| 1 | JAFFA AND TEL AVIV |
Sunday, August 25, 1929
We will open with an account of what happened in Tel Aviv, Acre, and Jaffa in 1929 because these cities were on the margins of the disturbances. We will learn of the triangle of relations between Mizrahi Jews, Ashkenazi Jews, and Arabs and the way these relations were shaken, and we will meet, among others, Mustafa al-Dabbagh, Yosef Haim Brenner, Simha Hinkis, Nisim Elkayam, and Ahmad al-Shuqayri. One thing leads to another, and one person leads to another.
In the summer of 1929 the Jews provoked the Muslims: thousands of their young and old people gathered on the streets of Jerusalem with the Zionist flag, adorned with black ribbons, waving over their heads. They marched in an organized fashion to the Western Wall—al-Buraq—enthusiastically singing the Zionist anthem, “Hatikvah.” Their voices rang out: “The Western Wall is ours, beware all who sully our holy site.” It was this provocation that led to the clashes that spread through the country in August 1929.
In Jaffa Jews, led by a Jewish policeman in the government service, attacked the home of Sheikh ‘Abd al-Ghani ‘Awn, the imam of the Abu Kabir neighborhood mosque, next to Tel Aviv. They killed him and all six members of his family and defiled the bodies criminally. They slashed open the father’s belly and smashed the heads of his nephew and his wife and son, who was three years old at the time. (Dabbagh 2002, 4:265)
This description appears in the volume on Jaffa and its environs, of the ten-volume work titled Biladuna Filastin (Our land of Palestine) by Mustafa Murad al-Dabbagh (2002). It is not a work of history but rather a geographical encyclopedia, arranged by region. Neither does it offer in-depth analysis. Rather, it surveys all the cities and villages of Palestine, noting significant events that took place in each one. An important reference work, it is frequently consulted by readers of Arabic. Given its nature, it does not offer a comprehensive survey of the events of 1929. Yet it cites a significant event—unfamiliar to Israeli and foreign readers as well as to many Arabs—the murder of an Arab family and the mutilation of their bodies by Jews.
The picture is a harsh one. It is not easy to read about the smashing of children’s skulls, the mutilation of bodies, and the slitting open of bellies. Furthermore, what connection is there between the riots of 1929 and the slaying of an Arab family by Jews? After all, the theme of the events of 1929—at least as far as Jews are concerned—is Arab brutality. But this is what al-Dabbagh tells us about what happened in Jaffa and Tel Aviv in 1929. In short order we will examine the truth of the story, but in any case it is important to keep in mind that it was not the start of the 1929 riots.
Not the Start
The 1929 riots officially started not in Jaffa but in Jerusalem, two days earlier, on Friday, August 23. The climax came the following day, Saturday, when Arabs massacred Jews in Hebron (the events in those cities are recounted in the chapters that follow). Violence continued, in various forms, throughout the country in the days that followed. But the events of that Friday were not in fact the start. The disturbances of August 1929 grew out of the relations between Jews and Arabs in Palestine throughout the 1920s. And those relations were built on the foundation, and in cognizance, of hundreds of years of Jewish-Muslim and Jewish-Arab encounters preceding the advent of Zionism. These relations were not static; they varied over time and space. Competition and cooperation, animosity, discrimination, feelings of superiority and compassion and hatred, as well as a complex of other human emotions and behaviors, all played a role. The recent and distant past are parts of human consciousness, and they were part of the emotional and political substrate of what people experienced in 1929 and how they acted during the violence. The historical memory of the inhabitants of Tel Aviv and Jaffa included a previous round of riots in 1921, eight years previously; the Jews remembered the dozens of their compatriots who had been killed then. Among the victims was the seminal Hebrew writer Yosef Haim Brenner.
Yosef Haim Brenner
Brenner was a symbol, both in life and in death. An essayist and novelist, he arrived in Palestine as part of the Second Aliyah, that wave of Jewish Zionist immigration lasting from 1904 to 1914. Central among the newcomers were young Eastern European Jews of socialist ideology who believed in the importance of manual labor and the revival of the Hebrew language, and who established the first communal Zionist settlements. Brenner was a man of great contradictions. He despaired and offered hope. He loved but suffered because of it. A tough critic of other people’s work, but a nurturer of talents. One of the great figures in the revival of the Hebrew language. One of the Zionist labor movement’s most prominent intellectuals. He often behaved, looked, and dressed oddly—some said like a prophet. For some he was the best and purest man in the Yishuv. He was killed, along with five companions, by Arabs from Jaffa on May 2, 1921, on the second day of that year’s riots, not far from an isolated Jewish farmhouse where he had been living, a short way outside the city, near Abu Kabir. The story was that the other residents had urged him to leave for safety when the violence began, but he insisted on remaining with them.
Brenner was painfully aware of Arab hostility toward the Zionist enterprise; among Arabs he felt just like he had among the gentiles who inflicted pogroms against Jews in Eastern Europe. Unlike a number of his friends, he had a hard time believing that the Jews would be able to forge an alliance with Palestine’s Arabs or with the Arab working class. Deep down, the Orient terrified him. He was certain that he would be killed by Arabs. About a year before his murder he wrote words that later seemed prophetic:
Tomorrow, perhaps, the Jewish hand writing these words will be stabbed, some “sheikh” or “hajj” will stick his dagger in it in full sight of the English governor, as happened to the agronomist Shmuel Haramati, and it, this hand, will not be able to do a thing to the sheikh and the hajj, because it does not know how to wield a sword. Yet the remnants of the people of Israel will not be lost. The stock of Jesse [the Davidic line] will not be extinguished. He will tell of our enemies to his sons—it will be told to those who remain. It will be told that we are the victims of evil, victims of the malicious ambition to gain power and property, victims of imperialism. Not us. We had no imperialist aspirations. (Y. Brenner 1985, 4:1758)
And eulogizing Avraham Sher, who had been slain in the Upper Galilee in February 1920, Brenner wrote in the monthly journal Ha’adamah: “Our savage neighbors, as always, know not what they do, whom they murder: humanity’s best” (1985, 4:1479). Many Jews felt the same way when Brenner was killed.
The Savages Know Not
The “savages” did not know who Brenner was, not before and not after they murdered him. Palestinian writing on the events of 1921 hardly mentions Brenner. When it does, it makes no reference to his important place in the life of the Yishuv or to how beloved he was. But there is another side to this story. Brenner himself knew nothing about his neighbors. His worst nightmare was Jewish integration into the Orient. Every bone in his body sensed the weakness of Zionism, the difficulty of living in the Land of Israel, and the horrors of the never-ending pogroms of Eastern and Central Europe. With all that in mind, he could not understand by what right the Arabs of Palestine opposed something that seemed to him so simple and clear and just: the desire of Jews from Romania, Lithuania, Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and everywhere else to save their lives and honor and to rebuild themselves as whole human beings, as a nation in the land of their fathers. Thus, the Arabs could only be savages, fighting against everything human and decent.
Humanity
Brenner arrived in Palestine in 1909. Between 1904 and 1911, Ibrahim al-Dabbagh of Jaffa published in Cairo a periodical called al-Insaniyya (Humanity), which was distributed in Jaffa as well. Brenner never read it, nor could he have read it had he wanted to. It presumably never occurred to him that there might be a periodical with such a name available in the port city where he disembarked. Neither did he know the extent to which the Arab press of the time identified with the persecuted Jews, and how furiously it condemned the pogroms in Eastern Europe—as shown by Shaul Sehayek in his PhD dissertation “Demut haYehudi beRe’i ha‘Itonut ha‘Aravit bein haShanim 1858–1908” (The image of the Jew in the Arabic press 1858–1908; 1991). So great was Brenner’s terror of the Arabs and so potent his disappointment at the fact that in Palestine, too, the Jews were no more than a powerless minority that he could think of no solution other than insularity and isolation from the non-Jewish environment. Only in the last essay he wrote, just before he died, did he express a shred of regret for the path he had chosen. He related an encounter with an Arab youth who addressed him as he was walking along the edge of Jaffa: “He asked me something in a clear, somewhat strident voice, clearly accented and precisely pronounced. I am sorry to say that I did not know how to respond to him, because I never taught myself to speak the Arabic tongue . . . at that moment I castigated myself harshly for never having taught myself to speak the Arabic tongue” (Y. Brenner 1962, 212).
It is a rare confession on his part. His writing makes it clear how far he was from an understanding of Arab society or even from a desire to understand it. He saw his position clearly, but he was also willfully blind to its implications. The world, in his experience, was full of hatred of Jews, and to cope with it one had to fill oneself with hatred. So he wrote to his pacifist friend Rabbi Binyamin (the pen name of the journalist Yehoshua Radler-Feldmann): “What, R. Binyamin, we are supposed to talk about love for our neighbors, natives of this land, if we are sworn enemies, yes, enemies. . . . We must, then, be prepared here also for the results of hatred and to use all means available to our weak hands so that we can live here as well. Since becoming a nation we have been surrounded by hatred, and as a result are also full of hatred—and that is as it should be, cursed are the soft, the loving” (1985, 4:1038).
Unlike Jewish political leaders, Brenner saw no reason to conceal Jewish hatred of the gentiles, the joy of having the opportunity to kill and be killed for the Jewish homeland. He felt no compunctions about declaring that war and bloodshed could be salutary, inasmuch as they could help shape and forge the nation. Others also spoke of the joy of dying for one’s homeland and the benefits of war, but it is difficult to find such clear-cut praise for hatred of the Arabs and gentiles in the works of other Zionist thinkers.
Uri, His Son
Uri Brenner was seven years old when his father was murdered. When violence broke out in Palestine in 1921, he was living in Berlin with his mother, Chaya Broide. By 1929 they had moved back to Tel Aviv, and Uri was a fatherless boy of fifteen. His uncle, Yeshayahu (Isaiah) Broide, was then serving as vice-chairman of the Zionist Executive in Palestine. Just prior to the riots Uri was tapped to enlist in the Haganah, the Yishuv’s defense force, and he immediately agreed. Along with other teenagers, he served as a messenger between the organization’s headquarters and outposts on the dividing line between Jewish and Arab neighborhoods, not far from the place where his father had been murdered. And not far from the home of the ‘Awn family. Forty years later, Uri Brenner gave his testimony for the Haganah History Archives: “The subject of the Haganah is connected to my father, and his death in 1921 was a painful subject that was repressed, perhaps because it was not spoken of at home, and perhaps because of an urge for revenge. The offer [from a member of the Haganah to enlist] was for me a saving moment in a certain sense, because I was suspended between an aggressive, avenging spirit and a defensive one” (HHA, testimony 11/7).
Uri Brenner chose an aggressive defense. In 1937 he was one of the founders and defenders of Kibbutz Ma‘oz Hayyim in the Beit She’an Valley, and a year later he joined the Special Night Squads organized by a British officer Orde Wingate, who taught that the best defense was an offense. In HaKibbutz HaMe‘uchad baHaganah (The united kibbutz movement in the Haganah; 1980), Uri Brenner wrote of the squads’ cruel and vengeful streak. In 1943 he enlisted in the Palmach, the Yishuv’s elite strike force that was closely tied to the kibbutz movement, and in the 1948 war he served as its deputy commander. In a sense, he embodied what his father had written about: “Yet the remnants of the people of Israel will not be lost. The stock of Jesse will not be extinguished.” But if Uri bore hatred of non-Jews in his heart; if he reveled at the opportunity to spill blood, as his father had; if he shared the complexities of his father’s attitude to the Arabs and the culture of force, he did not say so in anything he wrote.
The riots of 1921 were just one memory in the minds of the people of Jaffa and Tel Aviv in 1929. That is, those involved in the riots—assailants, victims, horrified onlookers, provocateurs, journalists and readers, poultry merchants, thinkers, warriors, pacifists, Jews, Arabs, Britons, washers of hands, assumers of responsibility, criers for peace—all went into these disturbances with heavy historical baggage that played a role in how they understood and responded to events. In this respect, the genesis of the disturbances long preceded their actual beginning and even the births of their protagonists. The riots’ roots reach deep into oral traditions and myths, stories of famous people; tales of real and imagined enemies told by grandparents; and legends from the Old and New Testaments and Qur’an that the people involved heard as children, in arguments their parents had with friends before the protagonists’ bedtime, while they were trying to fall asleep in their homes in Eastern and Western Europe, in the Hebron highlands and the orange groves of Jaffa, in the glens of Scotland, in Baghdad, and everywhere else they came from—while they lay in beds in proper houses or slept on rags with their siblings in a hut. The events began in souls imprinted with stories and were shaped when children had their first encounters with strangers. Traditions and stories provided the templates, and experiences were the material that, melted together, was cast in these molds—except that sometimes what came out was not the shape imprinted there but its reverse, and at other times the figure that emerged was twice as sharp as the mold itself. But it did not end there—the templates themselves were melted down and recast at junctures in these people’s lives, when they were at school or under the instruction of an Eastern European melamed or a local sheikh, when they helped their parents in the fields or served as cheap hired labor. That was when their political and nationalist consciousness awakened—or did not.
It would be best, then, to start in all those places at once, but that is not possible. A writer has no choice but to choose a starting point and to move forward and backward in time, keeping in mind always the gap between what he knows and what people knew at the time.
Knowledge Gaps
The participants in and observers of the events of 1929 knew their times better than anyone who did not live through them. However, we have knowledge of what happened in their future, which they obviously lacked at the time. We know what happened in Hebron and Motza and Jaffa and Safed and Hulda and Jerusalem and Acre and Migdal ‘Eder and so on, while they, in real time, saw only what was happening before their eyes. We also know how events progressed after the riots, that animosity between Jews and Arabs did not end, and that there was a fateful war in 1948 in which the Arabs were defeated and during which the State of Israel was founded. We know that hundreds of thousands of Arabs became refugees and that the conflict continues. This knowledge makes it difficult for later generations to view events from the perspective of those who lived through them. Jews today have trouble really feeling the dread felt by Jews who lived as a persecuted minority (even if some observers believe that existential fear is the key to understanding Israel’s actions in the present). Palestinians today have trouble imagining Palestine as it was at the end of the 1920s, part of a spacious Arab land from which one could travel unimpeded to neighboring Arab countries and within which were scattered, here and there, Jews who were trying to gain a foothold in the country and to take control of it.
But all that is connected to how the events played out and turned out. We are still at the beginning, in Jaffa in 1929, seeking to understand what happened in this city and what we can learn from what happened there regarding the 1929 riots as a whole. Before we investigate what occurred in the ‘Awn family’s house, let’s take a look at the book in which their story appears: Biladuna Filastin (Our land of Palestine).
Our Land of Palestine
The first volume of the Biladuna Filastin encyclopedia was published in 1947. The set was completed in 1965. Al-Dabbagh relates in his introduction to the new complete edition: “When I issued the first volume of my book, I did not imagine that the Nakba would take place in the country within the year and disperse its inhabitants as a storm scatters the sand” (2002, 1:7). He goes on to describe how, at the height of the fighting, before Jaffa fell, his cousin arrived on a boat from Egypt and persuaded him to sail away, in so doing saving his life:
I did not take anything on the trip except for a small suitcase containing the manuscript of more than 6,000 pages of my book on the history and geography of Palestine, my only book, the product of more than a decade of collecting material and writing. I blessed God for the fact that, a few days earlier, I had sent my wife and children to relatives in Beirut, and boarded the ship with my cousin and his friends, uprooted as we were.
The sea was rough, the waves rolled and roared, a gale raged and a hard rain fell. Water began to enter the boat on all sides. The captain shouted that we should cast the cargo into the sea to lighten the boat, otherwise it would sink. I held my suitcase fast to my breast, but the arm of a tough sailor, aided by a wave that fell over the ship, separated the suitcase from me and hurled it into the sea. So the book was lost to me and with it the labors of many years. (2002, 1:7)
Al-Dabbagh spent another fifteen years reconstructing his manuscript, and later in his introduction to the complete edition he offers the principal conclusion of his research: “The book shows that the Jews’ claim of a historical right to the land is baseless. The claim is unsubstantiated in a manner without historical precedent, a bald fabrication. . . . The Jews have passed through our homeland, as have other nations that have vanished from the earth” (2002, 1:7).
Reading the Final Sentence Precisely
Three points in the last of al-Dabbagh’s sentences quoted above are worthy of note. First, he acknowledges that the Jews were once present in Palestine. That is not to be taken lightly. It contradicts a popular Palestinian claim then and now that the Jews of today are not descendants of the Israelites of old but are rather, for example, Khazars. The second important point is the claim that the Jews’ presence in the country in the past does not validate their claim to sovereignty in the present—they came to Palestine during their wanderings in the past, and now they are passing through once more. The third and central point is encompassed within the term “our homeland.” 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. But let’s return to Jaffa in 1929 and search for further sources of that year’s killings.
More Sources on the Murder in Jaffa
Further information on the ‘Awn family’s murder can be found in contemporary newspapers. They did not report the crime when it occurred, but they did cover the trial of Simha Hinkis, a Jewish policeman arrested by the British as a suspect in the crime. A large amount of material on the case can be found in the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem and in the National Archives of the United Kingdom, and the incident is also mentioned in Sefer Toldot HaHaganah (The Haganah history book; Dinur 1973), a history of the Yishuv’s major military force, written in the 1950s.
The Haganah History Book
Sefer Toldot HaHaganah is considered a classic of the “old history”—that is, traditional Zionist historical writing—because it tells the story of the Yishuv and the Haganah from the point of view of the central current of Zionism at the time, the labor movement. The work was a collective undertaking, and the names of its authors make it tempting to view the book as having a manifestly political agenda. The principal writer was Yehuda Slutsky, a professional historian and writer; the editorial board’s members included Shaul Avigur (whose previous assignments included being chief of the Haganah’s intelligence service and one of the leaders of the illegal immigration operation that brought European Jews to Palestine in violation of British immigration restrictions), Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (a leader of the Second Aliyah, one of the founders of the Haganah, and later the second president of Israel), Elazar Galili (nicknamed Lasia, head of the Haganah’s Culture Department, founder of Ma’arakhot, the official journal of the Israel Defense Forces, and a member of Kibbutz Afikim), and Yisrael Galili (whose posts included chief of the Haganah’s national command in 1947–48, member of the Knesset, and member of the cabinet in 1966–77). The chief editor was Ben-Zion Dinur, a prolific historian of the Jewish people who served as Israel’s education minister from 1951 to 1955. But the work was not just a megaphone for the political ideas of its writers and editors. Its thick volumes contain a trove of information, including about the “Hinkis incident” (a euphemism for the murder of the ‘Awn family). The fact that the “incident” was included is just one of many examples that show that the authors and editors did not, as a general rule, seek to conceal problematic parts of the Zionist project in Palestine, but they present such incidents in soft focus. Here is what the work says about the murder: “A short time after this event [the killing of members of the Haganah in Abu Kabir], several Jews, among them the policeman Simha Hinkis, broke into one of the Arab homes in Abu Kabir that were adjacent to Tel Aviv. Four Arabs, among them a woman and a child, were killed. It was an act of retribution, the product of an emotional outburst, after news of the massacre in Hebron reached Tel Aviv and after the murder of Jews who had set out to save human lives” (Dinur 1973, 2:327).
Note that Sefer Toldot HaHaganah gives a different figure for the number of dead than does al-Dabbagh. Was it four or seven? The indictment and judgment in Hinkis’s trial will provide an answer.
And what about the event that, according to the Haganah history, preceded Hinkis’s raid on the house? Who were the Jews who were murdered in Jaffa? The answer can be found in Sefer Toldot HaHaganah: On Sunday around noon, a day after the massacre in Hebron, a Haganah patrol set out to rescue Jews who had been trapped in an ethanol factory outside Abu Kabir that was being besieged by Arabs. The British ordered the patrol to return to Tel Aviv and sent a British unit to disperse the Arabs and evacuate the besieged Jews. The Haganah patrol headed toward Tel Aviv, and, according to the book, “on its way back the group of defenders encountered an Arab mob that was, apparently, guarding the entrances to its neighborhood, and it attacked the [patrol’s] vehicle. Four Haganah men were killed” (Dinur 1973, 2:327).
Jaffa: A Historical-Literary Reader
The account in Sefer Toldot HaHaganah is pretty concise. A more comprehensive picture of the events can be found in Yafo: Mikra’ah Historit Sifrutit (Jaffa: a historical–literary reader), published in 1957 by the Education and Culture Department of the Tel Aviv–Jaffa municipality. The editor was Yosef Aricha, at the time an important and influential writer of Hebrew fiction. The book includes memoirs, poetry, and a history of the city from biblical times to Jaffa’s surrender to Zionist forces in 1948, written by dozens of writers. One of its chapters is devoted to the 1929 riots in and around the city. Here is the general background the book offers:
In Tel Aviv the riots began on Sunday, 19 Av 5689 [August 25, 1929], after an inflamed Arab mob emerged from the Hasan Beq Mosque south of Tel Aviv. The Arabs had long prepared for an attack on the city. The sheikhs and effendis incited the fellahs and poor people to stage a massacre of the Jewish Yishuv and promised them their wives and daughters. Each Arab who promised to take part in the attack was given a pack of cigarettes and a shilling. Thousands of inflamed Arabs, craving loot, gathered from the entire region and in the afternoon commenced their attack on Neveh Shalom and next to HaCarmel Street from the alleys across from Allenby Street. (Hinkis 1957, 229–30)
So Tel Aviv was also attacked in 1929. The street called HaCarmel then is today’s King George Street, in the heart of Tel Aviv’s downtown, and that is where the first act of the offensive took place. To be continued.
An Inflamed Mob?
The term “inflamed mob” connotes that the mob lacked any ideological motivation or judgment of its own. It is derisive of the people in the mob, as they have been inflamed by someone and are following his or her exhortations rather than thinking for themselves. Inflamed mobs have three attributes: first, they operate outside any organized framework; second, they are irrational; and third, they are not acting of their own volition. The attackers in Jaffa, Hebron, and other places in 1929 meet the first criterion, as they were not part of a professional force on a mission and had not been trained as fighters. Rather, they were a large group of people who were driven to act after learning (or hearing rumors about) what had happened in Jerusalem. The other two criteria are more complicated, as they have to do with the attackers’ logic and judgment and their motivation for acting. The author of the quoted part of Yafo maintains that their motive was a vile one—effendis (members of the new economic elite) and sheikhs (religious leaders) incited the masses and distributed measly gifts—and the masses, mostly poor people, went on the attack. They did not truly understand the significance of their actions and did not consider the moral implications. For them, human life was worth less than a pack of cigarettes.
Is that convincing? Were these Arabs really goaded into action by a pack of cigarettes and a shilling? By dreams of beautiful women—a motive frequently cited in Jewish accounts of the events in both Jaffa and Hebron? The explanation is attractive in its simplicity, but I am not certain that it is sufficiently comprehensive. The claim that the Arab masses of 1929 had no powers of judgment is unpersuasive for the simple reason that there were people who attacked and people who refrained from doing so. The explanation is also invalid for another reason—had these same people been offered a pack of cigarettes in exchange for murdering their own friends and families, would they have done so? If the answer is no—as presumably it would be—the only possible conclusion is that these attackers had stronger motives than just immediate gratification. We may also presume that the incitement encouraged an outbreak of already existing animosities, rather than creating new ones.
The concept of the “inflamed mob” has another flaw: implicit in the phrase, for many, is an assumption of the moral inferiority of the mob as opposed to organized forces. But this is not necessarily true. Just as organized forces can act with or without a moral compass, so can a seething (or “inflamed”—that is, responding to emotional appeals directed to it) mob. Jaffa’s own history provides an example.
Napoleon in Jaffa
A memorable event in Jaffa’s long history is its conquest by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1799. French forces had captured Egypt a year earlier, and at the beginning of 1799 they began moving overland toward Palestine, from El-Arish to Gaza and from there to Ramla. During the campaign the French took thousands of Ottoman prisoners, whom they took with them on their northward progress. On March 3, Napoleon’s army reached Jaffa and besieged it. The city resisted for four days before falling. French soldiers looted Jaffa’s homes and slaughtered many of its inhabitants. Two days later, the French led 3,000 prisoners southward on an organized march. Just outside the city limits, on the seashore, they were divided into small groups and shot dead by French soldiers. The executions lasted for hours. Those who were not killed by the bullets were stabbed to death with bayonets.
Napoleon and his men justified the massacre on the ground that they did not have enough troops both to guard the prisoners and defend their positions, adding that they also lacked food for the captives. They claimed too that the Ottomans had been the first to violate the customary laws of war—the Ottoman governor of Jaffa had had beheaded the messenger that Napoleon sent him. Even more critically, the Ottoman prisoners who had surrendered in the country’s south and were subsequently released violated their pledge to stay away from the battlefield, instead joining the forces defending Jaffa. Of course, logical, political, and moral justifications have been offered for almost every massacre from the dawn of history to the present day.
So Muslims are not the only ones who can commit atrocities—European Christians are fully capable of doing so as well. And not just any Europeans—this was the army of the French Revolution, spreading the gospel of liberté, egalité, and fraternité. In Napoleon: His Army and His Generals, Jean Charles Dominique de Lacretelle wrote that the piles of bodies in time turned into pyramids of bones. These monuments to the dawn of modern cultural interaction between the West and the Levant long stood on Jaffa’s beach (1854, 106).
The Modern Age
Napoleon’s eastern campaign—the conquest of Egypt and capture of Jaffa (commemorated in several classic paintings)—is often seen as the beginning of the modern age in the Middle East. But it did not exactly put Western-style modernity’s best foot forward. At a conference on religion and the state held at Bar-Ilan University in May 2011, the Indonesian historian Azyumardi Azra spoke of the far-reaching consequences of the event in another sense. He argued that Middle Eastern Islam developed in the direction of intolerance as a result of the siege mentality under which the Arab world lived after Napoleon’s attack. It was this, he claimed, that impelled the Arabs to avoid interaction with the West and to turn toward sectarianism (Mandel 2011).
From Napoleon’s Massacre to 1929
Napoleon’s slaughter of his prisoners is an inevitable association when the subject is massacres in Jaffa. But there is another reason why I mention it here: to correct a historical distortion—or, rather, to cleanse that distortion from the minds of those who maintain that only an inflamed crowd or only Muslims are capable of committing a mass murder of innocent people. That claim is manifestly without foundation, yet the more it is shown to be so, the more some people seem to assert it. After the horrors of World War II nobody really needs to be reminded that Europeans are capable of mass murder. Nor did Jews need such a reminder in 1929. At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, pogroms were part of everyday life (and death) for Jewish communities in Eastern Europe (and less so in Central Europe), and by 1929 dark clouds were gathering over the entire continent.
We’ve cited Christian brutality and Muslim brutality. Now we need to examine the Jews and mass murder.
What about the Jews?
During the nineteenth century, in Palestine and throughout the world, Jewish involvement in massacres was very one-sided—they were always victims. One example is the Peasants’ Revolt of 1834, a seminal event in the history of Palestine. Some background: About thirty years after Napoleon’s campaign, a dispute broke out between the Ottoman sultanate and Muhammad ‘Ali, who ruled Egypt under nominal Ottoman suzerainty. The dispute was about the sphere of the Egyptian ruler’s influence and the extent of his powers. Muhammad ‘Ali took military action, sending forces northward that conquered large swaths of the Levant, up to the border of what is Turkey today. He controlled Palestine for about a decade (1831–40), during which time he instituted important changes in its administration, as well as in the social and legal sphere. Among other things, he introduced mandatory conscription and mandated legal equality for Jews and Christians, putting them on a par with Muslims. Keep in mind, however, that conferring equal rights on minorities is tantamount to depriving the majority of its privileges. That is one reason why majority communities throughout the world often oppose the concept of equal rights so vociferously and sometimes violently. The history of European Jewry during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries offers a notable instance of this. But there are even more recent examples.
In 1834 the Arabs of Palestine rose up against the Egyptian administration and its innovations. In Palestinians: The Making of a People (1993), Baruch Kimmerling and Joel Migdal present this revolt as marking the first glimmering of Arab nationalism in Palestine (many other scholars dispute this claim, for a variety of reasons). The rebels were led by the most powerful families in the region’s rural areas. The revolt encompassed all of Palestine, from Gaza in the south to Safed in the Galilee. At the end of May the rebels attacked Jerusalem, and with the help of the city’s Muslims they reached al-Haram al-Sharif, the Temple Mount. From there, masses of rebels and local Muslims marched toward Jaffa Gate, pushing back the Egyptian forces step by step. Muhammad ‘Ali’s troops retreated into a fortress near the gate, now known as David’s Citadel; the rest of the city fell to the rebel villagers. The conquerors began to plunder the city. Muslim homes and establishments were not touched; their owners may well have joined the looters. Christians fled for their lives into fortified monasteries.
The city’s Jews bore the brunt of the attack. In 1938 Asad Rustum of the American University of Beirut published Egyptian documents relating to the revolt. He cited this passage from a report on Jerusalem: “The homes of the Jews were demolished completely, leaving them without beds to sleep on. Many of them were slaughtered and their wives and daughters dishonored.” In Safed the rebels broke into the Jewish quarter, “looting and violating the accepted bounds of decency and honor” (1938, 60). Despite Muhammad ‘Ali’s ostensible liberalism toward minority groups, the Jews in Hebron found that they could not depend on his protection when his forces defeated the rebels. The commander of the Egyptian troops gave his men a free hand to rape and plunder, “and boldness entered into their limbs and murder into their bones. They killed some with torches and some they slashed with swords. Many women were tortured and sullied,” the members of the community wrote of the disaster after they rose from their period of mourning (Avisar 1970c, 56).
One Law for Jews, the Uncircumcised, and the Ishmaelites
Bloody events like these were not routine. While Jews did not enjoy equality under the Ottoman Empire, in Palestine and elsewhere, prior to the era of nationalism, it was one of the easiest places in the world for Jews to live. At the beginning of Igrot Eretz Yisra’el (Letters from the Land of Israel; 1943), Avraham Yaari quotes a number of letters penned at the beginning of the modern age that contain material relating to the condition of Palestine’s Jews under Mamluk and Ottoman rule. The writers of the letters, he notes, emphasize
that the regime does not discriminate against the Jews and that the Arab inhabitants harbor no special hatred of the Jews as Jews. The writers stress in particular that there was no contempt for the Jew and his faith, the kind of contempt that had become etched in their souls during their time living in Christian lands; they declare in astonishment that the Arabs honor Jewish holy sites and the tombs of Jewish saints.
Rabbi Yitzhak Latif writes in his letter from the last quarter of the fifteenth century: “The Arabs are at peace with us. They will never strike us and never pillage.” At about the same time, Rabbi Yosef da Montagna declared in his letter from Jerusalem: “On the way we were sometimes in the field among many Ishmaelites and I never heard a man open his mouth to speak evil.” A few years later, in 1488, Rabbi Ovadiah of Bartenura wrote in his first letter from Jerusalem: “The Jews feel no sense of repression at all from the Ishmaelites in this place; I have traveled the length and breadth of the country and no one opens his mouth or jeers.” A student of this same Rabbi Ovadiah of Barentura describes in a letter the punishments imposed by the authorities, remarking that “as a rule, there is a single law for the Jews and the uncircumcised [Christians] and the Ishmaelites, but they do not hate Jews and castigate and abuse them as in your country [Italy]. . . .” In the mid-eighteenth century, Rabbi Avraham Gershon of Kitov wrote from Hebron: “The gentiles here very much love the Jews. When there is a brit milah [circumcision ceremony] or any other celebration, their most important men come at night and rejoice with the Jews and clap hands and dance with the Jews, just like the Jews.” (Yaari 1943, 18–19)
The letters include additional accounts of close interaction and cooperation between Jews and Muslims, certainly much beyond what was customary in Europe. The attack on the Jews in Jerusalem, Hebron, and Safed during the uprising of 1834 was thus an exception that proved the rule of generally placid, if not equal, relations between the Muslim majority and the Jewish minority. But they also marked the beginning of a change for the worse for the Jews. 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.
Pre-Zionist Anti-Zionism
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.
Implications for Today
Arabs commonly viewed the Jews in Palestine as colonialists and emissaries of Western imperialism. This seems to have been the background against which many Arabs understood, and still understand, the Jewish-Arab conflict. The basis for the evolution of this view can be found in the 1830s. During that decade, under Muhammad ‘Ali’s rule, Jewish immigration to Palestine increased with the help of foreign powers, and this continued after the reassertion of Ottoman control over the country. The British consulate that opened in Jerusalem in 1839 took under its protection all Jews who were neither Ottoman citizens nor citizens of any other European power, and its staff was inspired in part by the belief that it was God’s will that the Jews return to Zion (Schölch 1993). Palestine’s Arabs were aware of the messianic Zionist outlook of many British officials, and this was a source of their perception (and inference) that the Jews and Europeans had concluded an anti-Islamic compact aimed at establishing a Jewish-Western territorial outpost in Palestine at the expense of its Arab inhabitants. While the Jews who came to Palestine at the time did not see themselves as agents of the European powers but rather as their wards, and their main goal was to live their lives free of the constant threats and discrimination they had endured in their countries of origin, the Arabs viewed their arrival as part of a deliberate project of dispossession. From the Arab perspective, all of the events of the decades that followed—the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the UN partition resolution of 1947, the Israeli, French, and British attack on Egypt in 1956, and European and American aid to Israel since its establishment—have confirmed their belief that Israel is a tool of the Western powers in the Middle East.
Back to Anticolonialism, Colonialism, and Murder
We can draw some interim conclusions from our comparative look at the conduct of Napoleon’s army in Jaffa in 1799 and that of the Arab rebels in Jerusalem and Safed and of Muhammad ‘Ali’s army in Hebron in 1834. Clearly, an unorganized mob, an organized army of conquest, and a rebel force are no different in this respect: in all three cases, national and religious rivalries, combined with superior force and a measure of frustration, can make the forbidden (looting, murder, or rape) permissible. Studies of mass psychology show that there are deeds that we do not permit ourselves to commit as individuals, but that we may well commit when we become part of a collective action. We also know that what is perceived to be out of bounds in everyday life can, at times, be seen as acceptable in a crisis.
But it is still important to keep in mind that there are different kinds of violent mass actions and that each of them presents different moral issues. There is action against the authority of an exploitative ruler (for example, the storming of the Bastille or certain incidents in the Algerian war of liberation), action against a vulnerable minority (Ukrainians against Jews or lynchings of blacks in the American South), and contention between equal groups in which both sides conduct pogroms (episodes in the interethnic war in the former Yugoslavia).
Where Does 1929 Stand on the Scale?
This is one of the principal questions under dispute. To answer it, we need to try to determine the facts that everyone can agree on. It is a fact that the Jews were at that time a numerical minority in Palestine. It is a fact that most of them aspired to achieve Jewish sovereignty, even if they did not always use those words explicitly. It is a fact that their actions were detrimental to the national aspirations that the country’s Arabs had begun to develop at the same time. It is a fact that a decisive majority of Jews had no intention of harming the country’s Arabs, at least not directly. It is a fact that they did in fact do them harm at various levels. It is a fact that on other levels the country’s Arabs benefited from the presence of the Jews. The upshot: The Arabs viewed the Jews as foreign usurpers. The Jews viewed themselves as members of a persecuted minority that returned to its homeland. Many Arabs perceived their struggle to be an anticolonialist one, even if, at the time, they used this terminology only sparingly. Many Jews viewed Zionism as a national liberation movement and the Arab uprisings as an extension of the pogroms they had experienced as a minority in Eastern Europe.
The question of whether the Arabs were conducting pogroms or fighting a war of liberation is, of course, linked to the question of whether Zionism has been a colonialist movement.
Has It Been Colonialism?
In addition to the British support for Zionist aspirations, the claim that Zionism is a colonialist movement is based on the following assertions: it is a movement that worked to transfer a European population to a region inhabited by a less technologically developed, and thus weaker, population (as in other colonialist movements); its members settled in that region without the consent of the local population (as with other colonialist movements); its members felt themselves to be fundamentally superior in culture to the native population (as in other colonialist movements).
Those who dispute the charge also offer serious arguments: the Zionist movement was not a great power; Zionist settlers did not have the support of a powerful country where they enjoyed full and equal citizenship, as most other European colonialists did; the Zionists did not intend to exploit the local population as cheap labor as other settler societies did; and the Zionists did not work to extract the resources of the land they settled and send those resources to another country, as colonialists generally do. Another argument is a historical one—the Jews were not in fact foreigners in the country but rather natives whose ancestors had been sent into exile generations previously. Thus Zionism, in the eyes of its adherents, is a national liberation movement that calls on Jews to return to their historic homeland. (Fundamentally, the debate over whether Zionism is colonialism is a political one; God is present only at its margins. There is a parallel polemic, a religious one, over the question of whom God gave the land to—which is the subject of the next chapter.)
This complex picture means that Zionism can be seen as a movement that combines nationalist and colonialist aspects. The Jews experience it primarily as a realization of their goal as a nation, while the Palestinian Arabs experience it as colonialist. That explains why Zionism did not view those fighting it as anticolonialists but rather as an inflamed and ignorant mob that did not appreciate the benefits that Jewish settlement brought to the country and opposed the progressive values that Zionism promoted.
Ironically
Colonialists everywhere have viewed local inhabitants who opposed them as an inflamed and ignorant mob opposed to progress.
An Example from 1929
Maurice Samuel, a Jew born in Romania in 1895, moved as a child to England with his family, where he attended high school and the University of Manchester (in Manchester he met and became fond of Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader). He then emigrated to the United States, where he was conscripted and served in the army in World War I. After his discharge he served as an interpreter at the Versailles peace conference and on the Morgenthau Commission investigating the pogroms in Eastern Europe. Subsequently he joined the staff of the World Zionist Organization’s New York office, and in the mid-1920s he published several books in which he wrestled with the question of the Jews’ role in Western history and their relations with non-Jews. Samuel was in Tel Aviv when the 1929 riots broke out, and he volunteered to serve in one of the contingents that the Haganah organized to defend the city. Shortly after the riots he published a widely read book about them. In one passage, he recalls his own thoughts and those of other guardsmen at a lookout point:
To complete the caricature, we could not help feeling that in this petty squabble (for such it was bound to appear to us) we did stand on the side of a principle. And the principle was symbolized for us there by the scene at our feet. On the one side lay Tel Aviv, a city which had sprung up in twenty years on empty and forbidding sands. A city that was modern in the least objectionable sense; peopled by men and women conscious of social and intellectual purposes. On the other side, Jaffa, a very ancient city, a city typical of the decayed East, with a few rich and many poor—and a poverty of that awful and indescribable type which can be found only in the East. . . . On the one side Tel Aviv with its poets and painters and thinkers. On the other, backward Jaffa, in which education is a fantastic luxury, and modern intellectuality—in a levantinized form at that—the possession of a handful. (1929, 75–76).
The author underscores, with an arsenal of literary techniques, the fact that he is rooted in Western culture, just like other Zionists, and in contrast with the backward Arab masses. He writes at length about the events of the day as a whole, but completely disregards a specific event that took place quite close to his guard post—the murder of the ‘Awn family.
Perhaps mentioning it would have weakened the thesis of his book. He mentions a Jewish wagon driver, Baruch Rozin, who was murdered nearby, and the killing of the Haganah troops who went out to rescue the Jews who had been trapped in the ethanol factory. Those deaths were compatible with the image he wanted to foster.
The Murder of Rozin the Wagoner
On Sunday, the day of the attack on Tel Aviv, Baruch Rozin the wagoner was moving out of his home in Neveh Shalom into a new apartment in the center of town. Not far from the Hasan Beq mosque, as he and his sons Aharon and Leib made their third haul of his belongings, they ran into an Arab mob advancing from Jaffa toward Tel Aviv. Aharon was driving the wagon while Leib and his father walked alongside. The mob approached and they heard voices calling out “Udrub [beat them]!” A wave of Arabs surged forward and attacked them with poles and sticks. Leib managed to get away, running toward Tel Aviv; Aharon, slightly wounded, evaded the mob, and also fled northward. He almost collapsed a short while later, and a passing car rushed him to a hospital. Their elderly father was beaten again and again until he died. An autopsy found a bullet entry wound. Apparently someone shot him at short range. Binyamin Plastovsky, a police officer, was on duty nearby. He later testified that he saw, from a distance, a mob attacking Jews, but he was deterred from getting any closer because he was alone. When the mob dispersed, he approached and found Baruch Rozin’s body (record of the trial of the attackers, October 10, 1929, CZA L59/58).
What Does Al-Dabbagh Say about That?
Al-Dabbagh does not mention the attack on the ethanol factory, the killing of the Haganah men in Jaffa, or the murder of the wagoner Baruch Rozin, all of which took place on the same day that the ‘Awn family was slaughtered. He also has a nationalist outlook he seeks to promote and a set of images he uses to that end.
A possible inference: both sides engage in similar techniques of denial, repression, and cherry-picking the events they write about. In other words, they use like methods of constructing a national narrative. In this regard, there is no difference between Western and Levantine intellectuals. Another inference: each writer mentions the victims that he cares for, those who are closest to him.
The Seething Mob: A British View
In normal times, some of the British in Palestine were attracted by the vibrancy of Jaffa. Some of them took a romantic, Orientalist view of it. Others were put off by the city. One account of the beginning of the troubles comes from a British officer, S. C. Atkins:
At about 1200 hours I received information that a mob was preparing to attack the Governorate. . . . [B]y this time some 2000 Moslems had collected in the Square and about 100 were already on the Governorate steps, although the mob was disorderly and excited, I do not think that there was any intention to attack the Governorate, furthermore any attempt would have been easily repulsed since I had a cordon of Police with batons at the entrance of the Governorate and an armed guard in reserve inside (out of sight). Seeing that this was the time for pacifying the mob, I cleared the Governorate steps using [as] little force as possible and then proceeded in amongst the crowd explaining what would happen if they did not clear, in a few minutes the square was clear. A little later, however, on the arrival of a wounded Moslem, a mob again began to collect shouting we want a “Turkish Government” (the Ringleader has since been arrested), the mob was dispersed in a manner similar to the former and the square was again clear. (Atkins 1929, 1)
Atkins’s temperate mob control method turned out not to be effective when more Arab casualties were reported. The mob gathered again, he reported, and at this point he had no choice but to fire shots in the air.
A Reminder
When attacked by natives, an officer with military experience, serving an imperial power, experiences the incident differently than do the members of a civilian community attacked in their home city, even when they are targets of the same attack. What is the significance of this difference? And to what extent are the attackers aware of it? Hard to say.
Isma‘il Tubasi, Incendiary No. 1
The term “inflamed mob” presupposes that someone has inflamed it. The British police in Jaffa identified two incendiaries prior to the outbreak of violence. In the district police log Officer Alfred Riggs (the policeman who repelled the attack on Tel Aviv and who arrested Hinkis) recorded what happened that morning. At 8:00 a.m., he wrote, a crowd gathered at the mosque. Orators spoke of the Western Wall, and Isma‘il Tubasi gave a fiery speech. Some of the older sheikhs tried to cut him off, without success. He got so emotional that he fainted and had to be revived and carried away. His talk, Riggs said, had a very bad effect on the audience.
In his testimony before the commission of inquiry, Riggs offered a more detailed account of what Tubasi said. Riggs placed the event at a slightly later hour, but the substance was the same: “[At] about 10.00 hours he [Sheikh al-Muzaffar] addressed the people. He asked them to refrain from demonstrating and told them to be quiet. Ismail Tubassa [sic] rose and said: ‘In the name of God, in the name of Mohammed and religion, we do not want protests; we are ten years protesting but without results. This protest will receive the same fate as the others, we must demonstrate, attack our enemies by ourselves, lose our lives for the country.’ He was excited and made the assembly very excited” (Commission on the Palestine Disturbances of August 1929 [hereafter Commission] 1930, 2:997–98).
Tubasi, as his name indicates, came to Jaffa from the town of Tubas in northeastern Samaria. He had been born in 1907 and was twenty-two years old in 1929, having just completed his studies at the Islamic College in Jerusalem. Following the riots he was sentenced to imprisonment for incitement. After his release he served for several years as a leader of the Arab Scouts in Palestine, working also as a teacher and journalist. In the war of 1948 he joined the forces defending Jaffa. After the city’s fall he returned to his hometown of Tubas, where he taught at the local high school. In 1979 he published in Amman a book titled Kifah al-Sha‘ab al-Filastini 1908–1965 (The struggle of the Palestinian people). His speech in Jaffa in 1929 was his first public appearance.
Stalin’s Man in Jaffa
A second activist involved in the events in Jaffa—a provocateur, according to the police—was Hamdi Hussayni. He personified a different social and political phenomenon than Tubasi did. Born in Gaza in 1899 to one of the city’s prominent Muslim families, he was sent to a church high school. At the end of World War I he went into journalism, eventually serving as editor of al-Karmil in Haifa, one of the most important Arabic periodicals in Palestine, and writing for other publications. At the beginning of the 1920s he served as a teacher in Ramla. About seventy years later, ‘Abd al-Rahman Kayyali, who had been a student of his, related how proud he and his fellow students were when Hussayni refused to stand up in respect during a visit by the British high commissioner to the town (Shina’a 1993).
In 1927, Hussayni assumed the editorship of the Jaffa newspaper Sawt al-Haqq (Voice of truth) and served as an active member of the anti-British Young Muslim Association, in the latter capacity helping promote a manual laborers’ union. As a result of this activity, the Palestinian Communist Party invited him to participate in an international conference of the League against Imperialism, organized by the Comintern in Germany in 1928. He seems to have made a very good impression on the participants (he was not just an analyst and organizer but also spoke several languages, among them Spanish, Italian, Hebrew, and Turkish). He was then invited to Moscow, where he met Joseph Stalin and other senior figures.
When Hussayni returned to Palestine, he was placed under surveillance by the British secret service. He was still being followed during the tense days of August 1929. British police officers who testified before the Commission on the Palestine Disturbances of August 1929 (the Shaw Commission) referred to him as a professional troublemaker. He tried to stir up the crowd politically, they said, but quickly realized that religious appeals were an easier way of influencing the masses. He thus adopted the claim—commonly voiced by the mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Hussayni—that the Jews were trying to take over al-Aqsa.
Communist sources depict Hamdi Hussayni in a different light. Leon Zahavi, an Israeli Communist activist and the Israeli Communist Party’s representative in Moscow, refers to Hussayni as a “well-known nationalist revolutionary” and relates that Hussayni advocated directing the struggle against the British, not the Jews (Zahavi 2005, 155, 178), because the struggle should be anti-imperialist, not nationalist. The 1929 pogrom, Zahavi writes, occurred because the communists in Palestine did not succeed in taking charge of and organizing the struggle.
In any case, Hussayni received in his office in Jaffa a telegram from the Committee for the Defense of al-Buraq (the Western Wall) asking him to organize demonstrations in his city in response to the Jewish procession to the site. He does indeed seem to have been involved in organizing the demonstrations, but we do not know what he thought about the attack on Tel Aviv.
And One Who Did Not Incite
A third prominent figure in these events was Sheikh ‘Abd al-Qader al-Muzaffar, one of the leaders of the Palestinian national movement at the time and a man of great public influence. Al-Muzaffar was born in Jerusalem in 1892 to a family of ‘ulamaa (Islamic scholars). He pursued advanced studies at al-Azhar Institute in Cairo, graduating in 1918. Al-Muzaffar spent the period following World War I in Damascus, along with other nationalists who gathered in the city in the hope of taking part in the establishment of a large and united Arab kingdom encompassing the entire Arab east (the territory that later became Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel-Palestine) under the rule of Faisal ibn Hussayn of the Hashemite clan. While in Damascus, al-Muzaffar maintained friendly relations with another native of Jerusalem, Yosef Yoel Rivlin, then headmaster of the Hebrew school for girls in Damascus and later a translator of the Qur’an into Hebrew (and father of Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin). Yosef Rivlin referred to al-Muzaffar as a leader of “the extremist anti-Zionist clique in Damascus” (“Beit-Hashem beMa‘arbolet,” Hed haMizrah, March 17, 1950) But he also recalled that in the 1930s al-Muzaffar sent his nephew to study Qur’an exegesis under Rivlin at the Hebrew University, and that the sheikh, then living in Jaffa, took a great interest in the innovative interpretations that his nephew learned from Rivlin. In 1923, when the British announced elections for a legislative assembly in Palestine in which seats would be apportioned on a religious basis among Muslims, Christians, and Jews, al-Muzaffar was among the leaders of the campaign for a boycott of the elections. Only a few men declared their candidacies, and the voter turnout was extremely low. In the end the British decided not to establish the assembly. It was one of the most important of the (very few) successes of the Palestinian national movement during the Mandate period, but it had a negative impact in the long run.
Al-Muzaffar’s public career later had ups and downs, as did his relations with the mainstream of the Palestinian national movement. The peak of his popularity came at the time of the mass demonstrations against the Mandate regime in 1933, when many of the protest leaders were arrested. All agreed to post bail except for al-Muzaffar, whom the Palestinian national poet of the time, Ibrahim Tuqan, memorialized in verse:
Palestine in flames, roars in fury
Step aside—you are not my men
The captive [al-Muzaffar] is he who has gained honor
And those who pursue office are his atonement. (Tuqan 1966, 48–49)
Al-Muzaffar shared a prison cell with Abba Ahimeir, chief of Brit HaBiryonim, a cell of radical Jewish nationalists. “As a Zionist of the Nordau-Jabotinsky school, the author of these memoirs had no interest in meeting with Arabs,” Ahimeir wrote in an article he published at the time of al-Muzaffar’s death (Herut, July 1, 1949). But the struggle against the British, even if pursued by both men separately, led them to the same prison cell in downtown Jerusalem’s Russian Compound. “That time spent in the company of Muslim Arabs and Levantine Christians buttressed my negative view of the East,” Ahimeir wrote. He called al-Muzaffar the leader and founder of Islamic extremism in Palestine.
Ahimeir’s conduct in the period leading up to the 1929 riots will be examined below. But here we can see that Ahimeir’s characterization of al-Muzaffar as “extremist” had no foundation. That same Sunday, when the riots began in Jaffa, al-Muzaffar had called on the crowd at the Hasan Beq Mosque not to head to the Jewish neighborhoods. It was the second speech, by Isma‘il Tubasi, that ignited the crowd and persuaded it to take action. Perhaps Tubasi’s collapse during his speech made his appeal more powerful. When he came to his senses, Tubasi repeated his call to attack the Jewish neighborhoods and set out to do so himself. In other words, two opposing views about attacking the Jews were voiced at the same time at the same mosque in Jaffa. Perhaps at that very moment the first sparks of resistance to the mufti’s belligerent strategy appeared in al-Muzaffar’s mind. During World War II, he opposed the mufti’s alliance with Nazi Germany (H. Cohen 2008, 184–85).
Jaffa, Sunday, Early Afternoon
The crowd that had assembled at Hasan Beq set out after Tubasi. The first wave of the attack was repulsed by Officer Riggs and his men, who positioned a machine gun at the corner of HaCarmel Street and fired at the attackers. But they were not deterred, and the gunfire continued. The historical-literary reader put out by the Tel Aviv–Jaffa Municipality includes an account of the events written by a Jewish policeman who was positioned at the end of Herzl Street:
I made out two Arabs armed with rifles appearing from under the orange grove’s barbed-wire fence and aiming their rifles to the right, toward our position. When I saw this I instantly aimed my rifle. A single shot and then another one and I saw one Arab fall. The second had also been hit but still had the strength to drag his friend by the feet into the grove.
I gathered up a group of courageous men and we set out on a counterattack. I was the only one with an English rifle and the few rounds that remained. The others—with pistols. The shooting from the side of the orange grove gradually fell silent. The Arabs must have suffered losses from our counterattack. We were able to advance to Herzl Hill, and I again heard lots of shooting at the hill. I raised my head up and saw, at a distance of 200 meters from me, a car with a group of Haganah members who had returned by this route, stuck in the middle of the Abu Kabir neighborhood’s main road; a few of the passengers had jumped out and began running one by one in our direction. They were heading toward Tel Aviv, to Herzl Street. The first to arrive was Tula Gordon and he called for help. After him came the driver, Verobichek, badly wounded in the head. Not far from him was Feingold’s son, wounded. After them a few others. The last was Binyamin Goldberg. When he was two meters from me a bullet hit his head. His white pith helmet was knocked aside and he fell bleeding into my hands, badly wounded in the head. I fired furiously at the advancing Arabs. . . .
At the same time I noticed that a ladder stood next to a one-story Arab house and that a group of armed Arabs was going up and down it between the grove and the yard of the house. I informed some of my comrades and asked them if they agreed to go there with me. They consented. We broke through the door into the yard with our weapons ready for any surprise. When I went into one of the rooms I heard the voices of people talking. I gave a sign to the guys and we broke into the room. The seven Arabs who were there were armed with pistols and sticks and were lying there surprised. Our desire for vengeance burned within us like fire and was satisfied. I checked the rest of the rooms but they were empty. We closed the door and went out. (Hinkis 1957, 231–32)
The author of this article in the book Yafo is Simha Hinkis.
The house in question was that of the ‘Awn family.
His version of the event: there were seven victims, all of them armed.
When he wrote the piece, he was an official of Tel Aviv municipal government.
Binyamin Goldberg and His Companions
Binyamin Ze’ev Goldberg, who fell bleeding into Hinkis’s arms, was born in 1905. He was the youngest son of Yitzhak Leib Goldberg, a wealthy Zionist activist who had opposed Theodor Herzl’s proposal to establish a temporary Jewish home in East Africa (called the Uganda Plan) and who had been one of the first donors to the Zionist land purchase organization, Keren Kayemet LeYisrael (Jewish National Fund). The senior Goldberg financed the purchase of land throughout Palestine, including an expanse on Mount Scopus, just east of Jerusalem, that belonged to Sir John Gray Hill and on which the Hebrew University was built. He also purchased the land on which Hartuv, a farm village in the Judean Hills, was established; Hartuv was also attacked in 1929. Yitzhak Goldberg owned citrus groves in the area of Ramat Gan, just east of Tel Aviv, and was a cofounder of the daily newspaper Ha’aretz and the Carmel distillery. Hayim Nahman Bialik wrote a poem about him, beginning with the line “May my lot be with you, the humble of the earth, the silent souls” (Gershon Gera identified Goldberg as the subject of the poem in his biography of 1984, HaNadiv HaLo Noda’ [The unknown philanthropist]). Yitzhak’s brother was injured during the 1921 riots and died of his wounds; the brother’s grandson, Dan Tolkovsky, who was eight years old in 1929, later became commander of the Israeli Air Force. Binyamin was twenty-four when he was killed. He had graduated from Tel Aviv’s Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium high school eight years previously and been sent by his father to study mechanical engineering in England. When he returned to Palestine in 1927 he went to work at Haroshet HaEmek, an underground arms factory established by the Zionist Labor Brigade on the western side of the Jezreel Valley that was camouflaged as a repair shop for agricultural machinery. But the factory did not last long, so Binyamin returned to Tel Aviv and joined the Haganah.
On Friday, when the disturbances began, Binyamin Goldberg rode to Jerusalem on his motorcycle to take part in defending Talpiot, an isolated Jewish neighborhood to the south of the Old City that was under attack. On Sunday morning he returned to Tel Aviv and immediately set out to evacuate the Jews trapped in the ethanol factory next to Abu Kabir. It later turned out that this mission had been superfluous, because the British had taken responsibility for rescuing the people in the factory. The residents of Abu Kabir thought that the Haganah contingent had come to kill them, so they took the offensive and killed their presumed assailants. Three other members of the Haganah force who had volunteered for the mission were also killed: Yosef Berkowitz, a customs clerk for the Mandate administration; Moshe Harari-Bloomberg, an actor and musician; and Isaac-Yehoshua Feingold, a founder of the Ariel cigarette factory. According to the page about him on the Defense Ministry’s memorial website, Harari called out to the Arabs who were approaching them: “We mean no harm to you, let us pass.” Goldberg’s last words were: “But the Land of Israel will be ours no matter what” (Gera 1984, 218).
This is the Zionist story in miniature: The Jews arrive in Palestine to save their lives and those of their brethren. They speak to the Arabs in two voices: “We mean no harm to you, let us pass” and “But the Land of Israel will be ours no matter what.”
The next morning, on August 26, at 8:15 a.m., an account of the discovery of the bodies in the ‘Awn home was recorded in the log of the Lod District police headquarters (which was responsible for Tel Aviv and Jaffa as well). An Arab family consisting of three men, one woman, and one child were murdered by Jews and cut to pieces, the log entry states. Immediately afterward is another entry reporting that Be’er Tuvia had been attacked by 2,000 Arabs. The Jews had all taken refuge in a single house, and the entire village was on fire. Trucks needed to be sent to evacuate the inhabitants to Rehovot. Then comes another entry: all the Jewish families in Gaza have been brought to Tel Aviv.
Be’er Tuvia was burned down and later rebuilt. The Jewish community in Gaza was never reestablished. Several Jewish settlements were founded in the Gaza Strip after it was taken by Israel in 1967, but all were evacuated in 2005. That same year the fourth and perhaps fifth generation of Palestinian refugees who left Jaffa in 1948 was growing up, many of them in Gaza.
The members of the ‘Awn family were buried after a medical examination of their remains; the doctors filled out death certificates with details about their wounds. Photocopies of the certificates are on file in the Central Zionist Archives.
The Investigation
The police assumed that the Jews murdered the ‘Awn family. Haganah operatives in Tel Aviv reported the incident by telephone to their counterparts in Jerusalem: “It has not been proven that it was done by Jews. Arab robbers are on the loose and it could be that it was a provocative act by Arabs” (ISA P69776/2). That was the first response, and perhaps the hope, of the Haganah.
The police launched an investigation. Officers went to the site and collected bullet cartridges. Witnesses were questioned. They related that a Jewish policeman had arrived at the house at the head of a group of Jews. The investigation continued in an unambiguous direction. In an interview in the daily newspaper Ma‘ariv some thirty years later, Hinkis recalled:
The next morning the British officer Ricks [the journalist’s misspelling of Riggs] came to me and instructed me to take my rifle and go to the Jaffa police station. There the rifle was taken from me and I was dismissed. I sensed that something was wrong and that the rifle had been taken from me as a court exhibit. Two days later I learned that the Arabs had informed the British that a Jewish policeman had killed the seven [victims found in the house]. A Jew also had a hand in informing about that. In the end they arrested me. For a month and a half I had no respite. Interrogations day and night. I denied everything. In the meantime they organized all the incriminating material against me. . . . The trial was conducted in Jaffa. The Jewish Agency and National Committee provided me with defense counsel. The late Drs. Eliash and Dunkelblum, as well as Olshan, Henigman, and Frankel, may they have long lives. (Yamim VeLeilot supplement, November 12, 1965)
Investigating Magistrate
Rules of procedure established in the wake of the riots called for the suspects to be brought before an investigating magistrate. If the magistrate was persuaded that there was sufficient evidence implicating them in manslaughter or murder, he would send the case to a panel of three British judges. On November 6, 1929, the investigating magistrate decided to indict Hinkis on five counts of murder, the victims being Sheikh ‘Abd al-Gani ‘Awn (about fifty years of age), Ibrahim Khalil ‘Awn (forty), ‘Abd al-Gani ‘Ali Bahalul (fifty), Maryam (forty-five), and Halima (twenty-eight). Hinkis was also charged with the attempted murder of two other victims: a five-year-old boy and a two-month-old baby. They were wounded in the attack and taken to the hospital, where they recovered (the testimony heard by the investigating magistrate can be found in CZA L59/68, 61).
No Children Were Killed
Notwithstanding al-Dabbagh’s account, the initial police report, and Sefer Toldot HaHaganah, no children were killed in the incident. The five-year-old was wounded when a bullet penetrated his left arm and exited from his ankle, damaging his internal organs. He spent forty-three days convalescing in the hospital and was released. The two-month-old baby spent ten days in the hospital. According to the medical report, he had suffered a blow from a blunt instrument to the left side of his head—on his ear, temple, and cheek. In other words, he was apparently beaten or struck, but his skull was not shattered. A third child, nine-year-old ‘Ali, the sheikh’s son, was found unhurt, lying under his mother’s body.
Medical Reports
The public considers such reports to be extremely reliable. Courts generally view them that way as well. Why? Because it is both necessary and convenient to do so. After all, neither the readers of this book nor the judges were present at the site when the incident took place. No one knows for certain who did the killing. No one knows precisely what caused the victims’ wounds. Medical reports imbue with authority the general picture of events that a court must construct in order to reach a judicial decision. The expertise that writing such a report requires and the professional language in which it is couched add to its gravity. In fact, courts often receive contradictory medical reports, one from the defense and another from the prosecution. That did not happen in the case at hand. The reports on the victims of the attack in Jaffa were written by the director of the city’s government hospital, Fuad Dajjani.
Arab (and Jewish) Civil Servants
The fact that the medical reports were written by an Arab doctor does not in and of itself mean they were biased. Arab civil servants coped with conflicting pressures and reacted in different ways. During the riots, some Arab policemen took action against the Arab attackers and in some cases testified against them in police investigations. Other Arab policemen joined the attackers, as in Jaffa in 1921. In one well-known case from 1929, a British officer, Raymond Cafferata, shot an Arab policeman who was trying to rape a Jewish woman in Hebron. In general, the conduct of most Arab policemen can best be described as navigating between a rock and a hard place—they were not overly diligent in thwarting Arab attacks, choosing not to become the targets of ire from their own community, but they also sought to do their duty adequately enough to avoid reprimands from their superiors. The assumption here, which many Zionists disputed, was that the British administration sought to squelch the riots rather than encourage them.
The classic example of an Arab police officer who acted against the assailants was Halim Basta, a Copt from Egypt who served as an officer in the Jewish and Arab villages that fell under the purview of the Ramla police station. Basta sent his men to defend the Jewish settlements in the region. The Ben Shemen Youth Village’s logbook praised him to the skies (as reported in Davar, September 5, 1929). Among other things, his men arrested the mukhtar of Hadid, a nearby Arab village, using him as a hostage to prevent an attack on the youth village. The newspaper recounts how Basta assembled the leaders of the surrounding Arab villages and warned them against attacking their Jewish neighbors. He later testified for the prosecution at the trials of the Arabs who attacked Be’er Tuvia and other settlements. For the Arabs, Basta crossed the line. At the beginning of November 1929 Arabs from Ramla wrote to the high commissioner demanding that he dismiss Basta for having treated “those who suffered damage in the riots” harshly. They meant that he had arrested Arabs who had been involved in attacks on Jewish settlements and who had been wounded in the process. Davar, the daily newspaper of the labor movement, reported this demand and interpreted it:
What did this Arab police officer do? He did his duty properly. He did what every other officer in the country should have done during the riots. For days before [the riots] Halim Basta’s car made the rounds of the area under his purview to warn, oversee, inspect. He visited many Arab villages during the riots, cautioning them not to attack Jewish settlements, as they craved to do. He also threatened arrests and other punishments if any sort of public disturbance occurred on his beat. . . . And the fact that flourishing Jewish settlements remained safe despite everything rankles the provocateurs. . . . After the riots he searched the villages, found stolen items, and arrested the guilty. Can the Arabs of Ramla and the rebel villages pass over that in silence? “We demand the dismissal of Halim Basta.” (Davar, November 12, 1929)
What Happened to Him?
Basta was not dismissed. He kept his position, serving for a while in Hebron, then in the northern valley district and afterward in Haifa. He excelled at his job as an investigation and intelligence officer. In 1933 he solved a horrifying murder in the Jezreel Valley, the killing of Yosef Ya’akobi of Nahalal and his nine-year-old son David in a bomb attack. Basta collected the nails that the bomb had sent flying; located the store in which they had been purchased; and traced them to the bombers, disciples of Sheikh ‘Izz a-Din al-Qassam, a jihadist Haifa preacher. The suspects were tried and sentenced to death. Basta continued to monitor al-Qassam’s adherents throughout the first year of the Arab Revolt of 1936–39, earning their indignation. In mid-April 1937, Basta and his bodyguard, an Arab policeman named Hanna Shehada, were walking near the Haifa courthouse when three gunmen overtook them and shot them to death at close range. Basta left a wife and a five-year-old daughter. The annual report of the Mandate police force for 1933 cited him for his work on the Ya’akobi case. The 1936 report praised him for his exceptional courage and devotion to his duties. The next annual report, that of 1937, stated that he had been posthumously awarded the king’s medal for police work (Palestine Police Force, Annual Administrative Report, TNA: CO 814/8, 11, 12).
A Multifaceted Dilemma
Under British rule, many Jewish policemen also had to maneuver between their professional obligations and their national affiliation. Shlomo Schiff served as a police officer in Tel Aviv in the 1920s. During the 1929 riots he was Hinkis’s commander. When he testified at his subordinate’s trial, he seems to have done his best not to incriminate Hinkis. But Hinkis felt that his commander did not do enough to defend him (HHA testimony 37/17). In Tel Aviv Schiff was remembered favorably for his role in repelling the 1929 attacks. At the time he also warned a group of armed Jewish defenders that the British forces were searching for illicit Jewish arms (Dinur 1973, 2:367). Schiff continued to serve in the police force during the 1930s and the early 1940s. His nemesis was Lehi (which the British called the Stern Gang), a radical Jewish national guerrilla organization. During these years Lehi perpetrated a series of attacks against British targets. Schiff’s duties included counterinsurgency actions against the splinter group, which acted against the directives of the Jewish agency and the Yishuv’s leadership. In January 1942 Lehi set an ambush for several senior police officers on Yael Street in Tel Aviv. Their primary target was Geoffrey Morton, head of the police force’s plainclothes Criminal Investigations Division. They laid a trap involving three bombs—a small one intended to draw police officers to the chosen spot, and two larger ones that would detonate after the officers arrived. Schiff arrived after the first explosion, along with several other Jewish officers, and was killed in the second explosion; another Jewish officer, Nahum Goldmann, was wounded and died the following day. Morton survived. By some accounts, the assassin who was assigned to shoot him got cold feet. Others say he survived because the third charge never went off. Following the attack, Lehi issued a broadside declaring that Schiff had been sentenced to death by an underground court for having devoted himself to turning Jewish freedom fighters over to the British enemy (differing accounts of the event can be found in Weinshal 1956 and Heller 1989). Al-Qassam’s disciples justified their attack on Basta in a similar way.
“The First of the Bloodbath”
About three weeks after the attack on the officers, on February 12, 1942, Morton’s operatives burst into the hide-out of Lehi’s commander, Avraham Stern, whose nom de guerre was Yair. Morton killed him on the spot. Some Jews cheered, but many mourned. One of the mourners was Yonatan Ratosh, a poet and a prominent figure in the Canaanite movement, a group that sought to create a Hebrew-Arab local culture on the basis of the country’s pagan and biblical past. In his elegy to Stern he wrote:
You are the first—like a dog put to death
You are the first—on the single road
Who steps on the altar alone
Who digs his grave with his own hands.
You are the first of the bloodbath
You are the first of the dawn of days. (Ratosh 1974, 55–56)
On the Witness Stand
We have jumped a decade ahead—it’s time to go back. In 1929 the Haganah was still the only Jewish defense organization. Etzel had not yet been formed, and Lehi had not yet broken away from Etzel. The Haganah’s level of organization and operational capabilities were still very limited. Jewish policemen, some of whom were also members of the Haganah, had to decide first of all how to act against the Arabs, not whether to act against Jewish underground organizations. Hinkis, according to the prosecution at his trial, had not only made a decision that violated his duty as a policeman, but also one that violated the law and morality—he had used his personal weapon to kill innocent people. His trial began in a small courtroom on January 21, 1930. There was a bench for the prosecution, another one for the defense, and one more for newspaper reporters, both Jewish and Arab. Unlike at most trials, people who wished to enter had to undergo a search to ensure that none of them was bearing arms. Policemen and officers from the Tel Aviv and Jaffa forces were called as witnesses. So was Mahmoud Gohar, husband of Maryam, one of the victims. He told the court that he and his family had lived in the same building as the ‘Awn family. He had been in the house when the incident took place. When the door was broken down by the Jews, he had climbed a ladder to the roof. He heard gunfire and hid under a pile of straw. When the attackers had gone, he went back down into the living room. His wife was wounded, could not speak, but was still breathing. His children were wounded. He saw the sheikh’s wife dead and her son ‘Ali under her, still alive. There were bullet cartridges between the pools of blood. He took the children with him to seek a hiding place and medical assistance. In the meantime his wife died. He testified that the shooter had been a Jewish policeman.
Mahmoud, Maryam’s Husband
The Hebrew press covered the post-riot trials extensively. These newspapers frequently exhibited a cynical tone. They tended to be dismissive of Arab testimony and relatively uncritical of Jewish witnesses. “He has a cataract on his right eye and the other eye is shortsighted,” Davar reported on February 5, regarding one of the prosecution witnesses. However, the same issue reported Mahmoud Gohar’s testimony in a more objective way, perhaps out of respect for the loss he had suffered: “About 30 years old. Dressed in breeches, dark, like the other principal inhabitants of Abu Kabir, a settlement of immigrants from Egypt founded by Ibrahim Pasha in the middle of the previous century.” This description is given offhandedly and does not include just one witness but makes a generalization: that most of the inhabitants of Abu Kabir had, just two or three generations previously, been Egyptian immigrants. They had arrived in Palestine about a century before, during the reign of Ibrahim Pasha, when Palestine was under Egyptian rule. Is this meant to imply that they are not truly natives of Palestine? That they are less indigenous to Palestine than the Jews? Perhaps. In any case, the writer does not claim that they were drawn to Palestine by the economic growth brought on by the Zionist influx—as, according to some writers, a large part of the Palestinian Arab population were. After all, the forebears of the inhabitants of Abu Kabir arrived prior to the inception of Zionism.
Like many other facts, the Egyptian immigration to Palestine sometimes serves as a political weapon. In the debates over the problem of the refugees from the 1948 war and about the connection the Arabs have to the land, some point to the fact that many of the refugees from Jaffa and the southern coastal plain had actually lived in Palestine for only a single generation, or if not that, then their ancestors had been there for only a century. This claim is meant to prove that they have just a tenuous tie to the land, and therefore that the Palestinian tragedy is not all that tragic. Indeed, this attempt to define these people as Egyptians—that is, to claim that they retained stronger emotional and political ties to their forebears’ country of origin than to Palestine—is tempting for Zionists but is not at all convincing. Had that been the case, they presumably would have fled to Egypt when they had to leave their homes in 1948. The evidence that I have been able to unearth indicates that very few of the refugees from this region did so. The vast majority of Palestinians of Egyptian descent found refuge in the Gaza Strip’s refugee camps after the war; they constitute an integral part of the Palestinian nation. Furthermore, having been in a place only a generation or two did not make being uprooted any easier. Israeli families who lived in the Yamit salient in the Sinai Peninsula for two decades or in the Gaza Strip for a generation, where Israeli government decisions on withdrawal from territories forced Jews out of their homes, can testify to the agony displacement causes even after a much shorter stay.
Arab immigration to Palestine is a subject studied largely by Israeli researchers, and the question of who was here first, the Arabs or the Jews, always hovers in the background. As a rule, Arab historians do not share the fundamental assumption that determining priority will show whose claim to the land is stronger. They view migration within the larger Arab region as natural, including the movement of peoples from the Maghreb (North Africa) and the Mashriq (the Arab lands of Asia) into Palestine. They see no relationship between this and the strength or weakness of the Palestinian national claim. For example, Hasan Ibrahim Sa‘id matter-of-factly notes the Egyptian and Maghrebi origins of many Jaffa families in his comprehensive book on Jaffa in the first half of the nineteenth century (Sa‘id 2006). Why do they not see this as undermining the Palestinian claim of a continuous presence on the country’s soil? The reason is that nation-states in the Middle East are a modern phenomenon created by the Western superpowers. That being the case, migration from one place to another within the Arab world, prior to World War I and even after it, is considered natural and unremarkable. Beyond that, Palestine, as a sacred land, had always been a special case. It had been a melting pot for Muslims who came there from all over the world, along with immigrants of other faiths. Hanna ‘Issa Malak (1993, 13) goes even further and reminds his readers that one of Jaffa’s nicknames is Umm al-Gharib (mother of strangers), referring to its warm welcome of people from all over the world. Muslims fluent in the Hadith literature (the sayings of the Prophet) add that the Prophet Mohammad told his companions that it was specially virtuous to perform a hijra to—that is, leave one’s home and go to live in—the land of the prophets. One of his companions, ‘Abdallah ibn ‘Omar, a major figure in the Hadith tradition, heard him say: “There will be a hijra after hijra, to the place that your father Ibrahim moved to” (Ibn Hanbal 1978, 2:84). This would be in preparation for the Day of Judgment.
Hinkis’s Sentence: To Be Hanged until Dead
Immigrant or not, Maryam’s husband gave the court his testimony. In their cross-examination, Hinkis’s lawyers attempted to undermine the credibility of the prosecution’s witnesses. But there was other testimony about the involvement of a policeman, and the forensic evidence confirmed this. An ammunition clip found at the site was of the type in police use, the bullets extracted from the bodies of the dead had been shot from Hinkis’s gun, the door had been broken open with a rifle butt—and the forensic finding was that it had been the butt of Hinkis’s rifle: “The British expert Dr. Becker proved black on white that I shot from my rifle, in such a clear way that Dr. Eliash and my other lawyers had no recourse. My position began to look very serious. I lost all hope. . . . The judgment was eighteen pages long, and concluded: the High Court for Serious Crimes has found you guilty and sentences you to death by hanging. You will be hung on a rope until your soul leaves you. The high commissioner will determine your place of burial and may God have mercy on you” (HHA Hinkis testimony 37/17).
Davar on the Conviction
Davar published an editorial the day after the sentencing. It was titled “No Confidence”:
During the riots unforgivable crimes were committed in this country. Among the hundreds of cases in which Jewish blood was shed by Arabs, of robbery and arson against Jewish property, there were isolated cases of Arabs falling victim [to acts] that had no defensive justification. These cases must be greatly regretted, but they should not be judged with the same severity as attacks on Jews. No judgment can disregard the fact that these cases occurred after Jerusalem and Hebron, Hulda and Safed. But despite the bitter and indignant mood of those days, when it seemed that the government had forfeited the blood of the Jews and that they had no one on whom they could depend, the court had to do its job in these cases. We demand justice and will not contest it even when the arm of the law falls on a Jew. We demand only that the judges and the government take into account the unusual moments in which these incidents took place. But we will not say that such a crime is not a crime because it was committed by a Jew, even during those horrible August days.
That being the case, what is the source of the furor that overcame the Yishuv when it heard the death sentence against Hinkis? . . . [The reason is that] Hinkis’s trial was preceded by the Maklef trial [of the murderers of the Maklef family of Motza, near Jerusalem; the defendants were not convicted, see below] and before and after that by less prominent and less horrifying cases, but with the same nature—a distortion of justice against the Jews. . . . It can only be that the legal investigation has been subverted. It can only be that a hidden hand is, it would seem, directing the courts to the detriment of the Jews. (“No Confidence,” Davar, February 7, 1930)
On Revenge
When Davar emphasized its opposition to acts of revenge, it was not just speaking in platitudes. This was consistently the official position of the labor movement, and therefore of the Jewish communal institutions led by the labor movement, both preceding 1929 and during the Arab Revolt of 1936–39. The policy was known then as havlaga—self-restraint. While it was not pursued without exception, it was nevertheless the reason why a group of the policy’s opponents within the Haganah broke away and formed Etzel. The ongoing debate over when and where resorting to arms was justified was a prominent feature of the public discourse of the Yishuv, as it continues to be in Israel today.
Contempt
On closer reading, Davar’s editorial shows itself to be carefully crafted, a jigsaw puzzle of arguments and counterarguments. It categorically condemns the murders, declares support for the courts, and proclaims the principle of equality before the law. But it also states that, despite this fundamental equality, the mind-set of the Jewish murderers should be understood. There is also a claim that Hinkis’s conviction resulted from biases in the investigation of his case. The newspaper clearly states that revenge is unacceptable, yet it supports Hinkis. The sum total is a sort of interweaving of the dialectics of socialist Zionism with the tradition of Talmudic disputation.
The British charged Davar with contempt of court. On the defendant’s bench sat Zalman Rubashov, the newspaper’s deputy editor who later, after changing his last name to Shazar, served as Israel’s third president. The attorney representing the newspaper was Moshe Smoira, who nineteen years later would be appointed Israel’s first chief justice. In February 1930 he made every effort to explain the editorial’s logic to the British judges. The paper did not accept Hinkis’s conviction, he said, not because it suspected that the judges had been partial, but because the police investigation had been biased. So the newspaper had criticized the police, not the judges. He also argued, and demonstrated, that British courts no longer handed down indictments for contempt of court.
The court did not accept Smoira’s arguments and responded at length to the last claim. While it was true that England itself no longer tried people for contempt, the court, quoting a special commission on the court system in the West Indies, reached the conclusion that “in small colonies in which the population was composed largely of colored natives, charging locals with contempt of court could be useful and necessary.” Davar’s February 28 issue quoted from the judgment on its front page, making no effort to conceal that it saw this as an insult to the Yishuv. How could the Jewish community in Palestine be compared to colored peoples in the colonies? What about the common interests and values shared by Great Britain and the Zionist movement? The newspaper’s chagrin was mollified by the reaction of the public, which donated money to cover the fine of eighty Palestinian pounds (roughly equivalent to the yearly salary of a clerk in the British administration in Palestine at the time), that the court had imposed on the newspaper.
Hinkis’s Appeal
The day following his conviction, Hinkis was taken to Jerusalem and put in the central prison there: “When I arrived at the prison they removed the light chains and an Arab blacksmith restrained me with chains that were twice as heavy, on my hands and on my legs. They dressed me in a red uniform and a black hat—marking those sentenced to death [and gave me the number] 4171; then, after several days, they placed me in isolation. I spent 40 days in a cell measuring 1 by 1.8 meters. In the meantime my lawyers submitted my appeal to the High Court of Appeals” (HHA testimony 172/22).
The major claim of the defense had been that the charge of murder required the prosecutor to prove prior intent, which had not been accomplished. Hinkis had been frenzied, the defense argued, because just a short time previously he had encountered Jews who had been attacked, and one of them, Goldberg, had died in his arms. Hinkis had thus not set out in advance to commit a murder. The appeals court accepted this claim and commuted the charge to unpremeditated murder and the death sentence to fifteen years’ imprisonment (Rotenberg 1935: 467). Davar reported that two of the three judges had commented in their opinions that “it is unfortunate that in Palestine the law does not permit imposition of a death sentence against a man who murders five people even if he did not do so with prior intent” (March 20, 1930).
The Appeal: A View from the Inside
What led the judges to overturn the lower court’s judgment and find that the murder was not premeditated? Here is a firsthand account of what happened behind the scenes:
Hinkis, who did what he did in reaction to Arab slaughters of Jews, was found to have been, by almost incontrovertible proofs, in a difficult condition, and the possibility of a severe judgment hung over his head. The Section [Haganah] commenced efforts to get him released, and when these were ineffective they began to plan his escape from jail. One of these attempts, which could almost certainly have succeeded, was planned for when Hinkis was taken to participate in a lineup in Abu Kabir. It was arranged with the policemen charged with guarding the site that they would make the escape easier for him and they agreed. But Hinkis did not flee. Afterward the policemen said that he refused to flee because it might be interpreted on the one hand as an admission [of guilt] and on the other as cowardice. . . .
I went to Jerusalem and, with the help of a bottle of whiskey, I was able to visit him in jail. He was dressed in a red uniform, the uniform of those sentenced to death, bound in chains and in a low mood. I tried to encourage him and promised him that we would not abandon him and would make every effort to change the verdict. Using some connections, we managed to visit him every Saturday. At the same time we saw that the appeal was prepared.
The appeal took place behind closed doors and I managed to be present at the hearing as the aide of the late defense attorney [Mordechai] Eliash. By bribing the general prosecutor, the lawyer managed to get the death sentence voided. During the appeal hearing the prosecutor was asked by Eliash whether he really believed that Hinkis had committed premeditated murder, and the prosecutor replied, as had been agreed on in advance, that he did not think so. This point determined the sentence, which was commuted from death to fifteen years in prison. (“The Hinkis Affair,” in Yehuda Blumrosen testimony, HHA, testimony 7/39)
Oral History
Blumrosen was present at the hearing, but his account was not recorded until twenty-five years afterward. Such evidence has well-known pluses and minuses. One obvious plus is that it contains information that cannot be found in contemporary documents, because many of the actions taken by Jewish underground forces were not put into writing. One of the minuses is that time can alter memory. Subsequent events on occasion retroactively revise a witness’s understanding of the events he saw and heard. Furthermore, witnesses might have a tendency to flatter certain people, aggrandize themselves, and underrate the part played by others. These issues are often raised in discussions of oral history and the reliability of such sources. Nevertheless, in many cases there is no substitute for such testimonies.
In our case, Blumrosen told the staff member of the Haganah History Archives who interviewed him not only about the event he had witnessed but also about his attitude toward it. His basic position was one of support for Hinkis, but not necessarily for his actions. That support was a product of his assumption that Hinkis’s killing of the ‘Awn family was a response to the killing of Jews in Hebron and Jaffa. This was also the position taken by Yishuv institutions, which sought to help Hinkis; planned his escape; and in the end provided him with legal representation, both in the lower court and in the appeals court.
Behind Closed Doors, Continued
The appeal was heard, in part, behind closed doors. At the time it was understood that sometimes a courtroom’s doors were shut not to prevent the revelation of state secrets, but to give the defendant a chance to bribe the judge or prosecutor. There was no difference between Arab and Jewish conduct in this regard, as can be seen in a book written by Bahjat Abu Gharbiyya, a participant in the Arab Revolt of 1936–39 and a commander of the Holy Jihad militia in Palestine in 1948. In this important memoir, he relates how Arab rebels were aided by the British practice of accepting bribes (Abu Gharbiyya 1993, 117). At the same time, all parties vilified the officials of the previous regime, the Ottomans, for doing the same.
In Hinkis’s case, an illicit agreement was reached with the prosecutor that he would retract his charge of premeditated murder. The prosecutor kept his word. Instead of hanging, Hinkis was given a long prison sentence.
Scion of an Indigent Nation from Poland
The support offered to Hinkis was not limited to under-the-table contacts with the prosecutor. Emmanuel Harusi, a poet who had come to Palestine during the Third Aliyah, wrote a paean to Hinkis immediately after his death sentence was handed down. Myriad copies of the poem, printed on the back of a double postcard, were disseminated. On one side was Hinkis’s picture; the poem was on the other side. The British police forbade its distribution and confiscated it from kiosks (Davar, August 29, 1930). The poem describes Hinkis conducting an internal dialogue with his mother, first speaking of the persecution of the Jews in Poland, which he had left for Palestine, and then addressing the riots and his arrest. Here are the final verses, with the mother’s voice in italics:
Bullets flew like hail
Like bees circled on all sides
But my Jewish mother’s voice
Crooned in each and every shot.
What is this fear I see
Why do you so bitterly cry
You were born a Jew
Hold your head high
My feet now smashed by stone
In my prison cell
I sit in bonds and chains
With killers and common thieves.
To my mother I wrote
Mother, I am weary
Long ago despaired
Of ever being free.
In my red shirt
I fall into an abyss
But to my dungeon mother sent
A message in these words:
What is this fear I see
Why do you so bitterly cry?
You were born a Jew
Hold your head high.
Harusi was a poet with his feet on the ground. He took part in the defense of Tel Aviv during the riots, while his wife was near the end of her pregnancy. The news of the arrival of his firstborn son came to him while he was manning his position. That came with another report: their friend, Police Sergeant Nahum Shalom Yudelevitz—nicknamed Nurka or Nuri, a gifted musician and outstanding soccer player—had been killed in Jerusalem’s Beit HaKerem neighborhood. Emmanuel and his wife decided to name their new son after their friend, modifying Nahum’s nickname, Nurka, into the Hebrew name Avner—from Av, being the name of the Hebrew month of both the riots and the baby’s birth, and “ner,” from Nurka. So Avner related when he was eighty years old (Harusi 2009).
Another Harusi Poem from 1929
The poem about Hinkis has sunk into oblivion, perhaps because of the commutation of his sentence. But Harusi wrote another poem about the riots that has been sung by generations of Hebrew-speaking children:
Sleep, child, sleep at peace
Do not weep and cry.
Next to you your mother sits
Safeguarding you from evil. . . .
In Tel Yosef a granary burns,
From Beit Alfa billows smoke
But cry no more my little son,
Slumber, lie and sleep.
Tonight, tonight the night’s fire
Consuming straw and hay
Never, no, must you despair
We tomorrow begin anew. (Lampel 1954)
The familiar melody came from a song sung by Chabad Hasidim, adapted by Shalom Haritonov. The song contrasts fire and destruction with construction, working the land, and human warmth. The enemy who has set fire to the granary at Tel Yosef and at Beit Alfa is not named, and it sounds as if the struggle is not against him but rather an inner battle against despair. Why does the enemy not appear explicitly? There could be two reasons: either to avoid teaching children to hate or as a way of utterly ignoring the Arabs, to the point of not seeing them. Both might well be true.
“From Beit Alfa Billows Smoke”—
and from the Tents of Ghazawiyya, Too
A few words on what happened at Beit Alfa. The kibbutz, located on the boundary between the Jezreel and Beit She’an Valleys, at the foot of Mount Gilboa, was attacked five times during the disturbances. Hundreds of Bedouin descended on it, shot at it from the mountain, and set its fields afire. Three of these attacks involved shooting from a distance, but twice the raiders tried to break into the kibbutz and assault its inhabitants. A report that reached the Haganah situation room in Jerusalem at 5:45 a.m. on August 26 stated: “Beit Alfa’s situation is serious. The children were evacuated yesterday and today the people of Beit Alfa are surrounded and they have no weapons” (ISA, P69/776). With the aid of British forces (which included a contingent from Transjordan) and two aircraft, the kibbutz defenders managed to repel the invaders. No Jews were killed, but the Bedouin caused serious damage to kibbutz property—the granary was set on fire and 160,000 kilograms of silage went up in smoke, as did 6,000 kilograms of straw.
Following one of the volleys of gunfire, a British patrol car set out to the east to locate the source of the shooting but encountered no armed men. On the way back to the kibbutz the soldiers heard an explosion. They jumped from their vehicle, took cover, and began to shoot in the direction of a group of Bedouin they thought had attacked them. The Bedouin did not return fire. When the situation had calmed, the soldiers discovered that the explosion they heard had been from one of their tires blowing out, and that the Bedouin were local shepherds. A Bedouin boy, about seven years old, was killed in the incident. An elderly man was wounded, and about ten domestic animals were hit (“Report of the Commander of the Beisan Police,” August 1929, ISA P987/16). The Bedouin, it emerged, were members of the Ghazawiyya tribe, one of the largest of the Beit She’an Valley, which owned land on both sides of the Jordan River. Beyond the human tragedy, the incident was a horrible error. The tribe, and in particular its emir (tribal chief), Mohammad Zeinati, had maintained close ties with the Jewish settlers in the region. A decade earlier he had warmly received Lord Balfour and Chaim Weizmann, and the Zeinatis had not hesitated to sell land to Zionist institutions. Still, the little boy’s death did not alter the tribe’s political stance. The Bedouin understood that the killing had been an error, and the incident did not prevent them from accepting a “voluntary transfer” proposal from Keren Kayemet LeYisrael. In exchange for land purchased for them in Transjordan and a grant of citizenship by Transjordan’s ruler, Emir ‘Abdallah, they agreed to sell the Zionists their land on the west side of the Jordan and move to the east side of the river. This is a rare example of an Arab population consenting to move out of Mandatory Palestine. The move took place in stages, ending in the mid-1940s.
Zeinati, who had promoted the plan, was shot dead in Haifa in December 1946 by emissaries of the National Fund, the Palestinian institution responsible for preserving Palestinian lands and preventing their sale to the Jews. It viewed Zeinati as a traitor (H. Cohen 2008). But that took place some seventeen years after 1929.
From Poland to Jaffa
Harusi did not lament the Ghazawiyya dead, nor the members of the ‘Awn family murdered in Jaffa by the hero of his poem. Each nation mourns its own dead, not those of their enemies. The poet focused on the painful past that Hinkis had brought with him, “from the distant exile where he had known troubles and sorrow.” This recalls Brenner, who, walking through Jaffa, felt as if he were rubbing shoulders with Ukrainian ruffians. Tzvi Nadav—who also arrived in Palestine during the Second Aliyah, helped found the self-defense force HaShomer, and served as a Haganah commander in Jerusalem during the 1920 disturbances—also made the connection between European pogroms and riots in Palestine. In 1920 he volunteered to make his way into the Old City of Jerusalem along with Nehemia Rabin (Yitzhak Rabin’s father) to help evacuate endangered Jewish families. Describing the scene on David Street, leading from the Jaffa Gate toward the Temple Mount, Nadav wrote: “We saw Jewish feathers [from mattresses and pillows] flying, the feathers that are such a clichéd symbol of Jewish existence, blown to and fro by every breeze. . . . We saw them [the Arabs] shattering burgled stores, an experience I know well from the Diaspora. . . . I thought to myself that the despicable British were acting on the model of Kishinev [where the Russian authorities stood by and allowed or even encouraged a pogrom]. Different insignia but the same method.” In 1929 Nadav was a senior Haganah commander in Haifa. On guard duty, his thoughts wandered to his father’s house in Russia and the pogrom that had ravaged their street, and to a desire for revenge:
I was close to sick for several days and dreamed of revenge in the form of remorse. Their conscience awakening. “They” sense what they have done. Remorse gnaws at them. “They” are imbued with a recognition that they did evil, insulted, humiliated a human soul. They come to me in alarm, plead for forgiveness for the awful crime of humiliating and hurting a human soul. My heart fills with compassion and love. I fill with compassion and love. I want to love everyone. I love them. I comfort them. . . .
Yes, revenge in the form of remorse. It seems to me that that would be the most soothing revenge I could ask for. Does a Bedouin woman not embrace her son’s murderer [in a sulha, or reconciliation ceremony] as he kneels before her in submission, imploring and contrite, and accepts him as if he replaces her murdered son, forgives him? Does my heart really want blood? Images of spilt blood are before my eyes. People killed. The face of Yehezkel [Nisanov, a founder of HaShomer who was killed at Nadav’s side at Merhavia in 1911] with a piece of brain spilling out over his forehead, and refusal wells up in my heart. No. I under no circumstances want blood. I recall a saying the Arabs use when they make peace: “Wa-shu al-atgal min al-tagil”—“What is heavier than heavy” [said in a Bedouin accent]. That’s right, nothing weighs down a man’s heart more than spilling blood. (Nadav’s testimonies, HHA, testimony 58/48; testimony 35/13)
There it is. The experience of pogroms and acquaintance with the Arabs can also lead in a different direction. Nadav, a founder of a Hebrew fighting force, dreamed of forgiveness and absolution even when he longed for revenge. His model was the Bedouin sulha ceremony. In this sense Nadav was different than Brenner, who had no familiarity with Palestine’s Arabs—for him, they were devoid of humanity. Nadav preferred a lesson his father had drilled into him over and over again: “Know this, my son. All human beings have a conscience. You just have to know how to awaken it. All people are born good.” Nadav did not view the Arabs only as assailants, but the common wisdom in the Yishuv, certainly after 1929, was that violence and lawlessness were inborn Arab traits. An example follows.
Riot Culture
On the same day when Hinkis won his appeal, news came of the death of Arthur Balfour, who had drafted the famous declaration promising British assistance to the Jews in their establishment of a national home in Palestine, while disregarding the national (as opposed to the religious and individual) rights of the Arab inhabitants. The Jewish community recalled him with favor. The Arabs did not. “There are Arabs who have had no compunctions about publicly displaying their joy at this sorrowful event,” Davar reported. “In the early evening two automobiles drove through Jerusalem bearing fifteen Arabs playing [the Zionist anthem] Hatikva and chortling wildly” (“Riot Culture,” March 20, 1930).
Urfali, Same Cell, Same Fate
When his appeal was successful, Hinkis breathed a sigh of relief. He would not die. But he could not fully rejoice—he realized that he had many long years in prison ahead of him. Nonetheless, he was in a much better position than Yosef Urfali, another Jew who had been brought to trial for murdering Arabs on the Tel Aviv–Jaffa border in 1929.
The events in Urfali’s neighborhood were recounted in detail by Riggs, the British police officer. Riggs related that when the riots started, on Sunday, August 25, at 10:30 a.m., the Muslim preacher Tubasi set out of the Hasan Beq Mosque for Manshiyya, a Jaffa neighborhood bordering on Tel Aviv, together with a large number of Arabs. Plainclothes detectives followed Tubasi. Riggs, as the officer in charge, proceeded to the border between Manshiyya and the Jewish city and set up a machine gun at the corner of HaCarmel Street, with the barrel pointing in the direction of Jaffa. Deputy Inspector Rashid ‘Abd al-Hadi and six policemen were ordered by Riggs to patrol the area and report all suspicious movements to him. At 12:15, he testified, he heard shouts coming from the Cardboard neighborhood, where both Jews and Arabs lived. Riggs galloped there on horseback, calling to soldiers and policemen to follow him with the machine gun.
Urfali lived in the Cardboard neighborhood. When the riot ended, the bodies of two Arabs lay in the street—those of Mahmoud Tartir and ‘Arafat Ramlawi. Witnesses fingered Urfali as their killer.
Urfali denied any connection to the deaths and maintained his denial under police interrogation and in his testimony in court. He suggested that Riggs and his men might have killed the two Arabs. But Urfali offered contradictory accounts of his involvement in the event. In his first account, he said that he had left his home on a quick errand to buy bread, then came back and hid there from the attackers. He heard of the deaths of Ramlawi and Tartir, he declared, only later from Arab friends who came to visit him. But then he changed his story and said that after running his errand he went not to his own home, but to that of his brother, along with another man, Ibrahim Ahmad. Urfali had not signed the first deposition he had given to the police; he signed the second with a fingerprint—Davar reported that he did not know how to read or write. In court Urfali was asked why his neighbors would have testified that they saw him shooting. He explained that they had conspired to implicate him in the crime (the file from the investigation can be found at CZAS25/4434 and ISA P986/23).
The court did not accept his account and convicted Urfali of killing Tartir and Ramlawi. According to the court, Urfali shot Tartir without premeditation but during the heat of the confrontation, and he was thus liable for imprisonment rather than the death penalty. But, the court further ruled, Urfali had fired his gun twice more after the mob dispersed, aiming at Ramlawi, a man who had come to evacuate the wounded Tartir. That, the court found, had been murder with criminal intent—Urfali had had sufficient time to consider his actions, and yet he shot a man who presented no danger to his life.
Two witnesses tipped the scales against him. Tartir’s mother testified that her wounded son ran toward her and collapsed, saying “Yusef Urfali. From the balcony.” Hajj Hussein Hijazi testified he was in the street at the time and that after Tartir was wounded, he joined Ramlawi in trying to rescue him, at which time Urfali shot at them from his balcony. The witnesses contradicted one other in some minor details, but the court nevertheless sentenced Urfali to death. The sentence was handed down on November 20, 1929. Urfali immediately appealed. Eliash, who headed the defense team for Hinkis and the other Jews accused of crimes in the riots, represented Urfali as well.
Neighbors Telling Tales
The claim of neighbors trumping up charges came up in a similar context in the case of another Jew who lived on the Tel Aviv–Jaffa border, Yitzhak Auadis. He, too, was accused of shooting from his home, in his case in the Neveh Shalom neighborhood, at passing Arabs on the street. According to his indictment, however, he only wounded three of them, and hence he was not liable for the death penalty. Nelly Moshenson, coeditor (along with Moshe Shertok, later Sharett) of Davar’s English edition, wrote at length on this trial in 1929:
It so happened that there was a man, Yitzhak Auadis was his name, a fishmonger by profession, who lived in Jaffa. . . . He is of typical Oriental appearance, tall, heavy, with impressive rolls of flesh, bald, with a nearly blond moustache. Auadis dressed in what is called a kumbaz [an ankle-length tunic] and tarboosh. A widower who was not young, he lived with his grown children. One of his daughters kept house for him. One of his sons, who was named for his Arab godfather, had attended the French Catholic College des Frères school in Jaffa. Arabic was the language of the house, and it was Arabic Auadis used to fill in the gaps in his weak Hebrew.
There is thus reason to ask what about him bothered his Arab neighbors. They could in no shape or form, directly or not, hold him responsible for the Balfour Declaration. The man, like many of his kind, was an integral part of that block of humanity that constitutes the multifarious population of an Oriental city like Jaffa. Muslim Arabs, Christian Arabs, Jews, Greeks, Armenians, Italians, Egyptians, even Russians. . . . Yitzhak Auadis, fishmonger, was charged with incessantly firing a pistol from the window of his home in Jaffa’s Neveh Shalom neighborhood on the day of the riots of August 25, and of wounding several people in the legs. When he was brought before Judge Plunkett he claimed that he was innocent. That that morning he had shut up his shop and taken his family to his sister’s house in a distant neighborhood in Tel Aviv.
The trial lasted three days, because the prosecutor called many witnesses. They all had one thing in common. They could not adhere to their original stories under the judge’s questioning. To their embarrassment, they deviated each time the defense attorney began to fire questions at them. They saw a hand holding a pistol in the window. They did not see it. They heard a shot. They heard three shots. There was a crowd. There were only a few loiterers. They were unanimous in declaring that none of them knew any of the others, that they did not even know there had been riots that morning, and that they had refrained from telling the doctor who treated their wounds and their families who had shot them, keeping this fact to tell the investigating magistrate. (“Auadis Trial,” reprinted in Davar, July 3, 1936)
The investigating magistrate took note of the contradictions of the witnesses, both within the accounts given by each one, and between their several accounts, and he freed the suspect. Auadis was luckier than Urfali.
The Common Ground
Both men were what are today termed Mizrahim—Jews from the Islamic world. Both of them lived in mixed Jewish-Arab neighborhoods. Both spoke Arabic and had frequent conversations with their Arab neighbors. For Nelly Moshenson, Auadis’s Mizrahi ethnicity was his salient trait. She could not understand why he had been attacked, she wrote, given that he had no connection to the Balfour Declaration—that is, to Zionism.
Are the Mizrahim Detached from Zionism?
That’s what Moshenson thought. More than Auadis was a Zionist, she maintained, he was “an integral part of that block of humanity that constitutes the multifarious population of an Oriental city like Jaffa.” Moshenson defined Zionism (not necessarily consciously) as a European movement with the goal of establishing in Palestine a Jewish national home of European character. From her point of view, a Zionist was a person who shared the Zionist and European conception of Jewish nationalism (in one of the many variants existing within Ashkenazi Zionism), identified with its goals, belonged to its institutions, and took part in the central Zionist activities of settling on the land and the “conquest of labor.” The last point was one of the central doctrines of the socialist Second Aliyah—the demand that Jewish settlements and businesses in Palestine not employ Arabs if there were Jews seeking the same jobs. European Jewry was the Zionist movement’s primary target audience. By the same token, some Jews from the Middle East and North Africa viewed Zionism as a foreign, European movement and for that reason did not join it.
This does not mean that these Jews felt no attachment to Zion—quite the opposite was true. Jews from the Islamic world settled throughout the Land of Israel, including Jaffa. Primarily, they were drawn to the Holy Land for a combination of religious, economic, and personal reasons prior to the emergence of political Zionism and wanted to live in it as Jews. The result was a major demographic shift in the port city. The Maghrebis constituted the great majority of the first Jewish community in Jaffa. They bought land from Arabs and built Jewish neighborhoods that constituted the first glimmerings of Tel Aviv. The first members and leaders of the Maghrebi community in Jaffa included Avraham Shlush, who came from Algeria in 1838 with his family and 150 followers; Rabbi Yitzhak Asouline and his family, who came in 1852; Hakham (Rabbi) Aharon Moyal, who led 180 followers to Palestine and settled in Jaffa in 1854; Rabbi Yitzhak Elbaz, who arrived in 1865; Rabbi Moshe Elkayam, who came with the students at his yeshiva in 1856; and Rabbi Ya’akov Shimol. All these men faithfully looked after the needs of Jaffa’s Jews for years and arrived long before what is now called the First Aliyah. According to Mordechai Elkayam (1990), some of them were inspired by proto-Zionist figures such as Rabbi Yehuda Bibas, Rabbi Tzvi Kalisher, and Rabbi Yehuda Alkalai.
In his book, Elkayam seems eager to prove the Zionism of the Jews who came from the Maghreb—just as Yitzhak Betzalel was in his book on the Sephardim in Palestine at the end of the Ottoman period, Noladtem Tzionim (You were born Zionists; 2007)—and to serve as an antithesis to Moshenson and her ilk. (The terms “Mizrahi” and “Sephardi” are used frequently synonymously to refer to all Jews from the Muslim world, including those from the Maghreb. But originally “Sephardi” referred to the descendants of the Jews who were expelled from Spain in the fifteenth century and who settled in the Middle East. The term “Mizrahi” was not used during the Mandate period.) Elkayam points to the deep connection that the Jews of the Islamic world felt to the Land of Israel but does not disregard the tension these Arab Jews—that is, Arabic-speaking, culturally Arab Jews—felt in following the Zionist immigration from Eastern Europe, and he tells how they dealt with it.
Tension
Elkayam describes the three-way encounter in Jaffa between Arabs, local Jews, and Zionist pioneers. He does not say what year this description applies to, but apparently it was sometime during the Second Aliyah, at the end of the Ottoman period:
The immigrants from the Orient dressed the same [as their Muslim neighbors]. They spoke the same language, the older people with a Moroccan accent and the young people with a Jaffa accent. The women went out on the street modestly dressed, just like the Arab women. They wore scarves over their faces and black dresses, so that you could not tell a Jewish woman from an Arab one. Like the Arab women, the Jewish women did not go out to shop in the markets and certainly did not walk the streets. The men did the shopping and provided all the home’s needs. In this way the two communities kept the peace. Relations between neighbors were thus relations of mutual respect. An Arab who saw a lout hassling a Jewish woman would reprimand and sometimes even strike him.
There were exceptions to this harmony, but it was violated by the immigrants from Russia. What stood out was the sight of their women and girls walking the streets with their faces bare, dressed immodestly in a way that everyone could see. Their appearance provoked, angered, and roused the passions of the Arabs. Jaffa’s Jews were also shocked. Most of them were very pious and opposed women publicly exposing parts of their bodies. The flouting of moral customs that had been accepted for generations was jarring for both Arabs and Jews.
Young Jews who saw the “enthusiasm” of Arab youths and their groping of Jewish women and girls took up their cause and admonished the Arabs. They asked their wives to advise the Russian women to behave more modestly so as not to anger the Arabs. But talk generally did not work. On more than one occasion fights broke out between Jewish and Arab youths over the honor of Jewish women. Sometimes the police even had to intervene.
Relations between the Arabs and the “Moscobim” [the Zionist pioneers; literally, Muscovites] heated up. Every European Jew was immediately assumed to be a Moscobi. Incitement against Europeans as a whole began, on the grounds that they intended to take control of the country and dispossess the Arabs. This charge added fuel to the fire. The Jews of Jaffa, the Sephardim, would deny these accusations as baseless, explaining the settlement movement as seeking only to solve housing problems. (1990, 175–77)
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. The Jews of the established community had to try to mediate, explaining to their Arab neighbors that the immigrants from Russia had come to Palestine simply because they sought a solution to their “housing problem.” It is an interesting claim. Did the Jews of Jaffa actually believe it? Not clear. Did the Arabs believe it? Certainly not. The 1929 riots are proof of that.
The stress the Arab Jews felt was multidimensional. There was tension between their familiarity with their Arab neighbors and their sense of Jewish solidarity; between their knowledge that European Zionism was detrimental to the trust between Jews and Arabs and their knowledge that that trust had its limits; between their sense of relative equality with the Arabs during the final years of Ottoman rule and the realization that the Jews of Europe did not see the Jews of the Islamic world as equal partners in their enterprise.
Partnership and Its Discontents
In fact, relations between Jaffa’s Jews and the Eastern European Zionists were at first based on mutual understanding. When it first began operating in Palestine, Hovevei Zion (a movement that emerged among Jews in Russia and Romania in 1873 to further Jewish immigration to and agricultural settlement in Palestine, prior to Herzl’s establishment of the Zionist movement) invited a member of Jaffa’s Jewish Maghrebi community, Aharon Amoyal, to head its Palestinian office. During the second half of the 1880s, Amoyal labored, with the help of the European organization, to settle North African Jewish families in Nablus, Lydda (today’s Lod), and Gaza. The community in Gaza, which became the largest of the three, remained there until 1929. But the honeymoon was a short one. 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. Prior to World War I, prominent Sephardi activists rejected the conquest of labor. The goal was to provide livelihoods to Jews and to create a Jewish working class. The Sephardim argued that doing so would harm Jewish-Arab relations and demanded that the Yishuv open channels of communication with the Arabs. They were not taken seriously by the Zionist leadership (Jacobson 2003). Yosef Eliahu Shlush, a leader of the Jewish community in Jaffa, protested that the newcomers did not think that the Maghrebis were sufficiently Zionist. He was especially irritated because the Eastern European Zionists suspected him and his fellows of making common cause with the Arabs against Zionism. In articles and in his memoir, Parshat Hayai (My life story, 1931), Shlush lashed out at the way the pioneers were taking over the Yishuv; their failure to comprehend the fabric of life in Palestine; and their marginalization of the established Jewish population, whose standing and priority they dismissed.
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).
The writings of the Arab Jews of this period display a sense of inferiority vis-à-vis the recently arrived Zionists, who seemed so organized and dynamic—out to change the world, educated, and filled with a will to power. A unique encounter between the two groups took place at Havat Ruhama, a settlement in the northern Negev Desert, not far from Gaza. Nisim Elkayam, the father of Mordechai, was one of the founders of this settlement, and Maghrebi Jews who had settled in Gaza at Amoyal’s initiative worked there alongside Second Aliyah pioneer laborers. Mordechai Elkayam’s description helps explain the relations between the two groups:
[The pioneers] were involved in constant political debate. This one represented one party and the other one represented another party. They all battled to get the votes of the workers. . . . Each party tried to instill in the [Jewish] Gazans its partisan idea and to get their votes.
The Gazans profited from all the uproar. They were divided into small groups and each group received classes in Zionist history from a counselor from a different party. In this manner a school of small groups arose, in which classes were given and talks and lectures held in small classes as in the school in Gaza, and all this in the revolutionary atmosphere of the commune at Ruhama, in which the Gazans took part. It propelled the Gazans 200 years into the future. Their dormant intellects were awakened; they totally changed, to the point that they could no longer live with their fellows, nor with their families in Gaza, who could not recognize them and who did not understand the change that had come over them. (1994, 208)
This passage gives us a sense of the fundamental assumptions of the integrationists: that adopting the European Zionist discourse constituted progress and that, as they saw it, this was not a blending of cultures but rather a matter of abandoning one culture and replacing it with another. The almost inevitable result was the alienation of the Gaza Jewish workers from their families and other members of the community from which they came. A book by another member of the established Jewish population of Jaffa, Aharon Shlush, has a title that sums up the process he describes—MiGalabiya leKova’ Tembel (From jellabiya to pioneer cap; 1991)—as an abandonment of Eastern culture and adoption of Zionist culture. A corollary was choosing sides in the Zionist-Arab conflict, a conflict that up to that point had not been theirs, or at least not in the same way as the pioneers saw it.
Integrating and Mediating
The two writers, Elkayam and Shlush, had something in common: both were from leading families in Jaffa’s Maghrebi Jewish community. But while Shlush’s father moved to Tel Aviv and married a “Moscobi” woman, Elkayam’s father moved to Gaza to lead the Maghrebi community there. Their lives, however, ran in parallel. Aharon Shlush, born in 1921, joined the Haganah as a teenager and continued to serve in the security forces after Israel’s establishment, specifically in the new country’s police force. His positions included head of the Minorities Division in the Gaza Strip when that territory was taken by Israel in the Sinai Campaign of 1956, head of the Special Missions Department in the National Police Headquarters, commander of the Jerusalem District, commander of the Southern District, and chief of the Investigations Division. Mordecai Elkayam served as a commander in the Haganah and Israeli Defense Forces (IDF); he was deputy military governor of the Gaza Strip in 1956 and governor of Jericho in 1976. Both were descendants of Arab Jewish families who chose to use their talents, connections, and knowledge to buttress the Zionist enterprise. In their later years, after integrating into that society, they wrote books recounting the history of their families and community.
And the Other Mizrahim?
Many other Mizrahi Jews did not integrate. They remained on the margins of Yishuv society. The poor neighborhoods of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, and other cities and towns were peopled by Mizrahi families that felt increasingly alienated from the Zionist establishment (but not necessarily from a sense of Jewish solidarity versus the Arabs). This alienation, which lasted through the Mandate period, derived both from the cultural disparity between them and the Ashkenazi mainstream and from the disdain with which they were treated. A year after Israel declared its independence, David Ben-Gurion summed up the social milieu in the IDF during the 1948 war:
It was the first time that all the popular strata came together, and there was rabble among them. We are not aware of the extent to which the ruling echelon of the Yishuv lacks connection and knowledge of how the people live, and this applies to all levels. There is a “common people,” people living in the [poor] neighborhoods, and we do not know them, we are ignorant of them and they are ignorant of us and we live in the upper atmosphere. Now, with the establishment of the army, we encountered each other. In these strata there are filth, illiteracy, and entirely different ways of thinking about everything (meeting of May 6, 1949, ISA, Meetings of the First Government, 5:2).
This was the state of affairs when the country was founded, even before the mass immigration that followed. Some four decades earlier, Yosef Brenner had had his protagonist Diasporin in MiKan umiKan (From here and there) argue against casting off Yiddish and making Hebrew the modern spoken and written Jewish language: “And beyond that . . . what good will one language do . . . one language for whom? Me and the Sephardim? What do I have to do with the Sephardim? Are we really the same nation as them? Say what you want—as far as I’m concerned, it’s already a different nation” (1985, 2:1420).
A Different Nation?
There may have been a few Jews who felt that way, but on the political level the Zionist movement claimed to represent all the Jews in Palestine, and this is how the British viewed it (although the non-Zionist Haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, community was somewhat exceptional in this regard). Furthermore, Zionist emissaries were sent to all Jewish communities in the Middle East and slowly but meticulously worked to change the political identities and loyalties of the Jews of the Islamic lands (see, for example, Shenhav 2006). While the disaffection between the Yishuv’s ethnic groups and classes did not vanish, the boundaries between the Jews and Arabs grew ever more salient as national identity grew stronger. The 1929 riots played a decisive role in this process of the Yishuv’s consolidation around the Zionist movement.
1929 and Jewish Unity
No other factor was more influential in bringing the established Jewish communities in Palestine and the new Zionist community together under a single political roof than the riots of 1929. The Arab attacks forced the Middle Eastern and North African Jews living in Palestine, including those who had previously had reservations about the Jewish national movement, to cast their lot in with the Zionists, to ask for and accept their protection. To put it bluntly, in 1929 the Arabs created the Yishuv. This is true to a certain extent regarding the pre-Zionist Ashkenazi religious community in Palestine, often called the Old Yishuv, but much more so regarding the Jews of Middle Eastern origin who had lived within Arab society. Prior to 1929, not many Jews living in Arab countries were all that eager to cast off Arab culture and sever ties with their Arab neighbors. Instead, they looked for ways to integrate into the new environment that emerged in the Middle East following World War I. The same was true of some of the Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews in the Holy Land. In 1929 these Jews received a resounding message from their Arab neighbors: if you do not take sides against Zionism, you are its allies. If you identify on the national level with the European Jews, you have no place in Arab society. Even if Palestinian Arab spokesmen continued to stress that they distinguished between Jews and Zionists, and even if Arab society at some levels continued to differentiate between Mizrahim (and the Ashkenazim of the Old Yishuv) and the Zionist immigrants from Europe, for both Arabs and Jews the similarities among the Jews, of whatever community and origin, increasingly overshadowed their differences. This process had begun before 1929, but the riots were a turning point. During them the Zionist movement became the defender of all Jewish communities in Palestine and thus established its preeminence among these groups.
Acre as an Example
The Jewish community in Acre flourished during the 1920s, expanding from a few dozen to some 850 members. The veteran members of the community consisted of a small group of families that had come from the Islamic world, most of them from North Africa. They were joined in the early 1920s by two groups of Zionist pioneer immigrants from Eastern Europe. One group had organized as a commune to mine sand, while the other founded a fishing cooperative called HaKovesh (the conqueror). A group of Jewish fisherman from Salonika also settled in Acre (Sarugo 2010). And in 1923 Yehiel Weizmann founded the Nur match factory there, in which a small number of Jews worked alongside a large number of Arabs.
Relations between Acre’s Jews and Arabs were fairly good, partly because the Islamic religious leadership was headed by Sheikh As‘ad al-Shuqayri, one of the most vociferous opponents of the virulently anti-Zionist mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Hussayni. Al-Shuqayri maintained good ties with Zionist institutions and opposed violence. He rejected the mufti’s request that he organize demonstrations in Acre to oppose the Jewish takeover of the Western Wall. On September 8, 1929, Ha’aretz reported that despite the good relations, tension had been evident in Acre following the demonstrations in Jerusalem. The Arab workers at the Nur factory told their Jewish colleagues (“who had in the past given them strike funds”) that they would slaughter them. One of the leading firebrands, according to Ha’aretz’s report, was Habib Hawa, a colorful and somewhat dubious character. His daughter, Raymonda Tawil, would gain prominence in the 1970s as an Arab journalist and feminist poet (1979). Her daughter, Suha Tawil, married Yasir Arafat, chief of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
Another Palestinian nationalist activist in Acre was Sheikh Ahmad al-Shuqayri, a son of Sheikh As‘ad al-Shuqayri and an opponent of his father’s conciliatory stance. “Every day during that time I gathered people at a café or in the city’s central square or on the street and I explained to them how serious the situation was, and I called on them to fight both imperialism and Zionism,” he wrote in his memoirs (1969, 116). The riots were one of the first events that shaped the consciousness of the young al-Shuqayri, who thirty-five years later founded the PLO, which he headed for four years.
What Does That Have to Do with the Mizrahim in Acre?
Throughout his book, al-Shuqayri stresses the difference between Zionists and Arab Jews and takes pride in his good relations with the latter. But this was largely a theoretical distinction. In practice, in 1929 the attackers treated all Jews the same. When tensions increased in the city, a reporter for Ha’aretz wrote, Zionist Jews began to be especially careful while walking in the street. The established Jews, for their part, continued to feel at home. It quickly became clear, however, that this sense of security had no basis in reality. The venerable mukhtar of the city’s Jewish community, Avraham Haim Tzuri, left home on the day of the riots just as he did every day, confident that no one would harm him, as a longtime inhabitant of the city. When he returned and entered his home he found his family under assault: “The rioters attacked his house, breaking all the items in two of its rooms. They were unable to break into the third room, where 23 people were sheltering, because Mr. Tzuri jumped from the window on the second floor into the street and shouted for help, and the police soon dispersed the rioters.” Ha’aretz stressed what seemed to it an important point:
It should be noted that they attacked the house of Tzuri, the mukhtar of the Jewish community, who has always had peaceful and friendly relations with the Arabs. His family speaks Arabic at home, some of his children attend Arab schools, and when the Arabs collect donations for a cultural or philanthropic project they do not forget to solicit him—yet they displayed no gratitude and his family was but a step away from death.
Also Mr. Farji, whose children attend only Arab schools and who keeps his distance from all other Jews and, being wealthy, is a respected man and member of the Acre city council, was not spared and was forced to take cover along with all the other Jews.
Tzuri and Farji represented different Mizrahi attitudes toward Zionism. Tzuri was in close contact with the pioneers and aided their absorption into the city, while Farji had nothing to do with the Zionist community. Yet the Arabs presumed that Jewish identity trumped Arab identity even for a man like Farji. They assumed that Mizrahi Jews supported the idea of a Jewish return to Zion even if these Jews did not belong to, or take part in, Zionist institutions and did not support the manner in which the Zionist movement operated. Even when they were aware of the opposition of some Mizrahi Jews, both in Palestine and elsewhere in the Islamic world, to the Zionist project of establishing Jewish sovereignty in Palestine, the Arabs nevertheless felt that, when it came time to choose between Arab and Jewish nationalism, the Mizrahi Jews in Palestine would choose the latter. That was the principal reason why these Jews, who lived for all intents and purposes as Arabs in their daily lives, were also attacked. To a certain extent, these Jews were considered even more dangerous than the European Zionists—they were a fifth column within the Arab community. Below we will see that the rioters in Safed and Hebron also made no distinction among Jews according to their ethnicity or time spent living in Palestine. The reasons for this will be examined in depth.
And the Result?
A number of things resulted from the attacks on Mizrahi Jews. They enhanced Jewish cohesion and made religious and national identity more important than cultural identity. On the institutional level, the riots prompted growing numbers of Mizrahi Jews to join Jewish militias—both the Haganah and the breakaway Haganah Bet that eventually became Etzel. Shevah Yekutieli immigrated to Palestine in 1923. In 1929 he was responsible for the Haganah’s armory in Haifa and commander of a contingent of fighters. In September 1970 he provided testimony in which he related that up until 1929 the Mizrahi Jews did not participate in Haganah activities and were closer in their lifestyle to the Arabs than to Ashkenazi Zionists:
There were no members of the Sephardi community in the Haganah. The Sephardim did not mix with the Ashkenazim. The European boys with their shorts were alien to them. They lived in hamulot [extended families or clans], with Arab culture, with Arab clothes, and with the Arabic language. They did not contribute to our funds. They always charged that we brought them trouble. Because they lived well with the Arabs. They ate the same things as the Arabs. After six in the evening you didn’t see any of them. Until six in the evening their cafés were full. We—after work, we dressed in their clothes, went to visit them, and saw how they lived.
Beginning in 1929 the Sephardim began joining the Haganah. The Arabs began to do with the Sephardim what they did with us. They [the Sephardim] had to leave Ard al-Yahud [Haifa’s old Jewish neighborhood; literally, the Jewish land] and they were provided with shelter on HaPo’el Street. We bought mats for them. They were the ones who suffered most from the Arabs. The Arabs burned down their wooden storage sheds. The young people began to connect with us. They didn’t go back to Ard al-Yahud. They lived on HaShomer Street. (HHA, testimony 103/23)
It was clear to the members of Haifa’s old Mizrahi community that the Zionists had “brought them trouble.” But, like most of the Jews in Palestine and the Arab countries, they underwent a process of Zionization. Prior to World War I and immediately after the war, they still tried to straddle the gap between their Jewish and Arab identities, and to a certain extent to fashion a bridge between the Zionists and the Palestinian Arabs. But heightening tensions between the Jewish national movement and the Arab national movement following the Balfour Declaration forced them to choose sides. Even though many of them felt alienated from the Zionist movement and its institutions, the gap between them and the Palestinian national movement, which opposed Jewish immigration, was even greater. As a result, some members of the younger Mizrahi generation were drawn into Zionist activity and adopted the pioneer ethos. But even to those who stayed on the sidelines, it was clear that their lot had been cast with the Zionists. And in 1929 Palestine’s Arabs were well aware of this. The Arab attacks on the Mizrahi communities and the Ashkenazi Old Yishuv in 1929 firmly ensconced the Arab Jews in the Zionist camp. In this regard, the attacks led to an irrevocable change in the identity of the pre-Zionist Jewish community. In other Middle Eastern countries the point of no return came later, at the time of the 1948 war, as described in the work of Moshe Behar (2007).
Each Other’s Creations
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.
Urfali: An Appeal, and Another, and Another
Urfali could know none of this in 1929. His priority was appealing the death sentence imposed on him. For a moment he seemed to have succeeded—on January 25, 1930, the appeals court accepted his attorneys’ request to procure the testimony of more witnesses and to remand the case to the trial court for an additional hearing. But the new hearing was painfully disappointing for Urfali. The Jaffa court scheduled a date for the new witnesses to testify, but most of them did not appear. The court then reaffirmed the death sentence. Urfali thus became the only Jew sentenced to death on charges stemming from the 1929 riots whose death sentence was confirmed after an appeal.
A Jew Was Sentenced to Death in 1929?
It’s a fact, if one that Israeli collective memory largely ignores. Nevertheless, we should not deduce from this that Urfali was indeed guilty, just as we should not presume that Hinkis’s acquittal, like that of many Arab murderers, meant that he and they were innocent. In any case, it is essential to bear in mind that the events in Jaffa and Abu Kabir were not representative of the 1929 riots as a whole, but exceptions: most of the Arab dead (unlike the ‘Awn family and a few others) were involved in attacks on Jews, whereas most of the Jewish dead were unarmed. There is nevertheless an advantage in presenting these events side by side—it helps us see both similarities and differences in the ways in which the Jews and Arabs experienced the events of 1929, and the diverse ways in which those events have been told of and written about up to the present day. Everyone knows that, as far as the Jews were concerned, the disturbances of 1929 were a nationwide Palestinian pogrom aimed at Jews qua Jews—and they had good reason for believing this. If that is the case, the killings committed by Jews during the disturbances, even the most morally offensive of them, clearly fall under the general rubric of self-defense. But how do the same events look to the Arabs?
Like Self-Defense, of Course
The Palestinians too viewed the 1929 riots as part of a movement of self-defense. The first paragraph of al-Dabbagh’s account, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, points to the common wisdom among Palestinians about what happened. The bloody events of 1929 erupted because of Jewish attempts to take control of the Western Wall (al-Buraq), in contravention of the binding status quo and despite the fact that the spot belonged to the waqf, the Muslim religious trust. The riots were set off, the Muslims maintain, by Jewish provocations in Jerusalem that reached their climax with a massive procession to the Wall. This claim of self-defense is consistent with Islamic logic and the Qur’an’s command:
Fight in God’s cause against those who fight you, but do not transgress: Indeed, God does not love transgressors. Kill them wherever you encounter them, and drive them out from where they drove you out, for persecution is more serious than killing. Do not fight them at the Sacred Mosque unless they fight you there. If they do fight you, kill them—this is what such disbelievers deserve. (al-Baqara 2:190–91)
These verses underline the distinction between a defensive and offensive war in Muslim law. This is not the place to discuss how Islamic thought on this issue has developed over the ages. What is important for the matter at hand is to understand that one of the principal motives for the attack on the Jews in 1929 was—in the Arabs’ perception—the desire and duty to defend Muslim holy places, given that the Jews had risen up to fight them first. The murder of an Arab family in Jaffa by a Jewish policeman and the lynchings of Arabs by Jews in Jerusalem are frequently cited in this context so as to depict the riots as Jewish aggression to which the Arabs responded in self-defense.
Whatever the case, there is no disputing that the aggression began in Jerusalem, and we will go there next in an effort to understand why the Arabs viewed the Jews as aggressors, whereas the Jews believed that they were under attack.