What Happened to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al-Hussaini?
The fictional grandson of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in the book, Mystery at the Thirteen Sycamores, Mohammad al Hussaini, is a creation, but the real Grand Mufti escaped his captors in Paris in 1946 and fled to Cairo, Egypt, where he was protected by King Farouk from the warrants for his arrest from the Nuremberg War Commission and the state of Yugoslavia as a Nazi war criminal. While under Egypt's protection, he became the head of the Arab Higher Commission in 1946 which rejected the pan Arab proposal to establish a united state in Palestine.
The British, under their League of Nations and now United Nations mandate to govern Palestine, had reopened the two-state solution that had been raised in 1922 by the Balfour Declaration which was approved by the League of Nations on September 16, 1922.
On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution recommending a partition with Economic Union of Mandatory Palestine to follow the termination of the British mandate on May 15, 1948. The plan was to partition Palestine which included the West Bank, Jerusalem, and Gaza into an independent Arab state alongside an independent Jewish state.
In 1948, the Grand Mufti and the Palestinian National Council created the government structure for an all Palestine state which was not supported by the Arab League which, with the insistence of King Abdullah I of Trans Jordan, favored a joint invasion of Palestine by the Arab League nations if the Jews declared a Jewish state. Immediately a large number of Muslim Palestinians (about 700,000) fled to neighboring Arab states, especially Trans Jordan. The remaining Christian, Jewish, and Muslim citizens took measures to protect themselves for the expected conflict.
On May 14, 1948, David Ben Gurion and the Jewish People's Council declared the establishment of the state of Israel. It was immediately recognized by the United States and 30 other countries and the United Nations. The invasion by the surrounding Arab League nations was on! Trans Jordan immediately grabbed the West Bank and Jerusalem while Egypt grabbed Gaza and pushed against Israel, which beat them and forced them back into the Sinai and pushed Trans Jordan out of West Jerusalem and some parts of the West Bank. On June 11, 1948, a truce was signed by all parties and Israel became a reality. In the short war, another 350,000 Arab Palestinians fled to the surrounding Arab States. Trans Jordan annexed East Jerusalem and the West Bank they controlled and created the modern state of Jordan. The Palestinians and Israel protested the annexation, which was a part of Palestine and not Trans Jordan which had been agreed on in 1922 when Trans Jordan was created out of the original Palestine. At that time Trans Jordan had taken 77 percent of the original Palestine that existed in the Ottoman Empire before it was carved up and governed by the colonial powers after World War I.
The Grand Mufti's influence started to decline as the leader of the Palestinians until 1964 when the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) led by an Egyptian, Yasser Arafat, favored by the Muslim Brotherhood and the Arab League, began to lead the Palestinians. The Grand Mufti considered the PLO as an enemy of the Palestinian people and he died July 4, 1974, in al-Mansuriyyah, Beirut, Lebanon, at the age of 80.
In the meantime, the Six Day War in 1967 and the 1973 Yom Kippur War initiated by invading Arab forces that were defeated by Israel, produced the 1978 Jimmy Carter Camp David Peace Accord that produced a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel that recognized Israel as a legitimate nation (the only Arab country to do so). Because of this peace treaty, the Muslim Brotherhood assassinated Anwar Sadat on October 6, 1981. Thus we still have an unsettled Middle East yet to have the two state Palestinian solution mandated by the United Nations and resisted by the Arab League and Hamas, the successor of the PLO.