The Army of the Holy War

When the United Nations General Assembly voted on 29 November 1947 to partition Palestine, the Arab majority of the country had no army, no arms industry, no conscription, no general staff, and no government. It had been disarmed and its leadership deported ten years earlier, at the end of the 1936–39 revolt. Against it stood the Haganah, with a standing structure, a command, a domestic arms programme and tens of thousands of members with wartime training, alongside the Irgun and Lehi. What the Palestinians assembled in the six months between the partition vote and the declaration of the State of Israel was the Army of the Holy War — jaysh al-jihad al-muqaddas — a force of volunteers organised village by village, with rifles bought where they could be bought and no reliable resupply.

Its name and its core went back to 1935, when Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni founded an organisation of that name in the run-up to the revolt. Abd al-Qadir was the son of Musa Kazim al-Husayni, who had been mayor of Jerusalem and president of the Arab Executive; he was born in Jerusalem in 1907, took a degree in chemistry at the American University in Cairo in 1932, and fought through the revolt, in which he was badly wounded at Bayt Iksa in 1938 and afterwards exiled. He returned clandestinely to Palestine in 1947 and took command of the central sector — Jerusalem and its hill villages — while Hasan Salama commanded the Lydda–Ramle sector to the west. Estimates of the force’s strength vary widely and none is firm; the more careful accounts place the fighters under arms in the low thousands, with far larger numbers of villagers mobilised locally for the defence of their own ground and dispersing afterwards.

Its one strategic idea was correct: the road. Jewish Jerusalem, with about a sixth of the Yishuv’s population, depended on a single highway climbing from the coastal plain through a defile at Bab al-Wad and past the villages of al-Qastal, Qaluniyya and Deir Yassin. Through February and March 1948 Abd al-Qadir’s men cut that road repeatedly, ambushing the armoured convoys, and by the end of March Jerusalem was effectively besieged. It was the one clear Palestinian military success of the war — and it triggered Operation Nachshon, the first Haganah operation to seize and hold Arab territory rather than defend Jewish settlement, launched at the beginning of April with a brigade-sized force and the newly landed rifles of the Czech arms deal.

Abd al-Qadir went to Damascus to demand weapons from the Arab League’s military committee, and was refused. He returned to the hills and on the night of 7–8 April counter-attacked al-Qastal, the hilltop village commanding the road that had fallen days earlier. He was killed at dawn on 8 April 1948, reportedly walking up to a house on the summit he believed his own men still held. His body was recovered and carried to Jerusalem, where an immense funeral was held at al-Aqsa on 9 April. That same morning, with the Jerusalem front’s commander in his grave and the fighters who might have defended the villages standing at his funeral, Irgun and Lehi units entered Deir Yassin and killed something over a hundred of its inhabitants, an event whose reporting accelerated flight across the country. Hasan Salama was killed at Ras al-Ayn on 2 June. The Army of the Holy War, deprived of both its commanders, was absorbed or dissolved; from 1949 the Egyptian and Jordanian authorities suppressed what remained of independent Palestinian formations.

It is remembered less as an army than as an argument. The men who founded Fatah a decade later took two lessons from 1948 and repeated them for thirty years: that a people without its own organised force will be defended by no one, and that the Arab states are not that force. Abd al-Qadir’s son Faisal al-Husayni became the PLO’s senior figure in Jerusalem and, until his death in 2001, the most visible advocate of a negotiated Palestinian state — an inheritance that runs in a single family from the road to al-Qastal to Orient House.

Sources

• Al-Jihad al-Muqaddas — Wikipedia
• Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni — Wikipedia
• Battle of al-Qastal — Wikipedia
• Deir Yassin massacre — Wikipedia
• 1947–1948 civil war in Mandatory Palestine — Wikipedia