c.1897-1974
Palestinian religious leader

1. Introduction
2. Stories
3. Biographical summary
4. See also
5. Further reading
6. References

1. Introduction

Amin Al-Husseini was a Sunni Muslim leader in British mandate Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s, with the title Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. He was a fierce Arab nationalist and anti-Zionist with the ambition of becoming the leader of a pan-Arab Muslim confederation of nations. During World War II, he allied himself with the Axis powers and lived in Germany, helping with Arabic propaganda broadcasts and the recruitment of Muslim soldiers from the Balkans. Churchill approved his assassination in 1940 but the operation failed. He had a temporary post-war role leading Palestinian Arabs while he was exiled in Egypt but was ousted and spent his last 15 years in exile in Lebanon.

2. Stories

• Husseini conflicted with Jews and the British authorities in Palestine, fleeing twice to avoid imprisonment.
• Churchill authorised an assassination attempt on Husseini using former Zionist extremists, but it was unsuccessful.
• While living in Germany, Husseini made propaganda broadcasts for the Nazis and helped to recruit Muslim soldiers.
• After World War II, Husseini was kept under loose house arrest in France but he escaped.
• The 1948 Arab-Israeli War marked the beginning of the decline of Husseini’s role in Arab affairs.
• Despite his diminishing influence, Husseini was an inspiration for Yasser Arafat, later leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation.
• A Central Intelligence Agency report, released in 2006, provides some revealing American views of Husseini.

Husseini conflicted with Jews and the British authorities in Palestine, fleeing twice to avoid imprisonment.

Husseini came from a distinguished Sunni Muslim clan in Jerusalem which had a long history of appointments to high office. He served as an artillery officer in the Ottoman army in World War I, stationed in İzmir, now in western Turkey. He returned to Jerusalem on sick leave with dysentery in 1916 and changed sides, cooperating with the British in support of the Arab revolt against the Ottomans.

After the Great War, Palestine came under British control. Tensions between Arabs and Jews ran high in relation to Jewish immigration envisaged by the Balfour Declaration of 1917. The Declaration was a highly influential and imprecise one-sentence public statement by UK foreign secretary Arthur Balfour, supporting ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’.¹ During the Arab Nebi Musa festival in April 1920, riots broke out in Jerusalem and Husseini was arrested for giving a speech deemed as incitement. He was released on bail and escaped to Syria. Tried in absentia, he received a 10-year jail sentence.

Sir Herbert Samuel, the new British high commissioner to Palestine, pardoned Husseini and appointed him in 1921 as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (keeper of Sunni holy places) to counterbalance the influence of the Husseini clan’s powerful rivals, the Nashashibi clan. In 1922 Husseini became president of the Supreme Muslim Council, making him head of the Muslim community and Islamic courts in Palestine. As Mufti, he raised funds and renovated the Haram al-Sharif, also known as the Temple Mount, which includes the Al-Aqsa Mosque (the third holiest site in Islam after Mecca and Medina) and the large, golden Dome of the Rock.

Riots broke out again in Jerusalem in 1929, leaving over 240 Arabs and Jews dead. The subsequent Shaw Commission absolved Husseini of direct incitement but said he should accept a share of responsibility.

In 1936, Husseini instigated a six-month Arab worker strike in protest against Jewish immigration and land transfers to Jews. He avoided arrest in July 1937 by means of asylum on the Haram al-Sharif, protected by a team of bodyguards, and escaped to Lebanon three months later, disguised as a Bedouin nomad.

Churchill authorised an assassination attempt on Husseini using former Zionist extremists, but it was unsuccessful.

When World War II was declared, Husseini was placed under house arrest in Beirut and was asked to declare his support for the Allies, which was not forthcoming. He bribed the French chief of police and escaped to Iraq. Jewish leader Pinhas Rutenberg in Palestine suggested to the UK Foreign Office that there were easy ways of getting rid of him. Rutenberg, a former Russian engineer, is alleged to have been one of a small group who hung an agent provocateur in 1906 near Saint Petersburg after the First Russian Revolution. The Foreign Office declined, believing that Husseini’s disappearance would not help, as he would simply be replaced.

In October 1940, Secretary of State for India Leo Amery proposed that ‘a few bold lads’² could kidnap Husseini in Iraq and have him taken to Cyprus. The chiefs of staff took this further and recommended that Husseini should be assassinated, which was approved by Prime Minister Churchill after cabinet discussion in November.

The Foreign Office was concerned about the possible consequences and hoped that it would not have to carry out the plan itself. Some prevarication followed, but the coup by pro-German Al-Gaylani in Iraq in April 1941, which Husseini assisted, prompted action. General Percival Wavell ordered that David Raziel, a jailed leader of the Irgun organisation (see Zionist Paramilitary Groups), be released with three other members. They were to disguise themselves as Arabs, ‘acquire’ Husseini, and then destroy Iraqi oil installations which were by then supporting Nazi rather than UK war efforts.

In May 1941, they were flown from Palestine to Iraq in a British aircraft, landing at RAF Habbaniya during the short Anglo-Iraqi War. Raziel was travelling in a car that was strafed by a German aircraft sent to reinforce the Iraqis. He and a British officer were killed, bringing the mission to an abrupt end.

The coup was overturned and Husseini fled with Gaylani to Iran. When the British and Soviets invaded Iran less than four months later, Husseini was transported by Italian forces to Italy, from where he travelled to Germany, remaining there for the rest of the war.

While living in Germany, Husseini made propaganda broadcasts for the Nazis and helped to recruit Muslim soldiers.

Husseini was favourable towards Germany because of its stance against the British and because it had not sought to colonise an Arab or Islamic country. Hitler’s anti-Jewish stance was an indication to him of potential support for the Arab cause in Palestine. Husseini met Mussolini in October 1941 and Hitler the following month, telling Hitler that they had the same enemies: ‘the English, the Jews and the Communists’.³ He obtained from them a declaration of Axis opposition to a Jewish homeland in Palestine. He could not, however, secure a broader declaration backing Arab independence or Arab revolt in the Middle East.

He opened the Islamic Cultural Institute in Berlin and became its chairman. It seems that he or an associate visited a concentration camp in 1942 which was perhaps presented as a re-education centre. In 1943 he was made aware of large numbers of Jewish deaths. When Heinrich Himmler, head of the paramilitary SS (Schutzstaffel), asked him what he would do with the Jews in Palestine, he said he would return them to their original countries. Himmler replied that they would not be received back into Germany.

Husseini was paid handsomely to make Nazi propaganda broadcasts in Arabic for transmission to the Middle East. His English equivalent William Joyce was known as ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ (see UK Fascist Groups); Husseini was dubbed the ‘Arabian Haw-Haw’.

Husseini helped to raise three Balkan Muslim army divisions, under German leadership. Hitler saw Arabs as being inferior to Aryans but had a perception of Arab Muslims as being more militaristic and stronger than Christians. He once bemoaned the successful defence of Gaul against Islamic invasion in 732, saying that Islam would have been more appropriate for Europe than Christianity which suffered from ‘meekness and flabbiness’.⁴

Husseini’s meeting with Hitler has sometimes been blamed for inciting extermination rather than deportation of Jews but the meeting transcript does not support this⁵ and it appears that the Nazi decision had been made a number of months earlier. It did, however, reveal Hitler’s thinking that his battles against the UK and the Soviet Union were against ‘two citadels of Jewish power’,⁶ regardless of their contrasting political systems.

After World War II, Husseini was kept under loose house arrest in France but he escaped.

In May 1945, Husseini tried to leave Germany for Switzerland but was refused asylum there. He was arrested by French occupying troops in southern Germany and transferred to Paris. He had a British passport and Britain requested his extradition but France refused, enabling the British to sidestep the problem of what to do with him.

The French understood the case for investigating Husseini’s wartime activities but found him to be a useful thorn in the UK’s side during British-French tensions in the Middle East. The interim solution was house arrest which became progressively less strict, including Husseini being allowed to receive visitors and have the use of a car. Some of the leaders of the Jewish settlers in Palestine considered taking action against him themselves. After they had located him, a plan for his assassination was hatched but soon abandoned to avoid him being seen as a martyr.

By May 1946, he was no longer being watched at home by the French police. With the help of some contacts, he obtained a Syrian passport in a false name and took a flight on an American aircraft to Egypt where he was given asylum. This was a convenient outcome for both France and Egypt, regardless of British recriminations against French authorities for lax security. France had a considerable diplomatic, economic and cultural presence in Egypt despite significant anti-French populist sentiment which Britain was suspected of encouraging. Husseini’s influence could perhaps help to moderate this in the region, including in the French territories of Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. Meanwhile, the presence of Husseini could potentially be used by the Egyptians to resist British influence.

In 1946, Husseini was made chairman of the Arab Higher Committee (later temporarily known as the Arab Higher Executive) which had been formed the year before by the seven-country Arab League to represent Arabs in Palestine. Conducting the role from Egypt, he opposed Jewish immigration and land purchases, and sought independence for Palestine as an Arab state. Meanwhile Zionists pointed to Husseini’s wartime record in efforts to discredit him.

The 1948 Arab-Israeli War marked the beginning of the decline of Husseini’s role in Arab affairs.

Although the battles in 1948 are often referred to as the ‘Arab-Israeli War’, it was part of a longer 1947 to 1949 war known to many Israelis as the ‘War of Independence’ and to many Palestinians as al-Nakba (‘the Catastrophe’).

After World War II, Britain faced strong conflict from both Jewish and Arab groups about Jewish immigration to Palestine, demanding opposite policies. Britain referred the situation to the newly formed United Nations which proposed a two-state solution in 1947. This was accepted by the Jewish Agency but was rejected by the Arab League and Husseini’s Arab Higher Committee, and a civil war broke out.

Having lost control of public order in Palestine, Britain withdrew much of its military and police presence in early 1948 and terminated its mandate as of 15 May 1948. Pro-British King Abdullah of Transjordan had made a secret agreement with the Jewish Agency that Transjordan would occupy what became known as the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, while the rest of Palestine would fall under Jewish control.

The State of Israel declared its independence on 14 May, the day before the end of the mandate which was a sabbath (a non-working day), with no reference to boundaries. On 15 May, the Arab Legion of Transjordan and other Arab forces occupied the West Bank. It became known that some senior UK officers were leading the Arab Legion; they were ordered to return to Transjordan, which they did, but some soon re-joined their Arab Legion units.

Egypt gained control of Gaza in the south-west, while Israel held the remainder of former Palestine other than the West Bank. In September 1948, during a ceasefire, the Arab League established the All-Palestine Government in Gaza and appointed Egypt-based Husseini as president. The government went into exile in Cairo in December after an Israeli incursion and declared its authority over all of former Palestine, but this was ineffective.

In December 1948, King Abdullah appointed a member of the Nashashibi clan as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, replacing Husseini. In 1952, the Arab League declared Gaza to be a protectorate of Egypt. The All-Palestine Government was almost entirely dissolved the following year and was annulled by Egyptian president Nasser in 1959, whereupon Husseini moved to Lebanon.

Despite his diminishing influence, Husseini was an inspiration for Yasser Arafat, later leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation.

Yasser Arafat joined Husseini’s entourage in Cairo in 1946, aged 17, through a family contact: his mother’s relative, Sheikh Hassan, was Husseini’s main adviser. Arafat was an Arab nationalist from an early age. His full name included ‘Husseini’, which he used for a while to associate himself with the Mufti, but there was little connection by blood, if any. He became Sheikh Hassan’s personal assistant and an Arab Higher Committee general assistant, delivering letters, collecting donations and providing feedback on youth attitudes to the Palestinian cause. He soon expanded into buying arms for Palestinian irregular forces.

In the early to mid-1950s, Arafat was president of the Palestinian Students Union while studying engineering at Cairo University. In 1959, he co-founded the Palestinian National Liberation Movement which became the Fatah party in 1965. The Palestine Liberation Organisation (‘PLO’) was founded by the Arab League in 1964 as an umbrella organisation for Palestinian nationalists, led by Arafat from 1969 to 2004.

When asked by a biographer how much time he had spent with Husseini, Arafat replied, ‘Not so much’,⁷ perhaps trying to distance himself from Husseini’s post-war reputation and decline. The relationship between the PLO and Husseini was remote. Husseini spent his last years in a well-protected villa in Beirut, Lebanon, where he died from heart failure in 1974, aged around 78. He is buried in the Martyrs’ Cemetery in Beirut, having been refused permission by Israel to be buried in Jerusalem.

Like Husseini, Arafat was an assassination target. The Israeli air force almost shot down a transport aircraft over the Mediterranean after Arafat had seemingly been seen boarding it in Athens. It turned out to be Arafat’s look-alike brother who was escorting 30 wounded Palestinian children for treatment in Cairo.

Yasser Arafat died from a stroke in 2004, aged 74. His widow did not request a post-mortem, but French, Swiss and Russian investigators were asked to test samples from his re-opened tomb in 2012, after persistent allegations of assassination. The poison polonium was found but a French judge ruled in 2015 that it was environmental and that he died of natural causes.

A Central Intelligence Agency report, released in 2006, provides some revealing American views of Husseini.

The Central Intelligence Agency (‘CIA’) described Husseini in 1951 as being ‘one of the most controversial and notorious political leaders of the world. King of no country, having no army, exiled, forever poised for flight from one country to another in disguise, he has survived because of his remarkable ability to play the British against the French, the French against the British, and the Americans against both.’⁸

It noted that he had a striking appearance, with pink-white skin, blue eyes and a fox-red beard turned grey (Hitler commented with approval that there was an Aryan in Husseini’s ancestry). He always wore an ankle length black robe and a tarbush (similar to a fez) wrapped in a pristine cloth. He was extremely courteous, had a well-modulated voice and a wide understanding of contemporary issues.

The writer of the report believed that Husseini made the mistake of viewing the Arab world as a single entity, rendering him ineffective in many of his appeals, although he clearly had a devoted following. Another reason for his limited effectiveness was said to be his somewhat negative approach, being critical and resistant but not having sufficiently constructive proposals.

The report describes the conflicted UK views about the Mufti, realising that they had given him a platform to develop anti-British sentiment but that they had to be cautious about how they treated him, fearful of provoking even more resentment from his supporters. The CIA refers to Husseini’s ruthlessness behind his charm, particularly toward Arab rivals, noting that he had a ‘personal bodyguard of some twenty well-disciplined and efficient gunmen who not only protect him but carry out his missions of assassination’.⁹

The reference to flight in disguise covers various incidents, the first being when he escaped from Jerusalem in 1937, dressed as a Bedouin. He fled from Beirut to Iraq in 1939 as a woman in a veil, and left Iraq in 1941 disguised as an Italian (the report does not specify what this involved). He shaved off his beard and dyed his hair to escape from France in 1946. On the internet, his appearance is sometimes likened to that of Hollywood actor Ryan Gosling.

3. Biographical overview

Occupation	Arab nationalist, Muslim leader
Territory	Palestine
Career	Commissioned in Turkish artillery (deserted 1916). Joined King Faisal’s Arab Revolt (1917). Employee in office of Ronald Storrs, British Military Governor, Palestine (1918-19). Teacher, Jerusalem (1919). Grand Mufti (Islamic jurist) of Jerusalem (1921-48). President of the Supreme Muslim Council (1922-37). President, Arab Higher Committee (1936-37). Exiled in Lebanon (1937-39). Assisted the anti-British uprising in Iraq (1939-41). Anti-Allies activities in Germany and Italy (1941-45). Palestinian nationalist leader (1946-48). President of All-Palestine (1948-53). Exile in Lebanon (1959-74).
Born	c.1897 in Jerusalem (around 23 years younger than Churchill)
Father	Mohammed Tahir al-Husseini (1842-1908), Qadi (Chief Justice) of Sharia courts of Jerusalem and Mufti of Jerusalem; from Hanafi school of Sunni Islam; first wife Mahbuba; second wife Zainab
Mother	Zainab
Siblings	Younger of two sons: – Fakhri – Muhammad Amin (c.1897-1974) Seven stepsisters from father’s first marriage and one stepbrother: Kamil (1867-1921), Mufti of Jerusalem 1908-21 (re-titled Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in 1918)
Education	Islamic, Ottoman and Catholic schools in Jerusalem; Al-Azhar Islamic institution (incomplete); Egyptian University, later Cairo University (humanities, incomplete); School of Administration, Constantinople; Military Academy, Constantinople
Spouse
Relationships
Children	One son: Salah al-Din. Six daughters: Zainab, Suad, Asma, Nafisa, Jihad and Amina.
Died	1974 in Beirut, Lebanon (nearly 10 years after Churchill), aged around 78; heart failure
Resting place	Martyrs’ Cemetery, Beirut, Lebanon (permission to be buried in East Jerusalem was refused)
Nickname	Haj Amin (‘Haj’ being an honorific for having completed a pilgrimage to Mecca which he performed in 1913)
Height	‘Tall’
Time magazine	–

4. See also

Arab nationalism

• Al-Gaylani, Rashid Ali
• Nasser, Gamal Abdel
• T.E. Lawrence

Islam

• Aga Khan III
• Jinnah, Mohamed Ali

Middle East nationalism

• Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal
• Mossadegh, Mohammed
• Shah, Reza

Palestine

• Zionist Paramilitary Groups

Churchill controversies

• Arab and Kurdish self-rule
• Imperialism
• Middle East borders
• Religion
• Zionism

5. Further reading

Al-Husseini

• Elpeleg, Zvi, The Grand Mufti: Haj Amin al-Hussaini, Founder of the Palestinian National Movement, ed. by Shmuel Himelstein, trans. by David Harvey (Taylor & Francis, 2012)
• Mattar, Philip, The Mufti of Jerusalem: Al-Hajj Amin Al-Husayni and the Palestinian National Movement (Columbia University Press, 1992)

Palestine

• Bunton, Martin, The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Very Short Introduction (OUP Oxford, 2013)
• Cohen, Michael J., Palestine to Israel: From Mandate to Independence (Taylor & Francis, 2012)
• Schneer, Jonathan, The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Bloomsbury, 2011)

Islam

• Dockter, Warren, Churchill and the Islamic World: Orientalism, Empire and Diplomacy in the Middle East (Bloomsbury, 2015)
• Friedman, Isaiah, British Miscalculations: The Rise of Muslim Nationalism, 1918-1925 (Transaction Publishers, 2012)
• Hillsdale College Churchill Project, ‘Churchill on Islam’, The Churchill Project – Hillsdale College, 2016 <https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/churchill-on-islam/>

Miscellaneous

• Rubin, Barry, and Judith C. Rubin, Yasir Arafat: A Political Biography (Oxford University Press, 2005)

6. References

¹ Arthur Balfour, ‘Balfour Declaration’, Yale Law School: Avalon Project, 1917 <https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/balfour.asp>. The full ‘declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations’ was: ‘His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.’

² FO 371/24568/367, ‘The Mufti: Proposed Visit to Ibn Saud to Discuss Palestine Question: Mr. Stokes’ Visit to Baghdad’, National Archives, 1940.

³ David Kaiser, ‘What Hitler and the Grand Mufti Really Said’, TIME, 2015.

⁴ Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (Simon & Schuster, 1997), p. 96.

⁵ Kaiser.

⁶ Kaiser.

⁷ Alan Hart, Arafat, a Political Biography (Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 75.

⁸ CIA, ‘Haj Amin Al-Husayni, the Mufti of Jerusalem’, CIA Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room, 1951, p. 1.

⁹ CIA, p. 4.