Grand Mufti (Amin al-Husseini)

The leading Palestinian-Arab political and religious figure of the British Mandate era. Haj Amin al-Husseini incited the 1929 Hebron massacre, met Hitler in Berlin on 28 November 1941, recruited Bosnian Muslims for the Waffen-SS, and lobbied to block the rescue of Jewish children from the Holocaust: the bridge between Nazi antisemitism and the modern war on Israel.

The title and the man

“Mufti” (Arabic: مفتي) is an Islamic jurist qualified to issue a fatwa, a religious ruling. Jerusalem had no single “Grand Mufti” until the British Mandate created the office: in May 1921, High Commissioner Herbert Samuel appointed the 24-year-old Husseini, born in Jerusalem in 1897 to one of the city’s most prominent Arab families, to the post, hoping to co-opt a rising nationalist. Husseini used the position, and the Supreme Muslim Council he built around it, to become the dominant voice of Palestinian Arab politics through the British Mandate period.

Incitement and the 1929 violence

Husseini’s central political tool was the claim that Jews intended to seize the Temple Mount and destroy al-Aqsa Mosque, a claim with no basis in Zionist policy but effective as agitation. In August 1929 that campaign detonated into riots across Palestine; in Hebron, Arab mobs murdered 67 Jews over two days in a city with no history of prior violence between the communities, an episode documented in detail by the Jewish Virtual Library. Husseini was never prosecuted for his role in stoking it.

Exile, the Arab Revolt, and flight to the Axis

Husseini chaired the Arab Higher Committee formed during the 1936-1939 Arab Revolt against both British rule and Jewish immigration. The British removed him from his official posts, and in 1937 he fled Palestine ahead of arrest, moving through Lebanon and Iraq before settling in Nazi Germany in 1941, where he spent the war years as a state guest of the Reich.

Berlin, 1941 to 1945

On 28 November 1941, Husseini met Hitler at the Reich Chancellery and asked for a public German pledge to oppose a Jewish homeland in Palestine; Hitler declined a formal treaty but assured him Germany’s fight against a Jewish national home in Palestine would continue. From Berlin, Husseini broadcast antisemitic and anti-British propaganda across the Arab world by radio, calling for an Arab revolt against Britain and the destruction of the Jewish community in Palestine. In 1943 he personally toured the Balkans to recruit for the 13th Waffen-SS Mountain Division “Handschar,” drawing an estimated 24,000 to 27,000 Bosnian Muslim volunteers. That same spring, when Germany’s Axis partners negotiated with Britain, Switzerland, and the Red Cross to move thousands of Jewish children to safety in Palestine, Husseini worked to block the rescue and proposed the children be sent to occupied Poland instead, where wartime conditions were far more lethal. He also encouraged the June 1941 Farhud pogrom in Baghdad from a distance, having spent 1939 to 1941 in Iraq stoking the same antisemitic agitation that exploded there.

After the war

Husseini evaded prosecution at Nuremberg, escaped French custody in 1946, and resettled in Egypt, where he headed the short-lived All-Palestine Government in Gaza in 1948 and remained an elder statesman of Palestinian nationalism until his death in 1974. His younger relative and eventual successor as the face of the Palestinian cause, Yasser Arafat, began his political career in Husseini’s orbit, and, according to former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami, acknowledged in a 2002 interview with the daily Al-Kuds that the Mufti remained his “hero and model.”

Misuse and accurate use of the record

Some pro-Palestinian writers minimize Husseini’s Axis years as a marginal wartime footnote, or wave off the Hitler meeting as a single failed diplomatic overture that changed nothing. The opposite error also circulates: treating Husseini as if he personally engineered the Holocaust’s machinery, which he did not; he held no operational role in the death camps and cannot be credited or blamed for the industrial scale of the killing itself. The accurate, documented claim is narrower and still damning. Husseini was an ideological collaborator who used Islamic religious authority to fuse Arab nationalism with Nazi antisemitism, incited mob violence against Jews in Palestine a decade before the war, and used his wartime access in Berlin to actively work against the rescue of Jewish children, not merely to lobby for Arab independence.