Author: Martin Kramer

The day the Mufti died

On By Martin Kramer

Fifty years ago, on July 4, 1974, Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the “Grand Mufti” of Jerusalem, passed away in Beirut, Lebanon, at the American University Hospital. At age 79, he died of natural causes. The Mufti had faded from the headlines a decade earlier. In 1961, his name had resurfaced numerous times during the Jerusalem trial of Adolf Eichmann. But a couple of years later, the Palestinian cause gained a new face in Yasser Arafat. With that, the Mufti entered his final eclipse.

When he died, the Supreme Muslim Council in Jerusalem asked the Israeli authorities for permission to bury him in the city. Israel refused the request. Any Palestinian who wanted to attend the funeral in Lebanon would be allowed to do so, but the Mufti of Jerusalem would not be buried in Jerusalem. Instead, the Mufti was laid to rest in the Palestinian “Martyrs’ Cemetery” in Beirut.

The Mufti was appointed to his position by the British in 1921. Within the British Empire, authorities preferred to work through “native” institutions, even if they had to create them on the fly. So they established a supreme council for Palestine’s Muslims and placed the Mufti at its helm. Although he lacked religious qualifications, he came from a leading family and appeared capable of striking deals.

In fact, he used his position to oppose the Jewish “National Home” policy of the Mandate. The “Arab Revolt” of 1936 finally convinced the British that he had to go, and in 1937 he fled the country.

After a period in Lebanon, he ended up in Iraq, where he helped foment a coup against the pro-British regime. When British forces suppressed the coup, he fled again, making his way through Tehran and Rome to Berlin. There, the Nazi regime used him to stir up Arabs and Muslims against the Allies. He was photographed with Hitler and Himmler, recruited Muslims to fight for the Axis, and attempted to secure promises of independence for colonized Arabs and Muslims. None of his efforts met with much success. His role, if any, in the Holocaust is a contested matter. Hitler and his henchmen hardly needed any prompting to execute their genocidal plans. Clearly, though, the Mufti rooted for Jewish destruction from the fifty-yard line.

After the Nazi collapse, he fell into French hands, and spent a year in comfortable house detention near Paris. Later, he fled to Egypt and subsequently moved in and out of Syria and Lebanon. Following the Arab debacle of 1948, Egypt established an “All Palestine Government” in the refugee-choked Gaza Strip, leaving the presidency open for the Mufti. It didn’t last long. He continued to maneuver through Arab politics, but he was yesterday’s man to a new generation of Palestinians born in exile. During the Eichmann trial, the prosecution sought to implicate the Mufti as an accomplice. Yet the Mossad never came after him, and he didn’t die a martyr’s death.

Man without a country

The Mufti was a formidable politician. In 1951, a State Department-CIA profile of him opened with this evocative enumeration of his many talents, which is worth quoting at length:

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; and also because he has become a symbol among the Arabs for defending them against the Zionists. His suave penchant for intrigue, his delicate manipulation of one Arab faction against another, combined with the popularity of his slogan of a united Muslim world, has made him a symbol and a force in the Middle East that is difficult to cope with and well nigh impossible to destroy. The names of Machiavelli, Richelieu, and Metternich come to mind to describe him, yet none of these apply. Alone, without a state, he plays an international game on behalf of his fellow Muslims. That they are ungrateful, unprepared, and divided by complex and innumerable schisms, does not deter him from his dream.

Profilers would later write similar things about Arafat, but the Mufti had none of Arafat’s cultivated dishevelment. He was manicured, even chic:

The Mufti is a man of striking appearance. Vigorous, erect, and proud, like a number of Palestinian Arabs he has pink-white skin and blue eyes. His hair and beard, formerly a foxy red, is now grey. He always wears an ankle length black robe and a tarbush wound with a spotless turban. Part of his charm lies in his deep Oriental courtesy; he sees a visitor not only to the door, but to the gate as well, and speeds him on his way with blessings. Another of his assets is his well-modulated voice and his cultured Arabic vocabulary. He can both preach and argue effectively, and is well versed in all the problems of Islam and Arab nationalism. His mystical devotion to his cause, which is indivisibly bound up with his personal and family aggrandizement, has been unflagging, and he has never deviated from his theme. For his numerous illiterate followers, such political consistency and simplicity has its advantages. The Mufti has always known well how to exploit Muslim hatred of ‘infidel’ rule.

So why did the Mufti fade into obscurity? (By 1951, he was on his way out.) Many mistakenly believe his collaboration with Hitler and the Nazis discredited him. It didn’t. Not only did the Arabs not care, but Western governments eyed the Mufti with self-interest. The general view in foreign ministries held that he had picked the wrong side in the war, but not more than that.

The above-quoted American report expressed this view perfectly: “While the Zionists consider him slightly worse than Mephistopheles and have used him as a symbol of Nazism, this is false. He cared nothing about Nazism and did not work well with Germans. He regarded them merely as instruments to be used for his own aims.” If so, why not open a discreet line to him and let him roam the world unimpeded?

Nakba stigma

What finally discredited the Mufti in Arab opinion, where it mattered most, was his role in the 1948 war. It was a war he wanted and believed his side would win. In late 1947, the British sent someone to see if there might be some behind-the-scenes flexibility in his stance on partition, which he had completely rejected. There wasn’t. He explained:

As regards the withdrawal of British troops from Palestine, we would not mind. We do not fear the Jews, their Stern, Irgun, Haganah. We might lose at first. We would have many losses, but in the end we must win. Remember Mussolini, who talked of 8,000,000 bayonets, who bluffed the world that he had turned the macaronis back into Romans. For 21 years he made this bluff, and what happened when his Romans were put to the test? They crumbled into nothing. So with the Zionists. They will eventually crumble into nothing, and we do not fear the result, unless of course Britain or America or some other Great Power intervenes. Even then we shall fight and the Arab world will be perpetually hostile. Nor do we want you to substitute American or United Nations troops for the British. That would be even worse. We want no foreign troops. Leave us to fight it out ourselves.

This underestimation of the Zionists proved disastrous, even more so than his overestimation of the Axis. He later wrote his memoirs, blaming “imperialist” intervention, Arab internal divisions, and world Zionist mind-control for the 1948 defeat. To no avail: his name became inseparable from the Nakba, the loss of Arab Palestine to the Jews. His reputation hit rock bottom, along with that of the other failed Arab rulers of 1948.

Upon his death in 1974, he received a grand sendoff in Beirut from the PLO, Arafat presiding. In 1970, Arafat had transferred the PLO headquarters from Jordan to Lebanon, and the funeral finalized his status as the sole leader of the Palestinian people. Four months later, Arafat addressed the world from the podium of the UN General Assembly, achieving an international legitimacy that the Mufti could never have imagined.

The PLO then dropped the Mufti from the Palestinian narrative; nothing bears his name. Even Hamas, which inherited his uncompromising rigidity and Jew-hatred, doesn’t include him in their pantheon. (Their man is Izz al-Din al-Qassam, a firebrand “martyr” killed by the British in 1935.)

If anyone still dwells on the Mufti, it’s the Israelis, including their current prime minister, who find him useful as a supposed link between the Palestinian cause and Nazism. One can understand Palestinians who push back on this; the Mufti was no Eichmann. But that doesn’t excuse Palestinian reluctance to wrestle candidly with the Mufti’s legacy. He personified the refusal to see Israel as it is and an unwillingness to imagine a compromise. Until Palestinians exorcise his ghost, it will continue to haunt them.

Highlights from the funeral of the Mufti. Yasser Arafat appears in his trademark keffiyeh.

Header image: “To His Eminence the Grand Mufti as a memento. H. Himmler. July 4, 1943.” Israel State Archives.

Assassination in Zion

On By Martin Kramer

It has been a century since the first nationalist murder of a Jew by a fellow Jew. On June 30, 1924, Jacob Israël de Haan left his evening synagogue prayers in Jerusalem. A man approached him and asked for the time. As De Haan reached for his pocket watch, the man shot him three times and escaped, never to be apprehended.

Jacob Israël de Haan.

For many years, the question “Who killed De Haan?” inspired rounds of accusations and journalistic investigations. Now, a century later, the more relevant question might be, “Who was De Haan?” Sixty years after his death, his assassin, then a Haganah operative, essentially confessed to the murder. While no new revelations about the assassination have emerged since then, fascination with De Haan’s complex personality has steadily grown.

That fascination has its own century-long history. Colonel Frederick Kisch, a decorated British-Jewish officer who chaired the Zionist Executive in Jerusalem, knew De Haan well. “I have been thinking a good deal about De Haan,” he wrote in his diary the day after the assassination.

—not about his death but about his life; really an amazing human story. Formerly regarded as one of the most brilliant poets in Holland, he spent his latter days living in dirt and squalor in a single room—little more than a cell—in an Arab courtyard at Jerusalem. He passed through an intermediate stage of intense Jewish national enthusiasm, having acclaimed the Balfour Declaration in inspiring verse, and came to Palestine as an enthusiastic Zionist. His personal ambitions, his resistance to the discipline which is indispensable in any organization, and a mania which showed itself no less in his private than in his public life, turned him against the majority of his own people. Thereafter he made of religious orthodoxy a political weapon, which he wielded relentlessly against his fellow Jews.

This “amazing human story” captivates the imagination today precisely because of the elements Kisch succinctly summarized. De Haan was an acclaimed Dutch poet and writer, a European intellectual of the first order. After arriving in Palestine in 1919, he gradually shifted from secular Zionism to ultra-religious anti-Zionism. By the “mania” of his private life, Kisch referred to De Haan’s homosexuality, evidenced in both his writings and his liaisons.

De Haan briefly taught in the British-run Government Law School, and reported on Palestine for a leading Dutch daily, filing nearly 400 feuilletons. He also served as a kind of foreign minister for the ultra-Orthodox Agudat Israel community, which opposed subordination to the Zionist institutions recognized by the British Mandate. De Haan worked diligently to dissuade British colonial officials and press barons from endorsing a Zionist monopoly on Jewish life in Palestine.

He also maintained close contact with the then-leaders of Arab nationalism: Hussein of Mecca and his sons, Abdullah and Faisal. The British governor of Jerusalem recalled how De Haan’s “gold-rimmed spectacles would peer out of a white silk kufiyya as he drove across the Jordan in full Beduin costume—now become a Nordic Arab—to visit the Amir Abdullah.” While the Zionists pressed these Arab leaders to recognize a Jewish “national home” in Palestine, De Haan told them that the Jews he represented wanted only communal autonomy in a larger Arab kingdom.

It was likely anger at De Haan’s diplomacy that precipitated his assassination. The plot against him emerged from the ranks of the Haganah, the nascent self-defense force of the socialist Yishuv. Just how high up the plot reached has been the subject of endless speculation. Did Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, later Israel’s second president, order the killing? Or perhaps David Ben-Gurion? It’s unlikely that we will ever see any new evidence to answer these questions definitively.

Retrieving De Haan

The circles that cherished the memory of De Haan were once fairly limited, primarily comprising the most anti-Zionist of the ultra-Orthodox, such as Neturei Karta, for whom De Haan was a martyr. To them, his killing proved the moral debasement of secular Zionism. As one adherent put it, “our homage is to be paid to the penitent who rose from the [Zionist] idol’s feet to spit in its face and sacrificed his life to rescue the faithful from its clutches.” These faithful would annually mark the anniversary of De Haan’s death, 29th Sivan (this year, July 5), by visiting his grave on the Mount of Olives.

Then there were gay Dutch readers who found inspiration in his homoerotic novels and poetry. A sample illuminates this body of work: “I wait for what, this evening hour— / The City stalked by sleep, / Seated by the Temple Wall: / For God or the Moroccan boy?” A line from one of his poems is etched on the Homomonument in Amsterdam.

De Haan in Arab dress.

The more recent growth of interest comes not from these circles, but from left-wing anti-Zionists, including Jews, who seek Jewish precursors for their views. For them, De Haan is the bearer of a timely political message: the path to peace lies not in continued Jewish statehood, but in the abandonment of Jewish sovereignty. A photograph of De Haan in keffiyeh and agal is sometimes deployed to pique the interest of “river-to-the-sea” critics of “settler-colonialism.”

How far this retrieval of De Haan will go seems uncertain. For one thing, his diplomacy didn’t engage Palestinian Arabs, and his dispatches sometimes disparaged their character. He instead swooned to the titled rulers of the Hashemite house, the makers of the “Arab Revolt” in their palatial desert tents across the Jordan. And much of his reportage on Jewish settlement was reasonably balanced.

For these and other reasons, De Haan hasn’t yet emerged as an inspiration for “free Palestine” activists. That would require a selective reading of his oeuvre, slanted toward the last year or so of his life. But since the great bulk of his work has never been translated into English, and there is no English-language biography, more would have to be done to make him accessible to today’s anti-Israel mainstream.

An irrational act

To mark this centenary, I’ve chosen to translate not something written by De Haan, but another text by a formidable publicist almost totally lost to memory. Moshe Beilinson was a prolific writer and journalist. This Russian-born physician and socialist relocated from Italy to Palestine in 1924. He quickly became a voice of authority in the labor movement, and played an outsized role in the Histadrut’s sick fund, which later named its flagship hospital in Petah Tikvah after him. (Beilinson Hospital is now part of the Rabin Medical Center.) If Beilinson is little remembered, it’s perhaps because he died before the birth of Israel, at the age of 47 in 1937.

The Zionist press generally responded to De Haan’s assassination much like Colonel Kisch did: “I made it clear to the police that they were not justified in taking it for granted that the crime was political, since De Haan had many private enemies.” The insinuation was that he had fallen victim to an Arab honor killing. Beilinson rightly asserted otherwise, arguing that this blatantly political murder crossed every red line. Beilinson responded to the first Zionist assassination with the first Hebrew case against it. Interestingly, he didn’t make the narrow argument that Jews must not kill Jews. Instead, he insisted that assassination itself was irresponsible, ineffective, and immoral.

It’s hard to tell how his argument was received, but it’s a fact that after De Haan’s murder, the Haganah largely forswore political assassination almost to the end of the British Mandate. This distinguished it from the rival Irgun (Etzel), which De Haan’s assassin ultimately helped to found.

Published in Kontres 9 (Tammuz 16, 5684 [July 18, 1924]): 14-15. Reprinted in Do’ar Ha-Yom, July 22, 1924.

On the Murder of De Haan

The war [of 1914-18] has taught the world to devalue human life. Political murder, which was rare and only tolerated under exceptional conditions before the war, has become commonplace, especially in the countries of Eastern and Central Europe. The use of this abhorrent method has been particularly embraced in the political struggles of those defending a crumbling world, which is somewhat understandable. But for those living under conditions of political freedom, where wars of words and writings are allowed, resorting to such means not only demonstrates a criminal attitude towards the lives of others, but also exposes their weakness and inability to fight by other means.

The murder of De Haan compels everyone in the country to rethink these questions.

De Haan’s personality is irrelevant in this context. No positive movement can derive any benefit from such a death. Even if we view De Haan’s actions as extremely harmful to the Yishuv, we must add that his personality was in no way so powerful or exceptional that his absence would change the situation today. Just as before, there will be Jewish enemies of our national interests, and it is likely that even now, as before, hidden hostility will lead them to measures which will justifiably arouse the Yishuv’s anger.

Assassinations of individuals have never and nowhere led to a change in the situation. The bullets and bombs that killed Plehve and Stolypin did not bring about the Russian Revolution, nor did the deaths of Erzberger and Rathenau ease Germany’s situation. On the contrary, if the Russian Revolution is now fading due to unnecessary destruction and if Germany still has not found peace, it is also due to political murder. That said, De Haan’s murder cannot be compared to the murder of those at the helm of governments. There, the purpose of the acts is not only to get rid of individuals but also to prepare for a revolution, which is irrelevant in this case.

This act is not only irrational but also very harmful to our cause. It gives all our enemies a perfect excuse to blame our entire movement, and rightly so. Who will demand justice and fairness when they can smear and harm us? It can be predicted that this evil act will be fully used to turn Arab and English public opinion against us, amplifying the supposed “Bolshevik danger” posed by secular Jews in the Land of Israel; and to provoke opposition to us within Jewish Orthodoxy. After all the accusations and false charges leveled at us, our enemies finally have a real fact to use against us, and they will undoubtedly seize upon it. In his life, De Haan was a highly dubious figure, and even those close to his views were not always willing to defend him. In these circles, his blood will overshadow his offenses against the Jewish people. De Haan, the criminal in his actions against his people, will be overshadowed by De Haan, the victim. His dead body can cause more harm than his actions in life.

Let our movement not be stained with the blood of the innocent or the guilty; otherwise, our movement will be in dire straits. Blood always begets blood, always seeks revenge, and once you start down this path, you never know where it will lead. Irresponsibility born of excessive emotion replaces measured and rational conflict. Political murder is always linked with provocation, betrayal, espionage, slander, and suspicion. We are strong enough to let our enemies live and to look upon them with contempt if they use illegitimate means. We are not strong enough to adopt methods of warfare that could lead to moral ruin within the movement. Our movement has a clear and definite path: it is the path of labor, and only under this sign will we prevail. This does not mean that we should not defend ourselves when attacked, but our defense of our work has no connection with killing unarmed individuals.

There is another side, a purely moral one, making it the hardest to address. We, the Hebrews, were the first to establish the commandment: “Thou shalt not kill.” We, the socialists, always and everywhere demand the abolition of the death penalty. Who has the right to violate, to transgress the most sacred commandment of Judaism and civilized humanity? Who in their mind can dive into the depths of another person’s soul—even if that person is a hundred times our opponent—and find them deserving of death? The most cruel aspect of political murder is that the accused have no chance to defend themselves, making it worse than a military trial; judgment is passed without investigation and counter-evidence. They use “objective facts,” but how often are these false, and how often do they lead to the gravest errors, even in courts of law? But let’s assume De Haan was truly guilty, that he did act from impure motives. He fought us with the power of speech and writing, and we should have fought him with the power of speech and writing, exposed his schemes, and refuted his lies—we live in a land of political freedom, and our mouths are not shut. But no one has the right to take another’s life—life that is not given by man and cannot be restored once it is taken away.

Political sense, concern for the purity of our movement, and moral feeling compel us—regardless of the victim’s personality and the motives of the perpetrator—to pass a harsh verdict on the murder of De Haan.

M. Beilinson

De Haan (right) in Jericho, 1922 or 1923, Frank Scholten Collection, Leiden University Libraries.

Israel must never stand alone

On By Martin Kramer

Israeli politicians often assert that Israel can and will “defend itself by itself,” a longstanding formula dating back decades. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeated it often. But he’s added an amplification: Israel will do so “even if we must stand alone.”

From here, from Jerusalem, on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day, I send a message, loud and clear: ‘You will not tie our hands.’ If Israel is forced to stand alone, we will stand alone, and will continue to smite our enemies until we achieve victory. Even if we must stand alone, we will continue fighting human evil.

This is borrowed from Winston Churchill, specifically his “We Shall Fight on the Beaches” speech in the House of Commons after Dunkirk in June 1940. There he said Britain would fight “to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone.”

Netanyahu isn’t the first leader to steal a phrase from the incomparable Sir Winston. But it’s a very partial crib, as Churchill said more in that speech, and it’s the forgotten part that is more relevant.

No sooner had he spoken of fighting “if necessary alone” than he began to name allies: “The British Empire and the French Republic, linked together in their cause and in their need, will defend to the death their native soil, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their strength.”

And then this:

We shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas… would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

When Churchill aimed to raise the morale and stiffen the resolve of the British people, he promised more than blood, toil, tears, and sweat. He also promised the support of allies. When he wanted to warn Hitler against an invasion, he alluded to American intervention. The speech is about the courage to fight—and the value of alliances, especially with America. America had “power and might,” and it would come to “rescue” and “liberate” Britain.

The only friend that counts

In his Holocaust Day speech, Netanyahu said: “We know we are not alone because countless decent people around the world support our just cause.” But this is anemic. Countless people, decent and otherwise, also support the Palestinian cause. And the question isn’t whether your friends can or can’t be counted; it’s whether they are strong enough to help you stand up in a crisis. As with Britain, so with Israel, that friend is the United States.

Since October 7, Israel has not stood alone for a moment. In the direct channel, there has been a U.S. airlift of thousands of tons of war materiel, the largest since 1973. Dozens of U.S. C-17s and 747 cargo planes have shuttled in and out of Israel from U.S. bases around the world: Dover in Delaware, and bases in Germany, Qatar, Spain, Italy, and Greece. More than half of the munitions in this war have come from the United States. Looking ahead, Congress has appropriated $14 billion in special military aid to Israel.

Regionally and internationally, the United States has deployed its premier naval assets to Israel’s shores and the Red Sea approaches to deter both Hezbollah and Iran. It played an indispensable role in coordinating the region-wide blunting of the Iranian barrage on Israel on April 13. Additionally, it has provided a diplomatic firewall for Israel in hostile international forums and wavering capitals.

Has there been a grinding of gears in the U.S.-Israel relationship? Obviously. But as Churchill once put it, “There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them.”

The wrong lesson

Israelis often say that the lesson of the Second World War is that, since no one stepped up to save the Jews during the Holocaust, the Jewish state must be prepared to fight alone. This past Holocaust Day, Netanyahu quoted a Holocaust survivor who told him that “gentiles (goyim) who make promises are not to be trusted.”

These heroic survivors are right. In the terrible Holocaust, there were great leaders in the world who stood by, so the first lesson of the Holocaust is this: If we don’t protect ourselves, no one will protect us.

But Israel is more similar to the states of pre-war Europe—Czechoslovakia and Poland, Belgium and Holland, even France and Britain—than to the stateless Jews who perished. Like Israel, these states had sovereignty, armies, industrial bases, weapons factories, and even fleets. However, they lacked strong, committed allies, so Nazi Germany either overran them or, in Britain’s case, bombed them relentlessly.

Their lesson from that war wasn’t that “we will continue fighting human evil even if we must stand alone.” It was that you must never stand alone. If you want to defeat human evil, you must rely on powerful allies. The combination of smallness and isolation invites aggression; strong alliances deter it. Today, these states are all embedded in an alliance system centered around the United States.

Leave no doubt

Israelis are a proud lot, and with good reason. Israel has the size and population of New Jersey. If you dropped New Jersey on the far shores of the Eastern Mediterranean, it might struggle to survive. Americans, both Jewish and non-Jewish, are right to admire a Jewish state that has held its own and more for seventy-six years.

But it’s time for its leader to stop talking like a Holocaust survivor and act like what he is: the head of a sovereign but small state whose job is to leave Israel’s enemies in no doubt that the Jewish state will never stand alone. To even suggest that “the gentiles” might shun it is an invitation to unending assaults. Any leader who errs there should be left by the Israeli people to fight for his own political survival—alone.

Header image created by DALL-E, OpenAI’s image generation model.