Opinion | Jerusalem’s lost mayoral mandate shows how factional rivalry surrenders power — a warning for Somalia’s leaders
A boy holds a Palestinian flag on top of a mound of rubble in the central Gaza Strip. Eyad Baba/AFP/Getty Images
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When Britain consolidated control over Jerusalem after World War I, the city’s future turned not only on imperial policy and Zionist immigration, but on a bitter rivalry inside Palestinian society. The struggle between the Husayni and Nashashibi families — two influential clans with distinct strategies for facing the British Mandate and the Balfour Declaration — helped decide who governed Jerusalem and, ultimately, who didn’t. That history carries a clear lesson for leaders today: factionalism is the handmaiden of dispossession.
The point of rupture came in April 1920, amid the Nebi Musa unrest. Britain’s military governor in Jerusalem, Ronald Storrs, removed the sitting mayor, Musa Kazim al-Husayni, who had become a symbol of resistance to British policy and Jewish settlement. Storrs turned to Ragheb al-Nashashibi to replace him. Ragheb accepted, arguing that if he declined the post, the British might hand the city to a foreign appointee altogether. It was a pragmatic calculation that quickly hardened into a political line: work with the Mandate authorities, engage with the incoming Jewish community, and stabilize the city through municipal compromise rather than street mobilization.
Those choices set his faction apart from the Husayni camp, which refused to lend British rule local legitimacy while Palestinian rights were being eclipsed. The British, meanwhile, reinforced the split. In 1921 they elevated Hajj Amin al-Husayni to Grand Mufti and head of the Supreme Muslim Council — a move that formalized religious leadership but also kept political influence diffused between rival elites. Divide and rule was policy, not accident.
Municipal politics became the arena where these competing strategies played out. During the 1927 Jerusalem municipal elections, the demographic balance had shifted under Mandate-era immigration and land transfers. The council of 12 seats was apportioned among the city’s communities — five Muslim, four Jewish, three Christian — and Ragheb’s camp courted Jewish votes to shore up its position. The approach alienated many Palestinians, who saw it as validation of a status quo undermining their claims.
Two years later, anger boiled over in the 1929 Buraq uprising, a watershed in Mandate Palestine. Britain convened Palestinian notables in London in 1930 to absorb the political shock. Ragheb went, presenting himself as a critic of the Mufti’s line yet still a partner to the administration. Jewish representatives in Jerusalem reacted by boycotting council meetings, signaling that even cooperation with the mayor they had once supported would not blunt their push for institutional power.
Under pressure, Ragheb backed a restructuring of Jerusalem’s council that tilted representation further: six seats for Jews, four for Muslims, two for Christians, and the creation of two deputy-mayor posts — one Jewish (Daniel Auster) and one Christian (Yacoub Farraj). The gambit did not save his own mandate. In the 1934 vote, Dr. Hussein al-Khalidi, aligned with the Husayni camp, won the mayoralty. Ragheb challenged the result in court and lost.
Al-Khalidi’s victory was brief. With Palestinian society entering the 1936–39 revolt against British rule and land dispossession, the Mandate struck back. The British arrested al-Khalidi and other leaders, later exiling them to the Seychelles. Jerusalem’s last Palestinian mayor was out of office. Daniel Auster, an Austrian-born Jewish lawyer who had immigrated under the Mandate, ascended to the city’s top municipal post. By the late 1930s, Palestinian control of Jerusalem’s municipal apparatus had ended.
The record is sobering. Ragheb al-Nashashibi was no ideologue of surrender; he was a skilled operator who believed incremental gains inside colonial structures could protect Palestinian interests better than confrontation. Yet his rivalry with the Husayni camp, and the British exploitation of that rift, helped break the political cohesion Palestinians needed at precisely the moment when cohesion mattered most. Collaboration won him influence, but not the leverage to preserve Palestinian authority over their own capital. Confrontation brought moral authority, but without a united front it invited isolation and repression. Between them, the city slipped away.
Three strategic errors stand out:
- Local rivalries became ends in themselves. Municipal power was treated as a prize to be defended against rivals, not as a platform to build a unified national strategy. That gave the Mandate wide latitude to play one camp off another.
- Short-term bargains crowded out long-term safeguards. Adjusting council seats and titles to placate the moment could not compensate for structural shifts in sovereignty and land control.
- Representation detached from legitimacy. Without broad communal consensus, municipal institutions lost the authority to negotiate — or to resist — on behalf of the people they claimed to serve.
History does not repeat itself tidily, but it rhymes loudly enough to be heard from Mogadishu. In a recent address to parliament, President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud urged caution over how the country engages with its northern regions. His warning — do not push communities “into a dark path” — speaks to the same political physics that doomed Jerusalem’s municipal mandate a century ago. Once factional logic takes hold, it invites external actors to set the terms, and local leaders are left negotiating over the furniture while the house is being redrawn.
Somalia’s leaders face no shortage of immediate pressures: security threats, fiscal constraints, regional competitions. The temptation to seek narrow advantage — to isolate a rival, to weaponize a procedural win, to extract a fleeting concession from an outside patron — is real. But the Jerusalem story shows how short-term victories calcify into strategic loss when they rest on division rather than consent.
The alternative is harder and slower: building inclusive institutions that rival camps accept as legitimate even when they lose, aligning state structures with popular mandates, and refusing external bargains that hinge on internal fragmentation. It requires political elites to prize restraint over one-upmanship and to treat each communal gain as a national one. Above all, it demands clarity about the end state. In Mandate Jerusalem, that clarity was missing: was municipal government a shield for Palestinian rights, or a staircase for those dismantling them? By the time the answer was obvious, it was too late.
Leadership is not only the courage to resist; sometimes it is the discipline to refuse the wrong kind of cooperation — the kind that turns rivals into the main audience and leaves citizens as spectators. If Somalia absorbs that lesson, it can avoid the trap that ensnared Jerusalem’s last Palestinian mayors, for whom the contest at City Hall masked a larger erosion of sovereignty happening just outside its doors.
By Ali Musa
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
