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Amin al-Husseini

Amin al-Husseini (born in Jerusalem around 1895, died in Beirut on 4 July 1974) was the British-appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem from 1921, the man most responsible for turning local Arab discontent into an organized, ideologically antisemitic rejection of any Jewish presence in the land. He incited the 1920 and 1929 riots, led the 1936 to 1939 Arab Revolt into a dead end, fled into exile, allied himself with Adolf Hitler in 1941, spent the war broadcasting Nazi propaganda from Berlin and recruiting Muslims into the Waffen-SS, and returned after 1945 to help lead the Arab side into the war it lost in 1948. He is the direct ideological forebear of the “no partition, no compromise, drive them into the sea” strain of Palestinian and pan-Arab politics that outlived him by decades.

Who he was

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Husseini came from Jerusalem’s most prominent Arab notable family, the Husaynis, who had long supplied the city’s Muslim religious officials under Ottoman rule. He studied briefly at al-Azhar in Cairo and served in the Ottoman army in the First World War before returning to Jerusalem as the British Mandate replaced Ottoman rule following the Balfour Declaration and the League of Nations mandate that obligated Britain to facilitate a Jewish national home. In 1921, despite his role the previous year in inciting anti-Jewish rioting, British High Commissioner Herbert Samuel appointed him Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, a religious post Samuel hoped would co-opt Arab nationalism into cooperation with the Mandate. Husseini instead used the position, and his parallel role as president of the Supreme Muslim Council from 1922, to build a personal power base and to make the destruction of Zionist settlement the defining cause of Palestinian Arab politics.

The riots he incited

Section titled “The riots he incited”

Husseini’s public career began with violence. He played a role in the Nebi Musa riots of April 1920, an outbreak of anti-Jewish violence in Jerusalem during a Muslim religious procession. Far more consequential was August 1929: Husseini and allied agitators spread false claims that Jews intended to destroy al-Aqsa Mosque and build a Third Temple in its place, and the resulting riots produced the Hebron massacre, in which an Arab mob murdered 67 Jews and destroyed the millennia-old Jewish community of Hebron. Across Palestine that August, Arab rioters killed 133 Jews; British security forces restoring order killed most of the 110 Arab dead. Husseini was never prosecuted for his role in either episode.

The Arab Revolt and exile

Section titled “The Arab Revolt and exile”

Husseini led the Arab Higher Committee that directed the 1936 to 1939 Arab Revolt, a campaign of strikes, attacks on Jewish communities, and assassinations of moderate Arab rivals aimed at ending Jewish immigration and any partition of the land. The revolt failed militarily but succeeded politically: the British Peel Commission had already proposed partition in 1937, and in 1939 Britain issued a White Paper sharply restricting Jewish immigration and land purchase, a capitulation to Arab pressure that closed Palestine’s doors to Jewish refugees just as Nazi persecution in Europe was intensifying toward the Holocaust. Wanted by British authorities for his role in the revolt’s violence, Husseini fled Palestine in 1937, first to Lebanon, then in 1939 to Iraq.

Iraq, the Farhud, and the alliance with Hitler

Section titled “Iraq, the Farhud, and the alliance with Hitler”

In Baghdad, Husseini supported the pro-Axis coup led by Rashid Ali al-Kailani in April 1941. When British forces crushed the coup within weeks, the collapse triggered the Farhud, a two-day pogrom against Baghdad’s Jewish community on 1 and 2 June 1941 in which Iraqi mobs killed at least 128 Jews and destroyed over 1,500 homes and businesses, a rupture from which Iraqi Jewish life never recovered. Husseini fled to Italy and then to Nazi Germany, where on 28 November 1941 he met Hitler personally in Berlin, seeking German recognition of Arab independence and support for eliminating the Jewish national home in Palestine. For the rest of the war he lived in Berlin on a German salary, broadcasting antisemitic and anti-British propaganda in Arabic across the Middle East, and he personally lobbied German and Bosnian officials to recruit Bosnian Muslims into Waffen-SS units, photographed reviewing troops of the resulting division in 1943. He met repeatedly with senior architects of the Holocaust, including Adolf Eichmann’s office, and never at any point during or after the war expressed regret for the alliance.

The war he lost, and legacy

Section titled “The war he lost, and legacy”

French authorities detained Husseini as Germany collapsed in 1945; he escaped custody in 1946 and made his way to Egypt, never facing trial for his wartime activity. From exile he opposed any compromise on Palestine, rejecting the 1947 UN Partition Plan outright and pushing the Arab side toward the war that followed Israel’s declaration of independence. He was nominally installed as head of the short-lived All-Palestine Government in Gaza in 1948, a body Egypt controlled and sidelined within months once the 1948 war was lost. He spent his remaining decades in Cairo and then Beirut, marginalized from real power but still producing antisemitic and anti-Israel propaganda until his death in 1974. His shadow outlasted him inside the movement he helped shape: Shlomo Ben-Ami, Israel’s former foreign minister, writes that Yasser Arafat, for all his self-styling as a secular Mandela, “remained essentially loyal to his youth as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and, as such, his real hero and model was the Mufti, Haj Amin al-Huseini,” a loyalty Ben-Ami records Arafat acknowledging himself in a 2002 interview with the Palestinian daily Al-Kuds.

Two false framings, and what survives them

Section titled “Two false framings, and what survives them”

Husseini’s defenders, then and since, have tried to recast him as simply a nationalist leader who made a wartime tactical alliance of convenience, no different from other anti-colonial figures who sought help from Britain’s enemies. The documented record does not support that framing: his antisemitism predates the Nazi alliance by two decades, visible in the 1920 and 1929 riots and in his consistent wartime insistence, recorded in his own broadcasts, that the fight was against Jews as Jews, not merely against British policy. The opposite exaggeration also circulates, crediting Husseini with singlehandedly inventing Palestinian nationalism or personally causing the Holocaust; neither is accurate. Palestinian national identity had roots independent of him, and the machinery of the Final Solution was built and run by Germans before Husseini ever reached Berlin. What the record supports, soberly, is narrower and still damning: a British-appointed religious official who built his career on incitement to mob violence against Jews, who chose Hitler’s Germany as his ally when the war came, and whose rejectionism, never partition, never compromise, became the template several generations of Palestinian and Arab leaders inherited.

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Sources

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