Martin Gilbert

On 28 September 1944 Churchill announced in the House of Commons that a Jewish Brigade Group would be set up, to be trained and armed by Britain as a front-line military unit. Five days later, on October 3, the Mufti of Jerusalem, who was then in Berlin, wrote to the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, proposing the establishment of ‘an Arab-Islamic army in Germany’. The German government, Haj Amin added, ‘should declare its readiness to train and arm such an army. Thus it would level a severe blow against the British plan and increase the number of fighters for a greater Germany.’

The Mufti was convinced that the setting up of an Arab army under German auspices ‘would have the most favourable repercussions in the Arab-Islamic countries’ and proposed November 2, the anniversary of ‘the infamous Balfour Declaration’, as the date of the public announcement. A senior SS officer had already reported to Himmler that in a conversation on September 28 the Mufti ‘noted happily that the day is nearing when he will head an army to conquer Palestine’. But no such announcement was made, and the Mufti’s army remained a figment of his own anti-Zionist imagination. The Mufti himself remained in Berlin, supervising Nazi propaganda broadcasts to the Middle East, and organizing parachute drops in British-controlled areas. A month after the Mufti’s letter to Himmler, four Arab parachutists were dropped into northern Iraq. Their aim was to carry out sabotage work against British oil installations. But the local village headman informed the police and the saboteurs were caught.

Ben-Gurion will always be remembered in Israel as the man who transformed a factional, disparate people into a nation, through his insistence on mamlachtiyut—the primacy of sovereign institutions. These included (and still include) the independence of the courts of law, the unity of the Israel Defence Forces, and the primacy of the Knesset and other institutions of Israeli democracy. For having done this, he was rightly called the Father of the Nation. Those who, in most recent years, have belittled the courts of law and mocked at the institutions of statehood when they fail to serve a sectional or political purpose, endanger the structure Ben-Gurion so tenaciously created and sustained.