Jerusalem: The Biography

At 4.30 p.m. on 28 November, the mufti was received by a tense Adolf Hitler: the Soviets had halted the Germans on the outskirts of Moscow. The mufti’s interpreter suggested to the Führer that, by Arab tradition, coffee should be served. Hitler jumpily replied that he did not drink coffee. The mufti inquired if there was a problem. The interpreter soothed the mufti, but explained to the Führer that the guest still expected coffee. Hitler replied that even the High Command was not allowed to drink coffee in his presence: he then left the room, returning with an SS guard bearing lemonade.

Husseini asked Hitler to support the ‘independence and unity of Palestine, Syria and Iraq’ and the creation of an Arab Legion to fight with the Wehrmacht. The mufti, speaking to the apparent master of the world, was bidding not just for Palestine but for an Arab empire under his own rule.

Hitler was happy that he and the mufti shared the same enemies: ‘Germany was engaged in a life-and-death struggle with two citadels of Jewish power – Britain and the Soviet Union’ – and naturally there would be no Jewish state in Palestine. Indeed the Führer hinted at his Final Solution to the Jewish problem: ‘Germany was resolved, step by step, to ask one European nation after another to solve its Jewish problem.’ As soon as ‘German armies reached the southern exit of Caucasia’, Hitler said, ‘Germany’s objective would then solely be the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere.’

However, until Russia and Britain were defeated, the mufti’s ambitious bid for the entire Middle East would have to wait. Hitler said he ‘had to think and speak coolly and deliberately as a rational man’, careful not to offend his Vichy French ally. ‘We were troubled about you,’ Hitler told Husseini. ‘I know your life story. I followed with interest your long and dangerous journey. I’m happy that you’re with us now.’ Afterwards, Hitler admired Husseini’s blue eyes and reddish hair, deciding he definitely had Aryan blood.

Yet the mufti shared with Hitler not just a strategic hostility to Britain but racial anti-Semitism at its most lethal – and even in memoirs written long afterwards, he remembered that Reichführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, whom he liked greatly, confided to him in the summer of 1943 that the Nazis had ‘already exterminated more than three million Jews.’ The mufti chillingly boasted that he supported the Nazis ‘because I was persuaded and still am that if Germany had carried the day, no trace of the Zionists would have remained in Palestine’.^*

He had come a long way from multi-national Jerusalem where, unsurprisingly, Jews were disheartened by his presence in Berlin. The mufti’s views are indefensible – but it is wrong to use them to claim that Arab nationalists were Hitlerite anti-Semites. Wasif Jawhariyyeh, who, as we will see, was very sympathetic to the Jewish plight, was typical, writing in his diary that Arab Jerusalemites, loathing the British for ‘their injustice, dishonesty and the Balfour Declaration, hoped Germany would win the war. They used to sit, listening to the news, waiting for headlines of German victory, grieving over good news for England.’

‘Strange as it may sound’, recalled Hazem Nusseibeh, wartime ‘Jerusalem enjoyed unprecedented peace and prosperity’. The British clamped down on the Jewish militias: Moshe Dayan and his Haganah comrades were arrested and imprisoned in Acre Fortress. But in May 1941, as British Palestine was potentially pincered between the Axis forces in North Africa and Vichy French Syria, the British created the Palmach, a small Jewish commando force, out of Wingate’s and Sadeh’s fighters, ready to fight the Nazis.

Dayan, released from prison, was sent on raids to prepare for the British invasion of Vichy Syria and Lebanon. During a firefight in southern Lebanon, Dayan was checking on French positions through his binoculars ‘when a rifle bullet smashed into them splintering a lens and the metal casing which became embedded in the socket of my eye’. He hated the eyepatch he now had to wear, feeling like ‘a cripple. If only I could get rid of my black eyepatch. The attention it drew was intolerable to me. I preferred to shut myself up at home, rather than encounter the reactions of people wherever I went.’ Dayan and his young wife moved to Jerusalem so that he could receive treatment. He ‘loved to wander around the Old City, especially to walk the narrow path along the top of its encircling walls. The New City was somewhat strange to me. But the Old City was an enchantment.’ The Haganah, with British help, was preparing to go underground if the Germans took Palestine.