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Episode: 1929: A harbinger of October 7th - with Yardena Schwartz

Author: Ark Media
Duration: 00:53:49

Episode Shownotes

Was 1929 a harbinger of October 7th, 2023? August 23rd, 1929, nearly 100 years ago, marks the day of what is referred to in history as the 1929 Arab Riots: a wave of pogroms waged against the Jews living in British Mandatory Palestine. These pogroms began in Jerusalem and quickly

spread to other cities and towns, including Hebron, Safed, Jaffa, and Haifa. The riots had largely subsided by August 29th, after 113 Jews were murdered. Just a few months ago, we at Call me Back released a special series of episodes wherein we spoke with thought leaders about the lasting impact of October 7th on Israelis, on Jews, and on the geopolitics of the Middle East and beyond. (Watch the special series here on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiYCxMRIBxFoxg8e8Efe0Rz5DZv7VXQeQ) Today, we examine the 1929 Arab Riots taking a broad view at how they shaped the following 100 years. Our guest is Yardena Schwartz, author of the recently published book: “Ghosts of a Holy War: The 1929 Massacre in Palestine That Ignited the Arab-Israeli Conflict” - a meticulously researched work that examines the 1929 Hebron massacre, where nearly 70 Jewish residents were killed by their Arab neighbors and friends, and that explores its impact on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Yardena Schwartz is an award-winning journalist, an Emmy-nominated producer, and author of “Ghosts of a Holy War: The 1929 Massacre in Palestine That Ignited the Arab-Israeli Conflict.” Her reporting from four continents has been published in dozens of publications, including the New York Times, New York Review of Books, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Time, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, and Foreign Policy. She has also worked at NBC News, and she reported from Israel for 10 years. Yardena’s newly released book, “Ghosts of a Holy War: The 1929 Massacre in Palestine That Ignited the Arab-Israeli conflict”: https://www.amazon.com/Ghosts-Holy-War-Palestine-Arab-Israeli/dp/145494921X Pre-order the audiobook here: https://tinyurl.com/hwphyrp4 Video on the seven American hostages held in Gaza: http://pic.x.com/pkUKmtYrQW

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_00
You mentioned Kishnev. That is one of the most infamous pogroms ever to take place in Europe.

00:00:05 Speaker_00
And yet the massacre in Hebron was both more deadly and more gruesome than the Kishnev pogrom, which drove tens of thousands of Jews to flee Eastern Europe, not just for Palestine, but also for the United States.

00:00:18 Speaker_00
And so this idea among anti-Semites in Europe was that, you know, Jews didn't belong there. They often told Jews, go back to Palestine. And Jews had listened. They went back to Palestine. They went back to their homeland.

00:00:32 Speaker_00
And there they were seemingly being told, you don't belong here either.

00:00:46 Speaker_01
It's 10.30 p.m. on Thursday, December 19th here in New York City. It's 5.30 a.m. on Friday, December 20th in Israel as Israelis begin a new day.

00:00:58 Speaker_01
Before we begin today's conversation, I want to take a moment to say the names of seven Americans being held today for well over a year in Gaza by Hamas terrorists.

00:01:11 Speaker_01
These are their names, Omer Nutra, Idan Alexander, Sagi Dechelchen, Keith Siegel, Itai Chen, and Gadi and Judy Chagay. In the days ahead, most Americans will slow down and turn inward for the holidays, gathering with family or going on vacation.

00:01:35 Speaker_01
At this time, though, I thought we should do everything we can to make sure these hostages are household names here in America.

00:01:43 Speaker_01
the same way Britney Griner and Evan Gerskovich were constantly cited everywhere in the news media by celebrities and by professional athletes and by our political leaders from both parties.

00:01:57 Speaker_01
Why don't we do the same for the seven Americans who have been through hell at the hands of Hamas and are in captivity in the dungeons of Gaza?

00:02:07 Speaker_01
Sam Harris, Sheryl Sandberg, Scott Galloway, and I recently made a short video to put a spotlight on these Americans. We'll link to it in the show notes.

00:02:17 Speaker_01
Every American should know about our fellow Americans in captivity as we demand that all the hostages held in Gaza be freed. Now onto today's episode.

00:02:32 Speaker_01
August 23, 1929, almost 100 years ago, marks the day of what is often referred to in history as the 1929 Arab Riots, a wave of pogroms waged by the local Arab population in then Palestine against the local Jewish community.

00:02:54 Speaker_01
These pogroms began in Jerusalem and quickly spread to other cities and towns including Hebron, Safed, Jaffa and Haifa. The largest and most savage of these pogroms was the Hebron massacre on August 24th and the Safed massacre on August 29th.

00:03:14 Speaker_01
The riots largely subsided by August 29th after 113 Jews were slaughtered. When you read about the savagery of these pogroms, they sound eerily similar to what took place on October 7th, 2023.

00:03:31 Speaker_01
It was not just the nature of the violence, but it was the language, the same language, the terms, the description of the objectives of the massacre. It all sounds so familiar.

00:03:45 Speaker_01
With us today is Yardenna Schwartz, who has just penned a new book called Holy War, the 1929 massacre in Palestine that ignited the Arab-Israeli conflict.

00:03:58 Speaker_01
This meticulously researched book examines the 1929 Hebron massacre, where a staggering number of Jews were murdered out of nowhere by their Arab neighbors and friends. Yardenna Schwartz is an award-winning journalist, an Emmy-nominated producer,

00:04:15 Speaker_01
Her reporting has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, the New York Review of Books, and The Economist, and she worked as a producer for NBC News.

00:04:26 Speaker_01
Yardena has reported from four continents and spent a decade as a journalist reporting from Israel. Yardena Schwartz on 1929, the harbinger of October 7th. This is Call Me Back.

00:04:45 Speaker_01
And I'm pleased to welcome to this podcast for the first time, Yardena Schwartz. Yardena, welcome to Call Me Back.

00:04:52 Speaker_00
Thank you so much for having me, Dan. It's a pleasure to be here.

00:04:54 Speaker_01
Yardena, history usually tells us old stories, stories from what appear to be a different world that often requires quite an imagination to truly understand the experience of the people who lived those stories, who were the main characters of those stories or the victims in those stories.

00:05:14 Speaker_01
In this case, tragically, we don't need that much of an imagination, just a reasonable recollection of events that took place just 14 months ago to give us a window into the period of almost 100 years ago or about 95 years ago that you write about.

00:05:30 Speaker_01
So what I want to do today is a little bit of a mental exercise.

00:05:33 Speaker_01
A couple months ago, we released a series called One Year Since October 7th, where we spoke with thought leaders about the lasting impact of October 7th on Israelis, on Jews, on the geopolitics of the Middle East and beyond.

00:05:50 Speaker_01
I encourage listeners to visit this video series on our YouTube channel. We'll share the link in our show notes.

00:05:57 Speaker_01
But what I want to do is look at the 1929 Arab riots, which you wrote a whole book about, sort of telling the story as if it happened in recent memory, and what led to it, what happened, what resulted from it, and then we can talk about how it shaped the next hundred years.

00:06:15 Speaker_01
So let's just begin with how the riots ignited. Describe what happened on Saturday, October 24th, 1929, in what is today Israel.

00:06:26 Speaker_00
So on the morning of August 24th, 1929, Jews in Hebron were already huddled inside their homes in fear because they heard the mobs of thousands of Arabs in Hebron shouting, slaughter the Jews. Palestine is our land, the Jews are our dogs.

00:06:46 Speaker_00
God is great, praising the Grand Mufti and shouting, eit bach al Yehud, slaughter the Jews.

00:06:53 Speaker_00
In Arabic, many of the Jews in Hebron understood Arabic, so they knew exactly what was happening and what was going to happen if those mobs entered their homes. And they went from house to house. They knocked down doors with axes.

00:07:07 Speaker_00
They climbed through windows, climbed through roofs and balconies to get to the people who were hiding inside their homes. And once inside, they stabbed.

00:07:20 Speaker_00
anyone they could until they were dead, and they wouldn't move on from a house until they were sure that everyone inside had been killed. So what ended up happening was that these homes were covered in bodies.

00:07:35 Speaker_00
Some of them dead, some of them mistaken for dead because they were covered in the blood of the people around them. Some of them hid beneath bodies.

00:07:44 Speaker_00
Those who were lucky enough managed to find a good hiding place, hiding behind wardrobes or underneath beds or inside rooms that were not discovered in the course of the mob's attack. And, you know, there were rabbis who lay

00:07:59 Speaker_00
hugging their wives, both of them killed. 3,000 Muslim men marched through the Jewish quarter of Hebron that morning with swords, axes, and daggers and proceeded to murder, rape, castrate, burn people alive.

00:08:16 Speaker_00
And these men didn't distinguish between men, women, and children, young and old. Babies were slaughtered in their mother's arms. Women and teenage girls were raped before they were murdered in front of the eyes of their family members.

00:08:30 Speaker_00
The British, who ruled Palestine at the time, they had a police force in Hebron. There was a British police chief in charge of about 40

00:08:40 Speaker_00
policemen, all but one of those policemen were Arabs, and those policemen either stood by and watched these atrocities take place or they actively participated in them.

00:08:52 Speaker_00
So the riots that hit Hebron on August 24th, 1929, had actually began a day before in Jerusalem on August 23rd, and they were the result of a year-long propaganda campaign

00:09:07 Speaker_00
fueled by disinformation that was perpetrated by the leader of Palestinian Muslims under British rule, Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini.

00:09:16 Speaker_00
Starting in Yom Kippur of 1928, he started to spread the rumor that Jews in Palestine were planning to conquer al-Aqsa Mosque to destroy it and rebuild the Third Temple.

00:09:30 Speaker_01
For our listeners, I'm going to stop you from time to time just to double-click on it. Okay, so the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, just real quick, who was he and how did he wind up in that position?

00:09:39 Speaker_00
So Grand Mufti Hajamina Husseini was a member of one of the most prominent and most powerful Arab families in British Mandate Palestine. His father had been the Grand Mufti, which is basically the equivalent of chief rabbi of what was then Palestine.

00:09:56 Speaker_00
And he had actually been appointed to the post by the British, in fact, by Zionist official

00:10:02 Speaker_01
Herbert Samuel, a serious Zionist. I mean, I don't think he knew what he was doing when he appointed, he couldn't have foresaw what the role that Grand Mufti would play.

00:10:11 Speaker_00
Yeah, so Haj Amin Husseini, before he became Grand Mufti, he had actually been exiled to Transjordan where he had fled arrest for inciting a different riot back in 1920.

00:10:24 Speaker_00
That riot was much smaller, much less influential than the riots of 1929, but nonetheless, killed Jews, Jews had been attacked also in Jerusalem that year, and it was also fueled by this incitement that he had spread, not about Al-Aqsa though.

00:10:41 Speaker_00
The lie that continues today about Al-Aqsa Mosque and this supposed plot by the Jews of Palestine to destroy it, to rebuild their temple, that began in 1928 as a result of the Grand Mufti's own effort to distract his own people from

00:10:57 Speaker_00
allegations of corruption and nepotism and misuse of religious funds that had plagued him for ever since he had been named Grand Mufti.

00:11:05 Speaker_01
And we're going to throw the term Al-Aqsa Mosque a lot in this conversation. So just quickly tell us what the Al-Aqsa Mosque was and its significance. And obviously the term reemerges close to 100 years later on October 7th, 2023.

00:11:19 Speaker_01
But we'll get to that later. But just what is the Al-Aqsa Mosque and why is it so significant here?

00:11:24 Speaker_00
The Al-Aqsa Mosque is the third holiest site in Islam, but it is the holiest place for Muslims in what was then Palestine. It was built atop the ruins of the ancient Jewish temples, the ruins of the Beit HaMikdash.

00:11:40 Speaker_00
in Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, of course, is the single holiest site in Judaism. It is the direction Jews have prayed for thousands of years. It was the epicenter and continues to be the epicenter of the Jewish people.

00:11:54 Speaker_00
But at the time, Jews were forbidden from going to the Temple Mount and the holiest place they were permitted to pray was the Western Wall, the Kotel, the Wailing Wall.

00:12:05 Speaker_00
And at the time when Jews were praying there, they would be attacked by Muslims quite frequently. They would be spat on, rocks would be thrown at them. And that was the result of this disinformation campaign that the Mufti had spread.

00:12:23 Speaker_00
creating so much animosity between the local Muslims in Jerusalem and the Jews who were simply trying to pray in peace at the Western Wall, but were being accused of actually trying to destroy the Temple Mount.

00:12:33 Speaker_00
And throughout the year before the riots erupted, what the Mufti did wasn't just perpetuate that propaganda campaign, but also carry out all kinds of efforts to restrict Jewish access to the Western Wall. So he initiated building campaigns.

00:12:48 Speaker_00
One of those involved a door being installed into the area where Jews could pray at the Western Wall, which would allow Muslims to go from the Western Wall directly up into Al-Aqsa, which made absolutely no sense because the Western Wall was not a place where Muslims prayed.

00:13:03 Speaker_00
It wasn't a holy place for them. It was the only place where Jews could pray next to their holiest site. And what that did was that increased the frequency of those Muslim attacks on Jews who were praying there.

00:13:17 Speaker_00
And it then initiated this effort by Jews in Jerusalem to campaign for the British to give the Western Wall to the Jews so that they could pray there freely.

00:13:29 Speaker_00
Because at the time, the Western Wall was owned by the Mufti because he was the head of the Supreme Muslim Council, which the British had also created. And so

00:13:38 Speaker_00
because he technically ran the Western Wall, he could initiate all of these building projects that then inhibited their access to pray there.

00:13:47 Speaker_00
So his effort to convince Palestinian Muslims that Jews were planning to conquer Al-Aqsa were then, in a way, validated by this effort by Jews to tell the British, hey, protect our rights here, or, you know, how are we supposed to pray here?

00:14:05 Speaker_00
And when they were campaigning for the British to grant them protection to pray at the Western Wall, the Mufti could then say, hey, look, they're trying to take over Al-Aqsa. So it kind of worked into his hands.

00:14:17 Speaker_01
But every time Jews would gather there, he could reframe it as, ah, they're coming to take Al-Aqsa.

00:14:23 Speaker_01
So you describe in the book, like on Tisha B'Av, the ninth of Av on the Hebrew calendar, the saddest holiday, the saddest date in the Jewish calendar, thousands and thousands and thousands of Jews in the area would go to the wall to pray, and he could turn that into they're storming Al-Aqsa.

00:14:41 Speaker_00
Exactly. So on Tisha B'Av, 10,000 Jews gathered at the Western Wall to pray in peace. And they were surrounded by a line of British forces.

00:14:52 Speaker_01
Literally in that year.

00:14:53 Speaker_00
Exactly. It was 10 days before the riots erupted. It was mid-August 1929. 10,000 Jews gathered at the Wall to pray. The very next day, a smaller group of a few hundred mostly revisionist Zionist activists

00:15:09 Speaker_00
marched to the wall singing Hatikvah and carrying the Jewish flag, the Magin David flag, the Star of David, and chanting the wall is ours and protesting against the British failure to protect Jews from increasing Muslim attacks and protect them from these restrictions that were preventing them from praying there.

00:15:31 Speaker_00
And And this protest, this march, was not a protest against the Muslims of the city.

00:15:36 Speaker_00
It was a protest specifically against the British forces that ruled Palestine and had ignored this campaign of disinformation against them, had allowed all these building projects and restrictions to prevent Jewish access to the wall.

00:15:49 Speaker_00
And that march was peaceful. You know, it was politically provocative, you could say, but it was absolutely peaceful.

00:15:55 Speaker_00
Yet immediately after that march, the Arabic press was filled with reports of, and not just the Arabic press, Arab leaders in Palestine were perpetuating this lie that said this march was not peaceful.

00:16:10 Speaker_00
that the young people who had marched the wall had actually raped Muslim women and attacked Muslims in the area and had cursed the Prophet Muhammad.

00:16:20 Speaker_00
None of that had happened, but the truth had become irrelevant at this point after a whole year of disinformation being spread without any kind of action by the British.

00:16:32 Speaker_00
So the day after that march, there was a march by Muslims in the area that was violent. And you know, rabbis were beat up, Torah scrolls were torn, and everything just kind of spiraled out of control from there.

00:16:47 Speaker_00
So over the course of the next week, there were attacks and counterattacks between Jews and Arabs in Jerusalem. And then on August 23rd, 1929,

00:16:57 Speaker_00
After Friday prayers in Al-Aqsa, when imams called on the faithful to defend Islam and defend Al-Aqsa with their blood, thousands of worshipers flowed out of Al-Aqsa compound and down from the Temple Mount to the Old City where they attacked Jewish passersby, stormed Jewish businesses and set fire to them.

00:17:20 Speaker_00
And the riots erupted that morning in Jerusalem and spread to every Jewish community in Palestine. No community was spared. The Jewish community of Gaza was evacuated by British forces to Tel Aviv. Jews in all of the Kibbutzim were evacuated.

00:17:37 Speaker_00
And yet when the riots reached Hebron, The Jews in Hebron had been sure that the riots would not reach them because Hebron at that time was considered the safest place for Jews in Palestine.

00:17:51 Speaker_00
Arabs and Jews had lived harmoniously, mostly peacefully together for generations, for centuries. There had been a Jewish presence in Hebron for thousands of years, dating back to the days of Abraham.

00:18:04 Speaker_00
And with Hebron being the burial place of Abraham, it was considered one of the holiest cities, not just for Jews, but for Muslims as well. And there was a community of about 800 Jews living in Hebron amidst 20,000 Muslims.

00:18:20 Speaker_00
While they were very much treated as inferior to the Muslim majority of the city, they did live in peace until that day. And so when the riots reached Hebron, the Jewish community was really caught off guard.

00:18:35 Speaker_00
You know, they had been offered protection by the Haganah, the Jewish underground Jewish defense force that would later become the IDF. The Haganite come to Hebron two days before the massacre and said, let us help you.

00:18:48 Speaker_00
Let us send reinforcements here or let us evacuate you to Jerusalem until the riots subside. And the Jewish leaders of Hebron were unanimous in their opposition. They said, get out of here. We don't need your help. Our Arab friends will never hurt us.

00:19:03 Speaker_00
They're our neighbors, they're co-workers. The Arabs of Hebron were often the Jewish residents' landlords. And the Jewish community of Hebron ended up paying the heaviest price, suffering more casualties.

00:19:16 Speaker_01
I'm just quoting here from your book.

00:19:18 Speaker_01
There are so many paragraphs in this book that I read, and as I told you previously, earlier, they could easily be clipped from contemporary news accounts of events of October 7th, but just, this is what you write in the book.

00:19:31 Speaker_01
You say, the rioters who broke into Jewish homes did not distinguish between men, women, or children. Infants were slaughtered in their mother's arms. Children watched as their parents were butchered by their neighbors.

00:19:43 Speaker_01
Women and teenage girls were raped. elderly rabbis and yeshiva students were mutilated. And you alluded to this but I just want to zero in on it.

00:19:51 Speaker_01
Were the residents of Hebron, even though they had been kind of warned, I guess in that sense it's different from October 7th, they were warned.

00:19:58 Speaker_01
They were warned both by the Haganah and they were hearing about the riots that were moving in other parts of pre-state Israel before the riots approached Hebron. So what was so singular about Hebron? I guess that's what I'm asking.

00:20:11 Speaker_00
What made the massacre in Hebron become the emblem, the symbol, of the riots of 1929 was the fact that Hebron paid the heaviest price. More than half of all the Jews who were killed during those week-long riots were killed in Hebron.

00:20:29 Speaker_00
And it wasn't just that they suffered the most casualties, they also suffered the most brutality. You know, the atrocities that were committed in Hebron.

00:20:37 Speaker_00
Some of those atrocities were also committed in Sfat and in communities outside of Jerusalem, but not on the scale with which they were committed in Hebron.

00:20:46 Speaker_00
And also they became a symbol of these riots because Hebron was this beacon of coexistence in British Mandate Palestine.

00:20:56 Speaker_01
So can you talk a little bit about that?

00:20:58 Speaker_00
So there was a very good reason why the leaders of Hebron in 1929 refused offers from the Haganah.

00:21:05 Speaker_00
They were absolutely sure that whatever happened in other parts of Palestine, it wouldn't happen there because the Jews and Muslims had coexisted peacefully together for generations. I mean, more than half of the Jews in Hebron were Arabic speakers.

00:21:20 Speaker_00
They and their families had lived in Hebron or in other parts of Eretz Israel, of British Mandate Palestine. They had lived there for generations. They dressed in Arabic dress. They spoke Arabic.

00:21:33 Speaker_00
And even the more recently arrived European Jews living in Hebron, they had also been there since, you know, the 1800s. The Hebron yeshiva, which also paid one of the heaviest prices, 25 yeshiva students were killed during the massacre in Hebron.

00:21:50 Speaker_00
It had been welcomed with open arms by the Arab residents of Hebron. You know, they benefited from the presence of the yeshiva because it brought economic benefits. Many of the yeshiva students rented homes from Arab landlords.

00:22:02 Speaker_00
They shopped in Arab shops. And so when the haganah came to Hebron two days before the riots erupted and told them that there would be riots here, It sounded like a joke. It sounded like, you know, you're confused.

00:22:16 Speaker_00
That might happen to you guys in Jerusalem, to you guys in Tel Aviv, but that won't happen to us here because our Arab neighbors are our friends. They were just absolutely certain of that.

00:22:26 Speaker_00
And indeed on that Saturday morning on August 24th, 1929, one of the leaders of Hebron's Jewish community, Eliezer Dan Slonim, he was the son of the chief Ashkenazi rabbi of Hebron. He was the only Jew on Hebron City Council. He had many Arab friends.

00:22:44 Speaker_00
He was visited by his Arab friends that morning, and they told them, we're going to sit outside your home and make sure nobody comes here and hurts you. Because it wasn't just his family that was sheltering inside, trembling in fear.

00:22:57 Speaker_00
It was actually 70 other Jews from Hebron who had taken shelter in his home because they were sure that his home would be the safest place in Hebron. once the riots had already erupted there.

00:23:08 Speaker_00
And yet when that mob came, those friends were no longer there. And one of those friends was actually part of the mob that ended up killing Eliezer, Dan Slonim, and his wife and their five-year-old son.

00:23:19 Speaker_00
They also tried to kill their infant 11-month-old son who ended up surviving. But more than 20 people were slaughtered in his home after he had been promised protection by his Arab friends.

00:23:33 Speaker_00
The reason why Hebron became the symbol of these riots was because it represented the end of this hope for coexistence in British Mandate Palestine and really ignited the conflict that we're still in today.

00:23:48 Speaker_00
Because before 1929, there was still hope that these two people could share this land.

00:23:55 Speaker_00
In 1929, that was when this rumor about the Jewish plot to destroy Al-Aqsa really took hold of the population and the causes of the riots, you know, this disinformation campaign didn't end there. After the massacre, there was this widespread denial

00:24:15 Speaker_00
among Arab leaders and the Arab population that those atrocities had taken place. And simultaneously, there was this effort to pin the blame on the Jewish victims themselves.

00:24:25 Speaker_00
So right after the massacre, and I think a week later, there was this statement published by the Arab leadership And it was published in city squares and all of the newspapers.

00:24:37 Speaker_00
And it said, the title was actually, Scandals of Jewish Propaganda, in all caps.

00:24:43 Speaker_00
And it stated not only that those atrocities had not been committed by the Arab population of Hebron, but that they had been committed by the Jewish yeshiva students who killed Jews in order to raise funds from the Jewish diaspora.

00:24:58 Speaker_00
So this disinformation campaign that had led to the riots also followed the riots.

00:25:03 Speaker_00
And the British, in the immediate aftermath, decided to set up this commission, this royal commission, to come from London to Palestine to investigate the causes of the riots.

00:25:15 Speaker_00
And in March of 1930, when they published their 400-page report concluding that the mufti was not to blame and he could keep his positions despite the fact that the British had appointed him to those positions and could have stripped him of them, the fact that the British had appointed him kind of made it in their interest to protect him from any kind of blame, despite the mountains of evidence that had emerged in his testimony and the testimony of others.

00:25:41 Speaker_00
that made it very clear that his incitement and disinformation campaign had directly resulted in this massacre. Instead, they blamed the spark of the riots on that peaceful Jewish demonstration at the Western Wall.

00:25:55 Speaker_00
And that commission, the Shaw Commission, led to another white paper published by the British several months later concluding that the solution to these tensions that had gripped Palestine and caused so much death and destruction was

00:26:10 Speaker_00
the limitation of Jewish immigration and land purchases in Palestine.

00:26:16 Speaker_01
What was the reaction of the Haganah? So that was the pre-state Jewish defense service military that was to protect the Jewish community in that area. So what was their response to all of this?

00:26:28 Speaker_00
So before the riots of 1929, the Haganah was a very decentralized, disorganized, kind of ragtag group of fighters, poorly trained, poorly armed.

00:26:40 Speaker_00
And one of many lasting impacts of the massacre was that after 1929, the Haganah became a much more centralized, much more organized, more heavily armed and larger fighting force. So many more people

00:26:55 Speaker_00
were recruited and it became a much more organized fighting force that could not just protect farms or Jewish communities in Jerusalem, but anywhere that Jews were living in Palestine.

00:27:09 Speaker_00
Because in 1929, one of the reasons why Hebron suffered the heaviest price was because there was no Haganah. There were no armed Jews living in Hebron. The Jews in Hebron were pious, religious people whose lives revolved around Torah.

00:27:24 Speaker_00
The only person who owned a gun in Hebron didn't even use it that day. Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, the Haganah was very active there and that's why they didn't suffer as many casualties.

00:27:35 Speaker_00
That was really this massive turning point for Zionism within the Old Yeshuv.

00:27:42 Speaker_00
And one of the results of that change in the consciousness of the Sephardim and the traditional Jews in Palestine was that the Haganah was no longer this exclusively Ashkenazi operation.

00:27:54 Speaker_00
And it was also, it became much larger, much more powerful, much more centralized and organized because they saw that they couldn't trust the British to protect them. So the Haganah needed to become bigger.

00:28:05 Speaker_00
It needed to become more organized because they understood that they were their only source of protection. that if there was going to be another riot or if there are going to be attacks, then we need to protect ourselves.

00:28:16 Speaker_00
Before 1929, Zionism was not a very popular movement among the Sephardim in Palestine. The Sephardim who had been exiled from Spain and then ended up in countries like Greece and obviously across the Arab world.

00:28:33 Speaker_00
And they didn't really embrace Zionism at first because it was a very secular movement and the Sephardim in British Mandate Palestine and Eretz Israel were very religious, very traditional.

00:28:48 Speaker_00
They saw this Zionist movement as kind of a secular contamination of Judaism. They believed that the massive return of the Jews from all corners of the world, from the exile, should only happen with God's will and the return of the Messiah.

00:29:05 Speaker_00
So they were Zionists in the sense that they believed in the return to Zion and they believed in the prominence of Eretz Yisrael.

00:29:13 Speaker_00
Obviously, they wouldn't be living there if they didn't, but they rejected what was a very secular Zionist movement before 1929.

00:29:22 Speaker_00
And after 1929, one of the most lasting impacts of the massacre was that this opposition and antagonism against the Zionist movement from the Sephardim and also from Ashkenazi traditional religious Jews in Palestine, that began to melt away because they realized

00:29:42 Speaker_00
that if they want to live in Eretz Israel, if they want to live in the ancient Jewish homeland, then they could only do so under the protection of their own army and in their own country.

00:29:54 Speaker_00
You know, they saw with their own eyes that the British had no interest in protecting them. And so this kind of militarization of the Zionist movement

00:30:05 Speaker_00
really picked up speed after 1929, even, and also resulted in the splitting off the Haganah into different fighting forces because the Haganah, even though it became much more powerful, it was still a militia of, you know, it was a reactionary militia.

00:30:21 Speaker_00
So if there was an attack, they would work to repel it, they would work to protect Jewish communities, but they would not carry out any kind of preemptive strike. They would not try to work to prevent attacks from actually happening.

00:30:33 Speaker_00
And there was a disagreement within the Haganah itself after 1929 that, you know, that's not enough. And so that resulted in these other militias being created to work to actually prevent these attacks and carry out preemptive strikes.

00:30:49 Speaker_01
That's how the Paganah reacts and gets organized. I just understand the Arab population, which, as you point out in the book, in 1929, there were 800 Jews, 800 Jews living in Hebron, and there were 20,000 Arabs living in Hebron.

00:31:07 Speaker_01
and you write that 3,000 of those 20,000 participated in the massacre in Hebron that day, okay? Just to put it again, 20,000 people living there, 3,000 living there.

00:31:18 Speaker_01
We constantly refer to the fact on this podcast that there are 2 million approximately, give or take, Palestinians

00:31:24 Speaker_01
living in Gaza, we know approximately 6,000 Gazans participated directly on October 7th, meaning crossed into Southern Israel and participated in the massacre. So 6,000 out of 2 million is still a very high number.

00:31:38 Speaker_01
Before you even get to the numbers of the Palestinians who participated indirectly, were involved with the planning, the logistics, the training, or just had knowledge. You know, many of these Gazans live in homes with seven, eight, nine, 10 people.

00:31:50 Speaker_01
Many of them knew something on the scale was in the works. So then you, you start to, you know, extrapolate out the numbers and you start to realize the scale of participation among average Palestinians in Gaza.

00:32:02 Speaker_01
But it's nothing proportionately to these numbers you're talking about because here you're talking about 3000 Arabs who participated in the massacre directly, not indirectly, not family members who had knowledge of.

00:32:12 Speaker_01
3,000 that we know of that participated directly out of a population of 20,000. What does that tell us about what was going on then?

00:32:19 Speaker_01
Was that a wake-up call for the Jewish community that, to your earlier point, we thought these were our friends, we thought they were our neighbors? No, actually, they're radicalized, and we didn't know it. They were our landlords, as you write about.

00:32:29 Speaker_01
They were our friends. They were our business partners in one direction or the other. They were our neighbors. and they were actually radicalized.

00:32:37 Speaker_01
So you say that was a shock, but what does that actually tell us what was really going on in that Arab population in Hebron and the surrounding areas?

00:32:44 Speaker_00
So it really is a testament to what individual people are capable of when they become part of a mob. Because those people, among them were those who had promised protection to their friends and neighbors.

00:32:59 Speaker_00
But then once they were grabbed by their friends and told, hey, come with us, we're going to pillage this house and take the women for ourselves and set it on fire. They couldn't say no.

00:33:12 Speaker_00
And it was a result of this process of radicalization and all of these lies that were being spread about not just the Jews in Jerusalem who were trying to pray in peace at the Western Wall, but also those rumors extended to the Jews in Hebron

00:33:28 Speaker_00
where religious leaders in mosques in Hebron were telling Muslims that Jews in Hebron were planning to take over Ibrahimi Mosque, which is the tomb of the patriarchs, Marat and Machpelah. So in 1929,

00:33:44 Speaker_00
The very epicenter of the Jewish community in Hebron was the Tomb of the Patriarchs where Abraham and Sarah and all of the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Jewish people are buried. It was completely off limits to Jews.

00:33:56 Speaker_00
You know, they lived in, the Jewish quarter was just outside of the Tomb of the Patriarchs. This is why the Jewish presence had been there for thousands of years.

00:34:05 Speaker_00
the tomb of the patriarchs, the fortress above, this burial place of the Jewish patriarchs. Matriarchs had actually been built by the Jewish King Herod 2,000 years earlier.

00:34:16 Speaker_00
And when Muslims conquered Jerusalem, they turned what was a synagogue into a mosque and prohibited non-Muslims from entering.

00:34:26 Speaker_00
So for 700 years under Muslim rule in Hebron, only Muslims were permitted to enter the Tomb of the Patriarchs, and Jews who wished to pray there were forced to do so outside, issuing their prayers through a hole in the wall.

00:34:39 Speaker_00
And they were being told in the days and weeks before August 24th, 1929, that Jews in Hebron were plotting to take over that mosque, to turn it back into a synagogue.

00:34:51 Speaker_00
So that disinformation, those rumors and those lies took hold of the population in Hebron as well. And that is what allowed them to turn on their neighbors who they were convinced were plotting something of their own.

00:35:05 Speaker_00
I think it just shows the power of disinformation, which we often think is this plague of the modern era and of technology and social media, yet in 1929, disinformation had such devastating consequences.

00:35:21 Speaker_00
And that disinformation was carried out by corrupt Muslim leaders in Palestine and these imams who were telling the worshipers in their mosques that Jews were trying to destroy their mosques and that they needed to kill them to protect Islam.

00:35:39 Speaker_00
But I think it's really important to mention, Dan, that on August 24th, 1929, more than 200 Jews were rescued by their Muslim neighbors from the mobs.

00:35:50 Speaker_00
So while 3,000 people participated in the massacre, more than two dozen Arab families risked their own lives to hide their Jewish neighbors in their homes or stood guard outside of those Jewish neighbors' homes and told the mobs, you know, you won't enter this home.

00:36:08 Speaker_00
And there was actually a man who literally arrived on a white horse from his vineyards. And he was in his seventies, and yet he stood outside his tenant's home.

00:36:19 Speaker_00
There was a Jewish family, actually the family of the chief Ashkenazi rabbi of Hebron, Rabbi Yaakov Slonim, the father of Eliezer Dan Slonim, who suffered a much different fate.

00:36:29 Speaker_00
His father, Rabbi Yaakov Slonim, was rescued by his Arab landlord who stood outside his home and told this armed mob, You know, if you want to come here, you'll have to enter over my dead body."

00:36:42 Speaker_00
And even when they slashed his leg with a sword, he didn't back down. He said, you know, you're not going inside this house. So there were so many stories like that of Arabs saving their Jewish friends and neighbors on August 24th.

00:37:00 Speaker_01
The news of October 7th traveled very quickly, instantly. In fact, the terrorists who conducted the massacre documented most of what they did. They telegraphed what they were doing on their GoPro cameras and other devices.

00:37:15 Speaker_01
So we all knew instantly, almost instantly, what was happening. Can you describe how the world learned about what happened?

00:37:26 Speaker_00
The British actually enforced a censorship on all Hebrew press in Palestine.

00:37:34 Speaker_00
There was no explanation why, but presumably to protect themselves from anger among the Jewish population at the British, the utter failure of the British to protect them, the neglect.

00:37:45 Speaker_00
and the betrayal of the Jewish subjects of the British authorities. But there were many foreign correspondents based in Palestine at the time. And so in other parts of the world, you know, outside of Palestine, there were reports.

00:38:00 Speaker_00
So for one week, there were no Hebrew newspapers being published. There was just blackout of communications. But the New York Times, the Times of London, the riots in Palestine and the massacre in Hebron specifically were front page news for days.

00:38:18 Speaker_00
And the New York Times published front page stories with headlines, you know, Muslim mobs carry out horrific atrocities. You know, they were very accurately reporting.

00:38:29 Speaker_00
on what had happened in Hebron and published very, you know, detailed descriptions of these atrocities that were carried out against the Jews of Hebron. In some reports, they were misreported as clashes between Jews and Arabs in Palestine.

00:38:47 Speaker_00
So there were many reports I found where

00:38:49 Speaker_00
Despite the details within the story that made it very clear that this was a one-sided attack by Arabs in Palestine against the Jewish community, the headlines sometimes said, you know, clashes in Palestine claim dozens of lives.

00:39:05 Speaker_00
The news traveled very fast to places like New York and London and in New York, actually two days after the massacre.

00:39:12 Speaker_00
So on August 26th, 1929, 35,000 people marched down the streets of Manhattan to the British consulate in lower Manhattan in protest against these riots and against the British failure to protect the Jews of Palestine. 35,000 people, August 26th, 1929.

00:39:30 Speaker_00
Wow.

00:39:31 Speaker_01
Yeah.

00:39:32 Speaker_00
I don't think we saw any kind of march.

00:39:35 Speaker_01
Right.

00:39:35 Speaker_00
of that scale after October 7th, at least not in support of the Jews who were killed. Maybe we saw, you know, celebrations of the massacre that large. But, you know, yeah. And on August 26th, 1929, 35,000 people, almost all of them Jews.

00:39:51 Speaker_01
I mean, the closest analog was the D.C. rally.

00:39:55 Speaker_00
The D.C. rally that happened, you know, what, a month later?

00:39:58 Speaker_01
Yeah, even more so. Yeah. But yes, this was immediate. Wow.

00:40:02 Speaker_00
Yeah. And the outrage from American leaders was also swift and unanimous. I mean, the American politicians were aghast and were openly critical of British policy in Palestine for allowing this to happen and for not protecting their Jewish subjects.

00:40:21 Speaker_01
Many of the Jews who had moved to pre-state Israel, to Palestine, were Jews who had left Eastern Europe out of fear for pogroms that had been sweeping Eastern Europe, specifically Kishinev in 1903, but not just Kishinev, although that's the one that's the most starkly referred to.

00:40:40 Speaker_01
But for a lot of the Jews that were living in the Shuv, this was, What suddenly was unleashed there, while a shock, it was an echo of something they had been experiencing or feared and were therefore running from in other parts of the world.

00:40:55 Speaker_00
Absolutely. I mean, the Zionist movement was a direct response to this epiphany that Jewish lives were not going to be safe. Jews were not going to be safe in Europe for much longer because these pogroms were becoming a fact of life.

00:41:13 Speaker_00
And many of the Jews who had fled to Palestine fled not just anti-Semitism, but fled pogroms. And you mentioned Kishinev. That is one of the most infamous pogroms ever to take place in Europe.

00:41:26 Speaker_00
And yet the massacre in Hebron was both more deadly and more gruesome than the Kishinev pogrom, which drove tens of thousands of Jews to flee Eastern Europe, not just for Palestine, but also for the United States.

00:41:39 Speaker_00
And the massacre in Hebron was one of the most gruesome and most deadly pogroms ever to take place outside of Europe. And so this idea among anti-Semites in Europe was that, you know, Jews didn't belong there. They were foreigners.

00:41:57 Speaker_00
They often told Jews, go back to Palestine. And Jews had listened. They went back to Palestine. They went back to their homeland. And there they were seemingly being told, you don't belong here either.

00:42:08 Speaker_01
August 1929 resulted in a paradigm shift, something that was unthinkable until it actually happened. Can you describe how the paradigm had shifted in the eyes of the Jewish world after August 24th, 1929?

00:42:22 Speaker_00
you know, Zionism was really not this unifying force in the Jewish world, particularly not within the Jewish community in Palestine, among Mizrahim, among very Orthodox Jews.

00:42:36 Speaker_00
Not only did that change, but the opposition to Zionism outside of Palestine. So, you know, in the U.S., Zionism was seen as this dangerous force for American Jews who had a very fragile place in American society.

00:42:52 Speaker_00
Many of them had recently arrived from Europe, were experiencing discrimination as, you know, immigrants, and there were restrictions on Jewish immigration. They didn't want Zionism to threaten their fragile place in American society.

00:43:07 Speaker_00
And so they really kind of stood back from the Zionist movement overwhelmingly, and that also began to change after August 1929. There was much more support for Zionism among American Jews as well.

00:43:20 Speaker_00
It wasn't, you know, the massive tectonic shift that followed the Holocaust. Of course, after the Holocaust, then it was, Zionism really became, you know, kind of a rallying cry for the Jewish diaspora. But that process began after the riots of 1929.

00:43:36 Speaker_00
because they saw that this massacre had really epitomized the tragedy of the stateless, powerless Jew. They saw that no other people were going to protect us. We're going to have to protect ourselves.

00:43:51 Speaker_00
So prior to 1929, the Jewish natives of Palestine, they had been accustomed to being second-class citizens under 1,000 years of Muslim rule.

00:44:01 Speaker_00
And after 1929, they realized that, you know, if that continues, there won't be a Jewish community in Palestine.

00:44:11 Speaker_00
And so, you know, following the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the British Mandate, when the British ended Ottoman-era restrictions on Jewish immigration, which the Turkish had instituted for many years, the British ended those policies.

00:44:27 Speaker_00
But then after the massacre, they brought them back. and they continued to limit Jewish immigration.

00:44:33 Speaker_00
And even after Hitler's rise to power throughout Nazi rule and throughout the Holocaust, the British held on to these very strict limitations on Jewish immigration from Europe and land purchases.

00:44:46 Speaker_00
And so during the Holocaust, when tens of thousands of Jews were fleeing Europe and arriving on the shores of Palestine, The British didn't just send them back to Europe often.

00:44:56 Speaker_00
Sometimes tens of thousands of Jews were sent by the British to internment camps within Palestine and Cyprus throughout World War II. And one of the results of the massacre was that the mufti, the grand mufti who had incited these riots,

00:45:15 Speaker_00
he became even more powerful. And he began a process of turning the entire population to his side by silencing any critics to his way, silencing political distance, whether by assassinating them or by intimidating them. And so

00:45:36 Speaker_00
his way became the only way.

00:45:38 Speaker_00
And so his policy of refusing any sort of peace with the Jewish minority of Palestine and any sort of peaceful resolution of the conflict that he had helped ignite, that became kind of the motto of all Arab leaders in Palestine, because leaders who didn't

00:45:57 Speaker_00
fall behind that line were assassinated or silenced out of their posts. And so, you know, one of the lasting impacts of the massacre was that this propaganda disinformation works.

00:46:11 Speaker_00
It will allow any kind of corrupt leader to distract his people from his corruption. And, you know, it really sadly worked for the Grand Mufti. He became one of the most powerful Arab leaders in the Muslim world, not just in Palestine.

00:46:25 Speaker_00
And when he led another rebellion, he led a rebellion against the British from 1936 and on, he became even more powerful. And the British tried to once again appease terrorism with new restrictions on Jewish immigration and land purchases.

00:46:44 Speaker_00
Finally, when that rebellion killed a British official, they finally decided, okay, we've had enough of the Mufti.

00:46:50 Speaker_00
They issued an arrest warrant for him, but he fled and eventually ended up in Berlin, where throughout World War II, he was a lavishly paid Nazi accomplice.

00:47:02 Speaker_00
And he didn't just broadcast Nazi propaganda throughout the Muslim world, but recruited tens of thousands of Muslims to fight for the Nazis. He lived in a Nazi-financed mansion in Berlin from 1941 to 1945.

00:47:16 Speaker_00
And when World War II ended, he was placed on the UN's list of Nazi war criminals. He had led the Arab branch of Joseph Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda.

00:47:25 Speaker_00
And yet, once again, when he was placed on the UN's list of Nazi war criminals, he fled again and ended up in Cairo and then in Beirut. He ended up training his young cousin, Yasser Arafat, who became his closest disciple.

00:47:39 Speaker_01
Yardena, it's fair to say that if we look at the way many in the West approach the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, they have, at least historically, framed it as a territorial dispute.

00:47:52 Speaker_01
There's some kind of negotiation if the Israelis and the Palestinians can just kind of negotiate some land dispute all of this can be resolved But you titled your book ghosts of a holy war.

00:48:01 Speaker_01
You don't talk about as a territorial dispute you define it as a holy war is Your understanding that today almost a hundred years later. It is still a holy war and it was always a holy war even though we went through all these periods and

00:48:14 Speaker_01
in the lead up to the creation of the state of Israel, that if, you know, the UN and other bodies, the British, the Peel Commission, all these efforts to just, if we get the Arabs a state, we get the Jews a state, then it'll be fine.

00:48:26 Speaker_01
And then obviously all the efforts in the 1990s, the peace process, Oslo, Camp David, all these efforts, if we could just resolve the territorial disagreements, we will have solved the problem. And as your understanding is, it was never about that.

00:48:41 Speaker_01
It was always, to quote from your book, a holy war. It was never a territorial war.

00:48:47 Speaker_00
Yeah, I mean you just have to listen to the players in this conflict, listen to their own words. I mean, Hamas named its attack on October 7th the Al-Aqsa flood.

00:49:01 Speaker_00
Its founding charter and also its revised charter are filled with references to Islam and to this land being wholly Islamic land and only Muslim land, and that it needs to only be Muslim land forever.

00:49:17 Speaker_00
And that if you listen to the leaders of not just Hamas, but Islamic Jihad, of Hezbollah, and even the more so-called moderate factions like Fatah and the Palestinian Authority, they use this religious terminology and they constantly refer to this land as holy Muslim land.

00:49:36 Speaker_00
and to the Jewish presence as some kind of abomination. There's a reason why when they talk about al-Aqsa, they use words like contaminating, because they see the Jewish presence as this affront to Islam. And that has been true for the last century.

00:49:54 Speaker_00
I mean, when the British tried to work out the first two state solution in 1937, and they held talks with the Jewish leaders in Palestine and with the Mufti, the Jewish leaders were begging the British, you know, there are millions of Jews in places in Europe where they cannot live.

00:50:15 Speaker_00
and we need a place to go, and we're just looking for this, you know, all we want is this tiny sliver of land to call home. They were not using religious terminology. When it came time for the Grand Mufti to testify to the British, he did.

00:50:28 Speaker_00
He referred to the land as Muslim land, as Arab land, and he said that there would be no peaceful resolution with

00:50:39 Speaker_00
The Jews of Palestine, when the British asked him, you know, what will happen to the 400,000 Jews who are now living here, he said, we'll get to that some other time. And they said, well, can they stay here? Can they live here? And he said, no.

00:50:52 Speaker_00
One word, no. And so the chief players in this conflict are openly telling us what they believe. And I think the international community and particularly the international media chooses this willful ignorance, chooses not to listen to what they say.

00:51:10 Speaker_00
And I can't know why they do that, but my hypothesis is that it complicates what they try to portray as a very simple narrative of, you know, this being a conflict over land. And it's really not.

00:51:25 Speaker_00
And I think it's really hard for Westerners to wrap their heads around this idea that this belief in, you know, holy Islamic land,

00:51:33 Speaker_00
and the belief that a Jewish presence there is contaminating this holy Islamic land, I think it's really hard for them to wrap their heads around that idea that that is one of the bedrock issues that is fueling this conflict.

00:51:46 Speaker_00
But it's the only thing that makes sense, because if you look at every two-state solution going back to 1937, 1947, 2000, 2008, all of those resolutions have been rejected, not by Israel.

00:51:59 Speaker_00
not by the Jews of Palestine, but by Arab leaders who claimed to want independence for their people. But really, if they did want independence for their own people, they could have had that 90 years ago.

00:52:09 Speaker_00
There could have been a free Palestine and independent Palestine in 1947 when the UN voted to partition Palestine. And the Grand Mufti declared jihad as a result of that UN vote. And he was joined by, of course, every other Arab leader.

00:52:24 Speaker_01
We will leave it there. The book is Ghosts of a Holy War, which we will link to in the show notes. The subtitle is The 1929 Massacre in Palestine that Ignited the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Thank you.

00:52:35 Speaker_01
It's an extremely important book, but tragically, and I know this wasn't your intention, but also tragically timely. And I know you were working on it before October 7th without being to anticipate how eerily relevant it would be. So thank you.

00:52:50 Speaker_01
There's like I thought as I was reading this is like ten conversations. There's ten episodes We could have just based on this book. So this just scratched the surface. Hopefully we'll have you back on until then.

00:52:59 Speaker_00
Thanks Thank you so much, Dan

00:53:07 Speaker_01
That's our show for today. To keep up with Yardena Schwartz, you can find her on X at Yardena S. And we will post her book, Ghosts of a Holy War, in the show notes.

00:53:19 Speaker_01
And the link to the video on the seven American hostages will also be posted in the show notes. Call Me Back is produced and edited by Ilan Benatar. Our media manager is Rebecca Strom. Additional editing by Martin Weirgo. Research by Gabe Silverstein.

00:53:37 Speaker_01
Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.