Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni

When Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni fell at al-Qastal, the Arab Higher Committee eulogized him as “a great and heroic commander who has gallantly led the battles of jihad in defense of Palestine ever since the year 1936.” He was born in Istanbul in 1908, son of Musa Kazim Pasha al-Husayni, and educated at the Rawdat al-Ma’arif school and Bishop Gobat’s School in Jerusalem before enrolling in the science faculty of the American University in Cairo to study mathematics. At his graduation ceremony in 1932 he stood up, accused the university of being a tool of imperialism, and was promptly expelled from Egypt. Back in Jerusalem he worked in the Land Settlement Office, wrote for the press, joined the Palestine Arab Party and ran its Jerusalem bureau — then resigned his post for full-time nationalist work.

With the outbreak of the Great Rebellion in April 1936 he became one of the founders of the Holy War Organization (al-Jihad al-Muqaddas) in the Jerusalem district, fighting alongside the Syrian commander Sa’id al-’As. Wounded and captured at the battle of al-Khudr near Bethlehem in October 1936, he escaped from the Jerusalem Military Hospital to Damascus; he slipped back into Palestine in 1938 as the revolt escalated and was severely wounded again at Bani Na’im that October. Pursued by the British military, he moved to Iraq, trained as a reserve officer in Baghdad, taught mathematics at the Military Academy, and took part in the April 1941 revolt of Rashid Ali al-Kailani against the British — for which he was interned, then imprisoned in the al-’Amara camp until the end of 1943. Two years as the guest of King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud followed, during which he travelled secretly to Germany and spent six weeks training in the manufacture and use of explosives and mines.

From Cairo in 1946 he organized the purchase of weapons left in the western desert battlefields of the world war and their smuggling into Palestine through al-Arish and Sidon. In December 1947, after the UN partition resolution and the Arab Higher Committee’s call to jihad, he crossed back into Palestine and reformed the Army of the Holy War under his command. Its forces fought Zionist units around Jerusalem, its settlements and its lines of communication; its explosives unit carried out major operations, the most notable the blowing up of the Jewish Agency building in Jerusalem.

At the end of March 1948 he travelled to Damascus to demand that the Arab League’s Military Committee supply him with arms equal to what the Zionist forces possessed to defend Jerusalem. He failed, and while he was there Zionist forces took al-Qastal, the strategic village commanding the Jerusalem–Jaffa road. He returned deeply disappointed, went directly to the field, and led the counter-attack that recovered the village; he was killed in the battle on 8 April 1948. Massive crowds attended his funeral, and he was buried in the vicinity of the Haram al-Sharif beside his father. His son Faisal al-Husseini later led the Palestinian national institutions in Jerusalem.

Sources

• Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question