Skeleton In The Palestinian Closet

Jewish Press ^ | July 23, 2008 | Jonathan S. Tobin

[SJackson]

It is axiomatic that a knowledge of history is a prerequisite for understanding the present. But the question is: How much weight should we give to controversial figures from the past when deciding how to think about current conflicts?

According to the authors of a new book about the grand mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini (1893-1974), a man who played a key role in fomenting and exacerbating the struggle between Jews and Arabs during much of the 20th century, the answer is quite a lot.

The book, Icon of Evil: Hitler’s Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam, by David G. Dalin and John F. Rothman, makes the case that you can draw a direct line from al-Husseini to not only the Palestine Liberation Organization and Hamas but to Iran, al Qaeda and the 9/11 conspirators.

That’s a searing indictment that both supporters and foes of Israel ought to examine closely. And if the book fails to deliver the definitive account of the Mufti’s life in English that students of this period of history have been waiting for, it nevertheless shines a spotlight on a figure who deserves far greater attention than he has received in recent decades.

Husseini was a member of an elite landed clan of Palestinian Arabs who retain their status to this day (Yasir Arafat was a cousin). In the aftermath of World War I, he rose to prominence as a fanatical opponent of both the British and the Jews.

Ironically, it was a British Jew, Sir Herbert Samuel, the first high commissioner of the Palestine Mandate, who appointed Husseini to the post of mufti, the putative Muslim religious leader of Jerusalem.

While many in the British government were openly hostile to Zionism, Samuels was not. But he was concerned about being seen as evenhanded between Jews and Arabs. So when there was a vacancy in the office of mufti, Samuels appointed the hard-line Husseini.

This was a decision Jews would rue for decades. Husseini used his post as a platform to promote hatred against the Zionists, who were transforming the country from a barren backwater into what would become the modern State of Israel. Husseini incited the riots of 1929 in which hundreds of Jews were killed and wounded by Muslim pogromists and did his best to better that record during the Arab Revolt of 1936-39.

Though the mufti’s gangs were defeated, his work paid dividends in 1939 when the British issued a White Paper that placed severe limits on Jewish immigration and land sales, effectively closing the door to a Jewish state.

But Husseini did not seize this opening and instead continued his Anglophobic campaign after the war began. Eventually, he wound up in wartime Berlin where he was received by Hitler and housed in luxury by the Nazi state as an honored collaborator. Husseini made propaganda broadcasts for the Germans and recruited Bosnians to serve in a special Muslim SS brigade that was responsible for the murder of more than 12,000 Bosnian Jews. As such, he played a personal role in the Holocaust.

After the war, Husseini evaded prosecution as a war criminal and, as the birth of the Jewish state loomed, sought to take command of the Arab drive to destroy it. In that he failed, as Palestinians loyal to the mufti were routed by the Jews. When the Arab states invaded Israel on May 15, 1948, the mufti was left on the sidelines of the conflict where he fumed impotently for the rest of his life in exile in Damascus and Cairo.

Unfortunately, Dalin and Rothman’s book is hampered by a lack of original research, leaving the authors to make sometimes uninformed guesses about the mufti’s inner life that leave us with more questions than answers about his personality. Instead, at times they rely on egregious speculation that adds little of value to the existing literature on the subject.

In this vein, they go overboard in a chapter devoted to a “what if” scenario in which their protagonist fantasizes about the mass slaughter of Palestinian Jewry had Hitler prioritized the conquest of the Middle East rather than that of Russia. Counter-factual fantasy can be amusing, but it has no place in what promised to be a serious biography.

While there’s no doubt that everything we know about the mufti tells us he would have liked to preside over a Palestinian Auschwitz, such speculation about this nightmare obscures more important issues that require no digression into fantasy.

What is important about the mufti is that he is a human bridge between early stages of a Palestinian nationalism and the Muslim Brotherhood movement and its current Islamist identity in the form of Hamas, al Qaeda and Iranian-backed Hizbullah.

The authors rightly see Arafat’s career in terrorism and rejection of peace as being inspired by the mufti’s example. And though some observers like to pretend that Islamism is a recent aberration in Palestinian culture and politics, Husseini’s life is testament to the fact that religious fanaticism has always been integral to its character.

Despite its flaws, Dalin and Rothman’s book is on target when it concludes that Husseini was a seminal figure not only in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict but also in the culture of the Muslim world.

Though contemporary Palestinian Arabs bear no guilt for the crimes of the Nazis simply because the mufti was one, it is both fair and reasonable to assess the influence of his philosophy on the movement he spawned. Fatah, Hamas and the Palestinian media – as well as the media of the rest of the region – demonstrate on a daily basis that the mufti’s bloodthirsty Nazi-like hate for Jews is alive and well today, not only in Gaza and Ramallah but throughout the Islamic sphere.

Although some deprecate the use of the term “Islamofascist,” a study of the life of the mufti shows that the combination of these disparate ideas into one ideology of hate is no Western invention. Amin al-Husseini, Nazi collaborator and Palestinian religious and political leader, may have been among the first Islamofascists. The tragedy of the Middle East and the Palestinians is that he was far from the last.

[SJackson]

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