The missing narrative and context of the Hebron massacre 1929
On social media, the Hebron massacre of 1929 is frequently cited as evidence of the Arabs’ true intentions in Palestine. Often referenced seemingly without any context, it perpetuates the notion that Arabs are inherently violent and seek to kill Jews, while Jews are always on the defensive and incapable of committing similar acts against Arabs. However, a deeper examination of the historical background reveals that the massacre was not a random act, but rather the culmination of a series of events and tensions that had been building for some time. To reduce it to a spontaneous outburst is to perpetuate a one-sided and oversimplified narrative.
The 1929 events are often seen as a symbol of Arab violence towards Jews, but a closer examination shows a more complex picture. While there were Jews who murdered innocent Arabs, others saved Arabs from being lynched, and there were also Arabs who saved Jews. The question that needs to be asked is why such violence occurred among neighbours who had lived together for many years. This is not to excuse the actions, but to seek understanding.
For example, it is possible for Islam to offer asylum to fugitives without conflicting with its principles. During the early Ottoman period, for example, Jewish fugitives from Spain were granted asylum. However, the situation was different in 1929 when Palestine had experienced almost a century of Jewish immigration, with the most recent 50 years characterized by Zionism — a movement that sought Jewish sovereignty rather than mere asylum. This led to significant changes in the social and political landscape of Palestine, with many older members of the Jewish community who had previously sought equality with their Arab neighbours now embracing Zionism and the possibility of a Jewish state. As a result, the distinction between Zionist and non-Zionist Jews began to blur in the eyes of the Palestinian Arabs, although the old lexicon still distinguished between “Arab Jews” who were culturally part of the Middle East and “Zionists” who brought foreign customs from Eastern Europe.
But at the height of riots, these distinctions evaporated. Jewish communities were attacked, regardless of political affiliation or length of time in the land. The disturbances made it clear that the distinctions between religious and secular; between the old established community and the newcomers; between Ashkenazim and Jews who hailed from Muslim countries; between the various currents within the labor movement and between them and the Revisionists — distinctions that divide up segments of Jewish/Israeli society — now as in before the establishment of the state, were just about meaningless for the Arabs. That wasn’t because, in the eyes of Muslims, all Jews should equally be put to death — that’s not the idea — but because at the end of the 1920s, the Arabs felt very strongly that what all these currents held in common was more significant than their differences. All those groups believed in the existence of the Jewish people, i.e. that Judaism is not only a religion but rather a nation. They all believed in the right of Jews to immigrate to their ancestral homeland. They all strove for a Jewish state in the Land of Israel/Palestine (whether it is established by human beings or thru the coming of the Messiah, whether it be liberal or socialist).
These beliefs were clearly counterpoised to the aspirations of the Arabs, and they turned all the Jews who subscribed to those principles into a single amorphous mass. And therefore, during the 1929 murderous riots, the Arabs in their own view were not killing their Jewish neighbours, but their Zionist foes who were trying to take over their country.
The Arab attack on Jews in 1929 hastened the process of Jewish unity under Zionism, which the Arabs had recognized as a potential threat. Jews who had previously been unenthusiastic about Zionism, or who wanted to maintain their traditional lifestyle alongside the Arabs, or who rejected politics altogether, all came to realize that they had no political home other than Zionism. The Arab perspective was that there could be no real political alternative to Zionism as they were not interested in union with the Jews who shared their land.
The preceding text provides a synopsis of an article written by Hillel Cohen, whose book “Year Zero of the Israeli-Arab conflict 1929” presents a more impartial and unbiased view of the events leading up to the massacres. In contrast, Pappé and Morris have taken positions at the extremes of the debate, which is why Cohen’s perspective appears to be the most rational in this context.
Cohen argues that there are two distinct perspectives on the situation, one from the Arabs and the other from the Jews, and neither is entirely objective when discussing the opposing side. For instance, Arabs tend to overlook incidents where Jews have saved Arabs from harm or death, and vice versa. Both sides tend to highlight only the “atrocities” committed by the other.
Cohen also notes a certain partiality in the sources when examining the past. He cites an instance where a Jewish police officer killed an entire Arab family in their home. Although Cohen found references to this incident in Arab sources, he was skeptical until the same event was mentioned by Jewish or British sources. Thus, there exists evident discrimination concerning who is to be believed, and more often than not, Palestinian narratives are not given credence, and their authenticity is only validated by Jewish counterparts.
Cohen delves into the different viewpoints held by Arabs and Jews before, during, and after the massacres.
Some examples below:
For the Arabs of Palestine, the country is their homeland from before the Hebrews or Jews first reached it, and they continue to be its natural inhabitants and heirs. This is a fundamental Palestinian concept. The fact that Palestinian society is composed of families and tribes — some of which have roots in Palestine and others of which arrived in waves of immigration over the years, prior to Islam and afterward — does not, in this view, diminish this claim, because by its nature Palestine is a land that serves as a melting pot for its inhabitants and melds them into a single Palestinian people. This Palestinian perception, which frequently sees the Jews who lived in Palestine prior to the inception of Zionism as part of the Arab Palestinian people, is profoundly opposed to the common Zionist Jewish view. First, Palestinian nationalism is based on the principle of jus soli — right of land. That is, it is the land that creates the nation, and the inhabitants of a country possess the right to it, no matter what their origin. The rival Jewish perception is based on the principle of jus sanguinis — right of blood. In this view, blood descent is the central component of nationhood, and the right to the Holy Land derives from its association with the Jewish people. The practical implications are, then, that the Palestinians see the land as their homeland and the Jews as foreigners (who can, under certain conditions, merge with the Palestinian people), while the Jews see it as the homeland of the Jewish people, no matter where they may be.
And some more background on the perspectives in regards to the massacres before Hebron 1929:
Here it is important to be precise: the assaults on Jews during the revolt indicate that anti-Jewish sentiment did not begin to increase solely as a reaction to organized Zionist activity in Palestine. In 1834, that had not yet begun. Rather, it seems to have been a response to Western attempts to gain political and economic control over Palestine and the Middle East as a whole. The role that the Jews played in this process — their increased immigration to Palestine during these years, and the support they enjoyed from European governments — aroused resentment against them.
Furthermore:
It can be put this way: European penetration of the Middle East heightened awareness of the difference between the Muslim majority community on the one hand and the minority Christian and Jewish communities on the other. Christians and Jews appealed to the European powers with the goal of improving their legal and economic status and gaining full equality, and in doing so were often seen as promoters of foreign interests and non-Muslim rule. So political enmity began. The Jewish and Christian alignment with Christian powers also had religious significance; the choice Jews (and Christians) made to prefer the protection of foreign powers was interpreted, understandably, as an act of renouncing their traditional status as wards of the Muslim sovereign. For Muslims, this was a watershed in their relations with these communities. Legally and theologically, from that point onward Muslims viewed themselves as absolved of the obligation to protect the Jews and Christians of the Holy Land and elsewhere in the Middle East. Furthermore, if the Jews wished to turn Palestine into their own land, as rumors began to say they did, the Muslims were bound to fight them. Political contention between the Jews and Muslims thus commenced prior to the dawn of organized Zionist settlement, even before the arrival of the proto-Zionist settlers of the Bilu and Hovevei Zion movements in the nineteenth century’s latter decades.
And Cohen also notes the relations with Palestinian Arabs and Jews and how this ecosystem got disturbed by the ascension of the European Jews:
Relations between Jaffa’s long-standing Jewish population and its Arabs were not ideal, but they were smooth enough because of the groups’ shared cultural background. The immigrants from Russia disturbed that harmony. They did not observe local mores. In addition, their arrival aroused fears that the Jews were trying to take over the country and push out the Arabs. The result was frequent fights between the Moscobim and the Arabs.
And the ideas brought with them caused more friction:
With the emergence of the Zionist movement and its establishment of institutions, and the growing influence of Russian socialist Zionism, the Sephardim and Maghrebis were shunted aside. For their part, they distanced themselves more and more from organized Zionist activity, which they viewed as too militant toward the Arabs.
Some comments from members of the Sephardi group:
Other members of the Sephardi elite, like Eliahu Elyashar, felt that the European Zionist leadership was largely responsible for undermining relations between Jews and Muslims. Elyashar voiced his frustrations in Lihiyot ‘im Falastinim (Living with Palestinians; 1997). In an introduction to the work, Israel Bartal sums up Elyashar’s views and feelings: “The leaders of the movement and of the Yishuv that ran matters from the beginning of the Mandate period were reluctant to include the Arab Jew and tended to deliberately avoid social and cultural contact between the Yishuv and the neighboring people. Not only did they disdain the customs of the Arab milieu, thus causing needless resentment and conflict, but they also displayed cultural arrogance and preferred a connection with distant Europe to connecting with their immediate surroundings” (1997, xv–xvi).
Hillel Cohen also writes that Zionism created Palestinian nationalism and vice versa:
It is a common view in Zionist discourse that Zionism created Palestinian nationalism. Gilad Sharon, son of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, put it this way: “They are a byproduct of our Zionism” (Yediot Aharonot, March 13, 2011). But it is important to be precise here: the Zionist movement did not create Arab nationalism in Palestine but rather shaped it, since the Arab national movement in Palestine had to wrestle from the start with Zionism. Similiarly, Zionism was shaped by the Palestinian national movement. That is, through its violent opposition to Zionism, the Palestinian Arab national movement strengthened Jewish solidarity and made the value of solidarity in the face of an enemy the cornerstone of the Zionist ethos. In other words, Israeli Zionism and the Jewish community in Israel as we know them today are a product of Palestinian nationalism, and vice versa.
And a lesser know fact, that it was a Muslim policy to let Jews reside in Jerusalem:
the fact that a Jewish community could reside in Jerusalem was a Muslim innovation. Both the Byzantines, who ruled the city prior to the Muslim conquest, and the crusaders, who took it from the Muslims and ruled it for a time, forbade Jews to live in the city. A lesser-known fact is that under the British Mandate, Christians still forbade Jews from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the street leading to it.
Cohen also writes about the events at the wall prior to the riots:
In chapter 13 of One Palestine, Complete (2000), Tom Segev does an excellent job of reconstructing the events at the Wall during the year preceding the riots. He relates that, at the end of the summer of 1928, during the Jewish High Holidays, it came to the attention of the British district commissioner for Jerusalem, Edward Keith-Roach, that Jewish worshipers at the Wall had erected a divider to separate men and women. Keith-Roach notified the Muslim religious authorities. He also instructed Police Constable Douglas Duff to remove the partition. “From his memoirs, Duff emerges as a violent man, a racist, a misogynist, and a fool,” Segev writes (2000, 295–96). Duff carried out his orders with brute determination. The Jews felt humiliated, and the Muslims believed they had won this small battle in an ongoing campaign. Both sides set out to defend their shrines. Both established committees to defend their holy sites. The Muslims ratcheted up their presence in the area. The Jews did the same. One side staged public prayers, and the other followed suit. One organized rallies and demonstrations, and so did the other. Both sent telegrams to King George V and his prime minister.
The importance of the wall divider:
Orthodox Jews separate men and women during prayers. Christians do not. The Muslim custom is similar to that of the Jews, which apparently is rooted in the practice at the Second Temple. In most Orthodox synagogues, the sexes are divided by a curtain or a solid divider. No such divider stood at the Western Wall, where men and women prayed side by side. Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak HaCohen Kook, the Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Palestine, told the Shaw Commission that the situation disturbed an important visitor — Rabbi Menachem Mendel Gutterman, the admor (Hasidic spiritual leader) of Radzymin in Poland. Rabbi Kook reported that Rabbi Gutterman “came to the Wailing Wall to pray; he noticed there was no partition between the men and women worshippers, and in his innocence he told the beadle [shamash, the functionary responsible for the physical arrangements at the site] to erect that screen. In all Orthodox Synagogues it is an old custom to make a partition between men and women” (quoted in Commission 1930, 2:740).
Jewish philanthropists and the Zionist movement attempted to purchase the Western Wall in Jerusalem in the late 19th and early 20th. The British assumed custodianship over Jerusalem, which made the Jewish population more self-confident. Sir Moses Montefiore and Baron Edmond de Rothschild attempted to buy the Wall, but their efforts were unsuccessful. Mordechai Ben-Hillel HaKohen reported in 1918 that Muslims in the city were coming to realize that the Western Wall would pass into Jewish hands, but negotiations led nowhere. In the months preceding the 1929 riots, the Zionist Executive in Palestine negotiated the purchase of a property to the north of the Wall, but the deal had not yet been concluded by the time of the agitation surrounding the Wall.
There were Jews that also opposed the deal:
Not only Arabs opposed the purchase. So did members of the Yishuv’s radical right wing. One such person was Abba Ahimeir, who after the 1929 riots would — along with Uri Zvi Greenberg and Yehoshua Heschel Yevin — found Brit HaBiryonim, a small group of radical Jewish nationalists. On October 8, 1928, following the incident of the divider at the Wall and prior to the outbreak of violence, Ahimeir, who wrote a column in the daily newspaper Do’ar Hayom titled “On Questions of the Moment (From the Journal of a Fascist), devoted a long installment to the question of the Western Wall:
“Again a proposal has been made to redeem the Western Wall by paying a full price for it, again this Diaspora method has been placed on the agenda: “I will buy everything with gold,” the Diaspora Jew always says. . . . But what is perhaps permissible with regard to the [Jezreel] Valley and the Sharon [plain] is forbidden with regard to the Wall. There are things, my friends, that it is forbidden to buy even though there are 4 million Jews in America. We need to obtain the Wall through our political power, if we still cannot get it by those same classic means by which little Serbia became great Yugoslavia. And if our political pressure is not sufficient, and if the millions of our compatriots in New York, Chicago, Warsaw, Paris, and London find that it is more urgent for them to devote themselves to business and jazz and this national insult is not their insult, then it would be best for the Wall to remain in the meantime in its current situation”.
Ahimeir believed that the Wall had to be liberated with military force. Barring that, one could make do with having official title to the Wall transferred to the Jewish people via an international diplomatic decision. But purchasing it was inconceivable, as it already belonged to the Jewish people. Similarly, as we have seen, the sale of the Wall was inconceivable to most Arabs — they could not even accept placing benches and a divider in the area designated for prayer. They understood that the Jewish agenda was much broader. They did not entirely understand what the Jews were after, but they sensed that it was not good for them.
Further along, we have yet again the difference in perspectives of how things went, in order to create the narrative that supports each side's perspective. About the Grand Mufti:
In a PhD dissertation on the 1929 disturbances written in 2007, Rana Barakat persuasively argues that the mufti sought to position himself as protector of Islam’s holy places. He fanned the flames in the conflict over al-Buraq, she argues, but from the start of the crisis he operated within the bounds of the status quo. In other words, he did all he could to pressure the British to resolve the dispute in the Muslims’ favor, but he had no interest in mass Arab violence. But the Palestinian Arab public, especially the rural population, refused to put their trust in the British. The mufti lost control of events. Popular resistance to the mufti’s conciliatory policy was evidenced in a number of accounts given to the Shaw Commission. For example, when Sheikh Abu Sa‘ud sought, at the mufti’s request, to sooth the tempers of the worshipers in al-Aqsa, some fellahin and Maghrebis shouted at him: “We absolutely do not accept these words. Except that we should go for the Holy War.” Then Sheikh Ya‘qub al-Jilani ascended to the platform and screamed: “Do not listen to these words. This speaker is telling lies. . . . Do not take note of what our leaders say, because they are unfaithful or traitors” (quoted in Commission 1930, 1:90, 104). A week earlier Abu Sa‘ud had led a demonstration at the Wall, but now, when he tried to prevent an explosion, he was shunted aside. George Antonius, a Christian Arab of Lebanese extraction, served as one of the four assistants to the Mandate government’s chief secretary. (Almost a decade later he published The Arab Awakening, which remains a classic text about Arab nationalism.) As part of his assignment, he accompanied the mufti in the early afternoon hours that Friday as he went from the Nablus Gate to Herod’s Gate and to al-Aqsa. Antonius told the commission that the mufti had done everything in his power to calm the crowds, but that they did not always listen to him. Stones were even thrown at his car as it made its way between the two gates (Commission 1930, 1:399).
The side of the Haganah:
But the Haganah’s official history pictures the mufti as the mastermind behind the riots. The Zionist Executive’s internal correspondence shows that orders were given to collect information on incitement in the mufti’s speeches (ISA/P 694/3) and present them to the Shaw Commission. In the field, the attitude toward him was more complex. When the violence broke out, Efrayim Tzur was sent at the head of an armed squad to defend the Shimon HaTzadik neighborhood, located next to the Arab neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah on the east side of Jerusalem. He related the following incident: I saw the mufti returning to his home with his entourage. I suddenly wanted to kill him. I sent one of the neighborhood kids, Shvili, a budding thief, to the Haganah command [at the offices of] the Jerusalem Jewish Committee with a note for Rachel Yana’it. I wrote that I could and wanted to get rid of the mufti. The boy equipped himself with a knife, stuck it in his mouth like a wild man, and set off. The response he brought back was in the negative: “For heaven’s sake don’t do it.” (HHA testimony 117/12) Tzur’s intense desire to kill the mufti grew out of the common wisdom — common mostly among the Jews — that the mufti was the man who had fanned the flames and set the attacks in motion.
And Arabs saving Jews and vice versa:
So, just as Arabs saved Jews in 1929 — in Mekor Hayyim, in Motza, in Hebron, and elsewhere — there were also Jews who saved Arabs. We already mentioned Shimon, the grocer in the Bukharan quarter, and now we have Mina Albert. I have not been successful in turning up any more information about Mina Albert or Shimon the grocer. No one extolled their deeds. Davar devoted a special column titled Orot MeOfel (Light from the darkness) to Arabs who saved terrified Jews from danger. No Jewish source said anything about Jews who saved Arabs. Perhaps the Jewish writers did not want to admit, even implicitly, that Jews had lynched innocent Arabs.
And an interesting tidbit about Deir Yassin and how an event in 1929 created the payback in 1948.
Deir Yasin: 1929 and 1948 A few days following the riots, Ha’aretz (September 11, 1929) called on the British to impose collective punishment on Deir Yasin, just as they had done with other villages. According to contemporary Jewish reports, several dozen inhabitants of Deir Yasin took part in 1929 in attacks on the nearby Jewish neighborhoods of Giv‘at Sha’ul and Beit HaKerem: At 2:30 [on Friday, August 23], some 30–40 Arabs were seen on the descent from Deir Yasin opposite us. They went down into the valley and prepared for an assault. A group of Jewish defenders hid at a corner on the slope down from Beit HaKerem and began to shoot at them, without hitting any. . . . The exchange of gunfire continued until 8:30. In the meantime, several machine guns arrived with the English army. A machine gun was set up and opened fire in the direction of Deir Yasin. The soldiers took a local car, drove to the village, and opened fire on Arabs and then came back . . . on the Jewish side several were wounded over Friday and Saturday in Giv‘at Sha’ul. One (Ya’akov Leib Dimentstein) was badly wounded and died. (Amikam 1929, 28–29) What happened in the village after Jewish forces took it in April 1948 can be seen as a response to what happened in 1929. Etzel’s deputy commander of the operation in Deir Yasin, Yehuda Lapidot, wrote the entry on the 1929 riots for the online Hebrew encyclopedia Da‘at. (Lapidot n.d.). In his account, Deir Yasin played a central role in the 1929 riots. The founder of the Kach movement, Meir Kahane, defended the massacre committed in the village, claiming that “Arabs from Deir Yasin led and organized the attack [on Jewish neighborhoods in western Jerusalem in 1929], but the village became world famous only twenty years later, in 1948, when it received its payback for the many Jews its inhabitants killed” (Kahane 1980).
And lastly, the topic about the massacres and the comparison:
Comparing Massacres Comparisons can offer a view of the common parameters of different events. While massacres committed by Arabs, Jews, Latin American dictators, American forces in Vietnam, or the Stalinist regime might all be different, they all have one thing in common: the slaughter of defenseless people. And in general, the slaughterers present their actions as necessary for their self-defense. For the most part, they seem to really believe this. And that is connected to the reason why the massacre in Hebron is not and cannot be a seminal event in Palestinian consciousness.
Why Not? Because, as we saw in chapter 1, people’s fundamental, overarching view of the world determines how they perceive historical details. And in the Palestinian conception of history, the massacre in Hebron is a small part of a larger campaign of self-defense. This is not to say that all Palestinians see it the same way. Some completely ignore the massacre, others see it as an act of heroism, and still others are pained by the human suffering it caused. And, of course, some of Hebron’s Arabs rescued Jews during the riots, an act much more important than any condemnation of or statement about the massacre. The different attitudes derive from the opposing ways in which Jews and Arabs perceive the larger arc of events in Palestine or Israel. A typical example of this can be seen in the following two passages on the riots. The first comes from Ha’aretz and the second from Filastin. Here is Ha’aretz:
It was not we who set the fire
It was not we who sought blood and loot
It was not we who set man against man, community against community.
We were attacked everywhere, city and country. (September 2, 1929)This was a response to a week of bloodshed. It is of interest because just a week before the riots, Ha’aretz had harshly condemned “the fanners of flames in both camps” (August 18, 1929), and because the editors knew of the lynchings that Jews had committed against Arabs in Jerusalem and of the murder of the ‘Awn family by Hinkis. In other words, the editors knew that it wasn’t true that “we” had been attacked in all cases. But they preferred to publish a declaration that accorded with the image of the Yishuv that they sought to paint. They did so by offering their readers a picture in black and white.
I will discontinue citing the book at this point. However, it is evident that there is extensive contextual background surrounding the occurrences. It is grossly disingenuous to utilize the Hebron massacre as the incident that exposes “the authentic nature of Arabs.” As previously stated, there were instances of assaults and massacres perpetrated by the Jewish faction as well.
Each group acted in accordance with their own beliefs and viewpoints.
Sources:
