Two Arab armies, Najada and Futuwah, have been sharing the limelight of Palestine news dispatches with Hagana, central Jewish resistance movement, and the two Jewish dissident groups, Irgun Zvai Leumi and the Stern group.
Although their leaders swaggeringly call them “armies,” Najada and Futuwah are listed with the government as boy scout organizations. These “boy scouts,” ranging in age from the early twenties to the middle forties, and variously outfitted in green shirts of an earlier period and khaki from United States surplus stores, are now a frequent sight in Jaffa, Nablus, Tulkarm, Jenin, and Jerusalem’s Old City. Barnstorming in clusters, they distribute the Mufti’s picture for posting on store-fronts, raid Arab shops carrying Jewish merchandise, and stop buses rumbling in from Jewish neighborhoods to search their passengers in the manner of customs officials, and within sight of British and Arab policemen, for “contraband” Jewish merchandise. In a country whose emergency regulations forbid the wearing or possession of uniforms and even parts of uniforms, and prescribe imprisonment for those who take part in drills of any kind, Najada and Futuwah’s public military posturings, including parades in city squares, have aroused comment, and speculation as to government policy. Last month Palestine police raided a unit of seventy Najadites on their return from Egypt, found illegal arms in their possession, but detained only three of the group.
According to the most current of many opinions, government sufferance of the Arab armies is to be explained by the fact that their presence bolsters Britain’s claim that she is a harassed arbitrator between two contumacious rivals. A harsher opinion accuses the government of actual complicity in the formation of Najada and Futuwah. The freedom enjoyed by the armies, the machine-gun training given Arab police officers but withheld from Jews, and an alleged government invitation to an Arab extremist, Jacov Ghoussein, to organize Arab “units” to fight Jewish “terror” are cited in support of this accusation. The eagerness of British intelligence officers to be in a position to control the Arab “army” from the inside, as well as the British desire to keep the Jews subdued and to have a native force ready in the event of war with the Soviets, is listed as the motive for Britain’s complicity.
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By The end of last summer, Arab estimates set the combined strength of their two armies at 25,000, as against a combined Jewish armed strength of 80,000 (70,000 in Hagana, and a maximum of 10,000 in Irgun Zvai Leumi and the Stern group). But the Jews estimated the total Arab strength at no more than 5,000 to 6,000—conceding, however, that this figure is likely to more than double by the end of the year. In reconciling these conflicting estimates, one should take into account the universally admitted inaccuracy of Arab statistics and the fact that the Jews’ estimate was made for their own use and not for publicity purposes: to over- or under-assess Arab strength might harm the Jews themselves. They arrived at their figures by estimating each of the Arab armies to number 3,000, and then deducting 1,000 from the total for those vacillating between Najada and Futuwah and temporarily belonging to both.
At loggerheads all last summer and this winter, Futuwah and Najada are now reported by their leaders for the nth time to have made peace and put themselves under the Arab Higher Executive. But their relations are still strained—marked by frequent clashes and disturbed by a jealousy like that between the Storm Troopers and the SS in the Nazi movement.
Najada’s ranks are filled with shepherds, seasonal laborers, and Lumpen recruited from the villages, and day laborers, pimps, and plug-uglies from the Jaffa waterfront. Futuwah’s membership is composed, primarily, of scions of the urban middle class, sons of shopkeepers, governmental officials, and professional men, with a comforting sprinkling of city toughs. Should the Arab armies ever go into action, Najada is likely to do the actual fighting, with Futuwah’s largely Jerusalemite membership taking care of such administrative details as imposing military “taxes” on well-to-do city Arabs. This at least has been the nature of the city Arab’s participation, from the lower middle class upward, in past disturbances. Acting as instigator, director, and political brain, he left the fighting to the villager—not, however, to the fellah, who is wary of political involvements, but to the dispossessed Lumpen Arab living on the fringes of village society, and to the habitual criminal who joined the “rebel” forces to find sanctuary.
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Najada began its recruiting in 1945, at the time of the repatriation of Jamal Husseini, the Mufti’s nephew and heir-apparent, and it registered itself with the government in February 1946. By last March, residents of Jerusalem, strolling on the city’s outskirts in the evenings, could hear rifle practice and see rockets flaring in the wadis between the hills and around Ramleh, “three peaks away” from the High Commissioner’s residence. Hagana found out soon enough that this was Najada drilling.
Najada’s “commander,” Mohammed Numr Hawari, an ambitious Jaffa lawyer, is believed to be fronting for a triumvirate that allegedly includes Jacov Effendi Ghoussein and Izzat Darwuza, who still operates from “exile” in Syria.
Ghoussein, forty years old, and weighing 224 pounds, is the insolvent proprietor of large orange groves in the Nes Tziona area, was founder and president of the now defunct Arab Youth Congress, and is alleged to have been an organizer of the 1936-1939 disturbances in Jaffa. He is reported to have turned down an invitation from the Palestine government in 1944 to organize Arab military units to fight Jewish terrorists, but is believed to have reconsidered since.
Izzat Darwuza, forty-five-year-old nephew of the Mufti, has had an even more checkered career. He is accused of having used the funds of the Waqf (Moslem religious foundation), when he was its director in 1936, to finance the anti-Jewish disturbances. Banished from Palestine in 1937, he showed up in Damascus, where he took charge of the “central command” of the Palestine “rebellion” and its fund-raising. In 1938 he was accused by leaders of the rebel units of defalcating with funds he had collected in their name. In June 1939 the French authorities in Syria arrested him on suspicion of acting as the Mufti’s liaison man with the Axis.
Najada’s “command” is made up of “younger men” itching with impatience to seize the reins of Arab leadership in Palestine, and they had hoped in the beginning to keep the organization “non-partisan”—that is, independent of the “old men” of the Mufti’s Palestine Arab party. This party regards all Arab activity not directed by the Husseinis as “irridentist” and to be brought arbitrarily under its own control. For instance, Ghoussein’s efforts in the past to keep his Arab Youth Congress independent only resulted in the latter’s disintegration under pressure from the Husseini.
A similar end seemed fated for Najada when Mohammed Hawari, the Jaffa lawyer who is Najada’s front, refused to be cajoled by Jamal Husseini into placing his organization under the clan’s control. Rumors soon began to spread about Hawari’s “Communist” connections and financial speculations, and Futuwah, a “boy scout” organization founded by the Mufti in 1936 but which collapsed soon after, was revived to compete with Najada in the summer of 1946 under the command of Kamil Ariqat, a former Palestine police officer, still alleged to be a frequent visitor at the headquarters of the CID (Criminal Investigation Department).
Clashes between Futuwah’s “patriots” and Najada’s “Communists” claimed a major share of the attention of Arab politicians all last summer. Faced with a choice between seeing his organization disintegrate or delivering it to Jamal Husseini, Hawari decided on the latter. To save face, he is reported to have put Najada under the orders of the Arab Higher Executive, which though ostensibly non-partisan, is dominated by the Husseinis. It is far from unlikely that Hawari’s obstinacy in the beginning was inspired in part by the desire to force a higher bid from Jamal Husseini—or even that Izzat Darwuza double-crossed his two colleagues on the Najada triumvirate.
Emil Ghoury, graduate of the University of Cincinnati, class of 1933, a pre-war envoy of the Mufti’s to the United States and Britain, and present secretary of the Mufti’s Palestine Arab party, has been slated to become the real boss or “political commissar” of the Arab armies. He was liaison officer between this party and Futuwah before the reported unification of the two forces. But according to the most recent reports, the Nablus branch of Najada, financed by Arab political opponents of the Husseinites who had hoped that the organization would protect them against Husseini terror, has renounced Hawari and is opposed to the merger.
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What the Arabs, given to boasting, have significantly failed to boast of are their well-stocked arsenals. The Bedouin’s centuries-old need of firearms for raiding fellaheen villages and robbing travelers, the fellah’s need of arms for protection, and the general Arab practice of feuds and belligerent ostentation have caused them immemorially to collect weapons of all kinds on a large scale. The arms they stored up during World War I came in handy in the 1920 riots, the 1929 riots, and the 1936-1939 disturbances. And it wasn’t until late in 1939 that their supplies petered out. By assiduous application, they restored their replenished stocks during the World War II by stealing, purchasing, and bartering from soldiers. Unplanned and unorganized, these acquisitions were made more or less as a matter of hobby and were scattered throughout the countryside.
As early as 1944, Hagana intelligence estimates put the total of Arab arms acquisitions at vaguely “scores of thousands of rifles and guns, and several million rounds of ammunition.” Even then, a large portion of these arms were dispersed in private homes in the Jenin-Nablus-Tulkarm vicinity, known as the “vicious triangle,” for it was from there that the Mufti recruited most of his forces for the 1936 disturbances. Two and a half years have passed since Hagana made its estimate, during which arms-running has been incessant. Since the winter of this year, the inner markets of Nablus and the former German Templar colony of Wilhelmina have been used virtually as Vickers branch stores, with military trucks unloading enormous shipments of contraband arms there—a fact confirmed most recently by the Associated Press. There has been almost incessant arms-running across the Egyptian border in recent months. The Mufti is said to be heading the “purchasing commission,” assisted by the religiously fanatic Moslem Brotherhood and by the fascist Green Shirts, whose chief, Ahmed Hussein, is now in the United States. Thus, although Najada and Fatuwah units are reportedly still drilling with sticks, they apparently will not lack weapons when Der Tag comes.
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Even so, the recruiting and arming of several thousand persons does not of itself bring an army into being, at least not one that could match the quarter century’s record of Hagana and the decade’s training and experience of Irgun Zvai Leumi and the Stern group. The Arabs have a hereditary familiarity with firearms, but it is mainly leadership, military planning, and morale that make a real army.
Morale was very low among the Arab units in 1936-1939, and there is little reason to believe that this morale is any higher now, considering that the same personalities still control Arab politics today.
Students of Arab affairs feel that had the British intelligence exploited the dissension within these units, the Arab troubles of 1936-39 might have been quelled within a few months. This claim is based on an examination of the correspondence between the Mufti’s central committee and Arab zone-commanders that the British seized. Duplicates of the seized letters “strayed” into the hands of Hagana, which circulated their texts in an illegal little Hebrew book, Documents and Portraits, for the instruction of its officers. Privately, British intelligence officers do not deny the authenticity of this material, which shows that both “officers” and “privates” in the Arab units were mercenaries first and last. The Mufti’s central committee, operating first from Jerusalem and then Damascus, permitted Arab unit-commanders to meet their expenses by supplementing the committee’s own remittances with “taxes” on villages, cities, and individuals in the areas where their units operated.
This permission was exploited in the most outrageous fashion. Thus sixty thousand pounds was extracted from Jaffa’s Arabs instead of ten thousand pounds originally fixed. “Military police” assigned by the Arab central committee to bar the zone commander from the city proceeded to do on their own hook what they had been sent to prevent the commander from doing. Zone commanders from backwoods districts where the pickings were meager extended their operations to big-city districts even where these had been assigned to other zone-commanders and had already been thoroughly “taxed.”
This interloping resulted in gang warfare of the kind we had here in America in the days of prohibition. City merchants and shopkeepers, the first to hail the Arab “revolt,” were also the first to cry out under its “taxation” their chorus was swelled by civil servants who, though willing to serve as stool-pigeons, intelligence officers, and finger-men for the terrorists, balked at going out on strike in sympathy with the Jehad—for this might mean loss of salary and possible loss of jobs. And, finally, resistance came from the villagers, who had at first contributed food generously to the “armies.” As the revolt extended into months and years, the Arab bands began to specify the type, quantity, and quality of the “gifts” they were to be given, and they even began to engage in free-lance murders, killing for a price persons who had in no way obstructed the “revolt.” The villagers, refusing to meet tax payments, were ripe for collaboration with the authorities, but for some reason or other the authorities took little advantage of this opportunity. Captain Orde Win-gate (later killed in Burma while serving as a general against the Japanese), who did take advantage of it, was removed.
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As For the commanders themselves of the Arab units, they had for the most part already seen years of service in various prisons for crimes entirely unrelated to politics. The only son of a well-to-do family to head a unit fighting in the field was Abed el-Kader, a black sheep of the Husseini family, who finally had to flee the country because of a long list of crimes committed against villagers in the vicinity where he operated. His crimes included the kidnaping of young village boys for the orgies with which he rewarded his “brigade.” He has not been heard of since his flight.
Nor did scandal fail to touch even Fawsi el-Qauqji, the only professional soldier in the Mufti’s service during 1936-1939; for several months in 1936 he was the hero of legends spun with such Levantine dexterity and finesse by Palestine’s Arabs that even the British and the Jews were taken in. A rebel and exile from French-controlled Syria and a leading instructor in the Baghdad Military Academy, Fawsi el-Qauqji arrived in Palestine in August 1936 and immediately proclaimed himself “Commander-in-Chief of the Rebel Army.” Retiring on October 20 after only two months’ service, this Arab George Washington was said by that time to have deposited in Lebanese banks £15,000 ($75,000 at the pre-war rate of exchange) skimmed from the funds assigned to him by the Mufti’s central committee.
He went to Iraq at the time of Rashid el-Gailani’s abortive pro-Axis putsch and fled subsequently to Berlin. There he was captured by the British and then, reportedly, kidnaped from them by the Russians. He emerged in Cairo last month, having flown there from Paris. En route he touched Lydda, Palestine, from where he was permitted to proceed to Egypt despite the fact that he is “wanted” by the Palestine police.
Now, as in the past, Palestine’s Arabs will have to rely for military training on their own native officers, drafting them from the Palestine police, discharged soldiers, and brigands. The police officers have limited training, while Arabs with real military experience are few; none saw actual combat in the recent war, and nearly half of the eight thousand Palestine Arabs who volunteered for military service deserted after several months in uniform.
In 1936-1939, the Arabs received some training from German officers at the Wilhelmina and Sarona Templar colonies. One of these officers, Adolf Eichmann, left Palestine early in 1939 to become Heinrich Himmler’s technical adviser in the extermination of European Jewry. The Germans, however, may be replaced by officers and ex-officers of the Polish forces now in Palestine. Eshnab, a clandestine Hagana publication, reported early in April that the Arabs had made an offer to the Poles, but there has been no further news of this. (Poles have been involved in numerous anti-Jewish incidents in Palestine.) Eshnab recently reported that the Mufti’s aides obtained by means of bribes the illicit release of scores of German officers from internment camps in the Suez vicinity, and have “loaned” some of them to dissident armed organizations in the Arab lands, but have smuggled most of them into Palestine.
The Arab units in the 1936 disturbances included innumerable Hauranites who had drifted over from impoverished Syria for work in Palestine. Alone in a foreign country and away from their families, they gravitated, after their jobs gave out, to the outlaw bands. Iraqi recruited for work on military projects during the war years—and now, incidentally, depressing the wage level of the Palestine Arabs—are certain to replace the Hauranites of 1936. But these Iraqi illiterates, among the most primitive elements in the Middle East, are definitely not officer material.
Palestinian Arab legend has it that Aziz el-Masri, chief of staff of the Egyptian army until 1942—when he was seized with Allied military plans on his person as he was about to fly to a rendezvous with Rommel—will undertake the training of Palestinian Arab volunteers, that Palestinian Arabs are already receiving training in the armies of neighboring Arab countries, and that Yusuf Alkhaz, reputed by the Mufti to be a “military genius such as we never have had in Arab lands,” will head the “rebels.”
Alkhaz, son of a wealthy Jerusalem family, accompanied the Mufti on his exile through Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran to Berlin. There he studied at an officer’s school, was commissioned a major, and was put in command of a Moslem unit fighting in Yugoslavia; later in the war he parachuted into Jericho on a mission for the Nazis, but he was captured on landing, and maps, money, and German sabotage-plans were found in his possession. Alkhaz is now in prison and his future role depends entirely on British vigilance—which also goes for Aziz el-Masri.
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Palestine Arab leaders boast of the help against the Jews they expect from the member states of the Arab League. These states have intimated that their help will be considerable, but one can only gauge the value of their pledges by their past promises and performances. Iraqi support of the Palestinian Arabs in 1936-1939 was semiofficial, with the Baghdad League for the Defense of Palestine publicly raising funds, and the Iraqi army extending “leaves of absence” to officers and men willing to join Palestine’s “revolt.” Syria, on the other hand, was the “revolt’s” headquarters. Yet the aid of both countries totaled no more than one hundred volunteers and a contribution of fifteen hundred dollars in gold from Iraq, some sixty men from Syria, and thirty Druses. Nothing came from Transjordan beyond permission for illegal traffic across its borders. Admittedly, this kind of help will be considerably larger now that all Arab countries have become relatively independent, but the Palestinian Arabs would be foolish to place too much reliance on assistance from their neighbors.
As for Ibn Saud—to carry out his extravagant and much publicized threats against the Jews of Palestine, he would have to cross Transjordan. But Transjordan, and Iraq, too, are ruled by Hashemites who have never forgiven Ibn Saud for driving the Hashemite king, Hussein, out of Mecca and forcing his abdication in 1924; they have been wary of the desert king ever since.
Then too, the Mufti has acquired powerful enemies in the Arab world since his return. The leaders of the Arab League who welcomed him on his return are now wary of him, having learned of his surreptitious connections with a group plotting to replace the league of Arab states with a new Arab peoples’ league. All Arab leaders resent him as a contender to the title of spokesman for all the Arabs. They know that disturbances in Palestine would only enhance his prestige.
Palestine’s Arab leaders are reportedly plotting to throw away hundreds of Arab lives in one initial and all-out action against Jews, hoping thereby to sting the Arab states into real action in their support. Hagana contends that it could cope even with this emergency, provided only that non-Arab powers do not intervene against the Jews. The Arab pro-fascist uprising under Rashid el-Gailani in Iraq was quelled, for instance, by a mere three thousand soldiers under British command. But no matter what provocation Palestinian Arab leaders may give, full-scale military aid from the Arab states is unlikely for several obvious reasons that have nothing to do with the Jewish capacity to resist.
An all-out action would result in intervention by the United Nations, throw the entire Middle East into turmoil, and give the racial and religious minorities of the Middle East, including the Kurds and twelve million Moslems of the Shiite sect, a long-awaited opportunity to rise against the Sunnite Moslems who now rule them. Furthermore, while diplomatic turmoil over Zionism may deflect the attention of the Arab masses from the economic misery in which they live, involvement in war would leave these rulers helpless to cope with internal rebellion in Iraq, Syria, and Egypt. In Western countries, war has been the pretext for military dictatorship and the suppression of civil liberties, but in the Arab countries, where tyranny and autocracy are the rule during the time of peace, war would only weaken the hand of authority. Such being the case, any real showdown is likely to be restricted to the Arabs of Palestine alone. According to Winston Churchill’s testimony in the House of Commons several months ago, the British High Command holds that the outcome of a direct test of strength between Jews and Arabs would be a victory for the former. This view was confirmed this spring by Jamal Husseini and Ahmed Shukheiri, chief of the Arab Office in Jerusalem. Each of these gentlemen told me separately, to explain their opposition to further Jewish immigration, that “one Jew equals three Arabs in resourcefulness, skill, and ingenuity.”
Hagana leaders now feel that the “havlaga” (restraint) on which they prided themselves in 1936-1939 was a psychological and tactical error. The Arabs mistook it for cowardice. Therefore, in the event of new Arab disturbances, the Jews will no longer stay behind stockades waiting to repulse attacks, but will take the offensive against the instigators and their armed followers. Hagana’s leaders contend that the Arabs, goaded on as they are by the diversion-hungry British, would have already begun new troubles were it not for their fear of Hagana, which has acquired a solid reputation with them because of its recent resistance campaign.
Britain will naturally be the decisive factor. Some Jewish resistance leaders concede that a two-front war of defense against both the Arabs and the British would be a hopeless prospect. The ultimate victor would be Britain, who would then “solve” the Palestine problem in a most elementary and ruthless fashion by bearing down hard on both Jews and Arabs. Hagana suspects that Britain’s aim in inciting the Arabs and permitting Najada-Futuwah to arm while disarming the Jews is to narrow the margin of Jewish military superiority over the Arabs as much as possible; in this way, should a conflict occur, violent intervention and arbitration would require relatively little expense of effort on Britain’s part. Whether or not this is her true intention remains to be seen.
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