Jerusalem: The Biography

In November 1935, a Syrian preacher named Sheikh Izzat al-Din al-Qassam, who worked as a junior official in the mufti’s sharia court in Haifa and was constantly urging him to reject any political compromise, rebelled against the British. He was far more radical than the mufti, a puritan fundamentalist who believed in the sanctity of martyrdom, a precursor of al-Qaeda and today’s Jihadists. Now he led the thirteen mujahidin of his Black Hand cell into hills where, on 20 November, he was cornered by 400 British police and killed. Qassam’s martyrdom^† jolted the mufti closer to revolt. In April 1936, Qassam’s successor launched an operation outside Nablus that killed two Jews – but released a German who claimed to be a Nazi ‘for Hitler’s sake’. This lit the spark. The Irgun, Jewish nationalists, killed two Arabs in response. As the shooting started, Sir Arthur Wauchope was totally unqualified to respond. A young officer noticed that he ‘doesn’t know what to do.’

²⁰

THE ARAB REVOLT

1936–45

THE MUFTI’S TERROR

One cool night in Jerusalem in early 1936, ‘scattered rifle shots rang out in the clear evening sky’ and Hazem Nusseibeh realized that ‘the armed rebellion had begun’. The revolt escalated slowly. In April that year, Arabs killed sixteen Jews in Jaffa. The Palestinian parties formed a Higher Arab Committee under the mufti and called a national strike that swiftly spun out of anyone’s control. The mufti declared this a sacred struggle and called his forces the Holy War Army as volunteers started to arrive to fight the British and Jews from Syria, Iraq and Transjordan.

On 14 May, two Jews were shot in the Jewish Quarter, and the mufti insisted, ‘The Jews are trying to expel us from the country, murdering our sons and burning our houses.’ Two days later, Arab gunmen killed three Jews in the Edison Cinema.

The Yishuv began to panic, but Ben-Gurion embraced a policy of self-restraint. Meanwhile British ministers now questioned the entire basis of the Mandate and commissioned Earl Peel, an ex-Cabinet minister, to report. The mufti called off the strike in October 1936, though he refused to recognize Peel. But Weizmann charmed the commissioners. On Amir Abdullah’s insistence the mufti testified that the Palestinians demanded independence, the annulment of the Balfour Declaration and, ominously, the removal of the Jews.

In July 1937, Peel proposed a two-state solution, the partition of Palestine into an Arab area (70 per cent of the country) joined to Amir Abdullah’s Transjordan and a Jewish area (20 per cent). In addition, he suggested a population transfer of the 300,000 Arabs in the Jewish area. Jerusalem would remain a special entity under British control. The Zionists accepted – they had realized they would never be given Jerusalem in a partition. Weizmann was not disappointed by the small size of the Jewish entity, musing that ‘King David’s [kingdom] was smaller.’

Peel complained that, in contrast to the Zionists, ‘not once since 1919 has any Arab leader said that cooperation with the Jews was even possible’. Only Abdullah of Transjordan enthusiastically supported Peel’s plan and, in retrospect, this would have prevented Israel in its present form but at the time, all Palestinians were inflamed by an English earl’s idea of creating a Jewish state: both the mufti and his rival Nashashibi rejected it.

The Revolt exploded again, but this time, the mufti embraced and organized the violence; he was seemingly more interested in murdering his Palestinian rivals than the British or Jews. ‘It seems’, writes the latest historian of the Husseinis, ‘he was personally responsible for establishing internecine terror as a means of control.’ Over his favourite meal of lentil soup, the mufti, always accompanied by his Sudanese bodyguards descended from the Haram’s traditional watchmen, behaved like a Mafia boss as he ordered assassinations that in two years of fratricide wiped out many of his most decent and moderate compatriots. Nine days after Peel, the mufti called on the German consul-general in Jerusalem to state his sympathy for Nazism and his wish to cooperate. The next day, the British tried to arrest him but he sought sanctuary in al-Aqsa.

The British did not dare storm the Sanctuary. Instead they besieged Husseini on the Temple Mount, denouncing him as the organizer of the Revolt. But not all the Arab gangs were under his control: the Jihadi followers of Qassam also enthusiastically killed any Arabs suspected of cooperating with the authorities. Nothing less than a brutal civil war broke out among the Arabs themselves. It was now that it was said that the mufti made many families weep.