Inlate 1942 and May 1943, as the Nazi program to murder all the Jewsreached its apex, desperate attempts were underway to rescue severalthousand Jewish children by ransoming their lives in exchange forGerman nationals held by the Allies. Negotiations wereprogressing until Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, gotwind of these plans and protested vociferously. The deals werecancelled and the children presumably perished in the Nazi killingcenters.
As German official Wilhelm Melchers testified after the war
Themufti was making protests everywhere ...The mufti was an accomplishedfoe of the Jews and did not conceal that he would love to see all ofthem liquidated.
These incidents and many others are extensively documented in Jennie Lebel’s penetrating book,
The Mufti of Jerusalem: Haj-Amin el-Husseini and National-Socialism (publishedby Cigoja Stampa, Belgrade, Serbia, 2007). Lebel exposes the Mufti ofJerusalem’s intimate involvement with the Nazis. Her book includesnumerous reproduced letters written by the mufti and photographicevidence of his meetings with senior Nazi officials.
The noted Serbian-Israeli historian gives particular attention tothe mufti’s activities in Yugoslavia, adding new insight into thesubstantial service Haj Amin provided to his Nazi paymasters. The muftiwas instrumental in helping to recruit several SS divisions made up ofBosnian Muslims to engage in anti-partisan operations and even serve onthe Eastern front to battle the Soviet forces. He lent his prestige asone of the world’s most visible Muslim leaders to convince his fellowadherents in the Soviet Union to defect to the German side.
Lebel explores the reciprocal affinity many Nazis felt for Islam.She reveals that SS chief Himmler cultivated a fascination with Islam.For example, Muslim SS units were unique in being allowed to include areligious officer and regular prayer. One chapter describes the effortsof German propagandists to eliminate the use of the term anti-Semitein official Nazi publications and replace it with more specific termslike anti-Jewish, in order to avoid lumping Arabs together with theobject of their hatred, the Jews.
Through Lebel’s account, themufti emerges as a consummate political operator, combining in equalmeasure pathological ruthlessness towards Arab competitors andobsequiousness to murderous demagogues. The mufti cultivated personalfriendships with senior Nazi officials, especially Himmler.
Thebook reproduces fawning letters penned by Haj Amin as he strove to ingratiate himself with Nazis officials. In one letter intended tocourt Hitler on January 20, 1941, he described the German Fuhrer as adescendent of the Prophet and the savior of Islam.
At thewar’s end in 1945, the Yugoslav government announced their intention totry him for his role in war crimes committed by Muslim SS units onYugoslav territory. British and French ambivalence over prosecutinghim, however, facilitated his “escape” to Egypt where he reasserted hisrole as Palestinian leader. Haj Amin rejected any compromise solutionand organized violent opposition to the establishment of the new Jewishstate. Ultimately his machinations failed to prevent Israel’s rebirthand his hardline stance left the Palestinians without their own state.Yet Haj Amin left an indelible mark by enshrining as a central tenet ofthe Palestinian cause, Israel’s dismantling.
The Mufti's Rise
Scion of a prominent family who had held the role of mufti,Haj Amin El-Husseini was appointed Mufti of Jerusalem in 1921 aided bysympathetic British officials. He advocated violent opposition toJewish settlement in the Mandate for Palestine and incited the Arabsagainst the growing Jewish presence. Lebel describes the violence of1929, where Haj Amin spread the story that the Jews planned to destroythe Dome of the Rock and the
Aqsamosque. Using falsified photos of the mosque on fire and disseminatingpropaganda that borrowed from the anti-Jewish forgery, the " Protocolsof the Elders of Zion," the mufti instigated a widespread pogromagainst Jews in Palestine. On Aug. 23, Arabs streamed into Jerusalemand attacked Jews. Six days later, a second wave of attacks resultedin 64 dead in Hebron, 45 in Safed.
The Jews were not the most numerous of Haj Amin's victims inPalestine. During the years of the Mandate, local Arabs who did notshare his extreme hostility towards the Jews were targeted andeliminated. Throughout the 1930s he instigated a campaign tointimidate moderate Arabs and assassinate those branded as traitors forselling land or cooperating with the Jews. Haj Amin's followers killedmany more Palestinian Arabs than the British colonial occupiers orJewish defense groups combined. This campaign, in its brutal execution,succeeded in solidifying the link between Palestinian nationalaspirations and the muftis opposition to any accommodation with theJews.
The Mufti injected a religiously based anti-Jewish component intothe emerging Palestinian national consciousness. Lebel relates how in1931, Haj Amin organized the Pan-Islamic congress, which demanded theend of Jewish immigration and rescinding of the Balfour declaration.Jewish journalists were expressly not invited to the congress, asGershom Agronsky, the Jewish correspondent for the Christian ScienceMonitor, found out when his paper was notified he would not be allowedto attend. Presaging modern boycott proposals against Jewishsettlement, Haj Amin called on all Muslims to boycott Jewish goods andorganized an Arab strike on April 10, 1936. The Arab Higher Committee,controlled by the Mufti, proposed a ban on the sale of land to Jews anda halt to Jewish immigration.
Haj Amin’s extreme positions inevitably led to a clash with theBritish, who had to temper their desire to appease the Arabs with theircommitment to a Jewish national home. Almost from the start he hadcharted a separate course from the British. He saw in the Nazis andItalian fascists natural allies who would do what the British wereunwilling to do — purge the region of Jews and help him establish aunified Arab state throughout the Middle East freed from Britishcontrol. As early as 1933, the mufti sought to establish an alliancewith the Germans. It was the Germans who were more circumspect.
Believingthat the Axis might prevail in the war, the mufti secured a commitmentfrom both Italy and Germany to the formation of a region-wide Arabstate. He also asked for permission to solve the Jewish problem by the"same method that will be applied for the solution of the Jewishproblem in the Axis states." Haj Amin also approached Fascist Italy, atone point requesting Italian assistance in poisoning the water ofTel-Aviv.
His role in the revolt in Iraq against thepro-British government on April 1, 1941 is also examined. Although thecoup was defeated quickly and with relative ease, the unrest didinspire a pogromin June that left at least 180 Jews dead. A British Commission set upto investigate found the German League and the mufti responsible.
Activities as a Paid Nazi Agent
Most of all, Lebel provides new details on the muftis wartimesojourn in Nazi Germany. She precisely traces his contacts with Nazileaders. He arrived in Berlin on November 5, 1941 with assurances byNazi Foreign Minister Ribbentrop that "Germany considers the Arabquestion with sympathy." On Nov. 28, 1941, he met for the first timewith Adolf Hitler, relaying to the German leader the Arab convictionthat Germany would win the war and that this would benefit the Arabcause.
While Hitler shared the mufti’s belief that the present warwould determine the fate of the Arabs, his priority was the struggleagainst what he saw as Jewish-controlled Britain and the Soviet Union.Lebel reveals Hitler’s promise that when the German army reached thesouthern borders of the Caucasus, he would announce to the Arab worldtheir time of liberation had come. The Germans would annihilate allJews who lived in Arab areas.
Haj Amin repaid Hitler’s promise of support by providing a bridge tothe Muslim world. An office known as the Das Arabische Buro was openedin Berlin under the auspices of the German Abwehr. The mufti provided aspy network to the Germans while receiving a salary of 75,000 RM. Evenafter the defeat of the Axis forces in North Africa, Haj Amin continuedto urge Arabs to rebel against the Allies claiming that the Britishwould establish North Africa as a "second Jewish homeland to bring theremainder of European Jewry and some of the Jews and Negros fromAmerica."
In early 1943, while the Second World War still raged, the muftiurged Germany to bomb Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. He also proposedparachuting forces into Palestine for sabotage operations. The plansincluded partitioning up Jewish property and Jewish women.
Likehis successor as leader of the Palestinian cause, Yasir Arafat, the HajAmin's weakness was his ineffectiveness in carrying out the morepractical responsibilities of leadership. Having gained prominencethrough assassination and maneuvering under the umbrella of powerfulpatrons, he was ill-prepared for the role of organizing an effectivemilitary effort to oppose the establishment of the Jewish state.
Theforces he helped organize, a mixture of local Arabs, German and BosnianSS recruits, and volunteers from surrounding Arab states, rapidlydeteriorated into a rabble. By the time the Jewish leadership announcedthe founding of the Jewish state on May 14, 1948, the military effortagainst the Jews had passed to the regular Arab armies of Jordan,Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. With the disintegration of his forces,Haj Amin’s influence declined as well.
Foreshadowing the current Palestinian political alignment, heestablished himself in Gaza backed by the Muslim Brotherhood, while themore moderate Jordanians dominated the territory that would come to beknown as the West Bank. Distrusted by the Egyptians, who then, as now,had an uneasy relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, Haj Amin'sposition eroded.
On December 20, 1948, Jordan’s King Abdullah removed Haj Amin fromhis position as mufti. By March, 1949, Haj Amin’s authority was soeroded that when he boycotted the UN Palestine Conciliation Commission,he was simply ignored.
The Mufti’s Legacy
Lebel’s thorough documentation of the mufti’s intimate involvementwith the Nazi regime sheds needed light on the virulent anti-Jewish andfascistic underpinnings of his brand of Palestinian nationalism. Whilehis political plans to establish a Palestinian state and bestow uponhimself the role of preeminent leader of the Arab world ultimatelyfailed, Haj Amin el-Husseini left a deep imprint on Palestinianconsciousness. His conspiratorial view of Jewish ambitions arereflected in the widespread dissemination of such publications as “TheProtocols of the Elders of Zion”and Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” in the Araband Muslim world. The view of the Jews as contaminators of society andmalevolent conspirators resonate today in the founding Charter of Hamas.
In a radio broadcast from Germany on Nov. 16, 1943, which Labelreproduced in her book, Haj Amin laid out his vision of the conflictwith the Jews:
TheJews bring the world poverty, trouble and disaster ... they destroymorality in all countries... they falsify the words of the prophet,they are the bearers of anarchy and bring suffering to the world. Theyare like moths who eat away all the good in the countries. Theyprepared the war machine for Roosevelt and brought disaster to theworld. They are monsters and the basis for all evil in the world ....”
Jennie Lebel has shown thatit is possible to bring forward fresh insights and new information on atopic that has already been well mined. Her book adds a new layer ofdetail to our understanding of the connection between Israel’s Arabenemies and German Nazis.