The Grand Mufti: Haj Amin al-Hussaini, Founder of the Palestinian National Movement (review)

170 SHOFAR Spring 1996 Vol. 14, No.3 Land of Paradoxes: Interest Politics in Israel, by Yael Yishai. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. 413 pp. $54.50 (c); $17.95 (p). This is a study of the involvement of interest groups in Israeli politics. The author is a talented political scientist on the faculty ofHaifa University. She approaches the subject in a broad context, drawing comparisons between Israel and a number of western industrial democracies as well as such developing countries as Turkey and India. The heart of her research was a set of questionnaires submitted to 277 interest groups, ofwhich 162 (or 58.5%) were completed and returned. The questionnaires were designed to elicit information regarding the nature of these organizations and their relationships with the political system, particularly the government and political parties. The book analyzes the data produced by the questionnaires, with individual chapters devoted to the existing interest group system in Israel, the relationship of these groups to the political parties and the state, the institutional organization of the groups, the nature of their efforts to influence the government, and their impact on the public policy-making process. She finds that the Israeli case does not easily fit the two general models which have dominated scholarship in this field (the corporatist and pluralist models). She suggests that perhaps Israel is an example of a third type, the elitist model, characterized by "incongruities among norms, structures, and behavior." Professor Yishai has produced a very interesting and insightful, as well as densely packed, study. Frank Tachau Department of Political Science University of Illinois at Chicago The Grand Mufti: Haj Amin al-Hussaini, Founder of the Palestinian National Movement, by Zvi Elpeleg. London: Frank Cass, 1993. 239 pp. $45.00 (c); $22.50 (P). On the blurb of his biography of Haj Amin al-Hussaini, Zvi Elpeleg laments that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem has not yet received his deserved place in Arab historiography: "As I see it, he is the Weizmann, the Ben-Gurion, even the Herzl, of the Palestinian national movement." There could be no higher praise by an Israeli to the archenemy of Jewish national rebirth in its ancestral homeland, and it is to Elpeleg's credit that his is a remarkably balanced and impartial biography. Regretta- Book Reviews 171 bly, this upbeat judgment does not square with the actual course of the Mufti's life-as presented by Elpeleg himself. Haj Amin was neither a Weizmann, nor a Ben-Gurion, nor a Herzl; rather, he was a Mussolini, or even a Hitler, whipping up extremist sentiments among his compatriots to unprecedented heights only to bring them down with a bang. The Realpolitik of the three Zionist leaders won their people national independence; the Mufti's "xenophobic and uncompromising" brand of nationalism, to borrow John Marlowe's term, condemned his people to defeat and dispersal. More than any single person in Palestinian national history, Haj Amin epitomized Abba Eban's observation that "the Palestinians don't miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity." leaving aside his general choice of confrontation rather than peaceful coexistence with the Jewish national movement, preferred by some contemporary Palestinian leaders, the Mufti's first tragic blunder was to reject the recommendation of the Peel Commission to partition Mandatory Palestine lIletween Arabs and Jews (1937), with the former receiving some 80 percent of the disputed land. Moreover, in his evidence before the commission Haj Amin even rejected the right ofJews to live in an Arab state comprising the entire territory of Mandatory Palestine and suggested the forceful expulsion of this sizable community from the Holy Land (pp. 45-46). Why the Grand Mufti chose this exclusionist approach is not difficult to understand: he .simply saw no reason to divide what he perceived as Arab patrimony with a movement which he considered an alien implant in a predominantly Arab Middle East. Yet this xenophobic shortsightedness, with its corollary of denying the other the right to self-determination, put the Palestinian national movement on a destructive course from which it would start extricating itself only a generation later. As if to add insult to injury, the Mufti missed yet anot~er...