The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty Read online

  ILAN PAPPE

  The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty

  The Husaynis 1700–1948

  SAQI

  First published in Hebrew as

  Azulat Haaretz: HaHusaynim Biographia Politit

  by the Bialik Institute, Jerusalem, in 2002

  First English edition published by Saqi Books, 2010

  This eBook edition published 2011

  eISBN: 978-0-86356-801-5

  Copyright © Ilan Pappe 2010 and 2011

  Translation © Yael Lotan 2010 and 2011

  Every effort has been made to obtain necessary permission with reference to copyright material. The publishers apologise if inadvertently any sources remain unacknowledged and will be happy to correct this in any future editions.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

  A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

  SAQI

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  www.saqibooks.com

  Contents

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Prologue

  1. The Making of a Family

  2. In the Shadow of Acre and Cairo

  3. Struggling with Reform, 1840–76

  4. The Death of the Old World

  5. Facing the Young Turks

  6. In the Shadow of British Military Rule

  7. British Betrayal and the Rise of the National Aristocracy

  8. The Grand Mufti and His Family

  9. The Great Revolt: The Family as Revolutionary Aristocracy

  10. The Family in Exile

  11. World War II and the Nakbah

  Epilogue

  Family Trees

  Endnotes

  Bibliography

  Photographs

  Index

  Foreword

  This book is a political biography of the Husaynis, the leading clan in Palestine for many years. The family appears here as an informal political organization whose activities have dominated Palestine’s political history for almost 250 years.

  Although historians have followed the trajectories of such elites quite successfully in the past, they have never focused on one particular family.1 Historians’ central interest has shifted over time from families as political elites to families as identifiably crucial social units. Historicizing a family is a fairly new scholarly approach, although one quite familiar in fictional works from both the Arab world (such as those of Naguib Mahfouz) and in Europe (such as those of Thomas Mann). In this respect, the scholarly venture is orientated toward the non-elite – part of an attempt to write ‘a history from below’.2 This biography of the Husaynis is inspired by, but does not reflect, the new scholarly focus on the Middle Eastern family and its place in the local society.

  Since this book focuses on elite history, it therefore does not examine the family’s internal dynamics, structure, rivalries and other features that characterize social research on the family in Middle Eastern history. These are all worthy subjects that will surely be explored by others in the future. The purpose here, however, is to analyze this Palestinian family, the Husaynis, as the most significant informal political association prior to the appearance of national movements and political parties – a political organization whose narrative is representative of Palestine and the Palestinians over a period of two and a half centuries.

  The family became an affiliation, and its name allowed individuals to wield influence and establish leading positions in their local and later national society. All the positions that could affect society in Jerusalem and eventually in Palestine as a whole could only be obtained through the family’s power base. As such, its members are considered here according to their political weight inside and outside the family. The central figures of this narrative are those individuals who held official and unofficial positions as the heads of the family. Only a few Husaynis who were less politically significant are mentioned (for instance, poets, writers and successful businessmen). This leaves, of course, much research to be done in order to achieve a more focused view on the social history of the family.

  A political biography of a large family offers a historical perspective with many advantages for writing a fresh historiography of Palestine. It enables historians to detect patterns of continuity over fault lines that, in hegemonic narratives of Palestine, seem decisively to divide the country’s history into modern and pre-modern periods or Zionist and pre-Zionist histories. The family’s political history is one way, by no means the only one, of telling the story of the continued human and cultural presence in the land of Palestine. By focusing on the Husaynis throughout their transformation from a provincial Ottoman elite into the leadership of a national movement, this biography is, I hope, a constructive way to demonstrate how Palestinian society existed and developed before the Zionist settlement or the British occupation began.

  Which brings me to the second principal motivation for writing this book. I wanted to tell the story of Palestine through the history of its leading family as a way to correct the common so-called truisms and to challenge some of the conventional mythology about its past. There is no need to elaborate here on why Palestine’s past is relevant to the contemporary Middle East and beyond, but it is still necessary to gain a better understanding of this history.

  By studying the Husaynis, one recognizes that Palestine was never an empty territory waiting for a landless people to inhabit it. Palestinian and other historiographies already show that this land had long had a society and an economy. This book hopes to complement such historiographies by humanizing a landscape described by travelers such as Mark Twain as arid and uninhabited. The Husaynis’ continuous presence at the top of a complex social structure in Jerusalem throughout Ottoman rule (1517–1917) attests to the falsity of the common view of Palestine on the eve of Zionist settlement (1882).

  A third reason for choosing the Husaynis as the focus of this narrative was their leading role in the Palestinian national movement from its inception around 1908 until the end of the British Mandate in 1948. By looking at the family, I hoped to gain much greater insight into the Palestinian struggle after the country was colonized by the Zionist movement and occupied by the British Empire. The family’s dominant political role in Mandatory Palestine forms a link in a continuum stretching back to the early Ottoman years. From the Husaynis’ perspective, one can better comprehend how the Palestinian political elite regarded the British presence and the Zionist movement: this point of view highlights the Palestinian predicament and failure, and consequently the tragic catastrophe of the 1948 Nakbah.

  Finally, this book is specifically geared towards a ‘Western’ readership. It was originally written in Hebrew in an attempt to challenge hegemonic Israeli–Jewish perceptions of the country’s history. In contemporary Israel, pre-1882 Palestine is still commonly viewed as having been an uninhabited land that was developed only when Zionism, and with it Western modernity, reached its shores. Moreover, Palestinian political life after 1918 has been portrayed in
both scholarly and popular literature as that of primitive tribesman, fanatic Muslims and hateful sheikhs. The text in Hebrew attempted to humanize, not idealize, the Husaynis, both because of their paramount position and because they are relatively well-known (due to the accusation that al-Hajj Amin was allied with the Nazis in the Second World War, and more recently because of the politics of Faysal al-Husayni).

  In the West, and particularly in the US, similar views reign, and thus similar attempts are required to redress a biased and hostile image of Palestine and the Palestinians. This seemed to me an especially urgent task after 11 September 2001 and the second Intifada.

  Hopefully, other more scholarly benefits will emerge from this work as well. One such byproduct, but by no means its principal objective, is that it is among the few histories of Arab Jerusalem that cover both the Ottoman period and the mandatory era. There are focused monographs on Ottoman Jerusalem and a very few others on post-1918 Jerusalem, but there are hardly any continuous urban histories of the city.3

  Ilan Pappe, London, 2009

  Introduction

  THE NARRATIVE

  This book is a narrative, the story of a family. In general it is purposely light on analysis. It moves along slowly in the hope of allowing the reader a closer look at the life of the Husaynis. It is also a descriptive narration. It leaves the reader to draw the more obvious conclusions about the patterns of continuity in the history of Palestine.

  I chose a descriptive rather than an analytical approach because I wished to zoom in on the dramatic events that shaped the lives of people in Palestine and to try to reconstruct how these events were experienced by individuals with names, distinct locations and discernable emotions. From Napoleon’s invasion to the Tanzimat, the British occupation and Zionist colonization, events are examined through the eyes of the family and not just from an ‘objective’ historical perspective. This means that some events that look important to us in retrospect were not important in the eyes of the family, and some we disregard today were life and death issues then. (A locust invasion could have been seen at the time as more disastrous than French occupation.) For this reason the book goes into minor details while the dramatic, well-known historical events are sometimes left in the background.

  The wish to tell a narrative transcends the choice of a family as a subject. There is a desire to plot a tale that is loyal to the facts but that has its own rhythm, flavor and color. Hence, I allow myself, not too often I hope, to speculate – using common sense – about people’s feelings, emotions and considerations. I feel this is part of the humanization of history.

  But this subject does also deserve an analytical context. So I would like briefly to introduce the proposed analytical context for this narrative, some historical background information that will benefit the reader’s understanding of the narrative and the sources I have relied on in constructing this story.

  THE ANALYTICAL CONTEXT

  Apart from being a political biography, this book is also very much an urban history – both Ottoman and mandatory. Although the book does not pretend to rise to the level of micro urban social histories such as André Raymond’s on Cairo, Kenneth Cuno’s on Mansura, Abraham Marcus’s on Aleppo, James Reilly’s on Hama, Leila Fawas’s on Beirut, Michael Reimer’s on Alexandria or Dina Khoury’s on Mosul, amongst many others, it has something in common with these works.1 They helped us to challenge the notion of Ottoman decline that allegedly began in the sixteenth century and continued with the economic stagnation of the eighteenth century before the advent of the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt in 1798. The narrative of this book hopefully challenges the notion of ‘decline’ in that period by showing how Arab-Ottoman elites maintained their position through a complex web of relationships with the center of the empire as well as with European powers and their representatives. This is a reality that cannot easily be reduced to the notion of ‘decline’.

  NOTABLES AND THEIR POLITICAL ROLE IN HISTORY

  The Husaynis were part of the urban elite in the Arab world. This elite dates back to the pre-Ottoman period and was present when the Ottomans conquered the Arab world in the early sixteenth century. Nor were these local elites replaced by the Ottomans’ ‘open occupation’.2 But with time, when the new rulers of the Arab world realized the benefits of taxation and direct power, they installed a more complex administration, many significant members of which were brought from the center of the empire. The Ottomanization of the provinces in the Arab world included, among other things, the reshaping of the local urban elite. But even within this restructuring, the families, which Gibb and Bowen and later Albert Hourani called the ‘notables’, continued to play a crucial role.3 These notables, to which the Husaynis belonged, were an informal elite consisting of the richest, the most influential and most prestigious families of merchants, ulama and civilian and military officers. This was not a well-defined class, and ‘notables’ are not a sociological concept but rather a political one. The term denotes those who play a role in the political system and suggest how this role is implemented.

  In the early eighteenth century, the system stabilized and the local elite were included within the imperial matrix of control and sovereignty. As Ehud Toldano remarks, this was not systematic planning on the part of Istanbul but rather a piecemeal, ad hoc policy responding to events on the ground. An elite position in the empire required a high office, which enabled the holder to acquire wealth (although wealthy people did not necessarily win high positions).4

  Ira Lapidus taught us that the core of this elite was the pool of Islamic scholars, the ulama. They appeared in nineteenth-century Syria as notables who descended from prominent eighteenth-century families who supplied the officials for the religious posts of mufti, khatib (preacher) and Syndic of the Descendants of the Prophet. They also managed the awqaf and had strong support from merchants, artisans, Janissaries, and the town quarters.5 The Husaynis belonged to the Syndic of the Descendants of the Prophet – the Ashraf families. This was the family’s main source of power, and through it its members held hereditary offices throughout the Ottoman period.

  THE ‘POLITICS OF NOTABLES’

  A more focused look at how the notables remained in a high position for so long can be obtained with the help of a concept developed by Albert Hourani for describing and analyzing their political career: the ‘politics of notables’.6 In many ways these ‘politics’ are the key for understanding the urban politics of the Ottoman provinces (at least in the Muslim provinces). The ‘politics’ were a mode of behavior, a ‘practice’, a Weberian concept put forward by Hourani to explain their prolonged political survival. The wider context of this kind of urban history is European patrician history. It is tempting indeed to use the term ‘patrician’ for these people, but it is safer to employ the term ‘notables’ as it is probably the closest to the term ‘a‘ayan’ used at the time. There are other possible terms from the period as well as new ones, but for the purposes of this book I am content to use ‘notables’.

  This practice is in essence the ‘politics of dependence and coalitions’, practiced by people in the city and the area around it with their notables and through them with their ruler. Such a mode of behavior can work when there are ‘great’ families or ‘grandee’ families – more akin in the greatness accorded to them to the medieval families of Italy than to that enjoyed in medieval France and Britain, as Hourani remarks.7

  The notables enjoyed considerable independence in running the affairs of the cities in the Arab Ottoman world. These families won this relative autonomy because they had access to the rulers of the empire – in the case of Jerusalem, to regional capitals such as Damascus, Acre and Beirut as well to Istanbul and Cairo. This enabled the notables to represent their society before the powers that be. Their prestige in the eyes of the empire stemmed from their standing within their own society.

  Other factors also affected the relative independence and authority of the urban notable families. The Husaynis’ ability to
compose effective coalitions with forces within and without the city is a major feature of this political biography. The key word is ‘coalition’, and it was such a powerful asset that it served the Husaynis as well in the eighteenth century as it did in the twentieth.

  As Hourani sensed even before going into a particular case study, the need to form coalitions increased the tendency ‘towards the formation of two or more coalitions’.8 These formations are traced in this book and are indeed a vital factor in the political history of Palestine in the period under review. In this context, Hourani makes additional remarks that are relevant to the history of the Husaynis: the coalitions were challenged because they were not institutionalized and were fragile because they demanded an almost impossible balancing act between the families’ interests and the policies of the rulers. But it is exactly this balancing act that explains why the Husaynis were leaders of such coalitions for so long: they had the support of the other families in Jerusalem and access to the rulers.

  The formation of coalitions was part of the habitual circumspection built into the ‘politics of notables’. These coalitions were not part of a fixed institution; they were far more fluid formations. Occasionally, one party left the coalition for another, disappointing an ally and aligning with a former foe. These shifts also occurred because of the ‘divide and rule’ policies of the central government. Therefore the notables’ ‘modes of action must in normal circumstances be cautious and even ambiguous’, as illustrated by how the Husaynis led revolutions against rulers or shunned others or left them behind when convenient.

  As it had been a century before, at the beginning of the nineteenth century ‘the politics of notables’ was very much a politics of ulama. Hourani remarks that their scholarly background placed the ulama notables closer to the ruler than to society.9 But this changed with the secularization of the notables at the beginning of the twentieth century. The notables of religion became the notables of nationalism.