The preeminent Palestinian leader during most of the British mandate over Palestine, 1922 to 1948, was Al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni (1895-1974), the mufti of Jerusalem. As a Moslem scholar/leader he sought to establish an Arab state in Palestine. Unable to end Jewish immigration, he led a violent Arab revolt (1936-1939) against the Zionists and the British but failed, as did his attempt to stop the creation of Israel in 1948.

Al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni was born in 1895 in Jerusalem to a prominent Palestinian Muslim family. He studied in Cairo at al-Azhar and at the military academy in Istanbul. He served in the Ottoman army in 1916 but, because of Turkish attempts to impose their language and culture on their Arab subjects, he left for Palestine. There he assisted in the 1916 Arab revolt against the Ottomans and in the effort to form an Arab nation. Because he feared Zionism would cause the eventual domination...