Why Hajj Amin Matters

While it has not come up as much as one might expect, I do sometimes get asked why I’ve spent so much time—three years, to be exact—talking about the most infamous Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini. This is a fair question and while some asking might have some motivated reasoning at work, I figured it was worth delving into a little bit, if only as a brief addendum to this six-hour beast I just unleashed upon all of you.

So why does Hajj Amin al-Husseini matter?

To state it plainly and to leave you with perhaps a more pointed example, Hajj Amin matters not just because of the significant effect his rhetoric, actions, and even mere existence has had on the historical memory of the birthing pangs of Israel and the image conjured by its most fervent, rabid foes; there is, in my view, much more to it than that. I would like to believe I have demonstrated this very effectively in the most recent episode of the podcast (and the other writing and podcasting I have done on the subject of Hajj Amin). Hajj Amin matters, and must be brought from the dustbin of history to be carefully examined, because like all monsters from our past, he was still a man, and a man with agency, just like the rest of us. There is a reason the relationship with his father is what opened the main narrative of the most recent episode of History Impossible.

To restate the gist of that mini-meditation on the influence fathers have on their sons, this influence can create ripple effects across time that can be felt many decades after those fathers and sons have shuffled off this mortal coil. This was, as made obvious by the episode’s narrative thrust, referring to the influence Hajj Amin al-Husseini’s father, Tahir al-Husseini, had on the future Grand Mufti; namely, his views on what would come to be known as Zionism, or as Tahir saw it, the encroachment of mostly European Jewish emigres on his decidedly pure Arab homeland. The circumstances of this influence are what is unique to the story of Hajj Amin—and thus, what makes him, in part, significant—but the influence Tahir had on his young son was not. We are all influenced by our parents, whether through their actions or through their absence. And there can indeed be long term consequences of such influence.

Those consequences are what makes Hajj Amin unique in the historical record, but the fact that they at least partly stem from the influence of his father are not. And perhaps paradoxically, that is what I believe makes him important and worth discussing; I say paradoxically because it hardly makes him unique, but it also reveals the human essence at his core, which was always there within him, even as his soul clearly rotted away over the years with the choices he made and hatreds he carried. To make this point clear, let’s ask: does this parable of paternal influence not apply to other controversial leaders in world history? Even the most bloodthirsty? Even the Stalin’s, the Pol Pot’s, the Hitler’s? Indeed, I believe it does. In fact, it applies very neatly to another controversial leader in this nearly century-and-a-half-long conflict; more importantly, a man who is quite literally on the opposite side of this conflict. That is, a one Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Ben-Zion and Benjamin.

Netanyahu, like Hajj Amin, grew up in the shadow (and indeed overcame the shadow) of his father, Ben-Zion Netanyahu. Ben-Zion was a formidable presence in Israel’s history, having served as secretary to the infamous head of the Revisionist Zionists, Ze’ev Jabotinsky. He lived to be 102 years old, passing away in 2012, and his presence especially loomed large over his son. As Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in the pages of The Atlantic back in the September 2010 issue:

“Always in the back of Bibi’s mind is Ben-Zion,” one of the prime minister’s friends told me. “He worries that his father will think he is weak.” […] Ben-Zion, by all accounts, was worshipped by his sons in their childhood, and today, the 60-year-old Benjamin, who has been known to act in charmless ways, conspicuously upholds the Fifth Commandment when discussing his father. At a party marking Ben-Zion’s 100th birthday, held this past March at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem, before an assembly that included the president of Israel, Shimon Peres, Benjamin credited his father with forecasting the Shoah and, in the early 1990s, predicting that “Muslim extremists would try to bring down the Twin Towers in New York.” […] Many people in Likud Party circles have told me that those who discount Ben-Zion’s influence on his son do so at their peril. “This was the father giving his son history’s marching orders,” one of the attendees told me. “I watched Bibi while his father spoke. He was completely absorbed.”

How much of Bibi’s policy decisions—including those related to West Bank settlements, as well as his post-10/7 policies—are directly related to Ben-Zion’s influence, it is obviously impossible to say for certain. However, it is also impossible, given the evidence provided by Goldberg and the sources with whom he talked, to claim that there was and remains no influence. Ben-Zion Netanyahu, in the tradition of Revisionist Zionism’s infamous intractability, would proclaim in a terse speech given at his 100th birthday party:

From the Iranian side, we hear pledges that soon—in a matter of days, even—the Zionist movement will be put to an end and there will be no more Zionists in the world. One is supposed to conclude from this that the Jews of the Land of Israel will be annihilated, while the Jews of America, whose leaders refuse to pressure Iran, are being told in a hinted fashion that the annihilation of the Jews will not include them. […] The Jewish people are making their position clear and putting faith in their military power. The nation of Israel is showing the world today how a state should behave when it stands before an existential threat: by looking danger in the eye and calmly considering what should be done and what can be done. And to be ready to enter the fray at the moment there is a reasonable chance of success.

Much can be gleaned from this outlook, both related to geopolitical news at the time, and how it is informed by a (perhaps more justified today) preemptively defensive Israel-centric worldview (with, in an interesting inversion of the dual loyalty trope, an implied allegation of insufficient loyalty by American Jews). But there can be no doubt that the outlook informing this speech has its fingerprints on Benjamin Netanyahu’s own approach to foreign policy.

The point to take home from this is less that I am just as capable of deploying a potentially problematic psychoanalytic framework against the controversial Prime Minister of Israel as I have been against the controversial Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. It is more that the point with which I opened the most recent episode of the podcast is even more proven: that men are often influenced by their fathers, and this can have reverberating effects across time in ways they (and those of us watching) are unable of appreciating in the moment. After all, even the greatest men among us are only human. And because we are all only human, we can recognize a lot of what drives men in positions of power that most of us can only dream of possessing and realize why they could well be figures not to be trusted to make a bad situation better. In a way, I’m more deploying a classic cinematic villain trope than anything else, imagining as I am writing these words, old Bibi sitting across a table from Hajj Amin, perhaps each sipping on a lemonade in the hot Jerusalem sun. I’m not sure who says it, but I don’t think it matters very much (since it works either way), but one of them eventually smiles and says, “You and I are very much alike.”

I hope I don’t sound too preemptively defensive when I say this, but I also want to make it clear that despite my biases (that I would like to believe I’ve sufficiently acknowledged both on the show and in my writing), I have been and remain very aware that there are a lot of varying perspectives on how things have devolved so horribly in the Holy Land, especially if we place October 7th, 2023 as a start date for our analysis. In other words, I am very aware that it is not just a bunch of Arab Nazis running around with a thirst for Jewish blood, full stop. There are other major factors at work, as there always has been, and the more thoughtful among the commentariat have discussed these factors over the years.

For example, some of the most compelling arguments I have seen made from a position more sympathetic to the Palestinian plight is questioning why the settlements of the West Bank continue to be built, despite everything that might justify their existence in the minds of more strident Zionist Israelis. Or despite everything that the Palestinians—namely, the more politically and especially religiously radical among them—have done to place themselves and, more importantly, the millions of their regular (i.e. civilian) counterparts in the situation that they’re in. And this class of Palestinian radical has indeed done this. And yet, I will be the first to admit, it is a bit complicated.

As

Andrew Sullivan

observed back in 2012 in a truly amazing essay (and one that inspired me to write this one you’re all reading, as it happens), “The Palestinians have for a long time been their own worst enemies, and in the past have not sought peace. […] For much of the past sixty years, the Palestinians bear a huge responsibility for their own situation.” But Sullivan also granted this fact—one now more resonant and, unfortunately, prescient post-10/7—while also asking very pointedly, “Why continue to build the settlements?” Why indeed. We can’t—or at least I can’t—pretend that this question is discounted because of the lack of responsibility Palestinians—namely, their more radical (and less radical) leadership—have as authors of the humiliation and even destruction they face. The question of West Bank settlements is not mutually exclusive from applying the appropriate amount of moral responsibility on Palestinian leadership across time.

However, to return to the main point of this essay, let’s loop all of this together. It’s this notion of placing the appropriate moral responsibility that brings us back to our friend, Hajj Amin al-Husseini.

The famous first meeting of Hajj Amin and Heinrich.

Given these things that help flesh out the moral complexity of the narrative I’ve been tackling, it is indeed fair to ask why place so much focus on Hajj Amin al-Husseini. The short version—my mini-thesis, if you will—is simply that he is underrated, both in the historical and moral record. This problem of his being underrated is still in the process of being corrected—and despite not being a real historian (yet), I’d like to think I’m contributing at least in some fashion—but it has hit many, many hiccups along the way. As I already covered in the just-released episode of History Impossible, this is partly due to how much misinformation is out there about the man coming from what we can call the Zionist camp, and partly due to how much seeming incuriosity (and at times, very clearly deliberate obfuscation) that there has been coming out of the Palestinian nationalist or Palestinian-sympathetic camp. As a reminder, this runs the gamut of Bibi Netanyahu falsely claiming that Hajj Amin was the real brains behind the Holocaust, to activist-scholars claiming that he was not actually the monster that he has been painted as, and even some pretending nothing he did between 1941 and 1945 mattered enough to discuss at any length or depth. This is a clear problem, and it’s one that actually has its own history. This means we’re diving into what normally is my least favorite part of historical scholarship (but really interesting to me, at least in this case): historiography.

In the paper “The Historical Problem of Hajj Amin al-Husseini, ‘Grand Mufti’ of Jerusalem,” published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs in the Jewish Political Studies Review, author Joel Fishman explains that the lack of attention, and thus, confusion that has arisen, over the course of the past half century since the Grand Mufti’s death is due to many reasons. The first he cites is that, thanks to the methodology of early Israeli historians of collecting and preserving sources with the intent of allowing research to take place in the future, “lost opportunities and major gaps in our knowledge” formed. World events also conspired to make these opportunities more difficult to seize, with diplomatic developments between the PLO and the Israeli government in the 1990s (i.e. the Oslo Accords), leading to a supposedly moral imperative that “in order to make peace with the PLO, it was necessary to forget the past.” The problem of diplomatic realpolitik aside, there were practical difficulties, such as the declassification of records from the war years occurring at different times and, more importantly, in different languages and countries. As Fishman explains, these sources included, “Nazi documents captured by the Red Army, State Department and CIA collections which have become declassified, and related primary sources from Germany.”

It was not even until the late 2000s and early 2010s when books like Jeffrey Herf’s masterful Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World and David Motadel’s incredible Islam and Nazi Germany’s War (both used extensively in the research of the last episode) that the story of the Grand Mufti began to emerge from the murk of recently unearthed historical documentation. He had indeed gotten coverage from sources like Bayan al-Hut and Philip Mattar, but without all of the documents unearthed in the 1990s and beyond, there was little that could be effectively contested in their sugarcoated (or arguably dishonest) accounts, no doubt contributing to Hajj Amin’s underrated status. This revival of interest thanks to the new information brought to light, of course, produced an opposite effect of bias in some corners of the discourse—leading, of course, to the more extreme claims made about Hajj Amin—but the point to remember is that a more fully fleshed-out sketch of the Grand Mufti and his thoughts and actions was not even possible until very recently. The best comparison one can make is that for a long time, William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich—written in 1960 and by no means a bad book—was the source for looking at the history of Nazi Germany for most people. Flash forward several decades and many debates later, look at how much more fleshed out the coverage has become, and we have incredible work like Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, or Max Hastings’ Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945, just to name a few examples. One might be tempted to suggest that the depth of scholarship on Hajj Amin al-Husseini has only just begun to scratch below the surface.

The scratching continues, with more material being produced on the Grand Mufti and painting an increasingly interesting picture of not just his relationship with Nazi Germany, but his overall thinking and eventual impact. It is certainly possible to overstate Hajj Amin’s impact on certain things—to revisit the most controversial chapter in his time spent with the Nazis, it is hardly certain that he was able to effect change on the level of Nazi policy when it came to their Final Solution—but it’s also become much more possible to establish how complicit he actually was when it came to the well-established crimes of that regime—again, the evidence seems pretty clear that at the very least, he was aware of the extent of their “Eastern policies” and that he tried to ensure the efficacy of those policies on various Eastern European Jews, including thousands of children.

Another one of the damning photos unearthed that demonstrated Hajj Amin’s awareness of the Holocaust, showing him and other foreign visitors being shown Sachsenhausen.

To put it bluntly, I do not believe I would have been able to strike that balance in the last episode of the podcast without the incredible scholarship that has been done by the likes of Gilbert Achcar, Joel Fishman, Klaus Gensicke, Jeffrey Herf, Jennie Lebel, and David Motadel. And that kind of scholarship would not have been possible without the diligent curiosity of such scholars with an interest in Hajj Amin al-Husseini and desire to not just take clearly politically-motivated scholars like al-Hut, Khalidi, Mattar, and Pappe at their word that, frankly, there is nothing to see here.

As Joel Fishman insists:

[W]e must make sure that our own understanding of this chapter of history is comprehensive, truthful and accurate. It is a disservice to ignore this part of the past because it is crucial for our understanding of the present and for the responsible formation of policy. […] It is simply not possible to build upon a foundation of myth and ignorance. The career of Haj Amin al-Husseini represents a major historical problem and the question of his place in history must be placed on the public agenda. It still requires thorough and sustained examination. If we look beyond the individual articles which appear in this issue, we may identify several larger themes: the fusion of religion with politics in the form of a new Islamism; the sickness of Arab antisemitism; and, of course, the Mufti’s historical responsibility.

And now for the complicated part.

If it is not yet clear, I could not agree more with the majority of Joel Fishman’s sentiment. Unfortunately, though, I have to urge caution to anyone might think that we take Hajj Amin’s career—and responsibility—as our North Star for coping with the historical memory that has fueled such vast and apocalyptic death and destruction upon the Arabs and Jews of the Holy Land, especially after the events of 10/7 and the subsequent war that has claimed the lives of thousands. It is true—without question—that the bloodthirsty, genocidal, and yes, savage and animalistic brutality brought upon the Israelis stands firmly in the same universe as Hajj Amin’s own genocidal Jew-hatred and, by extension, his status as a true Muslim Nazi, if there is such a thing.

But if we are to base the entire moral calculus of how to deal with the “Palestinian question” (truly, for lack of a better term) on Hajj Amin’s record, the ease with which we (or at least Israel’s government) could come to some pretty heinous, morally compromised conclusions increases exponentially. We spent hours looking at the vile things said about Jews that came from Hajj Amin’s pen and mouth during (and before) the Second World War, so it’s not worth revisiting them here, but his bloodthirstiness and ruthlessness claimed the lives of many Arabs and Muslims as well. As historian Jennie Lebel has written:

The Mufti was accused of numerous murders of his own people, which left behind 20,000 neglected orphans and many poor people in the homeland. They also accused him of using humanitarian and religious funds for payments to his followers who practiced terror and carried out crimes. The Sheikh from Jaffa accused the Mufti that he had corrupted and subdued the public opinion media by means of arms and confiscated printing presses from their legitimate owners.

Someone like this is not simply morally compromised, or someone who has simply “gone insane.” This is someone who, if given the means and opportunity (which he thankfully never got), would join the annals of history with the likes of Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, or yes, Adolf Hitler. And yet, despite this, I see very little utility and, in fact, potential for true danger, in using him as a guiding light for present policy.

This is why, as much as I wholeheartedly agree with Joel Fishman that the story of Hajj Amin must be examined and reexamined, and told and retold, in order to fully understand his breadth and depth as a historical actor and as I’ve been suggesting, a human being like the rest of us, that I can’t bring myself to go the whole way with this line of reasoning. I can’t say that there is a lot of use beyond the academic or intellectual, at least not right now and not in the way that many people—especially those inclined to see the Palestinians as problematic by default—may be tempted to see in the story of Hajj Amin al-Husseini.

There has been a lot of talk in the United States in the last couple of weeks (as of this writing) about the role of existentially-phrased rhetoric in compelling people to act in a certain way. And for good reason; I’m currently working on something that will hopefully help put to bed the idea that things are as simple as “violent rhetoric causes violent behavior,” though I’m sure I’ll have a hard time convincing a good portion of my audience of such a thing while emotions are running as high as they are. However, when it comes to the idea of crafting policy toward a historically hostile people, based on how their first self-appointed political and spiritual leader saw you—as Jews, in this case—in ways little better (if not worse) than the National Socialists of Germany, then the probability of treating all of those people as existential threats goes up. And with that probabilistic increase, you are also running the risk of treating them in some truly, disproportionately cruel and unusual ways.

This must be made clear, because I can already hear the shouting from either side that a.) the Palestinians have clearly shown themselves as an existential threat to the existence of the world’s only Jewish state, or b.) that Israel is already treating the Palestinians in truly, disproportionately cruel and unusual ways. What I am saying does not diminish these opinions. One can very easily make the argument that Israel has every right to feel existentially threatened by the Palestinians, especially when their government—that is, Hamas—sees such astoundingly high support from the populace and that same government does obviously hold as much if not more hate in their hearts for Jews as people as the Nazis did. And one can very easily make the argument that Israel’s response has been disproportionately cruel, especially in the context of the nakedly imperialistic statements made by members of the Likud Party and the Netanyahu cabinet. One can even make relatively reasonable arguments if you—mistakenly in my opinion, but regardless—reduce the proportion to literal numerical comparisons (a fool’s errand in war).

The point is this: we can and should use Hajj Amin al-Husseini’s record, responsibility, and influence across time as a guiding principle for understanding men who radicalize themselves and develop monstrous characteristics. But we should not use these things for informing wartime policy. As

David Josef Volodzko

and I discussed, and as he has written, the war is already underway; it has been for over nine months, as of this writing. The dead can’t be made alive, and pleas of “ceasefire” mean very little when both sides of the conflict understandably show very little interest in ceasing anything, or at least finding some kind of common ground required for a lasting peace. But the war will eventually end, and the question of how to conduct things after that happens is the much more important one, at least by my estimation. The questions of war conduct are rather moot in the moment, especially since the world remains watching. And as morally defunct and inconsistent as the UN has been on this issue (and really on all issues related to Israel), it won’t let us forget any infractions committed during war time.

The accounting for such things will come later whether we want them to or not. It will be the occupation that follows that will serve as the true litmus test on Israel’s trustworthiness on the world stage (at least as far as I’m concerned), and I would rather they (or anyone) not use the legacy of Hajj Amin as the barometer for how to treat millions of Palestinians a dozen generations removed from him and his ilk. Because if I’ve learned anything in the process of researching this story over the years, there were very few people who hated Jews as much as Hajj Amin al-Husseini did. And when you see him as the guiding principle for a people (rather than just an unspoken or even subconscious influence on the most radical among them), there is very little you would not justify doing in order to prevent the horror of 10/7 from happening again.

This is to say that Hajj Amin serves as a guidepost for a worst case scenario, both for Arabs in general, and for Jews in particular. Preventing such a figure from rising to the occasion, as it were, requires a deep and serious investment in the lives of Palestinians once this war—which remember, is already happening—is over. To revisit what David Volodsko and I spoke of, this is the real moral responsibility in a post-10/7 world: making sure it doesn’t happen again in the most sustainable and dignified way possible. Ensuring “peace”, at least in the short term, by shooting and incinerating and exploding any and all threats faced by the Jews of Israel, but without a long-term, truly peaceful investment, the death and destruction will be for literally no reason, and it will simply perpetuate the cycle of violence that we have been seeing unfold for over a century.

Simply fighting, destroying, and displacing will just create another vacuum in the Arab world. They say nature abhors a vacuum; figures like Hajj Amin al-Husseini crave it. And if he is not used as an object lesson for what not just Arabs and Jews, but all people, should avoid and prevent, then the consequences could be disastrous. At best, people like Hajj Amin just manage to make things worse. And at worst, well, we have plenty of examples with body counts that he could only dream about.