Mohammad Amin al-Husayni

Mohammad Amin al-Husayni (ca. 1895 - July 4, 1974, أمين الحسيني, alternatively spelt al-Husseini), Mufti of Jerusalem, was an Arab nationalist and a Muslim leader in Palestine and Egypt. Known for his anti-Zionism, al-Husayni fought against the establishment of a Jewish state in the territory of the British Mandate of Palestine and particularly during the Great Arab Revolt. Sent to exile in 1937, Husseini collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II and helped recruit Muslims for the Waffen-SS. During the 1948 Palestine War, he led the Palestinian Arab opposition to Zionists and opposed King Abdullah's ambitions in Palestine but without success. Afterwards, he lost most of his remaining political influence and he died in 1974.

Early life
Amin al-Husayni was born in 1893 or 1895 in Jerusalem to a prominent al-Husayni clan. The al-Husaynis were wealthy landowners in southern Palestine, and thirteen members of the clan were mayors of Jerusalem between 1864 and 1920; another member of the clan, Kamal al-Husayni, was Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Amin al-Husayni attended a government school in Jerusalem and Al-Azhar University in Cairo, studying Islamic law for about one year and founding an anti-Zionist society. In 1913 at the age of 18, al-Husayni went to Mecca and received the honorific of Hajj. Prior to World War I, al-Husayni studied at the School of Administration in Istanbul.

With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, al-Husayni joined the Ottoman Turkish army, received a commission as an artillery officer and was assigned to the Forty-Seventh Brigade stationed in and around the predominantly Greek Christian city of Smyrna. In November 1916 he left the Ottoman army on a three month disability leave and returned to Jerusalem where he remained for the duration of the war. After the British conquered Palestine and Syria in 1918, he was employed in various positions by the British military administration in Jerusalem and Damascus, including one where he recruited soldiers for Faisal's army.

Early political activism
In 1919 al-Husayni attended the Pan-Syrian Congress held in Damascus where he supported Emir Faisal for King of Syria. That year al-Husayni joined (perhaps founded) the Arab secret society El-Nadi al-Arabi (The Arab Club) in Jerusalem and wrote articles for the first new newspaper to be established in Palestine, Suriyya al-Janubiyya (Southern Syria). The paper was published in Jerusalem beginning in September 1919 by the lawyer Muhammad Hassan al-Budayri, and edited by Aref al-Aref, both prominent members of al-Nadi al-Arabi.

During the annual Nebi Musa procession in Jerusalem in April 1920, al-Husayni, then a teacher at the Rashidiya school in Jerusalem, incited the Arab crowds against the Jews. For his role in the ensuing riots, al-Husayni was sentenced to ten years imprisonment in absentia, since he had already fled to Transjordan.

Until late 1921 al-Husayni focused his efforts on Pan-Arabism and Greater Syria in particular with Palestine being a southern province of an Arab state with its capital in Damascus. Greater Syria was to include territory now occupied by Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel. The struggle for Greater Syria collapsed after Britain ceded control over present day Syria and Lebanon to France in July 1920 in accord with the Sykes-Picot Agreement. The French army entered Damascus at that time, overthrew King Faisal and dissolved Greater Syria.

After this al-Husayni turned from Damascus-oriented Pan-Arabism to a specifically Palestinian ideology centered on Jerusalem and expelling the Jews and foreigners from Palestine, thus in his mind restoring it to Dar al-Islam.

Mufti of Jerusalem
Following the death of Amin's brother Kamil, the former Mufti, the British High Commissioner Herbert Samuel pardoned Amin al-Husayni; Al-Husayni and another Arab had been excluded from an earlier general amnesty because they had fled before their convictions. Elections were held, and of the four candidates who ran for the position of mufti, al-Husayni received the least number of votes. Nevertheless, Samuel, anxious to keep a balance between al-Husaynis and their rival clan Nashashibis, decided to appoint Amin al-Husayni a Mufti of Jerusalem, a position that had been held by the al-Husayni clan for more than a century.

In 1922 al-Husayni was elected President of the newly formed Supreme Muslim Council, which controlled the Waqf funds worth annually tens of thousands of pounds, the orphan funds, worth annually about 50,000 pounds, besides controlling the Islamic (Shariah) courts in Palestine. These courts, among other duties, appointed teachers and preachers.

Al-Husayni launched an international Muslim campaign to improve and restore the mosque known as the Dome of the Rock. Indeed, the current landscape of the Temple Mount was directly affected by al-Husayni's fundraising activities.

Al-Husayni's role in the 1929 Hebron massacre was hotly disputed at the time. The Jewish Agency charged him with responsibility for inciting the violence, but the Shaw commission of enquiry concluded that "no connection has been established between the Mufti and the work of those who either are known or are thought to have engaged in agitation or incitement. ... After the disturbances had broken out the Mufti co-operated with the Government in their efforts both to restore peace and to prevent the extension of disorder". Al-Husayni also served as president of the World Islamic Congress, which he founded in 1931.

The British initially balanced appointments to the Supreme Muslim Council between the Husaynis and their supporters (known as the majlisiya, or council supporters) and their rivals, the Nashashibis and their allied clans (known as the mu'arada, the opposition) (Robinson, 1997, p. 6), for example by replacing Musa al-Husayni as mayor of Jerusalem with Ragheb al-Nashashibi. During most of the period of the British mandate, bickering between these two families seriously undermined any Palestinian unity. In 1936, however, they achieved a measure of unity when all the Palestinian groups joined to create a permanent executive organ known as the Arab Higher Committee under al-Husayni's chairmanship.

On 19 April, 1936 an Arab rebellion broke out in Palestine. Soon the rebellion had spread across the country, openly and officially led by the Mufti and his Arab Higher Committee, founded a week after the rebellion had started. The Committee, with the Mufti presiding, proclaimed an Arab general strike and called for nonpayment of taxes and shutting down municipal governments. In addition, the Committee demanded an end to Jewish immigration, a ban on land sales to Jews, and national independence. Jewish colonies, kibbutzim and quarters in towns, became the targets for Arab sniping, bombing, and other forms of attacks.

In July 1937 British police were sent to arrest al-Husayni for his part in the Arab rebellion, but he was tipped off and escaped to the Haram where the British thought it inadvisable to touch him. In September, he was removed from the presidency of the Muslim Supreme Council and the Arab Higher Committee was declared illegal. In October, he fled to Lebanon, where he reconstituted the committee under his domination. Al-Husayni retained the support of most Palestinian Arabs and used his power to punish the Nashashibis. He remained in Lebanon for two years, but his deteriorating relationship with the French and Syrian authorities led him to Iraq in October 1939.

The rebellion lasted until 1939, when it was quelled by the British troops. It forced Britain to make substantial concessions to Arab demands. The British abandoned the idea of establishing Palestine as a Jewish state and, while Jewish immigration was to continue for another five years (allowing a total of 75,000 Jews to immigrate), the immigration was thereafter to depend on Arab consent. Al-Husayni, however, felt that the concessions did not go far enough, and he repudiated the new policy. See also Peel Commission, White Paper of 1939.

Pre-war
In 1933, within weeks of Hitler's rise to power in Germany, al-Husayni sent a telegram to Berlin addressed to the German Consul-General in the British Mandate of Palestine saying he looked forward to spreading their ideology in the Middle East ,, especially in Palestine and offered his services. Al-Husayni's offer was rejected at first out of concern for disrupting Anglo-German relations by allying with an anti-British leader. But one month later, Al-Husayni secretly met the German Consul-General Karl Wolff near the Dead Sea and expressed his approval of the anti-Jewish boycott in Germany and asked him not to send any Jews to Palestine. Later that year, the Mufti's assistants approached Wolff, seeking his help in establishing an Arab National Socialist (Nazi) party in Palestine. Wolff and his superiors disapproved because they didn't want to become involved in a British sphere of influence, because the Nazis desired further Jewish immigration to Palestine, and because at the time the Nazi party was restricted to German speaking "Aryans" only.

On 21 July 1937, Al-Husayni paid a visit to the new German Consul-General, Hans Döhle, in Palestine. He repeated his former support for Germany and "wanted to know to what extent the Third Reich was prepared to support the Arab movement against the Jews." He later sent an agent and personal representative to Berlin for discussions with Nazi leaders.

In 1938, though Anglo-German relations were a concern, Al-Husayni's offer was accepted. From August 1938, al-Husayni received financial and military assistance and supplies from Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. From Berlin, al-Husayni would play a significant role in inter-Arab politics.

In May 1940, the British Foreign Office declined a proposal from the chairman of the Vaad Leumi (Jewish National Council in Palestine) that they assassinate al-Husayni, but in November of that year Winston Churchill approved such a plan. In May 1941, several members of the Irgun including its former leader David Raziel were released from prison and flown to Iraq on a secret mission which, according to British sources, included a plan to "capture or kill" the Mufti. The Irgun version is that they were approached by the British for a sabotage mission and added a plan to capture the Mufti as a condition of their cooperation. The mission was abandoned when Raziel was killed by a German plane.

In the Middle East
In April 1941 the "Golden Square" pro-Nazi Iraqi army officers, led by General Rashid Ali, forced the Iraqi Prime Minister, the pro-British Nuri Said Pasha, to resign. In May he declared jihad against Britain. Forty days later, British troops occupied the country and the Mufti went to Germany, via Iran, Turkey and Mussolini's office in Rome. See Farhud for more details of the events in Iraq.

Husayni aided the Axis cause in the Middle East by issuing a fatwa for a holy war against Britain in May 1941. The Mufti's widely heralded proclamation against Britain was declared in Iraq, where he was instrumental in the pro-Nazi Iraqi revolt of 1941. During the war, the Mufti repeatedly made requests to "the German government to bomb Tel Aviv."

In Nazi-occupied Europe
Upon al-Husayni's arrival in Europe, he met the German Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop on November 20 1941 and was officially received by Adolf Hitler on November 30 1941 in Berlin. He asked Hitler for a public declaration that "recognized and sympathized with the Arab struggles for independence and liberation, and that it would support the elimination of a national Jewish homeland". Earlier, al-Hussayni submitted to the German government a draft of such a declaration, containing a clause:"Germany and Italy recognize the right of the Arab countries to solve the question of the Jewish elements, which exist in Palestine and in the other Arab countries, as required by the national and ethnic (völkisch) interests of the Arabs, and as the Jewish question was solved in Germany and Italy."Hitler refused to make such a public announcement, but "made the following declaration, requesting the Mufti to lock it deep in his heart:
 * 1) He (the Führer) would carry on the fight until the last traces of the Jewish-Communist European hegemony had been obliterated.
 * 2) In the course of this fight, the German army would - at a time that could not yet be specified, but in any case in the clearly foreseeable future - gain the southern exit of Caucasus.
 * 3) As soon as this breakthrough was made, the Führer would offer the Arab world his personal assurance that the hour of liberation had struck. Thereafter, Germany's only remaining objective in the region would be limited to the Vernichtung des...Judentums ['destruction of the Jewish element', sometimes taken to be a euphemism for 'annihilation of the Jews'] living under British protection in Arab lands.."


 * "Years later it was revealed that Hitler had detested the mufti, who had no influence whatsoever over the Nazis." Uri Avnery

The Mufti established close contacts with Bosnian and Albanian Muslim leaders and spent the remainder of the war conducting the following activities:
 * Assisting with the formation of Muslim Waffen SS units in the Balkans
 * The formation of schools and training centers for Muslim imams and mullahs who would accompany the Muslim SS and Wehrmacht units.

Propaganda and recruitment
Until the end of the World War II, al-Husayni worked for the Nazi Germany as a propagandist for the Arabs and a recruiter of Muslim volunteers for the German armed forces. Beginning in 1943, al-Husayni was involved in the organization and recruitment of Bosnian Muslims into several divisions of the Waffen SS and other units. The largest was the 13th "Handschar" division of 21,065 men (sometimes spelled Hanjar: the word Scimitar in Turkish, Arabic Khanjar خنجر), which conducted operations against Communist partisans in the Balkans from February 1944.

Al-Husayni insisted that "The most important task of this division must be to protect the homeland and families (of the Bosnian volunteers); the division must not be permitted to leave Bosnia.", but this request was ignored by the Germans (German archives cited in Lepre, p34).

On March 1, 1944, while speaking on Radio Berlin, al-Husayni said: Arabs, rise as one man and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history, and religion. This saves your honor. God is with you.

The Holocaust
The Mufti's knowledge about the Holocaust while living in Nazi Germany has been debated with the Mufti himself denying any such knowledge after the war. Testimony presented at the Nuremberg trials, however, accused the Mufti of not only having knowledge about the holocaust but of also actively encouraging the initiation of extermination programs against European Jews. Adolf Eichmann's deputy Dieter Wisliceny testified during his war crimes trial in 1946 that ... "The Mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and adviser of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of this plan... He was one of Eichmann’s best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures. I heard him say, accompanied by Eichmann, he had visited incognito the gas chambers of Auschwitz."

When the Red Cross offered to mediate with Adolf Eichmann in a trade prisoner-of-war exchange involving the freeing of German citizens in exchange for 5,000 Jewish children being sent from Poland to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, al-Husayni directly intervened with Himmler and the exchange was cancelled.

Among the sabotage al-Husayni organized was an attempted chemical warfare assault on the second largest and predominantly Jewish city in Palestine, Tel Aviv. Five parachutists were sent with a toxin to dump into the water system. The police caught the infiltrators in a cave near Jericho, and according to Jericho district police commander Fayiz Bey Idrissi, "The laboratory report stated that each container held enough poison to kill 25,000 people, and there were at least ten containers.".

In his memoirs after the war, Husayni noted that "Our fundamental condition for cooperating with Germany was a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from Palestine and the Arab world. I asked Hitler for an explicit undertaking to allow us to solve the Jewish problem in a manner befitting our national and racial aspirations and according to the scientific methods innovated by Germany in the handling of its Jews. The answer I got was: 'The Jews are yours.'”

Recent Nazi documents uncovered in the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Military Archive Service in Freiburg by two researchers, Klaus Michael Mallmann from Stuttgart University and Martin Cüppers from the University of Ludwigsburg, indicated that in the event of the British being defeated in Egypt by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps the Nazis had planned to deploy a special unit called Einsatzkommando Ägypten to exterminate Palestinian Jews and that they wanted Arab support to prevent the emergence of a Jewish state. In their book the researchers concluded that, "the most important collaborator with the Nazis and an absolute Arab anti-Semite was Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem." According to the German researchers Husayni was a prime example of how Arabs and Nazis became friends out of a hatred of Jews. Al-Husayni had met several times with Adolf Eichmann, Adolf Hitler's chief architect of the Holocaust ,,,,.

Arrest and Trial
After the Second World War, al-Husayni fled to Switzerland, was detained and expelled back to Germany, was captured by the French and put under house arrest in France after he was sentenced by the Yugoslav Supreme Military Court to three years imprisonment and two years of deprivation of civil rights as convicted war criminal. During the Nuremberg Trials, Eichmann's deputy Dieter Wisliceny testified that The Mufti was one of the initiators of the extermination of European Jewry and a collaborator and adviser of Eichmann and Himmler in the initiation of the Final Solution. In 1948, Husayni escaped and was given asylum in Egypt. Jewish groups petitioned the British to have him indicted as a war criminal. The British declined because such a move would have added to their growing problems in Egypt and among Palestinians - where al-Husayni was still popular. Yugoslavia unsuccessfully sought his extradition.

1948 Palestine War
From Egypt al-Husayni was among the sponsors of the 1948 war. The Jordanian monarch, King Abdullah, gave the position of Grand Mufti of the Jordanian part of divided Jerusalem to someone else, and Haj Amin al-Husayni was in contact with the Arab conspirators of King Abdullah's assassination in 1951, while still living in exile in Egypt. King Talal followed Abdullah as king of Jordan, and he refused to give permission to Amin al-Husayni to enter Jerusalem. After one year, King Talal was declared incompetent; the new King Hussein also refused to give al-Husayni permission to enter the City.

Although the mufti was involved in some of the high level negotiations between Arab leaders before and during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War at a meeting held in Damascus in February 1948 to organize Palestinian Field Commands, the commanders of his Holy War Army, Hasan Salama and Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni, were allocated only the Lydda district and Jerusalem respectively. This decision paved the way for an undermining of the Mufti's position among the Arab States. On 9 February, only four days after the Damascus meeting, a severe blow was suffered by the Mufti at the Arab League session in Cairo where his demands for the appointment of a Palestinian to the General Staff of the League, the formation of a Palestinian Provisional Government, the transfer of authority to local National Committees in areas evacuated by the British, a loan for administration in Palestine and appropriation of large sums to the Arab Higher Executive for Palestinians entitled to war damages were all rejected.

The Arab League blocked recruitment to the mufti's forces, which collapsed following the death of his most charismatic commander, Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni, on 8 April.

Following rumors that King Abdullah of Transjordan was re-opening the bi-lateral negotiations with Israel that he had previously conducted in secret with the Jewish Agency, the Arab League, led by Egypt, decided to set up the All-Palestine Government in Gaza on 8 September under the nominal leadership of the mufti. Avi Shlaim writes: The decision to form the Government of All-Palestine in Gaza, and the feeble attempt to create armed forces under its control, furnished the members of the Arab League with the means of divesting themselves of direct responsibility for the prosecution of the war and of withdrawing their armies from Palestine with some protection against popular outcry. Whatever the long-term future of the Arab government of Palestine, its immediate purpose, as conceived by its Egyptian sponsors, was to provide a focal point of opposition to Abdullah and serve as an instrument for frustrating his ambition to federate the Arab regions with Transjordan. Abdullah regarded the attempt to revive the mufti's Holy War Army as a challenge to his authority and on 3 October his minister of defence ordered all armed bodies operating in the areas controlled by the Arab Legion to be disbanded. Glubb Pasha carried out the order ruthlessly and efficiently.

During the 1948 War, the Mufti is also alleged to have said "I declare a holy war, my Moslem brothers! Murder the Jews! Murder them all!" (Leonard J. Davis and M. Decter, Eds., Myths and facts: A Concise Record of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, Washington DC: Near East Report, 1982, p. 199).

Al-Husayni died in Beirut, Lebanon in 1974. He wished to be buried in Jerusalem, but the Israeli government refused this request.

Legacy

 * The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry's report dated April 20, 1946 says: "The flight of the Mufti, Haj Amin el-Husseini, to Italy and Germany, and his active support of the Axis, did not lose for him his following, and he is probably the most popular Arab leader in Palestine today." (Appendix IV. Palestine: Historical Background. The Arabs and the War)
 * Yasser Arafat's interview with the London-based Arabic language newspaper Al Sharq al Awsat was reprinted by a leading Palestinian daily Al Quds (August 2, 2002):
 * Interviewer: I have heard voices from within the Palestinian Authority in the past few weeks, saying that the reforms are coordinated according to American whims...
 * Arafat: We are not Afghanistan. We are the mighty people. Were they able to replace our hero Hajj Amin al-Husseini?... There were a number of attempts to get rid of Hajj Amin, whom they considered an ally of the Nazis. But even so, he lived in Cairo, and participated in the 1948 war, and I was one of his troops."


 * According to John Marlowe, "The dominant figure in Palestine during the Mandate years was neither an Englishman nor a Jew, but an Arab &mdash; Haj Amin Muhammed Effendi al Husaini... Able, ambitious, ruthless, humourless, and incorruptible, he was of the authentic stuff of which dictators are made."
 * Israeli historian Tom Segev paraphrased a letter that the commander of the British forces in the British Mandate for Palestine, General Evelyn Barker, a publically anti-Zionist, wrote to his wife in around May 1947 about the mufti's legacy: "Haj Amin al-Husseini, the former mufti, thought only of his own interests and not of his people, and had done the Palestinian Arabs a great disservice. The mufti sought only to augment his political power.  The Arabs had only dissension and petty jealousies.  Their tragedy was that they had no real leadership."
 * "Years later it was revealed that Hitler had detested the mufti, who had no influence whatsoever over the Nazis." Uri Avnery