Arab Executive

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ARAB EXECUTIVE

: Palestinian nationalist umbrella group founded in 1920. It was formed at the third Arab Congress in Haifa with nine members and was expanded in 1928 to include forty-eight. It was primarily a conservative organization of the middle and landowning classes. Its leader, as president from 1920 to 1928 and chairman from 1928 to 1934, was Musa Kazim al-Husayni, a prominent member of a notable family and former mayor of Jerusalem. Through direct appeals to the British government and the League of Nations, the Arab Executive opposed the imposition of British rule, whose formal mandate (written by the British themselves) was founded on the provisions of the Balfour Declaration and accorded privileged status to the Zionists while denying the right to self-determination to the Palestinians (who were referred to in the Mandate only as "non-Jewish communities," although they were 90 percent of the population in 1922). It failed, and the Mandate was officially instituted in 1923. Rallying public support, the committee was more successful in opposing British plans for a legislative council with limited powers and a disproportionately small number of seats allocated to Palestinians; accepting it would have meant accepting the legitimacy of the Zionist project. The failure to prevent the imposition of the Mandate, however, or to penetrate the indifference of the policy makers in the British government, caused dissension among Palestinians, and on the Arab Executive.

In 1928 a sense of crisis grew as Zionist immigration and land purchases (often, it should be said, from members of the Arab Executive or interests with which they were associated) increased and Zionist economic power and organizations grew in strength. The Arab Executive tried to meet the problem by expanding the committee to include representatives of various factions and religious groups. Renewed discussions with British Mandatory officials, however, broke down at the time of the Western Wall disturbances in 1929. Investigations by two British commissions, the Shaw Commission and the Hope-Simpson Commission, into the causes of the violence resulted in an official report, the Passfield White Paper, which in 1930 recommended serious changes to recognize Palestinian rights and redress social and economic problems among Palestinians caused or exacerbated by Zionist activity. Private talks between the Jewish Agency and the British government increased Zionist political strength in Palestine, and the British government's basic commitment to the "Jewish National Home" as part of the Mandate ensured that these recommendations were repudiated.

This chain of events was the beginning of the radicalization of the Palestinian community's opposition to the Zionist project and of the end of its support for the caution, moderation, and deference of the committee's methods, which were those of the Ottoman-era politics in which its members had been schooled. Amid calls for strikes, boycotts, and other such actions, the Arab Executive was seen as increasingly old-fashioned and ineffectual, and it was not able to adapt to the changed conditions. Under pressure, it did sponsor a public demonstration in Haifa in October 1933, in which Musa Kazim al-Husayni was beaten by the police, but it fell apart not long after al-Husayni's death (largely as a result of the beating) in March 1934; it held its last meeting that August. Its position as Palestinian nationalist umbrella group was filled in 1936 by the Arab Higher Committee.

Dictionary of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict