by Robert Fisk
He even played a role in fomenting hatred between Bosnian Muslims and the largely Serb-led partisan force fighting the Germans in Yugoslavia, an anger that burst forth again in the atrocities of 1992. On 26 May 1944, the BBC Monitoring Service recorded Haj Amin describing Tito as “a friend of the Jews and a foe of the Prophet.” In 1943 he received from Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the Holocaust, a telegram recalling for him that “the National Socialist Party had inscribed on its flag ‘the extermination of world Jewry.’ Our party sympathises with the fight of the Arabs, especially the Arabs of Palestine, against the foreign Jew.” Radio Berlin later reported that Haj Amin had “arrived in Frankfurt for the purpose of visiting the Research Institute on the Jewish problem.”
Did Haj Amin know about the Jewish Holocaust? According to his most meticulous biographer, Zvi Elpeleg—a former Israeli military governor of Gaza who is respected as a historian even by Haj Amin’s surviving family—“his frequent, close contacts with leaders of the Nazi regime cannot have left Haj Amin with any doubt as to the fate which awaited the Jews whose emigration was prevented by his efforts.” In July 1943, when the extermination camps were already in operation in Poland, Haj Amin was complaining to Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister, about Jewish emigration from Europe to Palestine in the following words: “If there are reasons which make their removal necessary, it would be essential and infinitely preferable to send them to other countries where they would find themselves under active control as, for example, Poland . . .” Before his death, Haj Amin was to write that “the Germans settled their accounts with the Jews well before my arrival in Germany,” a statement that is factually and historically untrue.
Wassef Kamal would insist that Haj Amin did not encourage the annihilation of the Jews. “He was of course involved in stopping the emigration of Jews to Palestine but he had nothing to do with the extermination policy. When I was in Berlin with him, I saw many Jews. The only sign of foreigners there was that Russians would have an Ost band on their clothes and the Star of David was worn by the Jews. They used to move about. I think it was a secret then, what was happening . . .” Three months before he died, Haj Amin met Abu Iyad, one of Arafat’s lieutenants, in Beirut. Of their conversation, Abu Iyad was to write:
Haj Amin believed that the Axis powers would win the war and would then grant independence to Palestine . . . I pointed out to him that such illusions were based on a rather naive calculation, since Hitler had graded the Arabs 14th after the Jews in his hierarchy of races. Had Germany won, the regime which it would have imposed on the Palestinian Arabs would have been far more cruel than that which they had known during the time of British rule.
Alia al-Husseini, Haj Amin’s granddaughter, recalled for me how her grandfather, in his last years, spoke of Hitler’s true aims. “He said that after the Jews, the Germans would destroy the Arabs—he knew this. But what could he do? You must understand that Haj Amin lived at a time when everyone was against him.” Rifaat el-Nimr, one of the founders of the PLO and subsequently a prominent Beirut banker, vainly tried to enlist the support of Haj Amin for the young PLO after the 1967 Arab–Israeli war. “I don’t think it was a mistake he had relations with Herr Hitler,” he said. “In 1916, the British lied to the Arabs about independence. In 1917, we had the Balfour declaration. Would the British or Americans have given Haj Amin anything if he had not gone to Herr Hitler?” But el-Nimr admitted that Haj Amin “hated the Jews” because “they stole his homeland.”
As the Allies closed in upon Germany, Wassef Kamal and Haj Amin found themselves commuting between the ever more dangerous city of Berlin and the resorts of northern Italy that remained under Axis control. Kamal remembered one afternoon, standing on the lawn of an Italian hotel with Haj Amin, looking far up into the heavens and watching “thousands and thousands” of American and British bombers heading for Germany. Haj Amin returned to Berlin, travelled down to Obersalzburg and then decided to seek asylum in neutral Switzerland. The Swiss turned him back and so the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem surrendered to the French. He was briefly imprisoned in Paris before being, with French complicity and American ignorance, smuggled to Cairo under a false name on an American military aircraft.
For eight dramatic days in 1948, Haj Amin helped to create a Palestine government in Gaza before the final collapse of the Arab armies and the annexation of the West Bank by Jordan. This was Israel’s “War of Independence” and Palestine’s nakba—the “catastrophe” in which around three-quarters of a million Arab Palestinians were driven from their homes or fled into a refugee exile from which they would never return. “Haj Amin should have accepted the UN partition plan,” his former admirer Habib abu Fadel would say. “So many nations went along with it and the Russians were among the first. He did not think about the future.” Haj Amin’s political life had been in vain. He courted and then disliked Colonel Nasser—whose troops now occupied Gaza—and he later hated and then courted King Hussein of Jordan, whose army occupied the West Bank. Returning in 1959 to Lebanon for his final exile, Haj Amin moved into a mountain villa, dispensing wisdom and memories to the Palestinians who came to see him, refusing to join any political movements lest he be dwarfed by them.
Chafiq al-Hout, who wanted the Grand Mufti’s power to be enhanced among the Palestinian refugees of Lebanon, asked if he could advise the old man, but was rebuffed when he visited the villa at Mansourieh in the early Fifties and was later beaten up by Haj Amin’s thugs in Beirut. “He was like all those tamed Ottoman subjects,” he recalls. “He spoke slowly, in whispers, listening, aware of himself twenty-four hours a day. He was like a man on the stage. He could not be interrupted. There were no jokes . . .” His granddaughter Alia remembers him as a family man, scolding her parents when they tried to stop her laughing with friends during the Grand Mufti’s afternoon siestas. “He used to say our laughter was music,” she says.
Haj Amin spent his last years listening to the music of the Egyptian singer Um al-Khaltum and to the Arabic service of the BBC. Forgiving the past, al-Hout invited him as guest of honour to his wedding—to a young woman, Bayan, whose father was one of Haj Amin’s early comrades and who would write her Ph.D. thesis on the Grand Mufti. Haj Amin’s journey to Nazi Germany, Bayan al-Hout says, was “a very stupid act—he could have found someone else to take care of negotiations with Hitler. He used to believe that he was responsible for all Muslims in the world; he used to feel an Islamic responsibility. In Bosnia, they looked upon him as a great leader . . .”
Within two years of his death in 1974, the Christian Phalangist militia stormed into his empty villa, stealing his files and diaries—there is a rumour in Beirut that the Israelis possess them now—while fifteen Christian refugee families moved into the wrecked house. They were still there when I visited the house twenty years later, repairing cars in an underground garage beneath what was Haj Amin’s study. He was more kindly treated by the latest of his biographers, Elpeleg, who wrote not just of his “enormous failures” but also his “impressive achievements for the Palestinian national movement.”
When he died of a heart attack, the Israelis refused Haj Amin’s request to be buried in Jerusalem and it was left to al-Hout to arrange his funeral in Beirut. “To my surprise, I found that the new Palestinian leadership in the PLO did not regard this as a great event. I thought there should be some continuity in our history, that we should ‘close a chapter,’ so to say. I told Arafat he should attend.” At the funeral, al-Hout praised Haj Amin as a “religious fighter.” Al-Hout remembers the speech. “We used then to look upon his grave as that of a martyr. But then the Lebanese war came and we had so many hundreds of martyrs’ graves that we forgot about his.”
Not everyone did. Although the al-Husseini family tried to maintain the tomb, the Lebanese Shiite Amal militia—at war in 1985 with their PLO enemies in the Beirut camps—believed that Palestinian weapons had been hidden in Haj Amin’s grave. So they chiselled open the marble lid and looked inside. There were
no guns; just the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in a decaying white shroud.
The Arab–Jewish struggle, from the conflicting British promises of Bill Fisk’s 1914–18 war—of independence for the Arab states, and of support for a Jewish national home in Palestine—to the establishment of the state of Israel on Palestinian land following the Jewish Holocaust and the Second World War, is an epic tragedy whose effects have spread around the world and continue to poison the lives not only of the participants but of our entire Western political and military policies towards the Middle East and the Muslim lands. The narrative of events— both through Arab and Israeli eyes and through the often biased reporting and commentaries of journalists and historians since 1948—now forms libraries of information and disinformation through which the reader may wander with incredulity and exhaustion. As long ago as 1938, when the British still governed Palestine under a League of Nations mandate, the eminent historian George Antonius was warning of the dangers of too much reliance on the vast body of literature already in existence, and his words are no less relevant today:
. . . it has to be used with care, partly because of the high percentage of open or veiled propaganda, and partly because the remoteness of the indispensable Arabic sources has militated against real fairness, even in the works of neutral and fair-minded historians. A similar equality vitiates the stream of day-to-day information. Zionist propaganda is active, highly organised and widespread; the world Press, at any rate in the democracies of the West, is largely amenable to it; it commands many of the available channels for the dissemination of news, and more particularly those of the English-speaking world. Arab propaganda is, in comparison, primitive and infinitely less successful: the Arabs have little of the skill, polyglottic ubiquity or financial resources which make Jewish propaganda so effective. The result is, that for a score of years or so, the world has been looking at Palestine mainly through Zionist spectacles and has unconsciously acquired the habit of reasoning on Zionist premises.
Most of the last thirty years of my life have been spent cataloguing events that relate directly or indirectly to the battle for Palestine, to the unresolved injustices that have afflicted both Arabs and Jews since the 1920s and earlier. British support for an independent Arab nation was expressed when Britain needed Arab forces to fight the Turks. The Balfour declaration giving support for a Jewish national home was made when Britain needed Jewish support—both politically and scientifically—during the First World War. Lloyd George, who was British prime minister in 1917, would often fantasise upon the biblical drama being played out in Palestine, saying that he wanted Jerusalem for Christmas in 1917—he got it, courtesy of General Allenby—and referring in his memoirs to “the capture by British troops of the most famous city in the world which had for centuries baffled the efforts of Christendom to regain possession of its sacred shrines.” That Lloyd George should have reflected upon Allenby’s campaign as a successor to the Crusades—“regaining possession” of Jerusalem from Muslims—was a theme that would run throughout the twentieth century in the West’s dealings with the Middle East; it would find its natural echo in George W. Bush’s talk of a “crusade” in the immediate aftermath of the international crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001.
In those memoirs, Lloyd George makes scarcely any reference to the Balfour declaration—and then only to suggest that it was a gesture made to reward the prominent Zionist Chaim Weizmann for his scientific work on acetone, a chemical essential in the making of cordite, and therefore to the British war effort. Weizmann’s name, Lloyd George would enthuse, “will rank with that of Nehemiah in the fascinating and inspiring story of the children of Israel.” Nehemiah was responsible for the fifth-century BC rebuilding and restoration of Jerusalem, a task he accomplished after his release from captivity by the Persian king Artaxerxes. But at almost the same time Lloyd George was writing this panegyric—in 1936— he was speaking far more frankly about the Balfour Declaration in the House of Commons during a debate on the Arab revolt:
It was at one of the darkest periods of the war that Mr. Balfour first prepared his Declaration. At that time the French Army had mutinied; the Italian army was on the eve of collapse; America had hardly started preparing in earnest. There was nothing left but Britain confronting the most powerful military combination that the world had ever seen. It was important for us to seek every legitimate help that we could get. The Government came to the conclusion, from information received from every part of the world, that it was very vital that we should have the sympathies of the Jewish community . . . We certainly had no prejudices against the Arabs because at that moment we had hundreds of thousands of troops fighting for Arab emancipation from the Turk. Under these conditions and with the advice they received, the Government decided that it was desirable for us to secure the sympathy and cooperation of that most remarkable community, the Jews, throughout the world. They were helpful to us in America to a very large extent; and they were helpful even in Russia at that moment because Russia was just about to walk out and leave us alone. Under those conditions we proposed this to our Allies. France, Italy, and the United States accepted it . . . The Jews, with all the influence that they possessed, responded nobly to the appeal that was made.
The French army’s mutiny and potential collapse on the Italian front, it seems, had more to do with promises for a Jewish “national home” than did Nehemiah. But now the Arabs “were demanding practically that there should be no more Jewish immigration,” Lloyd George complained to the Commons. “We could not accept that without dishonouring our obligations. It was not as if the Arabs were in a position to say that Jewish immigration is driving them, the ancient inhabitants, out . . .” But Lloyd George grasped, if with too little gravity, where the problem lay:
The obligations of the Mandate were specific and definite. They were that we were to encourage the establishment of a National home for the Jews in Palestine without detriment to any of the rights of the Arab population. That was a dual undertaking and we must see that both parts of the Mandate are enforced.
But both parts of the British Palestine Mandate could not be enforced, and Nazi Germany’s persecution of its Jews in 1936, which Lloyd George specifically mentioned, would turn into the Holocaust that would ensure the existence of an Israeli state in Palestine—whatever “the rights of the Arab population.” By 1938, George Antonius was saying quite clearly that “the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, or of a national home based on territorial sovereignty, cannot be accomplished without forcibly displacing the Arabs . . .” Antonius wanted an independent Arab state “in which as many Jews as the country can hold without prejudice to its political and economic freedom would live in peace, security and dignity, and enjoy full rights of citizenship.” Fearing “an unpredictable holocaust of Arab, Jewish and British lives,” help for the Jews of Europe, he said, must be sought elsewhere than in Palestine:
The treatment meted out to Jews in Germany and other European countries is a disgrace to its authors and to modern civilisation; but posterity will not exonerate any country that fails to bear its proper share of the sacrifices needed to alleviate Jewish suffering and distress. To place the brunt of the burden upon Arab Palestine is a miserable evasion of the duty that lies upon the whole of the civilised world. It is also morally outrageous. No code of morals can justify the persecution of one people in an attempt to relieve the persecution of another. The cure for the eviction of Jews from Germany is not to be sought in the eviction of the Arabs from their homeland; and the relief of Jewish distress may not be accomplished at the cost of inflicting a corresponding distress upon an innocent and peaceful population.
It is astonishing that such remarks—so prescient in view of the Palestinian disaster a decade later—could have been written in 1938. Yet there were others who foresaw future disaster in equally bleak terms. Only a year earlier, but reflecting upon the future, Winston Churchill had written of the impossibility of a partitioned Palestine and had written—fa
r more prophetically—of how:
the wealthy, crowded, progressive Jewish State lies in the plains, and on the sea coasts [of Palestine]. Around it, in the hills and the uplands, stretching far and wide into the illimitable deserts, the warlike Arabs of Syria, of Transjordania, of Arabia, backed by the armed forces of Iraq, offer the ceaseless menace of war . . . To maintain itself, the Jewish State must be armed to the teeth, and must bring in every able-bodied man to strengthen its army. But how long would this process be allowed to continue by the great Arab populations in Iraq and Palestine? Can it be expected that the Arabs would stand by impassively and watch the building up with Jewish world capital and resources of a Jewish army equipped with the most deadly weapons of war, until it was strong enough not to be afraid of them? And if ever the Jewish army reached that point, who can be sure that, cramped within their narrow limits, they would not plunge out into the new undeveloped lands that lie around them?
If Palestine should be partitioned, Churchill concluded, “I find it difficult . . . to resist the conclusion that the . . . [partition] scheme would lead inevitably to the complete evacuation of Palestine by Great Britain.” And so, as they say, it came to pass.
John Bagot Glubb, commanding the Arab Legion from 1939, would comment movingly that “the Jewish tragedy owed its origin to the Christian nations of Europe and America. At last the conscience of Christendom was awake. The age-long Jewish tragedy must cease. But when it came to the payment of compensation in expiation of their past shortcomings, the Christian nations of Europe and America decided that the bill should be paid by a Muslim nation in Asia.”
Antonius would have had the world settle Jewish refugees in countries other than Palestine—we know that the British considered Uganda—while we also know that prewar Zionist committees were contemplating the “transfer”—ethnic cleansing—of Palestine’s Arabs to, among other locations, the Djezaira area of Syria, the very deserts around Deir es-Zour and Aleppo in which the Armenian deportees “had ended their miserable existences” twenty years earlier. It was in this atmosphere of suspicion, paranoia and immense suffering that the Arabs and Jews watched the Second World War overwhelm Europe, the former fearful that Britain would eventually sanction an Israeli state on their lands, the latter observing the annihilation of their race in Europe while the British sought to block even those few Jewish refugee ships that made a run for the Promised Land. This was the world in which Haj Amin, the Grand Mufti, set off to Germany and urged Hitler to end Jewish emigration to Palestine. But at what cost?
