Research notes collected by Franciso Gil-White from Howard Sachar's "A history of Israel". Retrieved from Internet Archive in April 2012.
Below are excerpts from Howard Sachar's book A History of Israel that relates the historical sequence of events leading to the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Muhammad Amin al Husseini, becoming a close ally of Hitler's.
Sachar, Howard Morley - A history of Israel : from the rise of Zionism to our time / Howard M. Sachar. 1982, c1979.
FGW
Starts p.(195)
"...in 1930, [Britain] reached treaty agreement with the Feisal government in Baghdad for Iraq to enjoy juridically sovereign status, under the proviso that British military installations remained. On the same basis, Abdullah, installed as emir of Transjordan in 1922, was allowed to preside over his own domestically autonomous government, with assurances of future sovereignty. Egypt, occupied by the British since 1882, was summarily awarded its freedom in 1922; and fourteen years later Britain curtailed its traditional military garrison rights in that country. These were not unimportant concessions, and in 1935-36 they were seemingly matched by France in treaties negotiated between Paris and the Syrian and Lebanese governments. Yet in neither instance, British or French, was imperial control relaxed simply as a response to legal obligation. The decision was extracted, rather, by a festering Arab and Egyptian nationalism that erupted intermittently in violence and that threatened not merely to undermine the Western presence in the Middle East but to become an instrument in the hands of Britain’s and France’s European adversaries.
One of these enemies, Italy, was obsessed by the need to rectify the ‘injustice’ of the Paris Peace Conference by extending its imperial presence throughout the Mediterranean littoral. After 1935, moreover, that ambition seemed within range of fulfillment. With his impressive African staging bases in Libya, Ethiopia, and Italian Somaliland, Mussolini could indeed begin to look westward toward French Tunisia, and eastward toward Egypt and the Levant, the historic destinations of the merchant fleets of Venice, Genoa, and Trieste. A high-powered Italian short-wave radio station in Bari broadcast Arabic-language propaganda nightly to the Mahgreb [Muslim North Africa] and the Middle East, striking systematically at Britain’s and France’s tenure in their Arab lands of occupation. Posturing as the ‘friend and protector of Islam,’ the Duce at the same time left no doubt that he regarded the Mediterranean as mare nostrum—our (Italy’s) sea.
The Italian campaign for influence in the Moslem world was shrewdly reinforced by Nazi Germany. Hitler may have evinced little enthusiasm for projecting German territorial claims into the eastern Mediterranean; it was understood that the Middle East was Italy’s sphere of expansion. But it was the Führer’s intention to erode the Allied position in a region widely considered to be the very pivot of Anglo-French imperial and defensive power. By 1935, therefore, the Nazi propaganda bureau was subsidizing a wide variety of Middle Eastern courses, institutes, and journals, and spending millions of marks on the ‘educational’ activities of German cultural and press attachés in the Islamic world. Beginning in 1938, the newly equipped German radio station at Seesen transmitted propaganda to the Middle East in all the languages of the area (except, of course, Hebrew). Combined with the broadcasts of radio Bari and Spain’s Radio Sevilla, these programs won a large and appreciative reception in the Arab world. So did the ‘goodwill’ visits to the Middle East of eminent Nazi figures, among them Dr. Hjalmar Schacht and Baldur von Shirach.
One particularly successful Axis technique of winning favor among the Arabs had its basis in ideology. German journalists and diplomats constantly drew parallels between Naxi Pan-Germanism and ‘the youthful power of Pan-Arab nationalism [which] is the wave of the Arab future.’ More significantly, the Arabs were reminded of the enemies they shared in common with the Nazis. Even in the mid-1930s, when Berlin exercised a certain restraint in ventilating its animosity against Britain and France, Nazi German diplomats evinced no hesitation whatever in publicizing the Nazi anti-Jewish campaign. Hardly a German Arabic-Language newspaper or magazine appeared in the Middle East without a sharp thrust against the Jews. Reprints of these strictures were widely distributed by the [Jerusalem] Mufti’s Arab Higher Committee. Upon introducing the Nuremberg racial laws in 1935, therefore, Hitler received telegrams of congratulation and praise from all corners of the Arab world. The Palestine newspaper al-Liwa eagerly borrowed the Nazi slogan ‘One Country, One People, One Leader.’ Ahmed Hussein, leader of the ‘Young Egypt’ movement, confided to the Lavoro Fascista that ‘Italy and Germany are today the only true democracies in Europe, and the others are only parliamentary plutocracies.’ A delegation of Iraqi sporting associations, returning from a trip to Germany in September 1937, expressed their profound admiration for ‘National Socialist order and discipline.’ During a visit to Transjordan in 1939, Carl Raswan, a noted German-born journalist, was struck by the near-unanimity of Arab opinion that only ‘Italy and Germany were strong, and England and the whole British Empire existed only by the grace of Mussolini and Hitler.’ Throughout the Arab Middle East, a spate of ultra-right-wing political groupings and parties developed in conscious imitation of Nazism and Italian fascism."
The following gives an account of what the Mufti’s forces, which launched the 1936 ‘Arab Revolt’ were like.
(starts p.200)
“…On April 25, the Mufti [Haj Amin] induced several of Palestine’s clan leaders to establish an Arab Higher Committee, with himself as president. It was this group that supported his call for the nonpayment of taxes after May 15, to be followed by a nationwide strike of Arab workers and businesses.
…Haj Amin loosed a series of grim warnings of the ‘revenge of God Almighty.’ The initial outburst of Arab violence was then followed by a mass strike against the government’s immigration policy…Enforced by the Mufti’s strong-arm men, the work stoppage paralyzed government and public transportation services, as well as Arab business and much of Arab agriculture…
…By midsummer 1936 the intensity of the fighting mounted as Arab irregulars poured into the hill country around Jerusalem, into Galilee and Samaria. A majority of them at first were local Palestinians recruited by Haj Amin’s agents. But soon ‘Committees for the Defense of Palestine’ were established in neighboring Arab lands. Syrian and Iraqi volunteers began arriving in Palestine at the rate of two or three hundred a month. Their leader, Fawzi al-Qawukji, played a vital role in the ensuing civil war…He was a compact, sandy-haired man in his early forties when the civil war began, gruff, vigorous, and endowed with an unquestionably dynamism that he cultivated in open imitation of his hero, Adolf Hitler. During the summer of 1936 it was Qawukji who organized military training among the Arab nationalists, imposing a single, unified command over the disparate rebel forces and helping smuggle in Axis weapons. His guerilla technique rarely varied. It took the form of night assaults on Jewish farms, the destruction of cattle and crops, the murder of civilians.”
Notice that the people living in Jewish farms are civilians, and cattle and crops are the property of civilians. So we have that they attacked civilians, destroyed the property of civilians, and they murdered civilians. In other words, their tactics were exclusively terrorist.
After the Arab Revolt was put down, a complex diplomatic effort by the British known as the Peel Commission elaborated a partition plan for the disputed territories in Palestine, presented in 1937.
(starts p.204)
“…It filled 404 pages, contained elaborate maps and statistical indices, and ranked as one of the major documents of British foreign policy. First summarizing the views expressed by Arabs and Jews, the report then detailed the accomplishments of the Jewish National Home, not the least of which was an economy vigorous enough to have stimulated a 50 percent growth of the Arab population since 1921. There was no question that Arabs, fellahin and landlords alike, were enjoying unprecedented affluence in Palestine. The Arab charge that Jews had obtained too large a proportion of the best soil could not be substantiated, for much of the citrus land originally had been sand or swamp…
…the report’s proposal was for Palestine and Transjordan to be divided into three regions: a Jewish state comprising, essentially, the coastal plain and Galilee; a much larger Arab state embracing the rest of Palestine and Transjordan; and a permanently mandated British enclave including the Jerusalem-Bethlehem promontory…
…there was no ambiguity whatever in the views of the Mufti and his followers. They rejected the plan with contempt and ensured that he entire Arab Higher Committee formally turned it down. In their stand, they now mobilized the support of Arab and Moslem leaders far beyond the boundaries of Palestine itself.”
With Axis weapons and political support, the Mufti then staged a renewal of the ‘Arab Revolt,’ which “ultimately claimed several thousand lives…”
The following explains how the close alliance between the Axis powers and Mufti Haj Amin developed.
(starts p.228)
"No courtship of the Axis was more avid…than the one carried out by the émigré Mufti of Jerusalem. Haj Amin had…reached Baghdad in October 1939, where he was granted an honorific status equal to that of a government minister. From the Iraqi capital he then dispatched his protégé, Naji Shawkat, on a secret mission to Ankara. There the Arab messenger transmitted to German Ambassador Franz von Papen a personal letter from the Mufti. The message extended felicitations to Hitler…
…On October 27 [1940] he was received by Mussolini…a draft pronouncement was worked out—upon agreement with Berlin—issued jointly by Mussolini and Hitler. It committed the two Axis governments to recognize the sovereignty and independence of the Arab countries and promised Axis help in ‘the elimination of the Jewish National Home in Palestine.’
…The Mufti…departed Rome on November 3, 1941, for Berlin. He was received in the German capital with much ceremony and presented to Hitler on November 30…Haj Amin insisted that Arab loyalty could best be mobilized by an immediate public declaration of support for Arab independence and unity…Hitler replied that…The Reich’s objective…would not be the occupation of the Arab lands…but solely the destruction of Palestine Jewry…
…Broadcasting repeatedly over Germany’s Radio Seesen, speaking in the ‘name of God and the Prophet,’ [the Mufti] urged Moslems everywhere to rise up against the Allies. To encourage that uprising, Haj Amin visited Yugoslavia to recruit units of Bosnian Tatars. Approximately 6000 of these eventually were dispatched to fight under German command on the Russian front…”