By 1943, the British controlled the regimes ruling every Arab country, or at least could depend on their support for the war. Britain had returned as-Said to power in Iraq; installed the moderate nationalist Wafd Party in Egypt; backed the loyal Abdallah in Transjordan; taken over the French colonies of Lebanon and Syria; ruled Palestine; captured—along with the Americans—Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria; and also occupied Iran, along with the Soviets and Americans. In contrast, their Arab enemies were either in Allied prisons or in Berlin. The same situation of moderates displacing radicals happened briefly in Palestinian Arab politics. The absence of the grand mufti and his closest supporters gave a chance for more moderate men to fill the vacuum. Musaal-Alami, who had previously collaborated with al-Husaini and the Nazis, changed sides and persuaded five anti-Husaini Palestine Arab parties to make him their joint representative at the October 1944 Arab summit conference in Alexandria.1
At first, al-Alami was seated at a small side table but then his credentials were accepted and Arab leaders welcomed him with kisses and embraces. No doubt they were relieved not to have to deal with al-Husaini.2 The meeting’s tone was moderate. Al-Alami proposed accepting the British White Paper, reversing al-Husaini’s 1939 rejection of it. Egypt even suggested offering some compromise to the Jews. The Saudi king warned against too strong a resolution on Palestine during the U.S. election campaign. In the end, the conference backed the 1939 White Paper.3 Of course, Arab countries and al-Alami wanted to prevent the creation of a Jewish state. But, in contrast to al-Husaini and his pro-German allies, they hoped to do so through diplomacy rather than violence, and possibly make some deal with the Zionists rather than murdering all of the Jews.4
Since the grand mufti’s strategy had clearly failed, Transjordan’s ruler Abdallah argued, someone else should be given a chance to solve the issue. Only he accurately gauged the Zionists’ power and organization. He pulled no punches in describing the Palestine Arabs’ “backward state of development” while, in contrast, the Jews, “Are constantly increasing their hold on the country. . . . Cultivating the sandy areas, boring wells, recovering dead lands and converting them into gardens of paradise. Arab parties are still fighting over the claims to leadership of those men who were responsible for the ruin of their country.”5
As the war came to an end, some portents seemed to favor the Arab side in the dispute: Western desire for Arab friendship, relative unity, the Arab states’ bigger role in international politics, and Arab oil’s growing importance. But in fact, largely due to the radicals’ disastrous strategy and the war itself, the Arabs had lost ground since 1939. U.S. involvement in the region provided additional support for the Zionists. The Holocaust had brought not only international sympathy for the Jews but made hundreds of thousands of European Jewish survivors desperate to immigrate to Palestine.
Yet the key question remained: Was the surest way to Arab victory through diplomacy and compromise or was total triumph the only acceptable outcome and war the only proper method?
In 1939, the radical nationalists and Islamists had chosen the path of violence and extremism, a story that would repeat itself in 1947–48. Yet that outcome was not inevitable and in 1945 even seemed unlikely. Al-Alami tried to prevent the grand mufti’s return by obtaining the Arab states’ backing for himself. He even courted Jamal al-Husaini, just released from his wartime exile in Southern Rhodesia. As-Said and the British also hoped Jamal would participate in a new, more moderate Palestinian Arab leadership. Instead, Jamal remained loyal to his brother Amin al-Husaini rather than join his brother-in-law al-Alami.
The Arab states lost their nerve and Jamal al-Husaini, leading Amin al-Husaini’s forces, outmaneuvered the smaller parties. Instead of imposing al-Alami and less extreme forces as the new Palestine Arab leadership, an Arab League–appointed commission appointed a twelve-man Palestinian leadership group, with five seats given to al-Husaini’s Palestine Arab Party and the presidency left open for Amin al-Husaini. Al-Alami was merely given one seat as an independent while the other smaller parties got one place each. The prewar radical nationalist, Nazi collaborationist and Islamist leadership had been restored. What followed—war, defeat, Israel’s creation, and a seemingly endless Arab-Israeli conflict—was thus largely inevitable.
How did al-Husaini so easily escape punishment for his war crimes? After the world war ended, even ordinary concentration camp guards were charged, tried, and convicted of acting as accessories to mass murder. They had done far less than the man who had been Germany’s leading non-European accomplice. Among his deeds had been launching a bloody revolt in Palestine; assassinating British officials; killing hundreds of other Palestine Arab and Jewish civilians; fomenting a pro-Axis revolt and a massacre of Jews in Iraq; collaborating with Hitler; gathering intelligence for the Germans; recruiting Muslim army units for the German army and SS; preparing a Middle East Holocaust against the Jews; promoting pro-Axis revolts in Egypt and elsewhere; and conducting pro-Nazi propaganda by every means at his disposal.
Al-Husaini’s denials of the charges against him were not very credible. On August 26, 1946, he claimed that Zionists had inserted forged statements about him in captured German records. A year later he promised to produce documents disproving his “alleged pro-Axis activity as claimed by the Jews” and proving his “innocence,” but he never did so.6 To neutralize any U.S. effort to go after him as a war criminal, al-Husaini lied by claiming he had “never spoken against America” in his Berlin radio talks. In fact, from the time America entered the war in December 1941 he had constantly charged it as being the Muslims’ enemy and the slave of world Jewry.7
During Eichmann’s trial, he lied at a May 4, 1961 press conference, saying he had “never met Eichmann” and claiming, “The Nazis needed no persuasion or instigation either by me or anybody.”8 Trying to conceal how decisions to commit genocide coincided with his agreements and meetings with Hitler, al-Husaini added that he had arrived in Germany only “after the Nazis had adopted their measures against the Jews.”9
Yet on other matters, he boasted of complicity. In his memoirs, al-Husaini bragged about how he had blocked Jewish escape from Europe, and made clear that he understood that this was why he was considered to be responsible for the death of so many Jews.10 He mentioned his many interventions to stop releases, including those of children.11 Al-Husaini justified this behavior at the time and later by saying that these people would have helped build and maintain a Jewish state in Palestine, the same rationale the PLO and Hamas would use for killing Israeli civilians, including children, decades later. Eichmann himself identified the al-Husaini–Hitler meeting as the turning point in setting off the implementation of genocide.12
The Germans also kept him better informed than anyone else about the planned and ongoing mass murders. Of course, this was because they knew he favored them, furthered them in every way in his power, and planned to initiate his own genocide in the Middle East. The only thing that stopped him was the German army’s failure to conquer that region. And where the Nazis ruled and al-Husaini had influence—in the Balkans, Tunisia, and Soviet Muslim areas—he supported their policy and trained people to implement it.
For this and many other reasons, al-Husaini was a war criminal and should have been tried as such. The grand mufti was so unrepentantly pro-Nazi that in his memoirs he attacked as a traitor and sell-out his old espionage handler, Canaris, who had turned against Hitler and tried to overthrow the Nazi regime.13 Some German counterparts noted that he was more fanatical than they were.
The Allies knew all of these facts, and began hunting Eichmann and al-Husaini as war criminals in late 1944.14 It was an American officer who seized al-Husaini’s archive in Berlin. Prior to this, al-Husaini had one of his aides, Mustafa al-Wakil, photograph his papers, and used parts of them in his memoirs.15 But most of the materials fell into Allied hands and ended up in the State Department’s basement.16
In mid-1945 Simon Wiesenthal, an Austrian Jew who had spent four and a half years in concentration camps17 and had thereafter worked for U.S. and Israeli intelligence and war crimes investigators, began researching the close ties between Eichmann and al-Husaini.18 He published his conclusions in early 1947 and later testified about al-Husaini at the Eichmann trial.19
The State Department considered the idea of trying al-Husaini as a war criminal at the Nuremberg trial, while the CIA produced a dozen reports on al-Husaini’s involvement in war crimes. But in 1950, it decided to let al-Husaini escape justice, concluding that to do otherwise would stir up trouble for the United States in the Middle East. The British and French had already reached similar conclusions. As would happen in later decades with many terrorists—especially the PLO—Western inaction was justified by political considerations.20
Equally, while much of the Arab-Israeli conflict’s ensuing history might have happened anyway, if al-Husaini had been kept in custody or tried for war crimes, thus allowing more moderate leaders to emerge, it is conceivable that Palestine might have been partitioned into two states in 1948. The flight of Palestinian Arab refugees might never have happened. Tens of thousands of people who died over decades of continuing conflict might have lived.
This, of course, involves speculation. Yet it is a reasonable assertion that this history would have been less bloody than what actually happened. Certainly, the radical nationalists’ and Islamists’ post-1948 domination of both the Palestinian movement and most Arab states, whose view of Jews was comparable to that of their former Nazi allies, made it all the more certain. Western inaction against al-Husaini’s Islamist ideology and role as an accomplice to genocide made it harder for a self-critical climate in the Arab world, or any international soul-searching that might have brought the region alternative policies and rulers.
In the war’s closing days, the Germans had tried to spirit al-Husaini to a neutral country, but Switzerland refused him entry and the French captured him. The only country that ever demanded his prosecution was Yugoslavia, because of the atrocities committed by the Muslim units al-Husaini had recruited and helped train. On July 10, 1945, Tito’s government put his name on the international list of wanted war criminals.
Ironically, al-Husaini was saved by two other former Nazi collaborators who had worked for him during the war. One was Husain Sulaiman Djozo, whom al-Husaini had hired as an instructor at his SS imam training school and who went on to be the Bosnian SS division’s chief imam. Tito’s Communist government pardoned Djozo because it needed a Muslim leader who it knew would follow orders. As an ex-collaborator Djozo was too vulnerable not to obey. If al-Husaini was a war criminal for raising the SS units, Djozo was, too, for helping to lead them. Thus he had a strong incentive to persuade Tito to leave al-Husaini alone.21
The grand mufti’s other savior was Abd ar-Rahman Azzam, the postwar Arab League’s secretary general. Azzam threatened an Arab boycott against Yugoslavia unless al-Husaini was taken off the list. Since the deposed Yugoslav royal family had taken refuge in Cairo, Egypt’s government hinted that it would retaliate by letting them organize an opposition center there. Consequently, the Yugoslav government quietly removed al-Husaini’s name in August 1945.22
Meanwhile, al-Husaini enjoyed relative freedom in Paris. The French let him direct aides, seek Arab League support, and order arms purchases for the next battle against the Jews. He authorized Saad ad-Din Arif, his main arms smuggler, to draw money from funds supplied by Nazi Germany. Ahmad Hilmi, his banker, and Ishaq Darwish, his secretary, signed the checks.23 While in French custody for crimes committed during the last war, al-Husaini was permitted to start fighting the next one, using Nazi-supplied money and guns.
When al-Husaini’s arrest was reported in late May 1945, it was widely expected that the French would turn him over to the British, who had been chasing him for the last seven years. While the Anglo-French extradition treaty related to criminals not politicians, al-Husaini worried that he would end up in British hands and be tried as a war criminal, but neither country took any serious action against him.24
On the contrary, the French protected him.25 On August 28, 1945, the French government elevated the captured man’s status to “privileged” because it was negotiating politically with him.26 U.S. intelligence knew by May 1946 that al-Husaini had secretly instructed old comrades to prepare for his arrival, saying that the French had no objection to his returning to the Middle East.27 As would happen with Khomeini, whom it would help more than thirty years later, the French government reasoned that it could help a dangerous radical in exchange for his promising to respect French interests in the future whatever he did to the British, Americans, or anyone else. In both cases, the French were deceived.
The British government said that the offenses with which al-Husaini might be charged were “not extraditable” and he was “not a war criminal in the technical sense, not a person who served in enemy forces.”28 Yet, of course, he had done far more damage than any private in the ranks of an Axis army. At the time, London was sponsoring the Arab League and seeking to develop postwar strategic ties with the region’s countries. One can only conclude that the British thought prosecuting al-Husaini would cause revolts, resentment, and retaliation in the Arab and Muslim world.29
In June 1946, Acting Secretary of State Dean Acheson announced the issuing of a White Paper on al-Husaini’s war record based on captured files, but the report never appeared. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, chief prosecutor at the Nuremburg war crimes trials, said that since the court’s jurisdiction was only to try war criminals in Axis Europe, al-Husaini could not be tried there, disregarding the fact that his activities in the Balkans and USSR fit the requirements for prosecution.30
While some American Jewish groups proposed that al-Husaini be tried for his role in the Holocaust, they received no cooperation from the U.S. government.31 At the end of the war, the government stopped New York’s Morgen Journal from publishing material about al-Husaini and demanding his trial as a war criminal.32 The liberal magazine The Nation called him an accomplice in the Holocaust, suggested he was only being treated leniently so as not to hurt Muslim feelings, and charged him with directing a movement in Palestine that echoed Nazi slogans.33 The liberal New York Post added new information by publishing extracts from British interrogations of the Arab paratroopers al-Husaini had sent to Iraq. The grand mufti, it said, “organized Axis activities in the Middle East” and was a war criminal being spared punishment because the British and French had agreed to use him as a political instrument.34
Since there were no charges against al-Husaini and the Yugoslavs had dropped him from the wanted list, however, the French released him in May 1946 and he quickly went to Egypt. Following the principle al-Husaini had done so much to introduce—that the most radical was always the most legitimate—no Arab leader tried to block al-Husaini’s return despite all the problems he had caused them. In the Arabic-speaking world he was a hero.
The Muslim Brotherhood campaigned for al-Husaini’s return precisely because of his past radicalism and intransigence, which it defined as Islamist heroism. His old ally Hasan al-Banna wrote:
Great welcome should be extended to him wherever he goes, as a sign of appreciation for his great services for the glory of Islam and the Arabs. . . . What a hero, what a miracle of a man. We wish to know what the Arab youth, cabinet ministers, rich men, and princes of Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Tunis, Morocco, and Tripoli are going to do to be worthy of this hero. Yes, this hero who challenged an empire and fought Zionism, with the help of Hitler and Germany. Germany and Hitler are gone, but Amin al-Husaini will continue the struggle.35
Al-Husaini did continue the struggle, in the same spirit as he had done when allied with Hitler. Most of those who worked with him did the same. Al-Husaini’s top military commanders in the new war against the Jews—al-Qawuqji, Abd al-Qadir al-Husaini, and Salama—had all been Nazi collaborators. Practically the first thing al-Husaini did on arriving in Cairo was to meet Salama and Abd al-Qadir al-Husaini to plan his attack.36
Abd al-Qadir had fought alongside the other two men in defense of Iraq’s pro-Nazi regime. But in a June 1941 battle at Sadr Abu Ghraib he was captured and imprisoned in Iraq for three years. After being released, Abd al-Qadir spent the rest of the war as a guest of the Saudi king in Mecca, where the al-Husaini clan had temporarily moved its headquarters. In January 1946 he arrived in Cairo to go back to work for his uncle.37
Their first task was to retrieve the Nazi arms al-Husaini’s men had hidden in Egypt’s desert for use in the projected 1942 pro-German revolt, a task carried out with help from the Muslim Brotherhood and the Young Egypt Party. The rifles sent directly to them by the Nazis in 1939 for their own revolt were also utilized in the new battles. Salama’s men used them, for example, in the December 8, 1947 attack against Tel Aviv’s Hatikva quarter.38
Al-Husaini had called the SS units he recruited for the Germans “as-Sa’iqa,” (“lightning storm”), named after the Nazis’ stormtroopers. Later, he would use the same name for his Syria-based Palestinian army fighting in the 1947–48 war, which was commanded by al-Qawuqji, still another collaborator with the Germans.39
As leader of the Holy Jihad Troops, al-Jihad al-Muqaddas, Abd al-Qadir drilled his men in a secret training camp near Egypt’s border with Libya. He then led al-Husaini’s main army until he was killed.40 Salama commanded on the key central front where he was mortally wounded by grenade fragments at the battle of Ras al-Ain in 1948.41 There are reports that the Palestinian Arab forces also had ex-Nazi advisers in the field.42
Between arriving in Cairo in May 1946 and launching his war about a year later, al-Husaini worked to muster Arab and Muslim state support, pressuring and blackmailing those—especially in Transjordan and Egypt—who were not eager to fight. As had happened in the late 1930s, Arab governments once more had to take into account the grand mufti’s charisma, ability to incite their own people to violence, and determination to veto any concessions, as well as internal pressures from Islamist and nationalist radicals who incited flammable public opinion.
It might seem excessive to assert that there would have been no 1948 war and no Arab-Israeli conflict without al-Husaini and his allies. Yet no one individual made this outcome more likely than him. While pressures from the public and militant groups between 1946 and 1948 made war seem inevitable, without al-Husaini’s presence as the Palestinian Arabs’ and a transnational Islamist leader there might have been other options. And al-Husaini was well funded by money and well-armed with rifles that had been provided by the Nazis.
With a moderate Palestinian leadership, partition might have been accepted and a Palestinian state created in 1948 or a deal worked out at some point during the half-century that followed.43 Certainly, if the radical faction had not triumphed so thoroughly both politically and ideologically, such an outcome would have been far more possible. Transjordan’s ruler Abdallah was interested in annexing the West Bank and making some deal with the Jews. The Egyptian government was eager to avoid war, and there were other relatively moderate Arab and other Muslim leaders.
One should not oversimplify these complex issues, but the retrospective view that everything was inevitable overstates the case. Once al-Husaini was allowed to reestablish himself as unchallengeable leader of the Palestinian Arabs, this ensured that no compromise or two-state solution would be considered, while making certain that Arab leaders would be intimidated and driven to war. Al-Husaini’s and the radical legacy has continued to dominate the Palestinian national and the Islamist global movement down to the present day.
Like al-Husaini and his own movement, most of the other forces pushing for intransigence and war over the Palestine issue also came from the same radical Arab and Islamist faction that had cooperated with the Nazis: the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Syria as well as militant nationalists and Islamists in Syria and Iraq. Again, while it might seem obvious that what happened was inevitable, a study of the records and secret discussions among Arabs and between Arab leaders and the West during that period—just as with the 1938–1939 events—makes that conclusion far less certain.
During the first phase, between the November 1947 UN partition vote and the end of the mandate accompanied by Israel’s declaration of independence in May 1948, al-Husaini’s men and foreign volunteers from formerly pro-Nazi radical groups fought the Jews. One of those volunteers was a resident of Egypt whose family had emigrated from Palestine named Yasir Arafat, a distant relative of al-Husaini. Arafat claimed that his mentor was Abd al-Qadir al-Husaini, who had fought for the Nazis, and that he had served in a unit under Abd al-Qadir’s command. That unit was a Muslim Brotherhood one and Arafat was at that time either a member of that organization or at least very close to it.44
Among those offering al-Husaini help were Egyptian officers who just five years earlier had collaborated with the Nazis. They called themselves the Free Officers and their ranks included as-Sadat, who had been expelled from the army for his pro-German activities and jailed in 1942. He escaped in October 1944, hiding out as a laborer and truck driver, and then returned home in September 1945, though he was only allowed to rejoin the army five years later.
Immediately after the November 29, 1947, UN partition vote, Free Officers leader Abd an-Nasir, another member of the pro-Nazi faction during the world war, visited al-Husaini at his home in Cairo to explain that his group wanted to support the “resistance movement in Palestine” as volunteers. Al-Husaini requested government permission and was turned down. The moderate Egyptian regime didn’t want to turn over its soldiers to al-Husaini’s control.45
The failure of al-Husaini’s local forces to destroy the Jews in 1947 and early 1948 led to the regular Arab armies’ intervention, finally getting Abd an-Nasir into the fighting. But they, too, were defeated. Israel survived the onslaught, though this was not the conflict’s end but only its beginning.
After the lost war, al-Husaini was desperate. The Jewish state was established despite his four-decade-long struggle from Istanbul, Jerusalem, Beirut, Baghdad, Tehran, Berlin, Paris, and Cairo to stop it. The rest of Palestine was also lost to him. Egypt seized the Gaza Strip; Trans-jordan annexed the West Bank and the eastern part of Jerusalem. On December 20, 1948, Abdallah even took away the grand mufti job, appointing in al-Husaini’s place his old rival Hisham ad-Din Jar Allah, and al-Husaini’s effort to create—at last, when too late—a Palestinian government in exile went nowhere.
Habib Hasan, his bodyguard for many years, left him.46 Al-Husaini, clearly under psychological stress, became irritable and antagonistic toward people. Trusting no one, he carried two guns and slept in a different place each night.47 He certainly could not depend on Arab governments, which had finally succeeded in shutting him out of regional politics. Publicly and officially, however, nobody blamed al-Husaini for having thrown away the prewar opportunities to get all of Palestine, betting on the Nazis to win the war, rejecting a UN-created Palestinian state, losing the remaining territory to his supposed Arab allies, and leading his people into a disastrous, avoidable war that resulted in so many of them becoming refugees.
Instead, the radical nationalists and Islamists blamed the disaster—the nakba, in Arabic—on Israel, the West, and Arab state leaders rather than on al-Husaini’s radicalism, intransigence and Islamism. And when they—like Abd an-Nasir—condemned governments of the time as incompetent, weak, and corrupt, they were complaining that those rulers had been too moderate. What was needed, the revolutionaries concluded, was not rethinking but revenge.
It would be easy to assume that al-Husaini’s career as an important political figure was finished in 1948, but that was not at all true. Instead, he devoted the remaining quarter-century of his life in seeking to ensure that radical Islamism would have its revenge on Western democracies, Israel, and Arab nationalists alike. During the years of Islamism’s eclipse, supplanted and repressed by its former radical nationalist partners, al-Husaini kept the movement alive. Arab regimes, aside from the pious Saudis, wanted nothing to do with al-Husaini. Jordanian and Iraqi leaders were angry at al-Husaini’s past subversive efforts against them. Egypt and Syria wanted no interference by al-Husaini or the Islamists with their radical nationalist agenda and the Palestinian issue. Given this enmity, al-Husaini had ample reason to end his attempt to balance nationalism and Islamism in favor of becoming a purely Islamist revolutionary.48
Figure 24. A CIA report from 1953 describes al-Husaini’s Islamic Congress in Jerusalem, his outreach to the West Bank Palestinians, and his cooperation with the Muslim Brothers and other Islamists, among them Said Ramadan in Karachi and Ayatullah Kashani in Tehran. Note the congress’s resolutions that “all Muslims must work for the liberation of Palestine” and that “dealing with Israel is treason.” The report is testimony to the survival of international Islamism at a time that it was being suppressed by nationalist regimes in many Middle Eastern countries.
At the time, al-Husaini’s plan for a worldwide radical Islamist movement seemed utmost fantasy, yet today that dream has come true. His first step was an attempt to unite the movement in 1951 by founding the League of Jihad Call at his Cairo residence. Mostly, however, it just brought together his old Egyptian allies, the Muslim Brotherhood, whose leader Hasan al-Hudaibi participated, and the fascist Young Egypt Party.49
But al-Husaini would not confine his new campaign to mere words. On July 16, 1951, he met al-Qawuqji in a Lebanese village. They had received reports that former Lebanese Prime Minister as-Sulh was visiting Abdallah to discuss making peace with Israel. According to a CIA investigation at the time, al-Husaini gave the order and, the next day, al-Sulh was assassinated. Three days later, one of al-Husaini’s men, a member of his Holy Jihad militia, killed Abdallah.50 The Jordanians captured Musa Abdallah al-Husaini, who had planned the attack for his boss and relative, and hanged him the following year.
Al-Husaini also kept up his contacts with old German comrades, many of them now escaped war criminals. In Cairo, Damascus, and other places he helped ex-Nazi officials obtain new identities and jobs, and even converted several of them to Islam. His most notable convert, Johann von Leers, would lead the Nazi underground in the Middle East.51
Shut out of Middle East politics, al-Husaini developed a broader Third World orientation, finding a political home in the growing “non-aligned movement” of countries trying to stake out an independent position in the Cold War. He was personally admitted to participate in the organization of nonaligned countries despite the fact that he had only recently been aligned with the Axis and led no country. Al-Husaini took part in the 1949 New Delhi and 1954 Colombo conferences of Asian nations, making sure the Palestine question was always included in discussions. In 1955 he attended the Bandung summit in Indonesia, where the nonaligned movement became a significant force. Arriving with two aides, Muhammad Ishaq Darwish and Emil al-Ghuri, al-Husaini met with leaders of twenty-nine countries, including India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, Indonesia’s Ahmad Sukarno, and Egypt’s Abd an-Nasir. He was also at the Belgrade session six years later where his host was Yugoslav dictator Tito, who had once added him to and then removed him from the list of war criminals for his involvement in massacring Tito’s countrymen during World War II.
While Abd an-Nasir continued to consult with al-Husaini through the 1950s, the former grand mufti’s main sphere of activity was in non-Arab Muslim countries, especially Pakistan and Iran. He cultivated such figures as Ghulam Siddiq Khan in Berlin, Mirza Ali Khan in Waziristan, and, continuing old efforts to foment Muslim revolts in India, with Ghulam Abbas, head of the Kashmir Liberation Front.52 In Pakistan, al-Husaini organized annual meetings from 1949 to 1952 of his Islamic World Congress, whose services he had offered Hitler a few years earlier, thanks to the hospitality of the Pakistani government, Egypt’s ambassador to Pakistan Muhammad Ali Aluba, and Shaudri Khaliq az-Zaman, head of Pakistan’s Muslim League.53
Early in 1951, al-Husaini visited Tehran to renew his acquaintance with Abd al-Qasim al-Kashani, the leading Islamist cleric, and Nawwab Safawi, the ex-Nazi agent who headed the radical Islamist group Fidaiyyun al-Islam. Tehran was then in turmoil due largely to Safawi’s group which committed six political assassinations that year. On March 7, it killed pro-British Prime Minister Ali Razmara. U.S. intelligence reported, whether accurately or not isn’t clear, that the Soviets were now funding the Iranian Islamists and al-Husaini, too.54
Al-Husaini next sent two of his Egyptian agents—Abd al-Jalil Sukkar and Said Ramadan—to meet with al-Kashani, offering him an alliance. Al-Kashani agreed, and at the Islamic World Congress’s next session, al-Kashani became a board member of al-Husaini’s secret terrorist group, Jamiyyat Fidaiyyun al-Filastin.55 While few of the plans made by this Palestinian Sunni and his Iranian Shia partner were implemented, the two men kept Islamism going through its leanest years. In 1952 they met in Beirut, and al-Kashani brought up his idea of creating a Brothers in Peace group to defend Muslim holy places from foreign imperialism.56
Al-Husaini proposed blocking West Germany’s decision to pay compensation to Israel for Nazi persecution of Jews and confiscation of their property.57 He also suggested getting the Arab League to threaten a boycott of West Germany. His old colleague Azzam, the Arab League’s chief, unsuccessfully sent a joint Arab delegation to Bonn to protest such compensation. No one seemed to notice the irony of two former Nazi collaborators who had been paid some of that confiscated wealth—al-Husaini and Azzam—fighting to deny compensation to the victims. Indeed, that was still the source of the funds that al-Husaini was using to finance his anti-Jewish campaign.
At the December 1953 Islamic World Congress session in east Jerusalem, al-Husaini again cooperated with al-Kashani and Safawi. Also participating were Ramadan, who worked for both al-Husaini and the Muslim Brotherhood, and Sayyid Qutb, the Brotherhood’s leading ideologue.58 Ramadan would become leader of Islamism in Europe while Qutb would be the father of modern Islamist ideology.
In the short run, however, Islamism’s fortunes declined. Safawi was executed in 1955 by Iran’s government for his terrorist deeds, while al-Kashani withdrew from politics and died in 1962. As a result, al-Husaini’s connections with Iranian Islamists were almost extinguished. The Abd an-Nasir regime’s ferocious persecution of the Egyptian and Syrian Muslim Brothers in the 1950s, closing down the organization entirely, was also a setback for his Islamist alliance. Qutb was arrested in 1954, spent most of the next decade in prison, and was executed in 1966. Yet the seeds for future revolution and violence had been planted: one of al-Kashani’s disciples was Khomeini; Safawi’s example inspired revolutionary terrorist Islamist groups in Iran. Both legacies would be critical in the future Islamic revolution there. The Muslim Brotherhood, its many even more radical spin-offs, and indeed all the revolutionary Islamist groups of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries would owe a big debt to al-Husaini’s and Qutb’s innovative thinking.
Why did the United States and its European allies never see the danger posed by al-Husaini and the other Islamists? Of course, at the time they were focused on the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Since the Islamists were anti-Communist, as well as being so weak, they were not perceived as a threat. Indeed, Islamist defectors from the USSR were useful intelligence assets, while Islamism seemed a way to counter the radical secularist Arab nationalists aligned with Moscow.
In part, though, U.S. policymakers were deliberately misled. In 1949, U.S. intelligence was alarmed by al-Husaini’s attempts to set up an intelligence service in partnership with Egypt,59 his efforts to create terrorist groups and foment a new war to destroy Israel, and the chance that he might align himself with the USSR.60 But they soon decided that he was harmless because this was what Arab and German sources told them. Arab contacts and allies asked about the issue by the State Department and CIA assured the Americans that they need not worry because al-Husaini was discredited—for losing Palestine, not as a Nazi accomplice—and would no longer be a problem. West Germany’s Foreign Ministry told the State Department the same thing: Israel considered him a war criminal but this was wrong. Al-Husaini had never been interested in Nazism and had not worked well with the Hitler regime.61 It is easier to understand this assessment when one knows that those making this claim were often themselves ex-Nazi diplomats who had worked with al-Husaini during the war. They now had to clear the former grand mufti in order to clear themselves.
Instead, American policymakers should have been listening to Musa Ali Bigiyev. During the war, he was a Soviet fighter pilot, and was shot down and captured by the Germans. Bigiyev was an ethnic Tatar, son of a distinguished Muslim cleric named Musa Jarullah Bigiyev who lived and taught in Cairo.62 The elder Musa met al-Husaini in the early 1930s at one of the international meetings hosted by the grand mufti. Apparently, after his son was shot down and captured Musa asked al-Husaini to get him released from the Mauthausen camp. Al-Husaini approached Eichmann but Musa Ali refused to join the German army units the grand mufti was forming and so remained a German prisoner.63 Freed at the war’s end, Musa Ali remained in Germany.
In 1949 the younger Bigiyev joined the German Muslim League in Hamburg.64 Members of the group admired al-Husaini.65 Although he remained opposed to the radical Islamists, Bigiyev’s activities made al-Husaini think he was a supporter and thus he tried to use Bigiyev as an agent. What al-Husaini didn’t know, however, was that Bigiyev was passing information to Wiesenthal.66 From Cairo, al-Husaini wrote asking Bigiyev to help establish contacts with Eichmann and other high-ranking Nazis.67 When that plan didn’t work, al-Husaini sent his emissary, Husain Haurani, in October 1949 to give Eichmann’s wife, Veronica, money so she and their three children could join her husband in Argentina.68
As for al-Husaini himself, he never had to flee anywhere. The man whose miscalculations did the most to prevent a Palestinian Arab state’s creation was the one the Nazis would have made the Arabs’ monarch and perhaps even the Muslims’ caliph. The decades of war, blood, and conflict that followed—while obviously the result of wider decisions and forces—were set in motion by a man who should have been in prison as a war criminal yet who most of the world was ready to make a head of state in 1948 if only he would take the invitation.
Al-Husaini lived unvexed in Lebanon until his death by natural causes there in 1974.