Ghosts of a Holy War: The 1929 Massacre in Palestine that Ignored the Arab-Israeli Conflict
By Yardena Schwartz
(Union Square & Co., 432 pages, $30)

In the immediate aftermath of the horrific Hamas attack on Israel of October 7, 2023, reasonably informed opinion in most of the world, excluding Muslim or Arab nations, expressed shock and sympathy. Who could not be horrified by a preplanned act of mass violence in which over 1,200 Israelis (men, women, children, and babies) were murdered, often following brutal rapes and torture, while some 250 were taken hostage?

Yet it wasn’t long before such reactions were widely replaced with ostensibly more “balanced” judgments that emphasized the sufferings of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank under Israeli rule ever since their lands were seized from the countries (Egypt, Jordan, and Syria) that previously reigned over them, in consequence of the 1967 Arab war of aggression that had aimed to destroy the Jewish state. From this standpoint, even the horrors of Hamas brutality were an understandable response to (alleged) Israeli oppression.

Any notion that Arab and Muslim hostility to the state of Israel resulted from Jewish mistreatment should be dispelled, in the mind of any fair-minded reader, by Yardena Schwartz’s eloquent, balanced, and thoroughly documented Ghosts of a Holy War. Schwartz is a native New Jerseyan and graduate of Columbia Journalism School who lived in Israel for a decade before returning to the U.S., serendipitously, three months before October 7.

Her book traces the roots of Palestinian Jew-hatred to the first arrival of new Jewish populations in the Holy Land (enhancing the small number who had continuously inhabited it since Biblical times) early in the twentieth century. Schwartz’s subtitle refers to the horrifying massacres of Jews, incited by fanatical, power-hungry, myth-making Arab demagogues, that swept Jewish areas of habitation, but particularly the city of Hebron (site of the Patriarchs’ Tomb, sacred to all three Abrahamic faiths) in 1929.

Schwartz’s narrative begins with the story of a handsome, stylish Jew from Memphis (son of a prosperous businessman who’d immigrated there from Ukraine 40 years earlier), David Frainberg, who dropped out of Penn’s Wharton Business School to devote himself to religious study. For that purpose, the 22-year-old Shainberg traveled to Hebron, site of Palestine’s greatest yeshiva, planning to devote two years to the study of Talmud (Jewish law), living a thoroughly Spartan existence, likely aiming to become a learned rabbi. But despite his longing to dwell in the land of his ancestors, Shainberg was no Zionist: strictly Orthodox himself, he described secular Zionism (its dominant form at the time) as “worthless” because of Zionists’ failure to observe Jewish law.

Schwartz then describes the situation of Jews in what had for a millennium been Ottoman-ruled Palestine, but where Britain promised in its 1917 Balfour Declaration, as its troops advanced against the Turks during World War I, to promote the establishment of “a national home for the Jewish people.”

As Schwartz observes, the Declaration “could not have come at a more desperate time” for Jews, since “between 1918 and 1921, more than 100,000” of them “were murdered in pogroms in Ukraine, Poland, and Russia.” But although the Declaration sparked a near-doubling of Palestine’s Jewish population to 150,000 between 1922 and 1928, they remained “a constellation of islands in an Arab sea” of nearly 600,000. Nonetheless, Arabs regarded the Declaration as a “betrayal” of promises of independence the British had made to them in return for rebelling against the Turkish state during the war.

There was no reason, in principle, why the two British promises could not have been reconciled, considering the small proportion that even a substantially increased Jewish population would have constituted compared with the much-larger number of Arabs inhabiting Syria, Transjordan, Southern Arabia, and Palestine. A Jewish state could not have occupied more than a tiny fraction of that overall territory.

Jewish arrivals typically purchased land “from wealthy absentee Arab landowners,” including “leaders of the Arab nationalist movement.” But nonetheless, Schwartz observes, the Jewish newcomers’ “progressive, egalitarian way of life” (living in kibbutzim and employing modern methods to cultivate wasteland) “aroused suspicion and fear” among Arab villagers devoted to “highly traditional, patriarchal” ways. Those suspicions were soon exploited by demagogic Arab leaders, with ruinous consequences.

As Schwartz reports, only a year and a half after the Great War’s end, in April, 1920, during a Muslim festival, some 70,000 Arab men gathered in Jerusalem’s Old City to beat and stone Jews, ransack homes and stores in the Jewish Quarter, burn down a yeshiva, and kill men. While Muslims portrayed the event as a revolt against the Balfour Declaration, its underlying principle was proclaimed by a prominent writer (and future mayor) as follows: “Palestine is our land, the Jews are our dogs!”

The theme of all subsequent attacks on the Jews had thus been proclaimed, long before there was any entity resembling a Jewish state. And of all people, Sir Herbert Samuel, one of the most prominent British Jews, upon taking office as High Commissioner of Palestine that July, sought to “ingratiate” himself with the Arab majority by not only releasing all Palestinians convicted in the riots, but permitting the virulent nationalist Haj Amin to return from hiding in Transjordan. Samuel then yielded to Islamist pressure by naming Amin his half-brother’s successor as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, choosing him over three other candidates, “all more qualified, more moderate, and far less anti-Semitic.” This was a fateful move.

It was the corrupt Mufti who instigated the atrocities of 1929. Taking advantage of Jewish efforts to protect their right to pray at Jerusalem’s Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism (the only remaining part of the Second Temple), he fabricated charges that the Jews planned to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third-most-sacred Islamic site (which stands above the Wall) so as to rebuild their Temple. After the Palestine Zionist Executive cabled the League of Nations, following the July riots, requesting that Jews be granted ownership of the Wall, the Mufti marshaled thousands of Muslims to attack Jewish worshipers there, and convened a General Muslim Conference (including representatives from Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, and Transjordan) to warn of the Jews’ supposed aspirations.

He then launched an antisemitic campaign throughout Palestine, including distribution of excerpts from the notorious Tsarist forgery Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which depicted Jewish ambitions to conquer the entire world.

Following peaceful Jewish protests against the erection of a new pathway to the Mosque along the Wall, facilitating Arab attacks on worshipers, the Mufti added to his campaign by circulating fabricated charges that the Jews had not only cursed Mohammed but raped Arab women. Anticipating the violent assault against Jews throughout Palestine that the Mufti’s campaign aimed to inspire, representatives of the Haganah (a Jewish defense organization formed shortly before the Jerusalem riots) visited Hebron to warn the tiny, devout Jewish community of the danger and offered to provide them with protection or to transfer them temporarily to Jerusalem.

But Jewish leaders, as Schwartz reports, unanimously rejected both offers, explaining that there couldn’t be any riots there, since the Arabs of Hebron, with whom their lives intermingled daily, were their friends.

This was a fatal error, the fruit of the Hebron rabbis’ not wanting to believe the evidence of mounting danger. While the combined efforts of the British and the Haganah managed to stifle the renewed riots in Jerusalem, the streets of Hebron, whose Jews lacked any means of defense, were soon occupied, filled by an armed Arab mob, stirred by sheikhs falsely accusing the Jews of having killed a thousand Jerusalem Arabs, seizing Al-Aqsa, and planning to occupy the Patriarchs’ Tomb.

I shall not try to summarize Schwartz’s bloodcurdling account of the horrors that the Arabs inflicted on Hebron’s Jews (men, women, and children), other than to observe that they anticipated, on a smaller scale, the horrors of October 7: “only” 67 were killed (including David Shainberg, as well as three children under age 5), with dozens more injured and “hundreds left traumatized for life.”

Yet the British Shaw Commission, convened to investigate the riots that swept Jewish communities throughout Palestine that same month, while acknowledging Arab responsibility for launching the attacks, laid much of the blame for inciting them on the peaceful Jewish demonstrations at the Western Wall, and recommended that Britain limit future Jewish immigration and land purchases to prevent renewed violence. And it cleared the Mufti of any culpability, enabling him to retain his position.

Only Sir Henry Snell, one of three British MP’s who oversaw the Commission, dissented from his colleagues’ conclusions, including the recommended restrictions on immigration and land purchases. Snell noted that what Palestine needed was not a change in policy but “a change of mind on the part of the Arab population who have been encouraged to believe that they have suffered a great wrong and that the immigrant Jew constitutes a permanent menace to their livelihood.”

Instead, “the Arab people stand to gain rather than to lose from Jewish enterprise,” which had already increased Palestinian prosperity, raised Arab workers’ standard of living, and “laid the foundations” for “the future progress of the two communities and their development into one state.” The obstacles to that goal, he added, were “the fears and animosities that Arab leaders had fostered for [their own] political needs.”

The British not only ignored Snell’s observations, but under Arab pressure commuted the sentences of death or long prison terms imposed on all but three of the 55 (out of 700 Arabs who stood trial) who were found guilty of murder to light sentences. (The three who were executed have been celebrated by Palestinian Arabs as “heroes” ever since on “Martyrs’ Day.”)

But British attempts to placate Palestinian terrorists — over Winston Churchill’s protests — led only to the Great Arab Revolt that began in 1936 under the leadership of a radical Syrian preacher, appointed an imam by the Mufti, who launched attacks on Jewish farms and British facilities. However, the 1929 attacks also engendered a unification between Orthodox communities and secular Zionists, including the recruitment of a growing number of Orthodox Sephardi into Zionist militias such as the Haganah, in view of the common danger.

But 1936 also marked the announcement of a “general strike” against British rule by the newly formed Arab National Committee, which Arab workers were compelled by force to obey, though it paralyzed their economy.

Again, the British tried appeasement, cutting by four-fifths the immigration quota the Jewish Agency had requested — just 1,800 in six months, even as many more Jews sought to flee Hitler’s persecution (and the U.S. refused to raise its own quota).

In response to Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann’s plea to Britain’s Peel Commission to allot a small homeland to the Jews, in contrast to the vast Arab kingdoms and numerous other Muslim-majority states, the commission offered the first “two-state solution,” according to which 80 percent of Palestine would be allotted to the Arabs, and only 20 percent to the Jews (separated by a British-administered buffer zone).

But the Mufti rejected this compromise, insisting that the presence of any Jews in the land endangered Muslim holy sites, so all of them must be removed. While the World Zionist Organization authorized continuing negotiations with the British, and numerous Palestinian mayors and the leaders of Transjordan, Lebanon, and the Syrian nationalist movement initially supported the proposal, the latter openness vanished when the mufti not only rejected it but called for the assassination of any Arab who supported it.

So the British caved again, fearing to alienate Muslim leaders as World War II approached, and thus issuing a White Paper in 1939 declaring their “unequivocal” renunciation of the Balfour Declaration, limiting Jewish land purchases to five percent of Palestine, and as Nazi persecution increased, capping Jewish immigration at 75,000 over five years, with Palestine’s Arab majority to set its own limits (most likely, zero) thereafter. But despite Britain’s betrayal, as soon as the war broke out, nearly all Zionist organizations suspended their opposition so as to support the Allied fight against the Nazis.

By contrast, the Mufti himself, deposed by the British as head of the Supreme Muslim Council following the assassination of a senior British official, escaped arrest and found a happy home in Berlin, where he proclaimed the Arab world’s admiration for the Fuhrer’s policies and declared jihad against the Allies. He became the Nazis’ chief propagandist to the Arab world throughout the war, recruiting “tens of thousands to join Hitler’s Waffen-SS and auxiliary units” and lobbying European countries to prevent Jews from fleeing to Palestine. He even masterminded a plot (unsuccessfully) to poison the water supply of Tel Aviv.

Living up to Hitler’s judgment of him as a “sly old fox,” Haj Amin then escaped Allied capture after the war, winding up in Cairo, where the British authorized his reinstatement as head of the Arab Higher Committee. From his new base he continued spreading anti-Jewish propaganda throughout the Muslim world and cultivated a new generation of Palestinian leaders, including a relative who adopted the name Yasser Arafat.

Upon the Mufti’s death in 1948, Arafat declared his “immense pride” in being his disciple, while a new Mufti appointed by Arafat maintained that the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust had been “exaggerated.” Introducing a theme now widely heard from Hamas apologists throughout the world, notably on American campuses, he then accused the Jews of instead committing a “genocide” against the Palestinians, simply by seizing “their” land.

I must pass over Schwartz’s brief but lucid account of Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, which occurred only after adjacent Arab nations refused to accept the United Nations’ 1947 partition plan for Palestine, instead launching an all-out war to destroy what would have been a minuscule Jewish state.

While Palestinian “refugees” lamented the war’s outcome as a naqba [catastrophe], Schwartz rightly notes that their descendants — still calling themselves refugees — inhabit U.N. camps only because no Arab nations offer them citizenship (in contrast to Israel’s having welcomed hundreds of thousands of Jews following their expulsion by Arab lands), and those countries typically deny them such privileges available to Arab citizens of Israel as access to education, health care, and the opportunity to work in various occupations.

Sadly, as Schwartz notes from her visits to Hebron, now a thriving city of over 300,000 living alongside a community of only 800 devout Jews (who are forbidden, thanks to the 1997 Hebron Protocols that Benjain Netanyahu signed with Arafat, from inhabiting the main city, and whose presence must be protected by the Israeli Defense Forces), the Palestinian attempt to “erase” Jewish history in the Holy Land continues apace, with Muslim officials denying that either the Patriarchs’ Tomb or the Western Wall ever had a Jewish connection. (Echoing them, Democratic Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortes declared over Christmas, 2023, following the Hamas attacks, that Jesus was Palestinian.)

Following the uncoerced withdrawal of Israeli governance over Gaza in 2005, Israeli governments, mostly led by Netanyahu, allowed large shipments of industrial supplies to be shipped to Gaza via Egypt for at least a decade before 2023, gulled by the impression Hamas conveyed that it was interested in economic development rather than inflicting war and terror. Their resultant lack of watchfulness — being unaware of the construction of hundreds of miles of tunnels, filled with military equipment — resulted in a catastrophe much vaster than the 1929 Hebron attack. But the outcome should at least have put paid to the delusion that Palestinian hostility to Israel results from economic or political deprivation.

Time and again, Israeli governments sought peace agreements that would allow Palestinians to govern the West Bank and Gaza independently, so long as these were combined with effectual security guarantees. All such agreements were rejected by Arab negotiators (most notably, by Arafat at Taba in 2000).

Those foolish Americans (and visiting foreign students) who chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will all be free,” and “Intifada is the solution,” must, lamentably, be taken at their word. We owe an immense debt of thanks to Yardena Schwartz for making this fact clear.

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