From: Ricshulman@aol.com

3/10/99 ARABS & ISRAEL 2715

Challenging the notion of the Grand Mufti as the leader of western Palestine, internet commentator Adrian asked, "Who elected the Haj?" (2/17). The Arabs didn't hold elections then, not that they have legitimate ones yet. But Adrian asks the question of an audience used to the legitimacy of genuine elections. That the Haj. was not elected is supposed to mean that the western Palestinian Arabs did not choose, and therefore would not identify with, and were not channelled by, that man of evil. Who elected any Arab leader?

In defending or at least defining early Arab anti-Zionism, Adrian re-dresses it anachronistically in the modern garb of democratic aspirations not then possessed. This is misleading.

For a description of events attuned to their time, I consulted Elias Cooper's article on the Grand Mufti, to which "The American Zionist" of 3/78 was devoted.

He wrote, "It was not Palestinian nationalism that Haj. Amin raised against the Jews but Islamic intolerance." As Amin made clear in an interview, "The source of his hatred for the Jews was a religious fanaticism that saw in the modern Jews returning to Palestine a threat, by their example, to traditional Moslem ways of life." They didn't want the Jews as equals, either.

Haj. Amin was appointed Grand Mufti by the duly constituted Mandatory Authority. With that position came prestige and funding (and therefore authority).

Aided by British collaborators the year before, Haj. Amin's inflammatory speech to Arab pilgrims had created deadly anti-Jewish riots. Shortly after his appointment, he instigated a pogrom. Thus this early Arab anti-Zionism was a creation of the British, as was the Arab League.

Understandably blaming neither their machinations nor their frankenstein, the British attributed the violence to Arab resentment over Jewish immigration, which they promptly suspended. Thus the British rewarded Arab violence (or helped prompt the violence in order to get an excuse to cripple Jewish nationalism. The rewarding of Arab violence continues as policy by the sovereign state which replaced the Mandate. Yes, Israel.)

Arab violence was used to justify Churchill's 1922 White Paper "temporarily" denying Jewish development of the Tranjordan provinces of the Palestine Mandate and denying past intent to promote Jewish statehood. (So much trouble to open an area for Jews from oppressive regimes to come to where they would be subject to the oppression of other traditional enemies?

Unlikely.)

The author suggests that the policy was instituted not so much because Churchill was anti-Zionist as that the Middle East Dept. of the Colonial Office was "100% hebrophobic." (Maybe, but parallel with Churchill's pro-Zionist rhetoric was an anti- Zionist policy. Anti-Zionists have honed pro-Zionist pretensions to a fine art, their Jewish audiences usually taken in by it.)

According to the Chairman of the Zionist Executive in Palestine, "...a large body of moderate Arab opinion would have been ready to follow a lead from the Mandatory Government in coming to an understanding with the Jews on the basis of the policy embodiedin the Mandate. Unfortunately, that lead was not given, but on the contrary, the Government never ceased to maintain the authority and power of the Arab extremist group, headed by the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj. Amin el Husseini." The Government did not inform the population of the Balfour Declaration for two years!

"It is not surprising that...in the continued absence of any encouragement from the Government, our friends among the Arabs lost heart and fell away! Government policy was divide and rule." (Remember the cry of the rioters, "The Government is with us!")

In 1921, the Government established the Supreme Muslim Council to administer courts, funds, mosques, shrines, schools, and staff. Haj. Amin was elected (by a select group) President of it in 1922. He then claimed a lifetime tenure. He used the post to create a religio-political cadre loyal to him.

By 1928, all recognized Arab institutions in western Palestine were under his authority. (Obviously he was the leader, Adrian.)

As with many authoritarian rulers, the Mufti consolidated power over time. Thus Arab participation in the violence he instigated in the 1920s was not widespread. Targets then mostly were the non-Zionist, ancient religious communities of Hebron, Safed, and the Old City. (This would appear antisemitic rather than anti- immigration.) In the early years, then, there was no national cause for Arab opposition to the Jewish National Home. Arab life, after all, was not disturbed by it but improved.

"Jewish enterprise, by expanding the tax base, eased the burden of the fellahin." (They had been heavily taxed, under Turkish rule.) Jews paid 70% of the taxes, which were utilized primarily to provide services to the Arabs, since the Jews had their own network of hospitals, schools, etc.. Within the Mandatory Admin., Arabs got most of the jobs.

"...75% of the traffic handled by the Arab(-staffed) port of Jaffa was generated by Jewish trade." "...80% of non- agricultural economic activity in Palestine was generated by the effort to build up a Jewish National Home."

Preparations for the 1929 riots took Haj. Amin a year. When ready, he claimed that the Jews were going to seize the Temple Mt.. (You see, there is no need to fear provoking the Arabs, they will devise whatever pretext they need.) Meanwhile, he ordered construction where the Jews had little space to pray by the Wailing Wall. He also had loudspeakers interfere with Jewish prayer but the British halted that. However, the British did not interfere with false rumors that the Jews planned to attack Moslem holy places. (Maintaining public order was not Britain's top priority.)

To get allies, the Mufti emphasized pan-Arabism and Pan-Islamism, not Palestinian identity. "In the early 1930s, he stressed pan- Islamism, which was entirely consistent with the fanatical religious intolerance that had been the key to his rise to power among the Palestinian Arabs (west of the Jordan R.). But as Britain and the League (of Nations) got weak, he did call for an independent state in Palestine. (You can guess whom he expected to run it.) He also called for an end to Jewish immigration and reprisals against Moslems who sell land to Jews.

In order to thwart peaceful relations, the Mufti rejected all contacts between Arabs and Jews. He vetoed a proposal for a Legislative Council, even though he would enjoy a majority on it. He simply wouldn't recognize the Jews individually as equals.

(Proposals by anti-Zionists for a democratic state with an Arab majority fail to take into account the Arabs refusal to develop one when they might have as well as their failure to develop one now.) Haj. Amin saw his position in Palestine as the springboard for awider role in the Arab world.

The Arabs revolted against the Mandate on 4/36 but they really turned on the Jews. The Arabs then formed the Arab Higher Committee, with the Mufti as President. It called a general strike and a tax strike until Jewish immigration were halted. The Mufti urged the Commission to deport 80% of the Jews already domiciled in the country. (So it was the Arabs who called for expulsion.)

Armed bands of Arabs roamed the country. Authorities arrested leading agitators but not the Mufti and his entourage. His agents came to Arab villages to demand men, arms, and support on pain of death for non-cooperative village elders. Similar elements infiltrated from Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan, and Iraq. Amin controlled the rebellion entirely!

On the other hand, the general strike petered out, because many Arabs resumed commerce with Jews clandestinely.

The Peel Commission investigated. It found that ZIONIST ACTIVITY improved Arab living standards and ATTRACTED ARABS FROM NEIGHBORING COUNTRIES. It noted that Jews did not take over good land from Arabs -- the Jews acquired mostly swamp and desert.

The rebellion flared up again, this time really against the British. The British fought back harder. They exiled Amin but he directed the violence from abroad. Interestingly, the Arabs never liberated western Palestine from Britain; the Jews did.

The Mufti had used his gangs to terrorize Arab opposition to him. He had the Mayor of Hebron and 12 mukhtars assassinated. The entire Jerusalem municipal council fled after one, an appointee of the Mufti, was assassinated. Many other leaders fled, especially those who had pleaded with the Government to halt the terrorism.

No Arab openly criticized him for a year. Finally, a Nashashibi accused him of using religious funds for terrorism. The Mufti responded with a public appeal for the assassination of the Nashashibi. It was carried out in 1946 in Baghdad.

Others accused him of having seized the Arab newspapers by force. Early in 1939, 8 of his regional commanders fled, charging that his murders had left 20,000 orphans and others (mostly Arab) destitute.

British policy was to appease the Arabs and to release some of the Mufti's men. (However often appeasement boomerangs, people still try it.)

The Mufti's 1920-21 attacks on Jews prompted the founding of the Haganah. His 1929 pogrom stiffened Jewish defenses. His 1936 attacks found the Haganah too restrained to retaliate. In response, the Irgun was founded. (Thus, the Arabs started the violence, Jewish militias arose in self-defense, and Jewish restraint proved inferior to taking the offensive.) Later, the British employed the Haganah briefly against the rebels and terrorists. The Haganah became the model for the famous British commandos.

The Mufti's boycott of the Jews stimulated their attainment of self-sufficiency. Jews had to develop their own longshoreman trade.

Although the Husseini's Axis allies were sinking by 1944, his faction in western Palestine gathered strength again. The Mufti, spending the war years in the service of the Holocaust in Europe, re-established contact with his followers.

Bowing to Arab pressure, the British let the Mufti's cousin in. Cousin Jamal revived the Arab Higher Committee. The League of Arab States pressured Britain to pardon 5 of the Mufti's associates from Germany. They joined the Arab Higher Committee.

Nevertheless, his comeback failed, despite, or perhaps because of, his having King Abdullah I of Jordan assassinated.

3/15/99 ARABS & ISRAEL 2720:

Throughout the 1930s and WWII, Arab leaders threatened to make common cause with the Axis unless Britain barred Palestine to Jewish refugees from Nazi horrors.

The Grand Mufti stressed to Germans that the Arabs' hatred for Jews made them allies of Germany and Italy, their common enemies of England and France, the supposedly pro-Jewish rulers of Arab lands.

Nazi antisemitism began appearing in the Arab press of Palestine in 1936. One journal criticized Western civilization because "it gave the subversive activities of Judaism a chance to develop a hold in international economies." "Jewry was a body incapable of occupying a place within another nation's democracy."

By 1937, German and Italian agents instigated widespread violence against Jews in Arab countries. One agent was the Mufti. He went to Iraq, organized a shadow government and national and pan- Arab societies, and ran Iraq's foreign policy in favor of Germany. ("A & I" has observed the ease with which Arabs from one country can flit to and fit into another. By contrast, Arab internetters deny a commonality of culture within the Arab world. Such a commonality militates against their artificially cultivated notion of a separate Palestinian nationality.)

The Mufti's Nazi propaganda helped stir up a pogrom in which over a hundred Iraqi Jews were killed, several hundred wounded, and several thousand made homeless, their property looted.

Other prominent Palestinian Arabs and Arabs from Iraq and Egypt spent the war years in Germany. The Egyptian government and army tried to betray British defenders of Egypt to Germany. The Germans saw the Mufti as the chief Arab figure and their spokesman for the Mid-East. Hitler was impressed with Haj. Amin's "Aryan" features.

What did the Mufti do in Europe? He directed propaganda urging the Arabs and other Muslims of Asia to rebel against the Allies. He helped organize spies and recruited Moslem SS divisions in southeastern Europe. He helped organize an "Arab Legion" but for lack of Arabs in Europe, other nationalities were included. He helped subsidize Arabs in Germany.

Amin sent saboteurs to Palestine. He urged Germany to bomb Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, but they preferred militarily useful targets.

Amin sought a German promise for Arab independence. Britain offered it.

The Mufti agitated with the Axis to prevent Jews from escaping to Palestine. His intervention sent to the gas chambers 5,000 Jewish children designated for rescue in a Red Cross exchange program. He interfered with other rescue plans, too (Elias Cooper, The American Zionist, 3/78). Better dead Jews than rescued Germans?