Musa Alami was a lawyer and statesman who founded the Arab Development Society and published a critical assessment of the Nakba.
Family Prominence and Upbringing in Jerusalem
Renowned lawyer and statesman Musa Alami hailed from two of the most prominent families of Jerusalem. For decades, members of the esteemed landowning Alami family served their city in a variety of capacities, including as mayors, qadis, civil administrators, and district commissioners. Alami’s grandfather, also named Musa, was mayor of Jerusalem in 1869 and again between 1879 and 1881. His father, Faidi, was appointed district officer for Bethlehem in 1902, elected mayor of Jerusalem from 1906 to 1909, and then chosen as one of three representatives from the Jerusalem Mutasarrifate in the Ottoman Chamber of Deputies, a position he held from 1914 to 1918, when the Ottomans were ousted from Palestine by the British.1
Alami’s maternal family, the Ansaris, also had a prestigious role in the city. Believed to be descendants of Shaddad ibn Aws, one of the Prophet’s companions, the Ansaris have been the patrons of the city’s Indian zawiya for 800 years.2 The Ansaris also serve as the custodians of al-Haram al-Sharif, cleaning the grounds and preparing the mosques for prayer.3 Alami’s mother, Zuleikha Ansari, thus came from a family with deep-seated historic connections to the city, and the household she and her husband set up was steeped in the ethic of service and devotion to Jerusalem.4
Born in the Musrara neighborhood of Jerusalem on May 8, 1897, Alami studied in Jerusalem’s most prestigious schools, including the American Colony School, Khalil Sakakini’s avant-garde al-Dusturiyya school, and the École des Frères from which he graduated on the eve of World War I.5 Alami was subsequently drafted into the Ottoman army and stationed in Jerusalem and Damascus, where he worked in the censorship office. His military service was short-lived, however, because the Ottomans lost the war, in great part due to Arab confluence with British forces in the 1916–18 Great Arab Revolt.
In 1979, British historian David Gilmour interviewed Alami in Jericho about this tumultuous period in Palestine, among other topics. Alami explained to Gilmour that the Arabs were fond of the Ottomans and viewed them as partners, not oppressors, especially in Palestine. Alami claimed that “a greater degree of freedom and self-government existed in Palestine than in many Turkish provinces.”6 This perspective was not uncommon among elite Arabs, who were mostly Ottoman loyalists. Like privileged classes under imperial systems everywhere, retaining a connection to the imperial center—Istanbul, in the case of Palestinian elites, and later London during the British Mandate—was both politically and economically favorable.
Legal Career and Political Activism
In 1919, Alami enrolled in Cambridge University in England, where he studied law for four years. During his time at Cambridge, he joined the Inner Temple Society, a prestigious professional association in London for training barristers and judges.
Upon his return to Jerusalem in 1924 with a law degree and license to practice, Alami was well ahead of the curve professionally. British Mandate authorities were quick to notice his distinction and appointed him as junior legal advisor in the Government of Palestine’s legal department, where he worked between 1925 and 1929. He was then appointed assistant to the public prosecutor in 1929, and then as advisor for Arab affairs in the office of the High Commissioner, Arthur Wauchope, in 1933. He held this position only for one year, however, due to his outspoken anti-Zionist views.7
According to Zionist historian Walter Laqueur, Wauchope tasked Alami with meeting with Zionist leaders, including David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharett, two of the founding fathers of the State of Israel. Alami told Ben-Gurion that at most, the Jews could expect a Jewish enclave around Tel Aviv in a Muslim Palestine. He subsequently rejected Ben-Gurion’s proposition that the Zionists develop the land for all its inhabitants by saying that he would rather the land remain undeveloped until Arabs developed it themselves.8 These provocations led the Zionist leaders to pressure British officials to dismiss Alami from Wauchope’s office, which they did in 1934. Alami returned to the legal department but in 1937, British authorities dismissed him from this position, too, and exiled him to Lebanon.9 By then, the Great Palestinian Revolt had already begun, and British suppression of any form of Palestinian resistance was rampant, including by exiling nationalist leaders.
Alami remained politically active over the course of the next two years of the revolt while in Beirut and Damascus. In fact, the Arab Higher Committee (AHC), formed in 1934 in Jerusalem, selected him to join the delegation of Palestinian nationalists that would take part in the London Conference held at St. James’s Palace in February 1939. The conference, which lasted for nearly six weeks starting February 7, was called by the British government to plan for the future governance of Palestine following the termination of the mandate. The Arab delegation, led by Jamal Husseini (who was married to Alami’s sister, Ni‘mati), consisted of Alami, Awni Abd al-Hadi, Yaqub Ghussein, Amin Tamimi, Alfred Roch, George Antonius, and Fuad Saba. The delegates made their demands known: independence, a rejection of the Balfour Declaration, an end to Jewish immigration to Palestine, and the replacement of the mandate by a treaty. For their part, the Zionist delegation, led by Chaim Weizmann, chairman of the World Zionist Organization, and Ben-Gurion, leader of the Jewish Agency, demanded a Jewish majority in Palestine, the continuation of the mandate and Jewish immigration, and investment in Palestine to speed up development.
The results of the five-and-a-half weeks of meetings were published on May 17, 1939, in the so-called White Paper.10 In short, Britain recommended a limit to Jewish immigration for five years, after which numbers would be set by agreement with Arabs; restrictions of Jewish land purchases in Palestine; gradual introduction of Palestinians into senior administrative posts; and the transfer of all powers to a representative government after 10 years. The proposals were conditional on the end of violence in Palestine, which, if unfulfilled within 10 years, would extend British rule. Both delegations ultimately rejected the proposals and violence continued in Palestine.11
Following the London Conference, Alami returned to Beirut, but within months, World War II broke out in Europe, leading French Mandate authorities in Lebanon to clamp down on any activism. Alami was exiled to Iraq, which had achieved independence from Britain in 1932 but remained allied with Britain.
While in Baghdad, Alami continued his political activity. In the summer of 1940, he joined Jamal Husseini, Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Said, and a Saudi envoy in talks with British authorities. The talks resulted in a new agreement: Arab support for the British war effort in exchange for British implementation of provisions of the White Paper, namely, the formation of a proportionally representative government in Palestine. While the British official involved, Colonel Stewart Francis Newcombe, agreed, London reneged, but months later, in 1941, mandate authorities allowed Alami to return to Palestine.12
Throughout the early 1940s, Alami returned to practicing law in Jerusalem, applying his expertise in a variety of arenas. His legal background, coupled with his unique experience navigating international policy circles, led to his selection to participate in the preparatory meetings for the formation of the Arab League, held in Alexandria in the latter half of 1944. As Palestinian scholar and architect Nadi Abusaada puts it, Alami was “the only leader of the requisite caliber who belonged to no party and could therefore represent them all.”13 When he arrived in Alexandria, Alami was informed by Egyptian prime minister and conference chairman, Mustafa Nahas Pasha, that he could not represent Palestine in the meeting. Evidently, Nahas Pasha had been coerced by British authorities, who “did not want to ‘antagonize’ the Zionists.”14 But Alami had his own contacts among the British, and once he secured a letter from Brigadier Clayton, a British intelligence officer in Cairo, who authorized his participation, Nahas Pasha “reversed his decision immediately”15 and Alami took part in the conference’s final session in November.
Alami pushed for two proposals among participating delegates.16 The first was a call for the establishment of an Arab media presence in major Western capitals to counter Zionist propaganda. The second proposal was for the formation of a “pan-Arab national fund whose mission would be to save Palestinian land that had not already been appropriated by Zionist organizations so as to prevent them from seizing remaining Palestinian lands.”17 Alami was concerned that the poor economic conditions across Palestine “had left many Palestinian villagers with no choice but to sell their lands to buyers,” many of whom would be Zionist organizations. “By establishing such a fund,” Abusaada explains, Alami “believed Palestine’s rural population could be convinced to turn their lands into inalienable family waqf properties, and thus prevent their loss.”18
Arab states at the conference agreed to allocate £2 million to the media campaign and £5 million toward the second proposal for a fund, which Alami would manage through the Arab Development Society (ADS), a project he had just formed in Jerusalem “to foster the development of Palestinian villages in the areas of agriculture, health, education and housing.”19 The Arab League was officially founded in March 1945, but “it did not take long,” Abusaada says, for Alami to realize that Arab member states “were paying mere lip service to the Palestine question: money was never forthcoming except from Iraq, which pledged £250,000, but withdrew its funding when it realized that no other country had contributed to the effort.”20 Even the first proposal for media offices was short-lived. In 1947, offices established in Jerusalem, London, and Washington were closed due to opposition from the AHC under the leadership of Hajj Amin al-Husseini,21 who had grown distrustful of Alami. The ADS, therefore, was slow to launch in its early years.
With the growing rift among Palestinian political leaders throughout the 1940s, especially within the AHC under Hajj Amin’s leadership, Alami founded the Arab Office to represent the Palestinian case before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, which was tasked with examining the state of affairs in Palestine following the termination of World War II in 1945.22 As historian Rashid Khalidi describes it, “the Arab Office had both a diplomatic and informational mission, with the goal of making the Palestinian cause better known.”23 To do so, Alami brought together “an extraordinary and highly motivated group of men,” including Darwish al-Miqdadi, Ahmad Shuqayri, Albert Hourani and his brother Cecil, Burhan Dajani, Wasfi al-Tal, and Walid Khalidi. And despite Hourani’s “remarkably cogent, prescient (and ignored) presentation delivered to the Committee of Inquiry,” the Arab Office was unable to transcend the “patriarchal, hierarchical, and fractious nature” of Palestinian politics at the time. Part of this, Khalidi describes, was Alami’s “high-handedness” which “alienated colleagues,” as did his proximity to the pro-British Iraqi regime.24 Like the AHC, the Arab Office failed to achieve consensus among Palestinian political leadership in the leadup to the Nakba.
The failure of the Arabs to organize effectively to save Palestine from the Zionists in 1948 compelled Alami to author what is arguably one of the most self-critical assessments on the Nakba. In The Lesson of Palestine, published in Beirut in April 1949, 11 months after the expulsion of the majority of Palestinians from Palestine, Alami argued that the Nakba was not inevitable and that it was ultimately the Arabs, including the Palestinians themselves, who failed to defend Palestine.
Alami published the original 98-page text in Arabic under the title ‘Ibrat Filastin.25 It was published in English by the Middle East Journal just a few months later in October 1949.26 At once self-critical and forward-looking, Alami begins his treatise with these stark words, describing a reality many were still far too shocked to confront:
The Arabs were faced by a challenge, the first since their liberation from foreign rule; and they did not meet it. A great national disaster has been inflicted upon them, exposing them in turn to further blows and disasters. The challenge and disaster are those of Palestine.
The disaster was not inevitable. During the course of the struggle we had an opportunity to finish with Zionism and its dangers altogether, but we did not take it.27
He spends the next 97 pages offering answers to questions that were undeniably on everyone’s minds: “How did the disaster happen? Why did matters take this turn? What were our mistakes? Where were the sources of weakness in us, and the gaps through which the enemy entered? How can we repel the great and imminent danger, and recover the beloved and violated fatherland?”28 Alami puts forth key reasons for the defeat, including British, US, and Russian bias in favor of the Zionists, but also Arab regimes’ inefficiency, which he believed desperately needed reform through modernization. In addition to creating modern states replete with robust educational programs, systems of rights and duties for an engaged people, and thriving economies that made the most of available resources, unity was an absolute must. “If the countries of the Fertile Crescent were unified, and endowed with good government and proper direction,” Alami argued, “they would be strong enough to meet and repel the enemy, and save Palestine and the Arabs.”29 But if reform through modernization and unity is not achieved, Alami warned in conclusion, “woe to the outcome.”30 One can only imagine what Alami would think of the Arab regimes and the deep fragmentation of the peoples of the Fertile Crescent today.
The Arab Development Society
In addition to his illustrious legal and diplomatic career, and his critical writings, Alami is perhaps most remembered for his pioneering project, the Arab Development Society (ADS), which continues to this day. First registered in Jerusalem in 1945 upon the foundation of the Arab League and its attendant funding commitment, Alami’s expansive development project (known by Palestinians simply as “the mashru‘”) only truly took off after the 1948 War—against all odds. In addition to uncommitted support from the Arab League, as well as resistance from Alami’s political opponents in the AHC, the area on which the project would be built was ecologically questionable. As a result, donors expressed reluctance to fund the project “citing the region’s dry climate and limited water resources.”31 To be sure, Alami selected Jericho as the site of his project due to the high number of Palestinian refugees who had fled to the Jordan Valley during the war and whom he planned to employ.
But Alami pushed through, and in the summer of 1949, under the scorching heat of Jericho, the lowest point on earth, he managed to secure “5,000 acres of registered wasteland between Jericho and the Allenby Bridge, five miles north of the Dead Sea,” from King Abdullah I of Jordan.32 Alami hired a team of refugees from the area to dig for water, and despite limited expertise, equipment, and funding, the team managed to find fresh groundwater by January 1950. Described as “a tireless fundraiser,”33 Alami secured funding from the Iraq Petroleum Company and the Arabian American Oil Company to dig 15 more wells in the area throughout 1950.34 He also managed to secure international funding from “Jordan, Scandinavian countries, the United States Government and private organizations such as the Ford Foundation, among others.”35 The project finally began to see the light of day and before long, Alami commenced construction on a “model village to showcase the potential for refugee resettlement in the area.” Over the course of the next 17 years, the project grew to 40,000 acres.36
As Abusaada put it:
Alami’s commitment to self-reliance, mirrored in his search for water, extended to his vision for the model village. Unlike the UN relief approach, his goal was to set up a scheme that would enable Palestinian refugees to achieve self-sufficiency. To do this, he combined housing with agricultural cultivation, viewing them as complementary. From the 1950s, the ADS conducted extensive cultivation experiments. It reclaimed 500 acres of land by planting tens of thousands of banana trees, forest trees and grapevines, as well as hundreds of acres for cotton, vegetables and grains.
These agricultural experiments were paralleled by a significant construction effort. By 1951, a total of 50 buildings had already been erected on the site. Among these, five buildings were designated for specific purposes: offices, schoolrooms, a clinic, a public oven and a public bath. The remaining 45 structures served as houses for the residents.37
But Alami’s vision for Palestinian refugees in Jericho met with more resistance as soon as it saw success—this time, from the refugees themselves. By late 1951, many refugees abandoned the site, protesting what they saw as a “potentially damaging” reality for their “ability to gain full repatriation” in their home villages from which they were expelled in 1948.38 In other words, many began to question whether Alami’s goal was the “permanent resettlement, or tawtin, of Palestinian refugees,” which would not only contradict the Palestinian struggle to return, but directly obstruct it.39 Rather than try to convince them otherwise, and inspired by the Deir Amr farm school for orphans established by Ahmad Samih Khalidi in the hills west of Jerusalem in 1941, Alami decided to populate his model village with 50 refugee orphan boys. Within four years, “their number had grown to 160.”40
The project thus became a home for these youth, and Alami adapted the site to their needs by incorporating a library, classrooms, and a vocational training center in modern farming, woodwork, and steelwork. The structures built to accommodate these initiatives were largely funded by foreign donors, and the equipment used within them were mostly imported from Great Britain and Germany, “revealing the contrast between Alami’s original vision of self-sufficiency and his reliance on external support to realise his objectives.”41 Nonetheless, the ADS flourished until 1967.
Israeli forces invaded the ADS grounds on June 7, 1967. As a result, “many of the staff joined the flood of refugees across the Jordan and the number of boys in training had to be reduced. Most of the farm equipment was looted and destroyed. Livestock on the site, including cows and chickens, died.”42 When Gilmour interviewed Alami in Jericho in February 1979, he learned more about Israel’s destruction of the immense project. As Gilmour narrates:
Both the farm and the school were highly successful until the Israeli invasion in 1967, when two-thirds of the land was laid waste and twenty-six of the twenty-seven wells destroyed. The Israeli army systematically smashed the irrigation system, the buildings and the well-boring machinery. Most of the land quickly reverted to desert . . . Perhaps some of the destruction was unavoidable in wartime but what seems utterly callous and outrageous is the way Israeli authorities have behaved since 1967. A chunk of land was predictably wired off for “security reasons” and turned into a military camp. It is now deserted.
Alami had been traveling in Europe during the war, but immediately upon returning to Palestine, he got to work to rebuild the ADS, which included further trips to Europe to secure funds. Though he managed to rescue aspects of the expansive project, the ADS never again functioned as it had before the occupation of Jericho—along with the rest of the West Bank—in June 1967. As Gilmour put it in 1979:
The Israelis refused to allow [Alami] to buy the necessary equipment either to restore the damaged wells or to drill new ones. So he made some manual repairs to four of the least damaged wells and with these he was able to salvage a fraction of the land and keep the farm and the school functioning . . . [The Israelis] are now telling him that he has too much water—though he has less than a fifth of what he used to have—and have warned him that they will be fixing a limit on his consumption and will be taking away the surplus for their own “projects” (i.e. their expanding settlements near Jericho).
When Gilmour mentioned US President Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy in the region, Alami evidently laughed at “President Carter’s obsession with human rights” because “he knows they will never be observed in Palestine.” Alami told Gilmour:
“Liberty and justice are meaningless words for my people and my country. We have never known either.” He waves towards his farm, a philanthropist’s dream that was once brilliantly successful. “I gain no pleasure from this place now,” he says, “I stay here out of duty. I know the Zionists have been wanting to get rid of us for years. They want me to go and have told me so. They want to build a kibbutz here. But I have a duty to keep going, a duty to my people.”43
Months before Alami’s death in Amman on June 8, 1984, the ADS transferred the management of the farm and vocational school for Palestinian refugee youth to Save the Children of Sweden and the Norwegian Refugee Council.44
Alami was buried in Jerusalem, and his funeral at the al-Aqsa Mosque was attended by massive crowds. He was laid to rest in the city’s Bab al-Sahira cemetery.
Sources
Abusaada, Nadi. “Forgotten History: A Vision for Palestinian Refugees’ Agricultural Self-sufficiency.” The Architectural Review, October 30, 2023.
Abusaada, Nadi. “‘Off the Record’: Palestine at the 1944 Arab League Preparatory Conference.” Institute for Palestine Studies, June 19, 2020.
Alami, Musa. “The Lesson of Palestine.” Middle East Journal 3, no. 4 (October 1949): 373–405.
“The Custodianship of al-Aqsa Mosque Is an Honor for the Ansari Family.” [In Arabic.] Al Jazeera, April 18, 2016.
“Faidi Al-Alami.” All4Palestine. Accessed January 21, 2025.
Gilmour, David. Dispossessed: The Ordeal of the Palestinians 1917–1980. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1980.
Johnson, Penny. “An Indian Corner in Jerusalem.” Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 62 (2015).
Khalidi, Rashid. The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020.
Laqueur, Walter. Dying for Jerusalem: The Past, Present and Future of the Holiest City. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2006.
“MacDonald White Paper.” Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question, May 17, 1939.
“Musa Alami.” Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question. Accessed January 21, 2025.
“Musa Alami.” [In Arabic.] Vision for Political Development, March 31, 2021.
“Musa Alami, Founder of an Arab Aid Group.” New York Times, June 16, 1984.
“Reply of Arab Higher Committee on MacDonald White Paper.” Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question, May 30, 1939.
Main image from Wikimedia Commons
Notes
“Faidi Al-Alami,” All4Palestine, accessed January 21, 2025.
The zawiya includes a hostel dedicated to the Sufi Indian dervish Hazrat Farid al-Din Ganj Shakar (Baba Farid), who visited Jerusalem in 1200. Penny Johnson, “An Indian Corner in Jerusalem,” Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 62 (2015).
“The Custodianship of al-Aqsa Mosque Is an Honor for the Ansari Family” [in Arabic], Al Jazeera, April 18, 2016.
“Musa Alami,” Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question, accessed January 21, 2025.
“Musa Alami,” Vision for Political Development, March 31, 2021.
David Gilmour, Dispossessed: The Ordeal of the Palestinians 1917–1980 (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1980), 35–36.
“Musa Alami” (Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question).
Walter Laqueur, Dying for Jerusalem: The Past, Present and Future of the Holiest City (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2006), 161.
“Musa Alami” (Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question).
For the text of the 1939 White Paper, see “MacDonald White Paper,” Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question, May 17, 1939.
For the AHC’s response to the White Paper, see “Reply of Arab Higher Committee on MacDonald White Paper,” Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question, May 30, 1939.
“Musa Alami” (Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question).
Nadi Abusaada, “‘Off the Record’: Palestine at the 1944 Arab League Preparatory Conference,” Institute for Palestine Studies, June 19, 2020.
Abusaada, “‘Off the Record.’”
Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020), 51.
Abusaada, “‘Off the Record.’”
“Musa Alami” (Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question).
Abusaada, “‘Off the Record.’”
Nadi Abusaada, “Forgotten History: A Vision for Palestinian Refugees’ Agricultural Self-sufficiency,” The Architectural Review, October 30, 2023.
Abusaada, “‘Off the Record.’”
“Musa Alami” (Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question).
Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War, 54.
Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War, 54.
Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War, 54–55.
Musa Alami, “The Lesson of Palestine,” Middle East Journal 3, no. 4 (October 1949): 373–405.
Alami, “The Lesson of Palestine,” 373.
Alami, “The Lesson of Palestine,” 373.
Alami, “The Lesson of Palestine,” 391.
Alami, “The Lesson of Palestine,” 405.
Abusaada, “Forgotten History.”
Abusaada, “Forgotten History.”
Abusaada, “‘Off the Record.’”
Abusaada, “Forgotten History.”
“Musa Alami, Founder of an Arab Aid Group,” New York Times, June 16, 1984.
“Founder of an Arab Aid Group.”
Abusaada, “Forgotten History.”
Abusaada, “Forgotten History.”
“Musa Alami” (Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question).
Abusaada, “Forgotten History.”
Abusaada, “Forgotten History.”
Abusaada, “Forgotten History.”
Gilmour, Dispossessed, 128–30.
“Founder of an Arab Aid Group.”