History – the remembrance and recording of the past – in the Muslim Arab world differs from history in the Western world. The Western world records past events and calls them history. The Muslim Arab world recalls myths, hopes, conspiracies and events and calls that history. In the Arab world history and memory merge into a psycho-cultural universe that informs and motivates and plots the future.
The events on the evening of Thursday, March 6, 2008 were part of a chain of events that began years earlier, late at night on Friday, August 2, 1929.
The eight Jewish students killed last week by an Arab terrorist in their religious school were a part of history even before they were brutally massacred. The machine gun-toting terrorist who entered Mercaz HaRav yeshiva and the people who rejoiced for his having been there were all reliving a historical memory from 1929.
They were reliving the 1929 massacre in Hebron that began at Yeshivat Hebron. They were reenacting the massacre of other Jewish students in another religious school. The location and the act chosen for this terrorist deed were a direct outgrowth of Arab/Jewish interaction and history – a history of Arabs massacring Jews. They were reconnecting the present with their past.
It was a hot Friday night in August. The students were gathered together in their yeshiva in the city of Hebron. The Sabbath had already been ushered in when the massacre began. The calls for reinforcements from the one British policeman in the area went unheeded for five hours, until it was too late. When it ended, three days later, 67 Jews were dead – butchered with axes and knives and swords. Those students still alive were evacuated by the British to Jerusalem.
That 1929 massacre became the paradigm in the Arab world for removing Jews. Massacre them. Massacre them especially while they are at study in their religious schools. Massacre them today and it will lead to the Jewish evacuation of Jerusalem just as it led to the Jewish evacuation of Hebron in 1929.
In the morning, after a night of murdering Jews, Arab leaders came to the home of a man whom they respected, a well-liked teacher at the yeshiva. They had a proposal to place before Rabbi Jacob Slonim. If the rabbi were to hand over all the Ashkenazi students (those from European backgrounds), they would end the massacre and spare the lives of the Sephardi students (those from Arab lands). Rabbi Slonim declined the offer. He was killed on the spot. The massacre continued.
Tensions between Arabs and Jews, particularly in Jerusalem around the area of the Western Wall, were high in the days leading up to the Hebron Massacre. In sermons delivered in area mosques and propaganda spread in Arabic newspapers, stories were told of Jews killing Arabs and taking advantage of Muslim holy sites.
These messages fed already widespread conspiracy theories that the Jews were engaged in “wholesale murder of the Arabs.” So the Arabs of Hebron took matters into their own hands, murdering the Jews of Hebron and forcing the survivors out of their city. Reenactments of the Hebron massacre have been carried out several times over the years, but never so successfully as this last attack at Mercaz HaRav.
Arab leaders around the world are still stoking the flames of conspiracy in order to motivate their murderers to act. That is one of the reasons one hears from them, with regular frequency, of the Holocaust Israel is allegedly perpetrating against the Palestinians.
There is no Holocaust being perpetrated by Israelis or by Jews anywhere in the world upon Arabs, and there are no Jewish land grabbers. If anything, the opposite is true. Jews are ceding land and Israel is pursuing peace. But that message will not motivate.
Hatred and fear breed evil. Untruths motivate massacres. History and conspiracy theories merge.