Icon of Evil: Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam (4 page)

Rumors were rife within the British administration in Jerusalem that the relationship between al-Husseini and Richmond was more than a passing friendship. It was rumored that Richmond and al-Husseini were involved in a passionate homosexual relationship. As a result of their relationship, Richmond enthusiastically used his political influence to persuade Sir Herbert Samuel to appoint al-Husseini as mufti. Richmond, who had previously been employed as a minor British government official in Cairo, had been brought to Jerusalem from Egypt by his longtime lover and mentor, Sir Ronald Storrs, the British mandatory governor of Palestine. Richmond and Storrs shared a house in Jerusalem and had earlier shared an apartment in Cairo.
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In his memoirs, Storrs spoke of Richmond as his “most charming and hospitable friend and companion,” who “taught me much for which I can never be grateful enough.”
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In 1921, Richmond prevailed upon Storrs, a close adviser and political confidant of Sir Herbert Samuel, to help him in his effort to have al-Husseini named grand mufti. Richmond’s intimate friendship with Storrs,
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which was well known and widely acknowledged in the Jerusalem of the early 1920s, was crucial to his successful effort to persuade Samuel, who yielded to Richmond’s arguments on behalf of al-Husseini’s candidacy.
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Samuel naively followed Richmond and Storrs’s recommendation, which resulted in the decision to name al-Husseini as grand mufti.
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This single political decision was to have far-reaching consequences whose effects are felt to this day.

Other British Middle East policy makers, however, strongly opposed Samuel’s decision, viewing it as a foolhardy attempt to appease and placate radical Arab opposition to Zionism and to Great Britain’s stated pro-Zionist policy in Palestine. Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, for example, who served as one of the two chief advisers on Arab affairs to Winston Churchill during Churchill’s two-year tenure as colonial secretary of state in charge of British colonial policy in mandatory Palestine, noted in his diary that al-Husseini hated both the British and the Jews and concluded that his appointment “is sheer madness.”
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Haj Amin al-Husseini was not satisfied to inherit his brother’s title of mufti of Jerusalem. His goal was to be the preeminent Islamic religious authority throughout the area of the British Mandate.

Yet even such wide-ranging religious authority was not enough to satisfy his growing political ambitions. Al-Husseini well understood that religious authority alone would not give him the leadership role within the Palestinian Arab community that he believed was his destiny. Political power, and the leverage to wield it, was of equal if not greater importance.

An opportunity soon came his way. In December 1920, the British mandatory government created a new body, the Supreme Muslim Council, whose function was to administer Islamic religious courts, maintain all mosques, Islamic holy shrines, and schools, and appoint or dismiss officials of these institutions. The council, which was composed of five members headed by a president, was put in charge of the Muslim Religious Trust, the Waqf, which administered an annual budget of one hundred thousand British pounds and was also given responsibility for the administration of all Muslim social services. With the active support of Sir Herbert Samuel and other British Mandate officials, al-Husseini was elected president of the Supreme Muslim Council on May 1, 1922. At its first meeting, the council confirmed al-Husseini’s position as both the religious and political leader of the Arab community in Palestine. In a classic demonstration of nepotism, al-Husseini appointed at least twenty-one of his own relatives to lucrative positions with the council. Throughout the 1920s, as president of the Supreme Muslim Council, al-Husseini would greatly enhance and extend his authority.

In assuming the presidency of the council, moreover, al-Husseini claimed that the position was for life, or identical with his tenure as mufti. This claim exacerbated the already existing tensions between the Husseinis and the Nashashibis.

Appeasement

Throughout the 1920s, during the first decade of the British Mandate, the British governing of Palestine was predicated on a policy of appeasement. Immediately after World War I, anti-Zionist British officials such as Ernest Richmond began to urge the government to renounce the Balfour Declaration because of local Arab opposition to the establishment of a Jewish state.
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Later, after having failed to persuade the British government to renounce the declaration, Richmond and some of his anti-Zionist colleagues in the British Foreign Office argued that the local Arab community could be appeased by the appointment of radical Arab Palestinian leaders, such as al-Husseini, to positions of political authority.
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Sir Herbert Samuel approved such measures because he believed in appeasement.
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No doubt, Sir Herbert reasoned, it made better sense to accommodate the concerns of the Arab majority in Palestine; after all, as more Jews arrived and the demographics changed, British policy could once again be adjusted and redefined. This would give the British time and flexibility to achieve their ultimate aim. Although the British Mandate was in theory temporary, in the end the British wanted a government that would support the empire.

While courteous and urbane even to a fault, Samuel retained a lifelong reputation for aloofness and formality that many colleagues and constituents perceived as an icily cold, sometimes distant personality. Throughout his political career, both as a rising member of Parliament and as high commissioner, in an effort to compensate for his apparent lack of personal warmth and effusiveness,
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he went out of his way to accommodate the policy concerns and viewpoints of his critics and political opponents. Generating goodwill and popular support in this way, however, was achieved at a price.

From the beginning, Samuel’s tenure as high commissioner was not entirely popular among pro-Zionist officials in the British government such as Richard Meinertzhagen, who believed passionately in affirming the Balfour Declaration’s commitment to creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine. These concerns about Samuel were shared by Chaim Weizmann and other leaders of the Zionist movement, who recognized that when Samuel became British Palestine’s first high commissioner in July 1920, he faced growing opposition from the anti-Zionist bureaucrats within his own office, who often tried to undermine or sabotage the policies that he and the Lloyd George government espoused.
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Like many political appointees before and since, Samuel soon found that his role in formulating and carrying out policy was overshadowed by that of his professional military and civilian subordinates, who were virulently anti-Zionist.
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Samuel had always endorsed the aims of the Zionist movement and worked to facilitate its policies.
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In 1918 and 1919 in particular, as he says in his
Memoirs,
he was “co-operating closely” with the Zionist leaders
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and even ready, at times, to use his political influence and connections to further their cause. As a British official in Jerusalem, however, his emphasis was on preserving peace and tranquillity in the city, and this required him to seek to pacify the local Arab population
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and to accommodate even their most intransigent demands and concerns.

After his appointment of al-Husseini, Samuel continued to be a voice for British appeasement of Islamic demands and concerns. In so doing, he unwittingly but unequivocally played into al-Husseini’s hands.

In May 1921, shortly after Samuel’s appointment of al-Husseini as mufti, a new wave of violent anti-Jewish rioting erupted, instigated by the mufti’s propaganda, including a translation in the Palestinian Arab press of the notoriously anti-Semitic
Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
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The mufti and his followers were outraged by the fact that since 1918 the Jewish population of Palestine had almost doubled as a result of Jewish immigration, and Tel Aviv had grown from a township of two thousand to a town of thirty thousand.
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Blaming this on the British, they took to the streets in protest. This new violence began in Jaffa, the ancient Arab port city alongside the new Jewish town of Tel Aviv, and quickly spread to Jerusalem. Within a week, this local dispute grew into a widespread Arab protest against the growing presence of Jews in Palestine and against the British Mandate.
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Samuel’s response to these riots, which left 47 Jews dead and 146 wounded, convinced al-Husseini that violence paid off. Accepting the report of a British commission, which placed the blame for the attacks on Arab anger and resentment over Jewish immigration, Samuel decided to temporarily suspend such immigration.
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This was the first of several such bans and restrictions that the British government would impose during the 1920s and 1930s. The news of Samuel’s announcement, indicating as it did a shift in British policy in Palestine, was hailed as a victory by the mufti and his supporters. Jews, however, reacted with deep indignation to what appeared to them as Samuel’s weakness and acquiescence in the face of Arab violence.
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Arab intimidation seemed to have been tangibly rewarded. In a subsequent speech on June 3, 1921, which Jewish leaders would attack as a further concession to Arab violence, Samuel tried to reassure the Arab majority in Palestine that their political interests would always be protected and safeguarded.
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Well before the end of his tenure as high commissioner, Herbert Samuel would come to be viewed by many Jewish leaders, both in England and in Palestine, as a spokesman for the British policy of appeasement of the mufti and of radical Islam in the Middle East. Neville Chamberlain has long been the enduring symbol of British appeasement in modern times. In fact, more than fifteen years before Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler at Munich, Sir Herbert Samuel had articulated the disastrous policy that would guide the British government until the outbreak of World War II.

The British policy of appeasement continued well after Samuel’s departure as high commissioner in 1925. It was especially apparent in the British response to the murderous riots of 1929—“the second intifada,” as it has come to be called—which was the worst outbreak of anti-Jewish violence since the British Mandate had been instituted.

The Mufti, the Western Wall, and the Riots of 1928–1929: The Second Intifada

As al-Husseini’s power grew, he made the strategic decision to focus his energies on establishing the absolute dominance of the Waqf in matters involving control of all the holy places—Jewish as well as Muslim—in Jerusalem. In September 1928, a dispute over Jewish religious rights and practices at the Western Wall led to an outbreak of anti-Jewish rioting and violence, planned and instigated by the mufti, that was unprecedented in the history of modern Jerusalem.

Over the centuries, religious quarrels have consistently erupted in Jerusalem, frequently at the Western Wall, a religious site sacred to Jews. One of the holiest sites for Jews, the Wall, known as ha-Kotel ha-Ma’aravi (the Western Wall), is the one surviving remnant of the western exterior supporting wall of the Temple Mount, which was built on the site of the Temple of Solomon and was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE. Throughout the centuries, Jews have come to this holy site to pray and to mourn the destruction of the First and Second Temples and the lost glory of ancient Israel.

The Wall is also the westernmost supporting wall of the Haram al-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary), Islam’s third holiest shrine, a rectangular area enclosing the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. The Al-Aqsa Mosque is the principal mosque in Palestine. The Dome of the Rock is traditionally the site from which the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven. For Muslims, the Western Wall was also called al-Buraq, after the name of the Prophet’s horse, which he supposedly tethered there before his “Night Journey” described in Sura 17 of the Koran.

Before World War I, in disputes over the Western Wall, the Ottoman Turkish rulers of Palestine often decided in favor of their Muslim core-ligionists.
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These disputes arose most frequently from Jewish demands to be allowed to bring to the pavement in front of the Wall chairs and benches for the elderly, an ark to house the Torah scrolls containing the Five Books of Moses that were read at worship services, and a screen to divide men from women during prayer. Muslims routinely protested Jewish innovations at the Wall, restricting Jewish worship practices in favor of Jerusalem’s Muslim community. The Jews of Jerusalem had to endure these restrictions, which centuries of Muslim-inspired anti-Jewish laws and customs had established, until the aftermath of World War I, when under the new British mandatory government in Palestine and its Jewish high commissioner, Jerusalem’s Jewish community grew in size and political power. During the 1920s, the status quo at the Western Wall, which had heretofore always favored the city’s Muslim population, was increasingly challenged by Jewish leaders. The city’s Palestinian Arabs, inspired by the demagoguery of Haj Amin al-Husseini and his fellow radical Islamists, openly resisted their demands. By the late 1920s, a showdown was inevitable.

It took place on September 23, 1928, on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement and the holiest day of the Jewish calendar year, when religious Jews set up a screen to divide men from women who came together to pray at the Western Wall. They did this in accordance with traditional Jewish religious worship practice, as a physical division between the sexes was a requirement of Jewish religious law. The city’s Muslim religious officials, led by al-Husseini, protested that the screen was an innovation that altered the prevailing status quo at the Wall. As a result of their protests, British policemen were instructed to have the screen forcibly removed.