Mufti: 1920 pogrom
The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia ...: An Authoritative and ..., Volume 5, Isaac Landman, Louis Rittenberg, Simon Cohen - 1941, p.507
HUSSEINI , HAJ AMIN AL - , former Mufti of Jerusalem , one time head of the Moslem Supreme Council , and leader of the Arab anti-British , anti-Jewish opposition in Palestine and in the Near East , b. Jerusalem, Palestine , 1893 .
... His speeches, pamphlets and articles in the newspaper Suria al Jenobia ( Southern Syria ) were primarily responsible for the outbreak of the 1920 pogrom in Jerusalem ..
Mufti of Jerusalem; the Story of Haj Amin El Husseini - Page 12 - Moshe Pearlman - 1947
Aref was alleged to have been the person in command of the attackers . Haj Amin · was charged with incitement to violence . The spark was said to have been touched off by his inflammatory articles in the newspaper Suriyah al Janubiyah.
Bangladesh Historical Studies, 1979, Volume 4, p.77
The emergence of Haj Amin al ... He was frank and open in his views and had strong hatred against the Jews and the British.
He became prominent in 1920 riots . Haj - Amin became Mufti of Jerusalem in 1921 and President of the Supreme Muslim Council in 1922
(Maurice Pearlman: Mufti of Jerusalem : The story of Haj Amin al - Husaini London , 1947 , pp. 12-15).
The Evening Star, Bradford, Pa., Wednesday Evening:, June 12, 1946. Page Three
MacKenzie Column
The Grand Mufti Is on the Loose Again
By DEWITT MACKENZIE (Associated Press Foreign Affairs Analyst)
Word that the powerful grand mufti of Jerusalem who is anti everything that is British or Jewish has evaded surveillance in France and again is at large somewhere among the Moslems of the Middle East, isn't calculated to ease the crisis which has arisen in Palestine over the fiery problem of Jewish immigration.
Dangerous Man
The highly educated grand mufti is a dangerous man to those against whom he conspires. For many years he has been leader of the Arab campaign for an independent Palestine and against the establishment of a Jewish national home as promised by the British. And it is an ironic circumstance that it was Sir Herbert Samuel, first British high commissioner of Palestine under the league of Nations mandate, who appointed him mufti. The 53-year-old Haj Amin El Husseini to give him his name not only is spiritual head of Palestine's some 1,000,000 Moslem Arabs but is political leader as well.
Moreover his influence extends into Trans-Jordan, Iraq, Arabia, Egypt, Iran and Syria, for he is gifted with leadership, has a strong personality and is as crafty as a fox.
Most of his life. Husseini has made war on the Jews of Palestine.
Indeed in 1920, when his brother was grand mufti, he fled to Trans-Jordan after being sentenced to 10 years imprisonment for his part in anti-Jewish riots.
Next year the brother died and Haj Amin was granted amnesty, after which High Commissioner Samuel appointed him grand mufti, it being the custom for this high office to remain In the same family.
Banished in 1937
Finally in 1937 the British banished the grand mufti from Palestine. He took refuge first in Syria, and then in Iran and finally in Italy, keeping just ahead of the British forces as they occupied the Middle East in 1941.
Of course the grand mufti was welcomed by Mussolini with open arms, for both Il Duce and Hitler were doing their utmost to inflame the Moslems of the Middle East against the Allies.
He carried on his anti-British activities from Italy until he again was forced to flee, this time to France where ultimately he came under Allied control.
Now the grand mufti is loose again and is reported to have gone by air to Syria, but his whereabouts is a mystery.
It scarcely can be mere coincidence that the grand mufti has made this spectacular get-away as the moment nears when a decision must be made whether the Anglo-American Committee recommendation shall be carried out.
June 20 is the time set for both Jews and Arabs to give formal reports of their reactions to the recommendation.
Reclaiming Israel's History: Roots, Rights, and the Struggle for Peace - David Brog - 2017
THE RIOTS OF 1920 AND 1921
On March 7, 1920, the Syrian Arab Congress declared Syrian independence under the reign of King Feisal. Less than a month later, on April 4, tens of thousands of Arabs streamed into Jerusalem for the annual Nebi Musa festival. This religious celebration provided a perfect opportunity for Palestine's Arab nationalists to send a strong message to their British overlords.
They took to the streets carrying photos of King Feisal and demanding that the British cede Palestine cede Palestine—which they called "Southern Syria"—to the new monarch.
When the procession reached Jerusalem's Arab Club, a number of nationalist leaders appeared on the balcony to address the crowd below. Speaker after speaker demanded independence and unity with Syria.
They also called for violence against the Jews. Observers recalled hearing the crowd chant, “ Slaughter the Jews,”21 “We will drink the blood of the Jews," and “Palestine is our land, the Jews are our dogs." In Arabic, this last phrase forms a rhyming couplet.
Thus incited, Arabs wielding knives, clubs, and stones burst into the Jewish quarter. They ransacked Jewish homes and looted Jewish stores. They raided synagogues and yeshivas and ripped up Torah scrolls. And they attacked any Jews they found.
By the time the riots finally ended several days later, 5 Jews had been killed and 211 had been wounded. Many of the female victims had been raped.
The British police quickly concluded that a young nationalist leader (and future Mufti), Amin al-Husseini, was responsible for the violence. A court found Husseini guilty of inciting the riots and sentenced him to ten years in prison. He evaded jail by fleeing to Damascus.
A year later, on May 1, 1921, Palestine's Arabs launched another round of violence against their Jewish neighbors. This time the Arabs of Jaffa went on the attack. Author... describes what followed:
"Arab men broke into Jewish buildings and murdered the occupants; women came afterward and looted. Bearing clubs, knives, swords, and in some cases pistols, Arabs attacked Jewish pedestrians and destroyed Jewish homes and stores. They beat and killed Jews, children included, in their homes; in some cases they split the victims' skulls open."
The attacks quickly spread from Jaffa to neighboring villages and beyond.
On the morning of May 5, two to three thousand Arab villagers and Bedouin attacked the Jewish town of Petach Tikvah. This time, however, the British intervened. British infantry, aided by armored cars and air support, turned back the Arab assault.
Two more attacks followed the next day. Several thousand Arabs from Ramle attacked the neighboring Jewish town of Rehovot, shouting, "Slaughter the Jews." Rehovot's residents successfully repelled the offensive. Further north, hundreds of Arabs from Tulkarem and its surrounding villages attacked the Jewish town of Hadera. Here the British intervened with infantry and air power to rout the invaders.
By the time the British had quelled the 1921 riots, 47 Jews had been killed and another 146 had been wounded.
Another tack: The postulate of illegitimacy
By SARAH HONIG
APRIL 3, 2014 21:37
[Jewish victims of the 1920 Nebi Musa Massacre (photo credit: JERUSALEM POST ARCHIVE)]
The inherent illegitimacy of the Jewish state makes Jewish self-defense illegitimate; we may be attacked, but we may not react.
Something strikingly dramatic happened in this country exactly 94 years ago. Cries of “Itbach el-Yahud” (“Slaughter the Jews”) filled the air. It was the first coordinated mass-murder offensive launched by infamous Jerusalem Mufti Haj-Amin el-Husseini (who would in time become an avid Nazi collaborator, Hitler’s personal guest in Berlin during World War II and a wanted war criminal).
Ever since, this land shook fitfully as rounds of massacres and wars followed each other in breathless succession.
The past mustn’t be consigned to irrelevance.
Unbroken historical continuities contextualize current events. Nothing springs forth from a vacuum. What now takes place began back then.
The pivotal murder-drive of 1920 and its aftermath are vital for understanding why .. peace pageant is a flop... It established the prototype whereby Jews are punished for Arab crimes against Jews. It highlights the pattern of appeasing Arab wrath and of Jews paying – as if Jewish existence is in and of itself a casus belli.
The bias maddeningly came into play already in 1920. It’s the bias that has today burgeoned into the escalating extortion and shameless expectation that Israel release convicted murderers as a matter of course and injure its own interests to keep its enemies sweet. It’s as if Israel has no valid interests, no rights.
This is the postulate of illegitimacy.
Western antipathy to Jewish self-preservation was already gallingly evident in 1920, as was indulgent acquiescence to Arab aggression. It’s scary to realize how little has actually changed.
Those deadly landmark rampages were kick-started on April 4, 1920, exploiting Muslim celebrations to rally thousands of raiders at Nebi Musa in the Judean Desert.
Serially inflamed by Husseini’s vitriolic harangues, they poured into Jerusalem, descended upon the Old City’s Jewish Quarter and began butchering, raping, pillaging and burning – all in the name of their God.
The premeditated atrocity lasted four days. Even passing reflections on its overlooked anniversary (it’s so uncool to recall crimes against Jews), can contribute considerably to our present-day perspectives.
This unprovoked killing-spree was launched before any of the excuses for Arab bloodlust – now so conveniently and commonly cited – existed. There was no Jewish state to fulminate against and no Israeli “occupation” with which to justify any outrage against Jews in the Jewish homeland.
There was no hint of what the Palestinians market so effectively as their nakba – catastrophe. There wasn’t a single Arab refugee. There was no war, no displacement, no reason to rage.
The 1920 victims were largely members of the old-time, traditional, pre-Zionist Jewish community that had long before then constituted Jerusalem’s majority. Yet this ancient community was deemed fair game. The subtext was that Jews have no rights – not even indigenous non-Zionists.
Considering their penchant for distorting history, Israel’s detractors are doubtless tempted to describe 1920’s predators as oppressed Palestinian peasants protesting against usurper Jews. It must, therefore, be a whopping downer to discover that none of this homicidal fury was unleashed on behalf of Palestine. The Arabs loathed the very name introduced to this country by its new British overlords.
It was the Jews who became known throughout the first half of the 20th century as Palestinians and it was the Arabs who scornfully rejected the moniker.
The executioners who swooped down on Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter championed the cause of Greater Syria. On March 7, 1920, Britain crowned Feisal, a Hashemite princeling from today’s Saudi Arabia, as king in Damascus. By July that year the French would chuck him out. In response, London earmarked its latest invention, Iraq, for Feisal’s next monarchy. So much for the fictitious nature of Arab nationalities.
Feisal, incidentally, conferred with Dr.
Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization, in January 1919 and they produced the Faisal-Weizmann Agreement for Arab-Jewish Cooperation.
Thereupon Faisal issued the following statement, which appears quite fantastic in view of all that ensued: ”We Arabs... look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement… We will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home... I look forward, and my people with me look forward, to a future in which we will help you and you will help us, so that the countries in which we are mutually interested may once again take their places in the community of the civilized peoples of the world.”
Nothing even minimally approaching such recognition can be expected nowadays of Abbas, who preposterously claims no fewer than 9,000 years of “Palestinian” Arab history in this land and who denies any Jewish connection to it whatsoever.
But truth be told, Faisal failed miserably to enlist support for his pro-Jewish inclinations.
Syria’s loyal enthusiasts right here were busy murdering Jews during Feisal’s brief reign as their king. They yearned to be ruled by Damascus – as Syrians, not Palestinians. Husseini’s co-instigator of the Nebi Musa bloodbath was Aref Aref, significantly editor of the Southern Syria newspaper.
Most instructive in regard to Israel’s current international standing is the reaction in 1920 of the international community’s representative – Britain, claimant to the mandate to rule this land. How did it respond to the Jerusalem pogrom? Not unsurprisingly, as if by a magic wave of the mufti’s wand, His majesty’s military units exited Jerusalem during the onslaught. Top officers, such as Field Marshal Edmund Allenby’s chief of staff, Col.
Bertie Walters-Taylor, trained and abetted the assailants. Inspired by him, British and Arab policemen joined the rioters.
No wonder the mob howled deliriously: “A-Dawla ma’ana” – the government is with us. They knew whereof they screamed and their assessment of the government’s bias was spot on.
How little things have changed. The entire watching world still seethes with bias against this land’s Jews.
The double standards and double dealings of foreign onlookers, self-appointed judges and purported peacekeepers carry consequences. Foremost, they delegitimize Jewish self-defense. So it was and so it is.
Given British duplicity, what were the Jews to do back in 1920? Become accomplices to their own demise? Ze’ev Jabotinsky had begun organizing a rudimentary self-defense force, the Hagana. With too few fighters and too few weapons, it could barely contain the marauders.
But Perfidious Albion, standing for the family of nations, knew whom to blame and whom to go after. The Brits didn’t dare confront Husseini. They arrested Jabotinsky and 18 other Hagana members.
They sentenced Jabotinsky to 15 years hard labor, which was later commuted to permanent exile. Jabotinsky was never again allowed to enter this country.
Why? Because Jewish self-defense was defamed as utter effrontery. Jews had no right to save their own lives.
It’s no different today when the rest of the world doesn’t hold Abbas accountable for impeding peace, for glorifying the murderers of Jewish children and for seeking to set these murderers loose. It’s on the same moral plane as not holding Husseini accountable for blatantly and boastfully exhorting his adherents to slay Jews.
The underlying premise – both in 1920 and in 2014 – is that Jews may not defend themselves. It was clear-cut nearly a century ago. It’s disingenuously disguised now.
Overseas, the de rigueur affectation is that Abbas aspires to liberate prisoners of conscience, persecuted altruists and vindictively incarcerated philosophers.
Abbas is, after all, feted as the prince of moderation and nothing must challenge this conventional wisdom, even if he routinely makes mass-murderers his objects of reverence.
Abbas cunningly postures as Israel’s guiltless casualty, as a saint on the side of the angels, indeed as the suppressor of terrorism rather than its devious promoter.
He seeks to do the right thing – which he would sincerely do, were it not for those obstructionist Israelis.
In the enlightened vanguard of the global good-guy brigade, Abbas convinces willingly gullible saps of what they’re anyway predisposed to imbibe. The watching world laps up his fabrications and hypes the deception.
If it weren’t so, liberals worldwide would ask why ostensibly moderate Abbas insists on springing the worst murderers. Why are the bloodiest sadists upheld by his official propaganda as heroic role models for the young generation? Does this perhaps betray the fact that the Palestinians don’t genuinely desire coexistence but desire an existence without Jews? Are Palestinians telling their children that the only good Jews are dead Jews? By avoiding these questions, fellow democracies insult our democracy and legal system. Our courts – autonomous as few others anywhere – deserve respect.
Those whom Abbas wants released aren’t – contrary to impressions imparted by foreign media – “political prisoners,” locked up because of their beliefs and gallant advocacy of freedom.
These murderers were convicted after eminently fair trials with all the breaks of due process. They were granted legal representation replete with rights habitually denied defendants in Arab and Muslim countries, where instant kangaroo-court rulings are the norm.
By blithely disregarding all this, the world disparages Israel’s pedantic and ultra-liberal jurisprudence. All Israelis – especially those on the Left, who miss no pretext to resort to Israel’s famous judicial interventionism – ought to be offended to the core by such insolence. It’s unthinkable that our courts would be relied upon only when it suits an expedient agenda but that their decisions would be dishonored when it’s so dictated by diplomatic exigencies.
Moreover, if even verdicts imposed by our courts on unrepentant genocidal murderers can be set aside, how at all are we to defend ourselves? Israel’s military might is verboten because it’s, alas, “disproportionate force.” Pinpointed targeting of individual terror-mongers, such as Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin, are likewise prohibited by unique rules applied to Israel alone. Assassination, we’re sanctimoniously reminded, is so not-nice. Finally, when on occasion some individual murderers are captured, tried and put behind bars, self-professed humanitarians decry this too as unsavory.
What’s left? No fighting back, no surgical strikes, no prosecution or imprisonment.
Nothing. The bottom line is that anything we do to protect ourselves is illegitimate. This perception, not inadvertently, meshes with Abbas’s contention that a Jewish state is illegitimate.
The inherent illegitimacy of the Jewish state makes Jewish self-defense illegitimate.
We may be attacked, but we may not react. This is how it was in 1920. This is still how it is.
www.sarahhonig.com Debunking the Bull, Sarah Honig’s book, was recently published by Gefen
The end of innocence
Some 100 years after the 1920 riots, which signified the opening shot in the Israeli-Arab conflict, what has changed? A great deal – and very little.
By Nadav Shragai
Published on 05-01-2020 11:33
Last modified: 05-11-2020 12:52
April 19, 1920, on a train on his way to the San Remo Conference, Chaim Weizmann wrote to his wife, Vera, who was living in London: "My dear, the most terrible, awful thing has happened to us: A pogrom in Jerusalem, with all the accompanying signs of a pogrom… I am tired and shattered and exhausted and nauseated by it all. If the bayonets of the English had not stopped us, we would have overcome the Arabs on the first day, but the English dismantled the weapon of our self-defense and imprisoned our people, including Vladimir Yevgenyvich (Jabotinsky)."
Two weeks earlier, on the first day of the week of Passover, 1920, the riots broke out in Jerusalem and its environs. Today, they would be considered not much more than midsize terrorist attacks. "Only" seven people were killed and 200 injured. Still, it was the start of a new era; the opening shot of the Israeli-Arab conflict, and the first major non-criminal incident of an ethnoreligious nature.
A month earlier, Yosef Trumpeldor and five of his comrades had been killed at Tel Hai, but that battle had more to do with the Arabs' desire to fight against how Britain and France were splitting up the region and less to do with Jewish-Arab relations.
It's not that budding nationalism and fears of Zionism and aliyah hadn't been simmering among the Arabs already, but in 1920 they came into focus and took on clear political and religious angles. That same year saw the foundations for the religious aspect of the national conflict, especially on the Arab side under the leadership of the Grand Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini.
Husseini elevated the status of the mosques on the Temple Mount, using them for his political purposes and inventing the blood libel "Al-Aqsa is in danger," which even then falsely accused the Jews of intending to demolish the mosques on the Mount. The riots and the libel spurred the growth of the Palestinian national movement. In 1920 the seeds of the modern-day Palestinian outlook, which does not recognize Israel as the national state of the Jewish people, were sown. This worldview is willing to accept Judaism only as a dhimmi, a protected subservient religion, and not as a sovereign entity in an independent state.
Illusions smashed
The events opened the eyes of many Jews who had made the mistake of believing that the dispute between Arabs and Jews over the land would be limited to the "new" Jews, the ones who were arrived from abroad, whereas the veteran residents who had lived among Arabs for years would be spared any evil.
Historian Joseph Klausner noted that "Among the casualties and wounded were Jews of every ethnic background, of all classes, of all parties, Sephardim and Ashkenazim … devout rabbis and educated freethinkers. The enemy did not differentiate. Let us, therefore, stop differentiating between ourselves…."
The illusion that a foreign power could be trusted to defend us was also smashed. "We were told by the government that nothing bad would befall the Hebrew public, because the government would keep order and peace in the Land, and we believed it," Ha'aretz stated in an editorial that threw off the naiveté in the face of the new reality.
What happened in those days came as a complete and utter shock. They brought an end to innocence and, much more importantly, a start to the formation of an orderly military force and the realization that the organization HaShomer would no longer be enough. Eliyahu Golomb faced off with HaShomer and convinced David Ben-Gurion that it was time to build a much more extensive and orderly defensive force.
As a result, after 1920, defense forces in various towns and communities organized and formed the Haganah. It was still a small, scattered, and weak organization, and would become effective only a decade later. But 1920 marked the beginning.
The terminology changed, too. The writer Moshe Smilansky, for example, believed that the conflict was one "between two peoples." He and his friends in the Jewish Peace Alliance erred in thinking that it would be possible to establish a bi-national state in the Land of Israel that would be based on what the cultures had in common. Reality came knocking. In 1920, Jerusalem saw the first calls of "Itbah al-Yahoud" (Slaughter the Jews) or "Palestine is our country – the Jews our dogs" – calls that are still used.
The Arabs of the land began to call themselves "Palestinians," and the weapons the rioters used 100 years ago haven't changed, either: knives, iron pipes, rocks, and sticks.
It is worth noting that in 1920 no use was made of guns. A report by a British committee of inquiry set up to probe the riots described one of the characteristics of Palestinian terrorism, which would remain in the years to come: "All the evidence indicates that these attacks were of a cowardly and traitorous nature. Most of them were against the elderly, women, and children. Most were attacked from the back."
The creation of 'interests'
So what, if anything, has changed in the 100 years since then? Two days after Israel's 72nd Independence Day, Palestinian terrorism is not the existential threat it used to be, but it can still disrupt our lives. The terrorist organizations and many of those who carry out terrorism have not changed their goal: The eradication of the state of Israel. And that goal still rests on the worldview that Jews are not among the groups entitled to self-determination because Judaism is a religion, not a nationality.
Most of the expressions of reconciliation from the Arabs, including the peace treaties, were not the result of any recognition of our rights, but rather recognition of our power. At their base, they are the result of interests and the understanding that what the Jews built here will not be erased, that it's too late to turn the ship around and that it is better to have peaceful relations and cooperation with Israel than be an enemy.
That is what happened with Egypt and Jordan as well as with Saudi Arabia and various African countries and Persian Gulf states. There's no love story here, rather a story of mutual interests. Will it be different in the future?
In most cases, relations between peoples that are based on a combination of interests and proximity will stand the tests of time and history. But we shouldn't count on that combination.
The 100 years that have passed have taught us, sadly, that over time, the ethnoreligious conflict has pushed aside personal ties between Jews and Arabs. However, economic, military, intelligence or health interests have overcome the conflict itself. These are what have laid the basis for something else, which might someday lead to peace – and not peace because of shared interests. A hundred years after the start of the conflict and 72 years after the state was founded, we need to make do with that. It's not nothing, and it's not something to be taken for granted.
Comments
Post a Comment