted by Arafat at the Camp David meeting in 2000, when Arafat rejected getting a Palestinian state through negotiations because he preferred the illusory hope of getting it all by violence.
Now, the moment had come for each Arab leader to choose between the Anglo-French alliance and the German-Italian Axis. The radical faction had already decided on Berlin; even moderate leaders sought to hedge their bets in case the Axis emerged triumphant. It seems as if the time of von Oppenheim’s old plan had truly come. But once again a world war would determine the outcome.