Muddled Mufti Memoir (Extract)

By RALPH AMELAN
Extract from an article in Issue 14, October 27, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Report click here. A new biography of Haj Amin el-Husseini exaggerates his importance The bad news with this book starts with its title. Bombastic and overblown, it introduces its subject with the literary equivalent of the ominous chords that accompany the entry of the villain in a Victorian stage melodrama. Yet after all the sound and fury, we get a very slight biography, padded with irrelevant material in an effort to support an improbable thesis. Admittedly Haj Amin al-Husseini, grand mufti of Jerusalem from 1921 to 1948 and leader of the Arab Revolt against the Jews in Palestine and the British Mandatory authorities in the 1930s, did much to earn his horns and tail. His gentle and distinguished appearance served to mask a scheming, wily and uncompromising politician with a knack for stirring up murderous violence and then quietly disappearing in the resulting tumult. Born into a wealthy and politically influential Jerusalem family some time in the 1890s, al-Husseini studied at Cairo and made the pilgrimage to Mecca. After the First World War, in which he fought on the side of the Turks, he wormed his way into the good books of the British rulers of the Palestine mandate. When in 1921 the post of mufti (religious leader) of Jerusalem fell vacant on the death of his elder brother, al-Husseini used his influence to persuade the high commissioner of Palestine, the Jewish Sir Herbert Samuel, to appoint him to the post, having pressured a more popular candidate to withdraw. The British rapidly regretted their choice. Al-Husseini threatened and even had his Palestinian Arab political rivals murdered to consolidate his power, then fomented pogroms against Jews. The Arab Revolt, which broke out in 1936, was the last straw. The mufti escaped to Beirut the following year, and was barred from returning. Undeterred, he pinned his hopes on Nazi Germany. He helped to engineer a pro-Axis coup in Iraq against the British-backed rulers there in 1941, and incited violence against the Jewish community. The British swiftly restored their authority, but the mufti, true to form, had already disappeared, finally reaching Italy that autumn. Personal interviews with Mussolini and then Hitler confirmed his status with the Axis powers as a leader in exile. He repaid his hosts handsomely by broadcasting inflammatory propaganda aimed at the Muslim world and raising Bosnian Muslim SS units. He was in close contact with Himmler and Eichmann: One of the latter's deputies claimed after the war that al-Husseini had visited Auschwitz to see the Final Solution in operation. He repeatedly urged the Luftwaffe to bomb Tel Aviv and Jewish Jerusalem and wrote to pro-Axis governments demanding that they prevent their Jews from emigrating. The end of the war saw another escape, first to Paris, then in 1946 to Cairo. His hopes of becoming the recognized leader of a Palestinian state came close to realization in September 1948, when he was elected president by the newly-proclaimed All-Palestine government in Gaza. Extract from an article in Issue 14, October 27, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Report click here.