Despite strenuous efforts to heal the ever-widening breach between the Grand Mufti’s party and the adherents of Mouzza Kazim Pasha within the Arab Executive, a divided Executive will meet with High Commissioner Chancellor and Dr. Drummond Shiels, under-secretary for the Colonies, within the next few days. The High Commissioner is returning to Palestine with proposals for parliamentary changes and the Arab leaders will confer with him on these changes.
The disagreement between the Arab factions centers around the proposed institutions, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency learns on excellent Arab authority. If the Grand Mufti decides to accept the British offer of a legislative council, Mouzza Kazim Pasha, president of the Arab Executive, will outwardly oppose it but actually is prepared to cooperate. On the other hand, if the government deals with Mouzza Kazim Pasha, the Grand Mufti does not intend to bridle his intransigeance.
It is understood that the government would perhaps prefer to deal with the more moderate Mouzza Kazim Pasha, having been given sufficient evidence of the Mufti’s lost hold on the people. Such action on the part of the government would probably also break the Mufti’s hold on the Moslem Supreme Council whose annual income of $400,000 gives him the mastership.
Jealous of the Multi’s power, and probably also fearful of the results of his unbridled recalcitrance the more thinking Arabs consider it more important to unseat the Mufti than to quarrel with the British authorities or even with the Zionists. The leadership of the Arab Executive is consequently divided with Auni Abdul Hadi, Kazim Pasha, the dismissed Omar Saleh and M. Moghanem and their followers on the one hand and on the other the Grand Mufti, his nephew Jamal Husseini and a large number of those who are dependent on the financial and political resources that the Mufti dispenses through the exchequer of the Moslem Supreme Council.
While the Arab Executive was being split wide open through the divided leadership the break in the united front of the Christian and Moslem Arabs became even wider with the indictment of Ramsi Omar, secretary of the Young Men’s Moslem Association, and Habj Ibrahim, head of the Haifa Waqf, on charge of first degree murder growing out of the death of Jamal Bakhri, Christian-Arab editor who was killed in a street affray resulting from a quarrel between Christian and Moslem Arabs over the ownership of a cemetery in Haifa.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
