Breaking History - The Hundred Year Holy War (From the Honestly Archives)

Episode Date: January 14, 2025

*This episode originally ran on October 12, 2024 on Honestly with Bari Weiss*  We all know the horrid tale of what happened in Israel on October 7, 2023. Waves of gunmen attacked families in their homes and young people attending a music festival. The marauders filmed their murders on GoPro cameras. They burned families alive in their safe rooms; raped, and mutilated their victims; and took hostages back to Gaza on golf carts. Why did they do it? For many critics of Israel, the horrific violence of October 7 was the predictable response to the “occupation”—never mind that Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005. To them, October 7 was a jailbreak from what progressives often call “an open-air prison.”   But for the belligerents, in their own words, this war is for the defense of a mosque on top of a mountain. They called their massacre “Al-Aqsa Flood,” named for one of the two mosques that sit atop what is known to the Jews as the Temple Mount. This is where King Solomon’s temple once stood, and at its base is the Western Wall, where Jews have prayed since its construction in the second century BCE. It’s also known to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif, a noble sanctuary. It’s where Muslims believe the prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven in a dream. An October 10 Hamas communiqué justified their attack as resistance to thwart “schemes and dreams of Judaizing Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa.” This reveals something very important about the Israel-Palestine conflict: That it is not a territorial dispute. It’s a holy war, with roots in an ancient city with significance far beyond its 2.5 miles of limestone walls. The world knows it as Jerusalem. The Palestinians call it Al-Quds. Hamas claims there is a plot by Israel to destroy Al-Aqsa—the mosque atop the Temple Mount that sits in the center of Jerusalem—and build a third Jewish temple where it now stands. It’s a lie. A lie that goes back a century. The man who first began to spread the libel was from one of Jerusalem’s great families that traced its lineage back to the prophet Muhammad himself. He was a seminary-school dropout, a fanatic antisemite, and a Nazi collaborator. His name was Hajj Amin al-Husseini. Eli Lake tells the story of al-Husseini, the origins of the 100-year holy war, and why it persists to this day.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Air Transat presents two friends traveling in Europe for the first time and feeling some pretty big emotions. This coffee is so good. How do they make it so rich and tasty? Those paintings we saw today weren't prints. They were the actual paintings. I have never seen tomatoes like this. How are they so red? With flight deals starting at just $589, it's time for you to see what Europe has to offer. Don't worry, you can handle it. Visit airtransat.com for details. Conditions apply. AirTransat. Travel moves us. A year ago, the entire world woke up to news of a massacre.

We all know the horrid tale. Waves of gunmen, some on paragliders, attacked families at Kibbutzim and young people attending a peace concert. The marauders filmed their murders on GoPro cameras. They burned families alive in their safe rooms, raped and mutilated their victims, and took hostages back to Gaza on golf carts. It was an act of jihad, or holy war. Why did they do it? Before October 7th, the people of Gaza didn't have one minute of self-determination despite Why do they do it? colonial project. For 75 years, there's been ethnic cleansing. We got to tell the truth about that. For people like Al Jazeera journalist Mark Lamont Hill, the outburst of horrific violence was

the predictable and predicted response to the occupation. Never mind that Israel pulled out from Gaza in 2005. October 7th was a jailbreak from what progressives often called an open-air prison. But for the belligerents, in their own words, the war is for the defense of a mosque on top of a mountain. That is at least what Hamas said shortly afterwards. They called their massacre Al-Aqsa Flood, named for one of the two mosques that sit atop what is known to the Jews as the Temple Mount. This is where King Solomon's Temple once stood, and at its base is the Western Wall,

where Jews have prayed since its construction in the first century BCE. But it's also known to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif, or Noble Sanctuary. And it's where Muslims believe the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven in a dream. And October 10th, Hamas communique justifies their holy war, or jihad, as follows. Given this historic achievement of our people and their courageous resistance, and to bolster the steadfastness of the Palestinian people in the face of the open aggression of the occupation, thwart its schemes and dreams of Judaizing Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa, and achieve victory for the just cause of our Palestinian people

and our struggle for the liberation of our land, prisoners, and sanctities. It's worth lingering on that phrase, Judaizing Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa, because it reveals something very important about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Much of this is not about a country. It is about an ancient and holy city with significance far beyond its 2.5 miles of limestone walls. The world knows it as Jerusalem. The Palestinians call it Al-Quds. If you listen to Hamas, they'll tell you that there's a plot by Israel to destroy Al-Aqsa, the mosque atop the Temple Mount that sits at the center of this ancient city, and build a third Jewish temple where it now stands. But that is a lie.

It's been 57 years since Israel won the territory of the Old City of Jerusalem in the Six-Day War. That's a lot of time to Judaize a mosque, if they really wanted to. Yes, there are a few on the fringe, including far-right Israeli minister Itamar Ben-Gavir, who speak fanatically about the desire to build a third temple. But every Israeli government since Jerusalem was reunified has entrusted the Temple Mount to the guardianship of a Jordanian religious agency known as the Waqf. Muslims, not Jews, have been the custodians of the two mosques on top of a mountain since 1967. But this line about Judaizing al-Aqsa, well, it goes back a century. The man who first began to spread the libel was from one of Jerusalem's great families that traced its lineage back to the Prophet Muhammad himself. He was a seminary school dropout, a fanatic anti-Semite, and a Nazi collaborator. His name was Haj Amin al-Husseini, the first Palestinian leader.

And while many Palestinians today are embarrassed by his legacy, which I'll soon explain why, their leaders stand upon his shoulders. Remember, October 7th was called the Al-Aqsa Flood, the lie Haj Amin al-Husseini told more than a century ago. It thrives today. And that is not an accident, because al-Husseini understood that if the war was between Palestinians and Jews, then the sides would have even numbers. But if this was really about the mosque on top of a mountain, then it would pit more than a billion Muslims against at most 15 million Jews. And that's why the conflict persists to this day. It's not a territorial dispute. It's a holy war.

Or as Haj Amin al-Husseini, known to history as the Grand Mufti, would say, a jihad. From the Free Press, this is Honestly. I'm Eli Lake. Today, the origins of the 100-year holy war. We'll be right back. You can bet on anything from money lines to spreads and player props, or combine your bets in a same-game parlay for a shot at an even bigger payout. Plus, with super-simple live betting, lightning-fast bet settlement, and instant withdrawals, FanDuel makes betting on the NFL easier than ever before. So make the most of this football season and download FanDuel today. 19-plus and physically located in Ontario.

Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. This is Hashem Safiuddin, the head of Hezbollah's executive council, a day after the horrors of October 7th. Hezbollah, which means party of God, officially joined the war against Israel that day. In this speech, as you might expect, he warns that the Al-Aqsa flood will come for the entire region, not just Israel, as the crowd chants death to America. Palestinian nationalism has taken many forms over the past century, from Maoism to Islamism. But some themes remain. Jews have no place in their ancestral homeland, and they are a great threat to the third holiest site in Islam, Al-Aqsa Mosque. You hear it over and over again in the history of Palestinian revolts in 1929, in 1936, in 1948, and later in the Second Intifada between 2000 and 2005.

All of this stems directly from al-Husseini. It's always going to be that. That's the trigger. We're threatening al-Aqsa. This is historian and former Israeli ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren. It's not that the Jews are threatening Beersheba. It's not that they're threatening Haifa or Jaffa or even Nazareth. It's Al-Aqsa because that's the trigger. And that's the sentiment. And it's a profound and deep sentiment that Hajime Hussein succeeds in tapping into.

And that's what makes him such a powerful figure. Not just his personality, not just his personality, not just his charisma, not just his single-mindedness and cruelty, but the fact he understands. He understands Palestinian politics and broader Arab politics. This story begins in 1920 with the British mandate for Palestine. Only three years after the British adopted the Balfour Declaration, which made it the policy of the British mandate for Palestine. Only three years after the British adopted the Balfour Declaration, which made it the policy of the British Empire

to facilitate the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. The British became the protectorate of Palestine in 1920. But they did not conquer the land. It was entrusted to the empire through the League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations. Before the British mandate, Palestineor to the United Nations. Before the British mandate, Palestine belonged to the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans collapsed after World War I, but until then, the land between the river and the sea was a colonial possession.

There was no Palestinian state. There really wasn't even a Palestinian nationalism. That identity emerged after World War I. Effectively, it evolves between the two wars, between World War I and World War II. This is Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute. As very little antecedent, there's certainly a Palestinian identity, but Palestinian nationalism as such does not really exist before World War I ended, before the British Mandate and all of that. You have Arab nationalism growing throughout the Arab world towards the end of the 19th century.

There's a backlash against the Ottoman Empire and a kind of, you know, Arab nationalism based on shared language and culture and geography, a European style Arab nationalism, in other words. In this environment of war and nationalism after World War I, the first birth pangs of a Palestinian national movement begin. And they begin as a rejection of the Balfour Declaration and specifically the movement of Zionist Jews returning to Palestine to create a Jewish state of their own. And this is where a young Haj Amin al-Husseini comes onto the scene. It is April 3rd, 1920, and Jerusalem's Arabs are celebrating an annual festival where Muslims would march to the tomb of Moses in Jericho, known in Arabic as Nebi Musa. Al-Husseini, who's only 23 years old at this time, addresses a crowd from a balcony in the old

city. the crowds chanted, this is our land and the jews are our dogs, as the young hajj amin al-husseini held up a photograph of king faisal of syria and shouted, this is your king. at the time, many palestinians considered the territory of palestine to be part of southern Syria, and King Faisal was one of the first independent Arab leaders to emerge after World War I. The crowd then descended on the Jewish quarter of the old city with knives and clubs in their hands. The pogrom began. Shops were looted, five Jews were murdered, and four Arabs were dead after Zionists organized a defense from the violent mob and the British joined the Farrakhas to put down the violence. All told, 216 Jews and 23 Arabs were wounded in the Nebimusa riots. The British cracked down. Al-Husseini was sentenced to prison,

and so he fled, a wanted man. But he would not remain in exile for long. A new High Commissioner for Mandate Palestine, Sir Herbert Samuel, arrived later in 1920. He was a British Jew who had risen to the highest levels of Her Majesty's government, and yet it was Samuel who the next year offered al-Husseini amnesty. We would not be sitting here talking about him in 2024

if not for the kind of amnesty that Herbert Samuel gives this man. This is Warren Kessler, author of Palestine, 1936. He rides out to Transjordan, speaks with the notables there, and Haj Amin is welcomed back to Palestine. And then in really the kind of, I think, the primordial blunder in a century of blunders over this land, Herbert Samuel appoints this man, Amin al-Husseini, to be Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, which is a term that didn't really even exist before. There had been a Mufti, but there had never been a Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. And he appoints him to be Grand

Mufti of Jerusalem and head of something that also hadn't existed before that the British create called the Supreme Muslim Council, which basically handles all of the kind of religious authorities and property that the Ottoman religious authorities used to handle. Now these are all concentrated in the person of the Mufti, and both of these positions are basically for life. And so single-handedly, Herbert Samuel has made this man the most powerful Arab and Muslim in Palestine for life. It was a remarkable turn of events for al-Husseini. While he was scion of one of the great families of Jerusalem, al-Husseini himself was unimpressive. He had not even finished his

Islamic education at Cairo's famous Al-Azhar University, but Herbert Samuel saw an opportunity to placate the most violent Palestinian leader by giving him real authority. And this has been a pattern for great powers over the last century. It's a template. It's a template that we see again and again. Again, historian Michael Oren. It's the person who incites the violence, the person who leads the violence, is the person who the powers, whether it be Great Britain, later the United States, will think this is the person who can resolve the violence.

At first, the bet worked. For most of the 1920s, Palestine was relatively stable. More Jews came, and the Palestinian elites continued to sell land to the new arrivals. Meanwhile, al-Husseini himself began to refurbish the two mosques on Temple Mount. He was consolidating his power. But in 1929, as al-Husseini was restoring the great mosques, he was also dropping poison in the ears of his followers. He claimed to know of dark plots of Jews to build a third temple on the site. He encouraged the British authorities to limit Jewish prayer at the Western Wall on the base of the Temple Mount. He also authorized a controversial new construction that interfered with the regular prayer of Jews there. Ironically, al-Husseini was doing exactly what he accused the Jews of planning, trying to build upon a sacred site

for the other religion. Al-Husseini also said the remains of the second temple's walls were sacred to Islam. It's where Muhammad's flying steed was stabled on his sojourn to Al-Aqsa. This, however, ignored how past caliphates allowed Jewish prayer at the wall, a wall which is one of the few physical sites on earth that actually matters to Jews. The tensions came to a boil in August of 1929, and the quiet was broken. First, on the 14th, a group of Jews led a demonstration to the Western Wall and chanted, The wall is ours, to protest the construction that endangered the worshippers. The next day, mobs of Muslims in the old city rioted and burned Jewish shops.

Al-Husseini's Supreme Muslim Council distributed pamphlets that urged Muslims to defend the honor of their faith. Jerusalem was shaken, but the real horror was still to come in Hebron, an ancient city that at the time was known for its Jewish seminaries or yeshivas. Jews had lived in the city for hundreds of years. It is a city with religious significance. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, along with their wives, Sarah, Rebekah, and Leah, are all said to be buried there, in the Cave of the Patriarchs. In 1929, there were around 700 Jews in Hebron, and 20,000 Muslims.

They had lived in peace together for centuries. Then on the Sabbath of August 24th, some newspaper accounts say a man on a motorcycle drove to Hebron and relayed al-Husseini's lie that Jews were desecrating al-Aqsa. The rumors started and the mob assembled. Some Muslim neighbors defied the crowd and hid Jewish families. The yeshiva students gathered at the home of the city's most prominent rabbi, but the crowds were out for blood. Here is a firsthand account of a yeshiva student as cited in Naomi Wiener Cohen's book, The Year After the Riots, of what happened

when the rabble approached the home of the rabbi. Quote, the rabbi, together with those present, rushed to a corner of the room and awaited the attack. The first to get killed was the rabbi. After him, the young men, who unarmed and unable to protect themselves, recited the prayer for the dead. I saw some of my dearest friends killed right in front of my eyes. Presently, I was hit too. I fell unconscious. I was covered under a load of dead bodies, which covered me and accounts for me being saved. Sixty-seven Jews were killed. The rest fled. In a single act of savagery, the Jewish community of Hebron was gone.

Hebron and Jerusalem were not the only places where al-Husseini's lies stoked violence. Here's an account from a civil servant's personal diary after his visit to Safed, a city in the far north that also saw mobs turn on Jews. Quote, Inside the houses I saw the mutilated and burned bodies of the victims of the massacre and the burned bodies of a woman tied to the grill of a window. Going house to house, I counted ten bodies that had not been collected. I saw the destruction and the signs of fire. Even in my grimmest thoughts, I would not imagine what I would find. The parallels to October 7th are striking.

Again, Oren Kessler. Much of the violence was sadistic. There was rape of daughters in front of their parents. There was almost anything you can think of. Much of the most gruesome ways of killing and torturing people that we saw on October 7th, a lot of those were seen nearly a century ago in 1929. After the Hebron riots, one might think the British would see to it that Haj Amin al-Husseini would be finished. Al-Husseini had incited two waves of terror, the Nebi Musa riots in 1920 and the

Hebron massacre in 1929. Maybe he wasn't the peace partner the British had hoped he would be. The British call a commission of inquiry, as they tend to do, and commissioners come here to the Holy Land, to Palestine, and they interview prominent Jews and prominent Arabs and British administrators, and they write a long report, as they tend to do. And the kind of bottom line of the report is not completely exculpatory of the Mufti, but they allow him to remain in his position. Why on earth would the British keep him around? After all, the Balfour Declaration, enshrined in international law by the terms of the mandate, required Britain to facilitate the development of a national Jewish home in Palestine. As always with any modern empire nation, the answer was oil. In order to quite literally fuel their empire, the British needed to keep the Arabs on their side. By 1929 and 1930, Haj Amin al-Husseini had emerged

as a charismatic Arab leader with international influence, and his family were a wedge against the other powerful Arab clans of Jerusalem. But there's another reason. The British were also worried about India, their most important colony and the home of the largest Muslim community on the planet. By 1929, al-Husseini had effectively succeeded in Islamizing the conflict by spreading the big lie about al-Aqsa Mosque, and the British needed to keep their Muslim colonial subjects in line. What was the position of the Zionists in Palestine? On the one hand, there was a lot of anxiety among the Arabs about this wave of immigration and the open plans to turn this former Ottoman colony into a Jewish state. At the same time, many of those wealthy Jerusalem

families were also happy to quietly sell land to the Zionists at inflated prices. Men like David Ben-Gurion, who would go on to become Israel's George Washington and its first prime minister, were optimistic that Israel could live peacefully and thrive in the region. They argued that a Jewish state would revive a dormant economy and create jobs. And one cannot help but wonder whether there may have been an alternative, less bloody history to this conflict if Herbert Samuel had anointed another moderate Palestinian leader more keen to compromise. Instead, he chose al-Husseini to lead the Palestinians, and we are still living with the reverberations of that choice to this day. One reverberation is the rise of political Islam in the Palestinian nationalist movement.

The first real Islamist in Palestine was a Syrian Muslim cleric called Izzedine al-Qasim. He was a radical who delivered his sermons with a pistol or a sword holstered on his belt. Qasim was more extreme than al-Husseini. While al-Husseini played a double game, sucking up to the British, pretending to be a force for stability, while stoking war and hatred in his sermons and propaganda, Qasim hid his revolutionary intentions from no one. He believed in armed resistance, full stop. Over time, Qasim's speeches became more and more violent into the 30s until he declared jihad in 1935. The British were alarmed and they hunted

him down to a forest near the city of Jenin. Qasim refused to be taken alive and he died a martyr. And he really becomes the first kind of, it's like an hour long gun battle. It's very dramatic, but he's killed. And he really becomes the first kind of martyr icon in the Palestinian pantheon, if you like. His death was eulogized throughout the Arab world. In one of the largest Arabic newspapers, Egypt's Al-Ram, quote, I heard you preaching from up in the pulpit, summoning the sword. Through your death, you are more eloquent than you ever were in life. End quote.

His face is on the cover of all the Arab papers, and Ben-Gurion recognizes the significance of his death immediately, and he writes in his diary, finally the Arabs have found a man who's willing to give his life for an idea or an ideal, and he predicted that dozens or hundreds or thousands would follow in his wake. And indeed, that's what happened. Izzedine al-Qassim became a hero of Palestinian nationalism. His death was the spark that lit a fire known as the Arab Revolt or Arab Uprising from 1936 to 1939.

And the military wing of Hamas that led the massacre of October 7th in 2023, you guessed it. They are called the Qasim Brigades, named after Izzedine al-Qasim. Now, al-Husseini, sly as always, may never have been as dynamic as Qasim, but he was smart enough to wrap himself in the memory of this icon.

He placed himself as the successor of Qasim's intifada between 1936 and 1939. al-Husseini got bolder and bolder, openly calling for a general strike in the spring of 1936. He then formed an Arab higher committee that encouraged violence against Jews. In April 1936 alone, Arabs killed 16 Jews in just Jaffa. Jewish partisans, of course, responded. The Irgun, a Jewish underground militia, led reprisal attacks in this period as well, throwing grenades into cafes and setting off bombs in Arab areas. al-Husseini's mask came off completely on May 14, 1936, after two Jews in Jerusalem's Jewish quarter were murdered. In reaction, al-Husseini declared in one of his sermons,

the Jews are trying to expel us from the country, murdering our sons and burning our houses. At this point, the British are quaking. They are losing control of Mandate Palestine. In response, they decided to study the Arab riots under the leadership of the British politician, Lord William Peel. He ends up proposing the first two-state solution. This is in 1937. He offers the Jewish community far less than they would be offered even 10 years later in a UN partition plan, but nonetheless the Jewish leaders accepted it. Privately, a few prominent Palestinian Arab leaders

were also warm to this idea. But under al-Husseini's influence, Arab support for the proposition was quickly dashed, as Oren Kessler explains. Obviously, history is complex. It rarely hinges entirely on one individual, but sometimes it does. As soon as Haj Amin registered his rejection of this plan,

everyone else kind of forgot that they had ever supported it. Haj Amin al-Husseini made his position clear. No more Jews should be allowed to come to Palestine, no Arabs should sell them land, and the British should leave and declare an independent Palestinian state. From here, al-Husseini's story gets even darker, leading to a four-year stay in Berlin. Al-Husseini's collaboration with the force to fight both the Jews and the British, while also beginning the organized murder of rival Palestinian factions. Here's how Simon Sabag Montefiore describes al-Husseini's new strategy in his magnificent biography of Jerusalem. Over his favorite meal of lentil soup, the mufti, always accompanied by his Sudanese bodyguards

descended from the haram's traditional watchmen, behaved like a mafia boss as he ordered assassinations that, in two years of fratricide, wiped out many of his most decent and moderate compatriots. End quote. Some of al-Husseini's ordered hits were mob-like. People who raised doubts about al-Husseini, like Rageb Nashashibi, paid for it when his villa was riddled with machine gun bullets. Al-Husseini issued death warrants against his Palestinian rivals in a premonition of the bloody wars in 2007 and 2008 between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority,

where Hamas infamously threw rivals off roofs. This was all too much for the British, and in 1937 the empire finally lost its patience, issuing a warrant for al-Husseini's arrest. Suspecting that the higher committee had incited Arab leaders to start a holy war against the British government, police swooped on the secret headquarters of assassins and rebels. Many arrests were made.

The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, head of the Muslim Supreme Council, was deprived of office. He fled to the Temple Mount, where he knew the British would not dare send their soldiers. In the dead of night, he rappelled down the hill to a waiting police car. He was disguised as a Bedouin farmer and made his way to the port of Jaffa, where he boarded a steamer to Beirut. Even in his absence, the Arab revolt in Palestine would continue for another two years. Meanwhile in Europe, the Nazis rose and war beckoned. Al-Husseini had made contact with Nazi diplomats in the early 1930s.

He was a fan. After all, they shared two enemies, the British Empire and Jews. Now in exile, al-Husseini was ready to join Team Hitler. He made his way to Baghdad and participated in an uprising supported by the Nazis against the British. It failed, and by 1941, al-Husseini was on the run again. He traveled to Rome, where he would meet with Benito Mussolini, and then to Berlin, where he would at last meet Hitler himself. When he came to Berlin, he was treated as a very welcome guest. There was an entourage, there was a house, there was a staff, there was funding. This is historian Jeffrey Hirth, the author of Nazi Propaganda

for the Arab World. He was paid a handsome salary, you could say, to reach hundreds of thousands of people on the radio and in print in German and in Arabic. So the Nazis helped to make Hajar bin al-Husseini from a storied figure of British Mandate Palestine to a world-famous figure. He was not an obscure figure in the 1940s. He was in the major papers all over the world. The Nazis offered that to him. What he offered to the Nazis was the ability to spread their views in Arabic in a way that only an effective politician could.

To get a flavor of al-Husseini's propaganda, listen to his words in a speech he delivered in November 1941 on Nazi radio. Today, the Arab people has at its side the most powerful enemies of its own enemy. In this war, the Arabs are not neutral. They cannot be neutral for the reasons I have already given and for the interest which they have in the result of this war. If, God forbid, England should be victorious, the Jews would dominate the world. England and her allies would deny the Arabs any freedom and independence, would strike the Arab fatherland to its heart, and would tear away parts of it to form a Jewish

country whose ambition would not be limited to Palestine, but would extend to other Arab countries. But if, on the contrary, England loses and its allies are defeated, the Jewish question, which for us constitutes the greatest danger, would be finally resolved. All threats against the Arab countries would disappear, millions of Arabs would be freed, and many millions of Muslims in Asia and Africa would be saved. Al-Husseini was not just a propagandist for the Nazis. He relentlessly lobbied allied and Axis governments alike to prevent Jews from leaving Europe so they could be rounded up and put into Hitler's ovens. This was particularly pernicious in light of British policy issued

by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, known as the White Paper of 1939, in response to the Arab revolt. The new policy greatly restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine. On the eve of the final solution, Jews were trapped with nowhere to go. Perversely, this reality made an effective case for a Jewish state, as it abetted the Holocaust. After the Allies defeated the Nazis in World War II, al-Husseini was captured by the French. Both the British and the U.S. governments wanted him in custody so he could be tried, but the French had other ideas. The French foreign ministry concluded that in order to enhance

French influence in Lebanon and in North Africa after the Second World War, that it would be a good idea to get on the good side of Hajjah Manal Husseini. Again, historian Jeffrey Herff. That meant not extraditing him to Britain, where the British wanted to put him on trial or put him on some island away from the Middle East, or certainly not to Nuremberg or to any war crimes trial in Yugoslavia. If there had been such a trial, then all of this evidence that the Allies had about him and his public statements would have been brought to trial, and it would have been more difficult, not impossible, but more difficult for

him to restart his career as he did in 1946. Hashem bin al-Husseini cheated the hangman and returned to Cairo, where he still acted like the leader of the Palestinians, but by this point, he was like a king without a country. He remained the ostensible head of the Arab Higher Institute, a body that was supposed to represent Palestinian affairs within the Arab League. The organization formed in Cairo in 1945 with six of its Arab neighbors, but as he was barred from returning to British-mandated Palestine, he devoted his efforts to persuading the other newly independent Arab states to recognize his authority over a yet-to-be-realized Palestine. Exiled in Cairo, al-Husseini tried his best to stay relevant. In 1947, he made it known that he rejected a second two-state solution, this time offered by the United Nations. Saudi Arabia? No. Soviet Union? Yes. United Kingdom? Abstain. United States? Yes. The resolution of the duck committee for Palestine

was adopted by 33 votes searching against 10 abstinctions. The Jewish people at once began to celebrate the United Nations decision. If they hadn't got all they wanted, they had at least gained the verdict for the setting up of a new Jewish state and their rejoicing was obviously a spontaneous affair. Such was the immediate Jewish reaction in Jerusalem and it was the same in Tel Aviv and elsewhere.

The Arab reaction was to follow. Two days later, this was the typical scene. Arabs advancing on the center of Jerusalem at the beginning of a three-day strike and an orgy of wrecking, looting, and bloodshed. Isolated police were more or less powerless to deal with the riot, which beginning as a demonstration, quickly led to the burning of Jewish shops and the general destruction of Jewish property. As the situation in Mandate Palestine devolved into civil war, he lobbied for his cousin,

Abd al-Qadar al-Husseini, to command a Palestinian fighting force for the coming war. It was a war that they lost. The Israelis would come to call it the War of Independence. The Palestinians remember it as the Nachba, the catastrophe. To his last day, al-Husseini blamed the other Arab leaders for failing to arm and fund them. But he could have blamed himself. His holy war army was impossibly corrupt, extorting innocent Palestinians and lacking in leadership. Not that al-Husseini would have known, as he never once set foot inside of Palestinians lost the war in 1948, and some 700,000 Palestinians were driven from or left their homes, creating the modern refugee crisis that persists to this day. But his failure to even show up to the war did not look good.

For a brief period, the Egyptians tried to make him the leader of a smaller Palestine based in Gaza, but the locals hated him. Haj Amin al-Husseini, the now not-so-grand Mufti of Jerusalem, would spend the rest of his years with his reputation in tatters. He died in Beirut in 1974 from a heart attack. While al-Husseini's legacy is today forgotten by most Palestinians, his template of leadership remains. Just read the call to genocide in Hamas's 1988 charter with its echoes of Nazi demonology of Jews. Quote, the enemies have been scheming for a long time and have accumulated huge and influential material wealth. With their money, they took control of the world media. With their

money, they stirred revolutions in various parts of the globe. They stood behind the French Revolution, the Communist Revolution, and most of the revolutions we hear about. With their money, they formed secret organizations such as the Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, and the Lions, which are spreading around the world in order to destroy the societies and carry out Zionist interests. They stood behind World War I and formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains. There is no war going on anywhere without them having their finger in it. End quote. We see it in the frenzied celebrations of murdered, mutilated Jews. That too has been a theme of Palestinian rejectionism, and it extends far beyond the

riots we discussed today in the period from 1920 to 1939. Jump ahead to 2000 and the start of the Second Intifada. Recall the infamous picture of the Palestinian teenager who posed in the start of the Second Intifada, recall the infamous picture of the Palestinian teenager who posed in the window of a Ramallah police station, his raised hands soaked in the blood of two lynched Israeli reservists, who he had just murdered and mutilated, as the crowd below him cheered and shouted, Allahu Akbar, God is great. Consider the gruesome murders at the Munich Olympics in 1972. The Palestinian terrorist group Black September mutilated the body of Israeli weightlifter Yosef Romano and displayed it on the ground floor of an apartment in the Olympic Village. Consider the desecrated body

of Shani Loke, dragged by her hair through the streets of Gaza on October 7th, 2023. And we most of all see al-Husseini's template in the denial of any Jewish connection to Jerusalem. Just listen to Mahmoud Abbas, the aged autocrat who sits atop the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank today, who channeled al-Husseini in a 2015 speech, The Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre are ours. They are all ours, and they have no right to defile them with their filthy feet. Six weeks before October 7th, Abbas, who wrote his graduate school thesis in the Soviet Union

on alleged Zionist collusion with the Third Reich, delivered a speech which claimed European Jews had no lineage to the Hebrews of the Bible, and asserted that Hitler killed Jews not because of their religion or ethnicity, but because of their social status. Or consider how the leader before Mahmoud Abbas, Yasser Arafat, infamously told President Clinton at the Camp David talks in 2000 that there was never any evidence a Jewish temple was erected at the site of the two mosques atop the mountain. The vicious uprising that began after Arafat rejected Israel's peace offers at Camp David, the Second Intifada, was called by the Palestinians Al-Aqsa Intifada, and the

organization that recruited and deployed suicide bombers to Israeli schools, markets, and synagogues was called Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. Al-Husseini could not have said it better. For generations, this lie about Al-Aqsa has poisoned millions of minds. Jewish sovereignty over Israel has not destroyed Al-Aqsa. Far from it. Under Jewish sovereignty, the two mosques on the Temple Mount remain open for Muslims to pray.

But that doesn't matter. Because at its root, the Al-Aqsa lie is not about Islam or even a mosque. Rather, it's a rejection of any Jewish connection to Jerusalem. It is a rejection of any Jewish state at all. There's no middle ground. Their liberation of Palestine demands the annihilation of Israel. And this strategy has failed for a century. Just ask Hashem Safiuddin,

the hollering Hezbollah cleric who delivered that sermon on October 8th. The Israelis killed him this month, just as he was about to fill the shoes vacated by Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the terror army who Israel also killed just a week before. Or consider the fate of Hamas, the authors of the October 7 massacre. Its ostensible leader, Yawah Singwar, is the only one left from his organization's senior leadership. He spends his days crouching in tunnels, surrounded by Israeli hostages. What has all of this accomplished for the Palestinian people? After 100 years, they remain stateless, ruled by corrupt autocrats who dream of demolishing a thriving democracy

instead of building a state of their own. Will this be the model for the next 100 years? Or will Palestinian leaders finally reject the legacy of the disgraced Grand Mufti that set them on a path of misery, loss, and jihad? Thanks for listening. I'm Eli Lake. If you liked this episode, if you learned something, if you disagreed with something, or if it simply sparked a new understanding of our present moment, please share it with your friends and family and use it to have a conversation of your own. And if you want to support Honestly, there's just one way to do that. Go to thefreepressatthefp.com and become a subscriber today.

See you next time.