"Who is a Palestinian?" • Chapter 4 • The British Mandate on Palestine

Who is a Palestinian? – The British Mandate version

In April 1920, at the San Remo Conference of the United Nations, Great Britain received the mandate for Palestine. According to the text of the mandate, the British were obliged to establish a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, while maintaining the national rights of the Arab inhabitants of the land, and thus the Balfour Declaration received international validity.

The first British Commissioner was Herbert Samuel, a Jew by origin. Samuel tried to manage balanced relations between the Jewish settlement and the Arab population and to gain the trust of the Arabs as well.

The residents of the country under the mandate were granted Palestinian citizenship. It was the first time the term Palestinian appeared officially. Palestinian citizenship was granted to Arabs and Jews alike.

The first Palestinians were, therefore, all the inhabitants of Palestine, mostly Jews and Arabs.
The British exceeded their mandate quite quickly. In 1921, Transjordan, with its Arab population, was handed over to Abdullah bin Ali, Faisal's brother. The British, in fact, invented a new country called "Transjordan" - later "Jordan".

As in Iraq, the British once again enthroned a Hashemite Bedouin king from the Arabian Peninsula, over a country they invented.

Haj Amin Al Husseini - from an instigator to a mufti

The most significant figure among the Palestinian Arabs at this time, and the one who can be pointed to as the father of the Palestinian people, was Haj Amin Al Husseini. It was a slippery and melodramatic type who, in the perspective of time, was largely responsible for the gloomy future of this newly born nation.

Haj Amin was the central figure in the struggle of the Israeli Arabs for their inclusion in "Greater Syria".

Immediately after the disappearance of "Greater Syria", the man went to fight against the British and the Jews in the Land of Israel. The struggle is aimed at achieving independence for a nation that has just invented itself - the Palestinian people.

Haj Amin is a key figure in understanding the direction in which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict developed, and in understanding the situation of the Palestinian people from then until today.

The Hosseini family was, along with the Nashashibi family, one of the two most influential families among the Israeli Arabs of the early 20th century.

Amin was the son of Taher Al Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem. His parents sent him to study at the "Alliance" school (a Jewish Zionist school), so that he would receive a western education.

At the end of his high school studies, young Amin was sent to study Islamic studies and Arabic literature at "Al Azhar" University in Egypt. He did not finish his studies there, but it was there that he absorbed and openly expressed his anti-Semitic feelings for the first time.

In the First World War Al Husseini served as an artillery officer in the Ottoman army. In fact, he did not participate in combat, and managed to quarrel with all his commanders.

Later, he wrote a series of anti-Zionist articles that defined the Palestinian struggle as a religious war.

In the riots that broke out during the Nabi Musa celebrations in April 1920, the 25-year-old Haj Amin already played a central role.

He instigated and led the events that started as a demonstration for the Palestinian Arabs to join King Faisal's "Greater Syria", and ended in a pogrom against the Jews.

Husayns and Neshashibs

With the beginning of the mandate, the British looked for centers of power and authority on both sides, to use them in controlling the country.

In the Jewish settlement, which was quite organized, the British recognized the center of power in the Jewish Agency, and in Haim Weizmann who headed it.

On the Arab side, the British did not recognize a similar establishment, so they turned to two old families that were considered centers of authority in the Arab public - the Husseini family and the Nashashibi family.

The Husayns were traditionally identified as religious office bearers, and the pragmatic Nashashibs, who for years held management positions in the Ottoman regime, were identified as leading technocrats on the civilian side.

After the occupation of the land by the British, the Nashashis continued to hold public offices under the British Mandate rule. They called on the Arabs to cooperate with the British institutions. Among the Arab society, the Nashashivs were considered a socially and culturally "aristocratic" family, and many of their sons were prominent writers and journalists.

These two families were in the midst of a power struggle.

Somehow, Haj Amin Al Husseini managed to impress the British. They were tempted, for some reason, to see him as a modern and liberal young man, and a follower of Jewish-Arab cooperation.

Haj Amin is gaining strength

Herbert Samuel, the first British commissioner in Palestine, was convinced and appointed Haj Amin as mufti of Jerusalem. Later, Hajj Amin was also appointed to head the Supreme Muslim Council established by the British.

In doing so, Al Husseini became the supervisor of all areas of the Muslim religion under the control of the mandate.

In retrospect, it was a terrible error in judgment, which produced disasters for all parties - the British, the Arabs and the Jews.

Haj Amin was not a liberal. He was an Islamist, a narcissist and a megalomaniac. He excelled mainly in boundless ambition and abysmal hatred for the Jews. In his new position, Husseini saw a lever to accumulate power, and sought to extend his influence also to the Muslim world beyond the mandate.

Jerusalem was a relatively marginal city in the Muslim space, and was greatly neglected during the Ottoman period. One of the first actions of Hajj Amin was to convene a world Islamic conference in Jerusalem, which emphasized the status of Jerusalem in the Muslim world.

He set out to raise funds in the Muslim world to renovate buildings on the Temple Mount, and this is how the Dome of the Rock won the golden dome that characterizes it today. He made sure to connect Muslim communities in the world with Jerusalem, and became very connected to the huge communities of Indian Muslims (Pakistan was in those years a part of India).

India was of prime strategic importance to Britain. Haj Amin understood this well, and very cleverly prepared for himself in advance levers of pressure on the British authorities.

There was a Jewish majority in Jerusalem, and Haj Amin went out to fight it. He first invented and spread the plot, which has come up again and again since then, that the Jews are planning to take over the Temple Mount and build the Temple on the ruins of the Al Aqsa Mosque.

He compiled into a book passages from the Koran that ooze hatred of Jews, and based on them he justified the murder of Jews wherever they were. It was an innovation that was well received, and its clear traces can be seen to this day (see for example the "Hamas" charter).

Zionism, which so frightened Haj Amin, was indeed a secular movement at its core, but he was determined to turn the struggle between Jews and Arabs into a religious war.

In 1928, the mufti convened an Islamic convention "for the defense of the Western Wall". He continued the campaign of incitement ("I will not leave in danger") which resulted, towards the end of 1928, in the harassment of Jews who prayed on the Western Wall plaza.

The explosion came in August 1929 (the events of 130), in a violent Arab outbreak. The violence began in Jerusalem and quickly spread to other cities involved - Safed, Haifa, and Hebron where a real massacre took place. During the events, approximately XNUMX Jews were murdered.

The British are under pressure

At the same time as the massacre, with the mufti's encouragement, severe riots broke out among the Muslims in India. Those who supported the Palestinian Arab public demonstrated against British rule. In this way, the mufti exercised the pressure lever on the British, which he had taken the trouble to prepare in advance.

The British were indeed pressed. The transformation of the local national conflict into a global religious conflict was for them a real threat at the level of the empire.

To appease the Muslims in Palestine and throughout the empire, Britain changed its policy. It imposed a restriction on the sale of land to Jews and a restriction on Jewish immigration. It also initiated the establishment of a Legislative Council for Palestine with 24 members and a guaranteed Arab majority.

This was, in practice, a withdrawal from the commitment in the Balfour Declaration, by virtue of which Britain received the mandate in the first place.

But the British surrender was not enough for Haj Amin. He opposed the establishment of the Legislative Council and prevented its establishment, as he feared that he would not be able to control it, since it would contain Jews as well as representatives of his opponents, the pragmatic Nasashivs.

Az-e-Din al-Qassam

In those days, a preacher of Syrian origin named Az-e-Din al-Qassam, who came to Israel after taking part in the fight against the French who took control of Syria, began to stand out.

Az-e-Din was appointed by Hajj Amin as a teacher at the Islamic school in Haifa. From there he advanced to the position of imam of the "Al-Estiklal" mosque in Wadi Salib, and in 1929 he was the marriage registrar of the Sharia court in Haifa.

By virtue of his position, al-Qassam frequently visited villages in the Haifa and northern regions.

In all the places he went to, Al-Qassam engaged in Islamic recruitment and preaching activities, while spreading his extreme anti-Zionist and anti-British fundamentalist religious doctrine. He encouraged people to organize into terrorist gangs for jihad against the British and the Jews. In 1930, he even founded a terrorist gang called "The Black Hand", which dealt with terrorism and the murder of Jews.

In the meantime (1931), after heavy pressure from the Zionists, led by Weizmann, the British Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, announced that Britain would nevertheless persist in its policy as defined in the Balfour Declaration.