Volume 4 No 2 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

2012] ISLAMIC ANTISEMITISM IN THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT 597other Islamic institutions. By virtue of these two offices, Husseini “becamethe most influential Arab in Palestine.” 9 Husseini and his clan were notablefor their ruthless treatment of political opponents, especially the rivalNashashibi clan. The Nashashibis were open to compromise and peacefulco-existence with the Zionists, while the Husseinis were adamantly opposedto any compromise, “but the Husseinis generally set the tone of PalestinianArab politics . . . and from the mid-1930s dominated the national movement.”10 During the Arab uprising of 1936-9, Hajj Amin al-Husseinibecame president of the Arab Higher Committee, a united front of all thePalestinian Arab political parties. The fighting and lawlessness of 1936-9offered an occasion for Husseini to assassinate and terrorize his politicalopponents, who included any Palestinian Arabs not categorically rejectingcooperation with the Jews. 11 When the British convened the Peel Commissionin 1937 to investigate the causes of the Arab revolt, Hajj Amin wascalled to testify. He not only rejected the creation of a Jewish state on anypart of Palestine, however small, but insisted that the vast majority of theJews (all who had arrived after 1914) should be expelled altogether fromPalestine, on the grounds that they would otherwise tear down the Al Aqsamosque and rebuild their temple. 12Expelled by the British from Palestine for his role in fomenting theArab revolt, Hajj Amin fled in 1937 to Lebanon and in 1939 to Iraq. Husseinihad since 1933 repeatedly reached out to Nazi German officials andreceived money from the Germans to fund the revolt. 13 In Iraq, he played acentral role in organizing a pro-Axis coup that took place in early 1941,necessitating a British invasion. 14 The mufti then fled, via Iran, first to fascistItaly and then to Nazi Germany, arriving in Berlin on November 6,1941. In Berlin, he met with foreign minister Ribbentrop and, on November28, with Adolf Hitler himself. Already in September 1940 Husseini’s privatesecretary had met in Berlin with top Nazi officials, where he had9. Gensicke, The Mufti of Jerusalem, 13.10. Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 10.11. Gensicke, The Mufti of Jerusalem, 17. See also Efraim Karsh, PalestineBetrayed (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), 35-8, and Morris,The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, 11, 22-3.12. Karsh, Palestine Betrayed, 32-35. See also Benny Morris, 1948: A Historyof the First Arab-Israeli War (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,2008), 408-9.13. Gensicke, The Mufti of Jerusalem, 28-32, 37-38.14. Gensicke, The Mufti of Jerusalem, 50: “There can be no doubt whatsoeverthat, but for the Mufti’s ceaseless political agitation, the coup in Iraq would nothave occurred in the first place.”