Philip Mattar is a Palestinian-American historian and the author of The Mufti of Jerusalem: Al-Hajj Amin Al-Husayni and the Palestinian National Movement (Columbia University Press 1988, revised in 1992). Mattar is also the editor of the Encyclopedia of the Palestinians (Facts on File, revised version 2005). He served as executive director of the Institute for Palestine Studies in Washington, D.C. and was president of the Palestinian American Research Center. He is currently completing a book on missed opportunities for the Palestinians. Diwan interviewed Mattar in early April to discuss his book on Hajj Amin al-Husseini, which is one of the rare non-polemical biographies of the mufti of Jerusalem.
Michael Young: In 1988 you wrote a biography of Hajj Amin al-Husseini. Though he was a major figure in the interwar years in Palestine, little had been written about him in English, and what had been written has tended to be polemical, focusing on his ties with the Nazis. What motivated you to take on such a project?
Philip Mattar: The more I became interested in British rule over Palestine (1917–1948) in graduate school at Columbia University, the more I realized that the existing biographies in English, Arabic, and Hebrew of the principal leader of the Palestinian national movement, and a popular figure in the Arab world, Hajj Amin al-Husseini (1895–1974), were partisan and polemical. Arab works, some relying on the mufti’s memoirs, distorted his record in Palestine, making him appear to be aggressively fighting Zionism. Those in English and Hebrew, written by Jewish nationalists, vilified him and discredited his movement. The latter works, primarily based on the Western press, lacked an elementary familiarity with the mufti, Palestinian society and politics, Islam, or Arabic.
Their illustrations told us a lot about the books. The most popular book in English was a biography by Joseph Schechtman, titled The Mufti and the Fuehrer, whose portrait of the mufti in the frontispiece was that of a bearded man with a turban. However, it was not the mufti at all. Another biography of the mufti, by Moshe Waters (later Moshe Pearlman),* had a drawing on the cover of a hooked-nosed, repellent looking man with blood dripping from his fingernails, ironically resembling anti-Semitic caricatures that were used to vilify Jews. The mufti and the movement he led were scarcely discernible in these biographies.
So, I was determined to discover the real mufti, for which I received a year-long Fulbright research fellowship that allowed me to do research in the United Kingdom’s Public Record Office (PRO), Cairo’s Dar al-Kutub, the Israel State Archives (ISA), and the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Palestine Research Center. I interviewed eighteen Palestinian leaders and members of the Husseini family, including two of the mufti’s daughters.
My goal was to transcend the political and cultural constraints of the primary sources, my own background as a Palestinian-American, and, of course, partisan secondary works. I was determined to write a detached narrative, about which, after it was published by Columbia University Press, the Oxford historian Avi Shlaim wrote: “[R]evisionist history at its very best.” Tel Aviv University scholar Asher Susser described the book as “the most skillful, dispassionate and worthy contribution.” Others were not so charitable, such as the Holocaust scholar Raphael Medoff, who endorsed Schechtman’s and Pearlman’s accounts that the mufti participated in the Final Solution, or the Holocaust.
MY: Your argument runs against the general view that the mufti was always a radical figure. Can you lay out for us what you concluded about his political trajectory, and in what way your book goes against the conventional wisdom about the man?
PM: The mufti is viewed as a radical by Zionists or Israelis because of his implacable opposition to Zionism, and by Palestinians who perceived him as having fought the good fight. In fact, my biography of the mufti, based on primary evidence, especially the PRO and ISA archives, concluded that both perceptions were distortions at the time and since.
His career must be viewed through two phases: as mufti of Jerusalem after 1921 and as president of the Supreme Muslim Council after 1922. Husseini cooperated with the British Palestine Government from 1921 to 1936, during the period when the Zionists were establishing their pre-state institutions. While he considered unjust Britain’s Balfour policy of support for the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine—where Palestinians had lived since time immemorial and Jews were a small minority for 2,000 years—he opposed Zionism in speeches, in pleadings to the high commissioner, and in London when communicating with British officials. However, he refused to support violent actions against both the British and the Zionists. I could not find credible evidence, either in Palestinian memoirs or in Zionist publications at the time, that he surreptitiously supported Palestinian preparation for violent confrontation with the British and the Zionists.
According to detailed British reports, he exploited but did not organize or lead any of the riots during the disturbances of 1920, 1921, 1929, and 1933. In fact, prior to the riots of August 23, 1929, he tried to disabuse the rioters and alerted the British police about the impending demonstration, and there is evidence he turned down pleas from the Syrian cleric Ezzedine al-Qassam for help to start a revolt. In general, he was a cautious, traditional leader who cooperated with the Palestine Government. I concluded that he was a strategic “moderate,” a term used by the British at the time. He and the Palestinian notables opposed Zionism in words but not in deeds from 1921 until 1936. From a Palestinian standpoint, it was a missed opportunity to not aggressively challenge the Balfour policy and Zionism while it was in its experimental and early stages of establishing semi-state institutions.
Increased Jewish immigration into Palestine and British repression of the Arab Revolt in 1936–1939 embittered and radicalized the mufti, who turned against the British and ignored pragmatic opportunities in 1937, 1939, and, of course, 1947. By escaping to Nazi Germany and seeking its support to oust Britain from Palestine and the Arab world, he stained and discredited himself and his movement in the West by adopting anti-Semitic propaganda and collaborating with the genocidal Nazi regime between 1941 and 1945.
MY: Can you explain to us how the “politics of notables,” to borrow from the historian Albert Hourani, played out in interwar Palestine, and specifically how the mufti fit into such politics?
PM: The mufti’s moderate behavior between 1917 and 1936, which I described earlier, tells us a lot about the politics of the notables, not just in Palestine but in Greater Syria as a whole, which the Oxford historian Albert Hourani analyzed. The Husseinis were among the most prominent of the urban notable families. They dominated the politics of Palestine for centuries through religious office-holding, tax collection, and landholding, which gave them a power base in the countryside and within cities, especially in Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Nablus. It was the kind of power base through which the central power could exercise its rule. In that sense, the Husseinis enforced the status quo. They challenged the Ottomans on local issues, but rarely made an effort to overthrow Ottoman rule. While they could not be perceived as being an instrument of the central authority, they also could not challenge the central authority lest they be removed from their positions of power and lose access.
Cooperation with the British forces in 1917 started early for the Husseinis. When Tahir al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem and father of Amin, died in 1908, he was replaced by Amin’s half-brother, Kamil al-Husseini. According to the historian Yehoshua Porath, Kamil “went out of his way to aid the British occupation authorities.” When Kamil died, and before Amin was appointed mufti, Sir Herbert Samuel, the British high commissioner, and Norman Bentwich, the legal secretary, both British Zionists, interviewed Amin. He promised to use “the influence of his family and himself ... to maintaining tranquility in Jerusalem,” and advised the government to take “reasonable precaution” so that the riots of the previous year, namely 1920, “would not be repeated.”
After becoming mufti and gradually acquiring political power, he was equally cooperative as the minutes of his meetings with the high commissioners show. Two months after the Western Wall riots in 1929, for example, he reassured the high commissioner that he considered himself “one who was, in a sense, an officer of the State.” As I noted earlier, he did not end his cooperation until he was forced by events to side with his people’s Arab Revolt in 1936, but even then it took him some time to join the revolt and fully participate in it. He led from behind.
MY: Hajj Amin al-Husseini has been repeatedly condemned for his ties with Nazi Germany, and there is a famous, or rather infamous, incident in which, in 1943, he successfully opposed a Nazi plan to send Jewish children to Palestine, which would have allowed them to survive the Holocaust. How would you assess this period in the mufti’s trajectory?
PM: There is no period in the mufti’s life more controversial than his years in Nazi Germany (1941–1945). Arab authors found this period so difficult to write about that some literally skipped over it in their accounts of his life. Others pointed out that he had nowhere else to go and was on the run from the British, even though he did not try to go somewhere else and seemed eager to align himself with Germany. Arab writers justified his activities in Germany, since he was hoping that when Germany defeated Britain, it would free Palestine and the Arab world from British rule. But here again, many Arab writers skipped over his anti-Semitic rhetoric and his activities in the service of the Nazis—recruiting Muslims for the war effort, sending sabotage teams to the Middle East, and broadcasting propaganda to the Arab world—most of which, in any case, was largely inconsequential.
Zionist writers, on the other hand, attempted to link him to the Final Solution. I am not surprised that authors like Schechtman and Pearlman made these charges on the basis of weak evidence supplied by the Jewish Agency’s propaganda in the late 1940s. However, it is disappointing that scholars such as Zvi Elpeleg, Raphael Medoff, and Jeffrey Heft perpetuated the myth of the mufti’s role in the Holocaust.
In 2015, Benjamin Netanyahu even claimed that the mufti of Jerusalem convinced Hitler to implement the Final Solution. “Hitler did not want to exterminate the Jews,” Netanyahu said. He only “wanted to expel them,” but the mufti protested because they would travel to Palestine. Hitler asked the mufti, “What would I do with them?” The mufti answered “burn them,” which Hitler did. The problem is that there is no such exchange in the transcripts of the only 95-minute meeting Hitler and the mufti held on November 28, 1941. The conversation was primarily about obtaining a German declaration of disavowal of imperial interests in the Arab world and supporting Arab independence, for which the mufti would try to start a revolt against the British. In any case, the Nazis hardly needed the mufti’s encouragement to commit their genocide.
What is true is that, on multiple of occasions, the mufti sought to block Jews in German-held territory from going to Palestine, which would be consistent with his wanting fewer Jews there. In one letter to the German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, in 1943, he objected to the transfer of 4,000 children and 500 adults leaving for Palestine. In the same year, he wrote the Romanian foreign minister regarding 1,800 children and 200 adults leaving from Romania to Palestine. In 1944, he approached the Hungarian foreign minister about emigration certificates for 900 children and 100 adults. The most disturbing aspect of this letter is the passage in which he wrote that if it was necessary to remove the Jews, they should be sent where they could be “under active supervision,” for example Poland. I could not find any evidence about how many Jews were blocked from leaving and what happened to them.
In the cases I examined, the mufti’s letters were acknowledged, with replies that they would be considered, but no commitments were made. In a letter to Von Ribbentrop in July 1944, the mufti complained that Jews were leaving for Palestine, implying that his earlier requests were not being heeded. He reminded the foreign minister of a German declaration that promised the destruction of the Jewish national home, and of Germany’ commitment to engage in the “battle against world Jewry.” Though I expanded my chapter on the mufti and Nazi Germany for the 1992 edition of my book, I did not cover the subject sufficiently. Unless I missed it, there is still no thorough and nonpartisan study based on the voluminous German archives that could elucidate the role of the mufti in Germany, especially if Jewish lives were lost because of his interventions.
MY: How did the mufti fare toward the end of his life, when younger Palestinians took over the nationalist movement? Though he is often depicted as a radical in Western accounts, the younger militants of the 1960s viewed him, as you write, “with ambivalence.” Can you explain why, and more generally what were his final years in Lebanese exile like?
PM: By the 1950s, the new generation of Palestinians was eager to begin a movement aimed at recovering Palestine. While most admired the mufti’s integrity, sacrifice, incorruptibility, and dedication to the Palestinian cause, they recognized that he was a traditional leader who was not up to the task they sought. He refused to cede the leadership of the Palestinian national movement to Egyptian president Gamal Abd al-Nasser and the tensions between them necessitated his moving from Cairo to Beirut in 1959. He was also hostile to the PLO, which was organized in 1964 by the Arab League, fearing the loss of independence of decisionmaking and action. The new generation gravitated toward the charismatic and pragmatic leader Yasser Arafat, who was the head of Fatah, the largest organization within the PLO. The mufti was hostile to the Marxist ideology and groups on the left, whereas Arafat tolerated groups from the left and right and united them under the PLO’s umbrella.
Hajj Amin, now in his mid-70s, obviously preferred Arafat, and finally reconciled himself with the transition of leadership, but not before some tension between him, still the head of the Arab Higher Committee (AHC), and the PLO. He was still revered by the older generation, among whom hundreds of people still visited him. In his retirement, according to one daughter, he read a lot of literature, especially poetry, listened to Arabic and Western news outlets, such as the BBC, and listened to Arabic music by Umm Kalthum.
Why the ambivalence towards the mufti? While I did not do much research on his life after the 1948 war, I think he was too traditional and his policies contributed to the Nakba (Catastrophe). Before taking a year off for research on the mufti, I was at a party in Washington, D.C. where a PLO representative was present. He came up to me to say he hoped I could improve the mufti’s image in the West. I told him I was determined to let the data guide me in my writing, which did not satisfy him. An hour and a drink or two later, he came back to tell me what he really thought of the mufti, definitely not the kind of details he would have liked to see published—authoritarian, inflexible, uncompromising, too traditional, and too religious.
In fact, my findings do not confirm that the mufti was too religious. He primarily used justice, not Islam, to justify the struggle against Zionism. He surrounded himself with Christian Palestinians, such as George Antonius, one of his closest advisors, Emile Ghuri, secretary general of the mufti’s Palestine Arab Party, and Issa Nakhleh, who represented the AHC at the United Nations. One of his daughters told me that while in Beirut, he was tolerant toward his daughters, allowing one of her sisters to wear a miniskirt. It is hard to imagine a Muslim religious leader, then and now, with Christians as top aides and such tolerance toward daughters.
In my view, the mufti was no match for the Zionist leaders David Ben Gurion and Chaim Weizmann, who had worldly experience, diplomatic gravitas, strategic acumen, and who were determined to establish a Jewish state at the expense of the Palestinians through expulsion and land takeovers. Nor were the Palestinians capable of resisting the British government and military that were enforcing the Balfour policy. This policy provided the Yishuv with time to grow in the 1920s and 1930s into a Jewish national home, basically a Jewish state, through immigration, land purchases, and institutional and military strength. As members of the pan-Arabist Istiqlal Party pointed out in the early 1930s, the mufti and other notables adopted the wrong policies until the Arab Revolt of 1936—they were too cooperative and solicitous while the Zionist movement was gaining strength.
During the second phase after the revolt, when Zionism had become powerful and received much diplomatic support after the Holocaust, the mufti should have become more pragmatic to retain as much of Palestine as possible. He missed an opportunity to settle for 45 percent of Palestine, and perhaps even more, had he negotiated over the impending partition resolution of 1947. He could have argued that much of Palestine was private or communal Palestinian land, and that while the Zionists owned only 7 percent of the land, they were offered 55 percent, even though they were one-third of the population. Given the overwhelming balance of forces, such moderation might not have resulted in a Palestine state, especially after the Zionist-Hashemite agreement in the late 1940s to divide Palestine, but the mufti’s lack of realism and his rejectionism reduced the probability of such a state. In his case, the perfect was the enemy of the good.
Missed opportunities are the focus of a book I am completing now, covering Palestinian missed opportunities during the Mandate, especially in 1947 and after 1967, when Israel and its enabler, the United States, missed opportunities, especially the Oslo peace process (1993–2001).
* This passage was amended to correct an inaccuracy.
