The 1929 riots pose difficult questions. What caused Arabs in Hebron and Safed and other places in Palestine to murder their Jewish neighbors? What motivated Jews to lynch Arabs in Jerusalem? What triggered the general Arab offensive against Jews that summer? What leads individual human beings to turn against the tide and save the very people that most members of their own community see as enemies? And at another level, what were the long-range effects of the riots on Jewish-Arab relations and on internal relations within each community?
This book offers a number of insights into the 1929 riots. Some of these touch on the events themselves, and others are more general. Some are not new but here come into sharper focus, while others depart from the common wisdom. The fact that Jews murdered Arabs in 1929 does not change the larger picture, which is that of an Arab attack on Jewish communities. This larger picture does not change the broader historical landscape, in which Jews immigrated to Palestine beginning in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire under European (in particular, British) protection. These Jewish immigrants expressly intended to make the country they called the Land of Israel into a Jewish one. The corollary of that intention was that the Arabs would become a minority in their own land. Over the course of the book I have presented the range of views regarding the question of whether the Zionist project was a just one. Here I will offer my own opinion: the Jews, as a persecuted people whose property and lives were in constant danger, had a right to take refuge in the Land of Israel. But this right did not strip the Arabs of their own rights in Palestine, nor can it justify every action and policy pursued by the Zionist movement to achieve its larger goal.
Granting refuge to refugees does not necessarily run counter to the spirit of Islam, even if the refugees are Jews and the refuge they seek is the Holy Land. Proof of this is the fact that the Ottoman Empire permitted many Jews to settle in Palestine following their exile from Spain at the end of the fifteenth century. But in 1929, following a century or so of waves of Jewish immigration under the protection of foreign powers and almost fifty years of organized Zionist activity, the Jews were no longer merely refugees seeking shelter but settlers taking possession of land and seeking sovereignty. Under Zionist influence, the long-standing Jewish minority in Palestine, which had at first sought equality with the Arab majority, now gradually became enamored of the European Zionist goal of a Jewish nation-state in the Land of Israel. As that happened, the country’s Arabs gradually ceased to discern any sharp line that distinguished avowedly Zionist Jews from other Jews who declared themselves anti-Zionists or who did not take an unambiguous stand. Language, however, sometimes lags behind perception. In Arab speech and writing, as well as in daily life, the old vocabulary persisted. Al-Yahud al-‘Arab (Arab Jews) were considered part and parcel of Middle Eastern culture; the Siknaj (Ashkenazi Haredim), who arrived in several waves beginning in the early nineteenth century, were absorbed into the fabric of Palestine’s society because they accepted the hegemony of Islamic Arabs. Then there were the Zionists, whom the Arabs called Moskobim (Muscovites), who brought with them foreign habits and mores from Eastern Europe and, even more critically, had national and political aspirations. The terms remained in use, but by the bloody summer of 1929 they no longer meant much. When the Arabs attacked, they made no distinction between Jews of different political views, or between those who came from long-established families and those who were relative newcomers. The clearest proof of this comes from the screams of the Cohen and Afriyat families of Safed, and of the Abushedid and Kapiluto families of Hebron, who in vain beseeched the neighbors who were attacking them, saying that they were natives of the country who had done no harm to the Arabs.
This was the summer that made it clear that the distinctions that meant so much to Jews within their community were virtually meaningless to the Arabs. They saw no appreciable difference between Haredim and secular Jews, between Old Yishuv and New Yishuv, and between the different streams within the Zionist labor movement or between the labor movement and the Revisionists. It was not that Muslims thought that all Jews deserved to die—that is not a Muslim belief—but because by the end of the 1920s they felt very powerfully that all these groups of Jews had much more in common than whatever it was that separated them. All of the groups maintained that the Jews were a nation, all of them believed that the Jews had an inalienable right to immigrate to what they viewed as the land of their fathers, and all of them aspired to establish a Jewish state in Palestine (whether that state would be founded by human action or by the Messiah, and whether it would be a capitalist or socialist state). All of them believed that Jews should be first and foremost loyal to and responsible for each other. All these principles were utterly opposed to the way Palestine’s Arabs saw the place of Jews in their society, and thus all Jews now looked the same to them. As the Arabs saw it, in the summer of 1929 they killed not their Jewish neighbors, but rather enemies who were seeking to conquer their land.
The Arabs were conscious of the danger that the Jewish community’s consolidation under the Zionist movement posed for them while that process was still embryonic. Paradoxically, their attack accelerated the very process they understood to be so dangerous. Jews of Middle Eastern or other extraction who had lived for generations in Palestine initially had an ambiguous attitude toward the Zionist movement. They had felt rejected by the socialists and the Zionist institutions and some of them aspired to carry on their traditional way of life alongside the Arabs. They felt much more comfortable with their Arab neighbors than with the insolence and debauchery they thought the Zionist pioneers exhibited, and they waited impatiently for the next hit by the superstar Egyptian chanteuse Umm Kulthum. The Haredi Jews kept their distance from politics and preferred to leave the issue of sovereignty in the Holy Land to Heaven. But after the attack they realized that, as Jews, their only political home was with the Zionists. Some started to be actively involved with Zionist institutions, while others viewed them only as shelters when the weather got rough. But they all realized that they had no real political alternative of joining forces with the country’s Arabs—the Arabs had no interest in that.
In this sense we can say that the 1929 riots founded the Yishuv. That is, following the riots, the disparate Jewish community in Palestine became the single Yishuv that was the precursor to today’s Israeli state, with its hegemonic values and pugnacious defensive spirit. Massacres were committed in places where no Hebrew defense forces were deployed, and where they were deployed, Jewish defenders succeeded in repelling Arab attacks. That was enough to prove to most Jews that only a Jewish army could save the Yishuv from obliteration. Ben-Gurion wrote as much in his diary on September 8, 1929: “The Yishuv’s value has risen in the eyes of the people” (BGA, “Yoman”). By “Yishuv” he meant the organized Yishuv—the Zionist institutions, including the Haganah. He knew that these institutions did not have an exclusive claim to represent the Jewish people, but he understood that the fact that the Zionist labor movement had founded the Haganah gave it the right to claim leadership of the Yishuv. As a consequence, the Zionist fighting force attracted the Yishuv’s best young talents. Military commanders garnered the adulation of the public, and military service became the natural and accepted steppingstone to political leadership. I have noted above that not a few of the Israel Defense Force’s first generation of senior officers, those who fought in the War of Independence in 1948, were men for whom the 1929 riots had been a formative experience.
The events of 1929 also highlight the huge abyss that yawns between the Jewish and Arab reading of history. Many Jews view the riots as a link in the chain of Jewish oppression that began with the Egyptian captivity and continued in European pogroms and the persecution that Jews experienced in some Islamic lands. According to this view, Jews are persecuted simply because they are Jews (“In every generation they rise up to destroy us,” as the Passover Haggadah says), and without reference to what they do or do not do, as we saw Ze’ev Jabotinsky say, and as many Israelis and Jews who reject criticism of Israeli actions assert today. They often support their argument by mentioning that the Arabs massacred Jews in Hebron and Safed in 1929, long before the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948 and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967.
But that is not how the attackers of 1929 saw it. They—or, more precisely, the ideologues who speak in their name—stress how well Jews were treated in Palestine and other Muslim lands under the Ottoman Empire. They reject any accusation of antisemitism and locate the riots in an entirely different context: that of the struggle of indigenous people against colonialist powers. In their view, the Jews of Palestine—who, with British backing, acted to make Palestine into a Jewish national home—were legitimate targets of attack.
No victim, and certainly not the Jews, can accept that they were legitimately attacked. The year 1929 thus marks the beginning of the greatest Jewish-Arab rivalry of all—the competition over who is the aggressor and who the victim, who the overlord and who the underdog.
The Jews were certainly the obvious victims of the riots, at least in Hebron and Safed. They came to the Land of Israel to live in their native land, to take refuge from pogroms and slaughter, and they found themselves under attack in their own homes or while plowing fields they had bought with good money. But from the Arabs’ point of view, the homes the Jews built stood in an Arab land, and the fields they plowed were Arab soil. No matter that the Old Yishuv had no intention of taking control of the country. No matter that the Zionists did not stage an armed invasion of Palestine but rather arrived to settle there in large numbers. They did so under the protection of British bayonets with the goal of transforming the land into a Jewish one. How else could that project be described if not as a colonial offensive? Of course, this account of Zionism utterly disregards the long-standing connection of the Jews to their ancestral land, but as far as the Arabs were concerned that connection was meaningless in political terms, and in no way could justify making Palestine Jewish.
Native peoples have at times committed brutal massacres in uprisings against colonial powers. In The Wretched of the Earth (1965), the Afro-French revolutionary and philosopher Frantz Fanon offered an ideological and psychological grounding for such violence. He claimed, in fact, that it was necessary and positive: only by committing massacres, he argued, could the oppressed truly liberate themselves. Furthermore, he declared, colonialists were no less violent and cruel.
The vantage point of the Zionist movement is that of the Eastern European Jew who sought refuge from antisemitism. Accordingly, Zionists viewed their movement as both a national liberation movement and a humanitarian rescue mission. As such, Zionism from the start rejected, as it continues to do today, its characterization as a colonialist enterprise. This viewpoint has led Zionists to avert their gaze from their own crimes against innocent Arabs in 1929, such as the lynchings Jews staged in Jerusalem and Simha Hinkis’s murder of a family in Jaffa.
We saw this clearly at the beginning of our journey. In a conflict between peoples, each side feels the pain of its losses more strongly than it does the pain of the other side. Each side mourns its own dead, not the dead of its enemies. This is not deliberate or malicious disregard—it is natural and understandable. Consequently, each side feels and displays elemental gratitude toward those who risked their lives to defend their compatriots.
Now it is time to offer another insight. These emotions are great forces in the consolidation of each side’s historical narrative. There is no need for a guiding hand from above for each side to center the story it tells itself on its own victims, and for it to mythologize as heroes those who risked or gave their lives for the nation. Furthermore, such gratitude shunts aside questions about just who the people those heroes fought were, why they fought them, who they killed, and how they killed them. National narratives are not formed by leaders instructing their people; rather, they are products of the encounters between the perceptions and feelings of the public at large with the structured ideology of the leadership.
So national narratives are born. It is the reason why each side fashions a closed world of its own. Only within a world shut off from the view of the other side can each side mourn its dead and celebrate its heroes. When two nations are at war, one side’s heroes, be it Hinkis or ‘Ata al-Zir, must necessarily be the other side’s villains.
In this book I have endeavored to introduce to my readers the opposing historical stories of each side. Inevitably, the book largely runs counter to the instincts of many Israelis and Palestinians, many Jews and Arabs. I have also augmented these national stories with alternative stories that were offered within each community—there were many voices on each side. That is another conclusion I draw from my study of the events of 1929: these alternative stories, ultimately marginalized by the mainstream narratives, are an important part of the picture and can teach us no less than the central story can. Yes, there is an Arab national story and a Jewish national story about what happened in 1929. But not all Arabs and not all Jews necessarily subscribe to their own community’s central story. Neither society is homogeneous, and each society produces more than one story and more than one understanding of the events. Even as the riots raged, the Arabs of Hebron did not experience them the way Jaffa’s Arabs did, and the Jews of Tiberias did not experience them the way Jerusalem’s Jews did. Those who opposed bloodshed did not experience the disturbances the way those who advocated violence did; those whose goal was compromise did not experience them as firebrands did. The courage of the rescuers, those Jews who saved Arabs and those Arabs who saved Jews as swords flashed and bullets whistled, shows that the mobilizing force of even the strongest national story has its limits—it cannot shatter a solid moral stand, whether that morality is clearly voiced or instinctive.
Were the killings of 1929 a necessary result of the Arab-Zionist encounter in Palestine? Determinists argue that everything that happened had to happen, that the bloody conflict between the two peoples not just in 1929 but before and after was the inevitable outcome of the fateful Zionist-Arab encounter; of the contradictory national aspirations of the Jews and Arabs; and of the view that if one religion is the true faith, all others must be lies. But there are other possibilities. There are more nuanced theologies, national rivalries that develop into alliances, and more complex and nuanced views of national rights. The decisions made and deeds done by Jews and Arabs prior to and during the riots were those of human beings. At each decision point, at each occasion of spontaneous action, there are a range of possibilities. Need I cite once more the villagers of Sur Baher who saved four Jewish miners; Abu Shaker ‘Amru of Hebron; Shimon, the owner of the Bukharan quarter grocery store; and Mina Albert of Meah She‘arim to show that at any given moment other actions were possible? That it is possible to behave differently from the majority, against the current of hatred of the Other? Need I cite once more Haidar ‘Abd al-Shafi and his pain at the death of innocents, and the members of Brit Shalom who sought to divert the two nations from their collusion course? The marginality of these people in the two national narratives about 1929 shows how difficult it is to adopt a viewpoint that is not in concert with the reigning chauvinistic perspective of each side. Yet their actions prove that under the deep currents of nationalism and religion, below the enmity and extremism and rivalry, something else flows—a sense of human brotherhood, of a common recognition of the fundamental value of human life. That is what makes it possible to declare that the killings of 1929, and other killings by Arabs of Jews and by Jews of Arabs, those before and since and those that still may happen, were not and are not preordained.