Title: Ghosts of a Holy War: The 1929 Massacre in Palestine that Ignited The Arab-Israeli Conflict
By: Yardena Schwartz
Union Square and Co. Publishing
Yardena Schwartz, an experienced journalist who lived in Israel for many years, has the insight to recognize that the hatred some Arabs hold for Jews and the willingness of those Arabs to rape, maim, and murder Jews and then lie about what they have done is not a new phenomenon. Although many of the Arabs who now call themselves “Palestinians” and their apologists assert that their brutality is a response to the supposed oppression of the State of Israel, Schwartz demonstrates in her admirably detailed book, Ghosts of a Holy War: The 1929 Massacre in Palestine That Ignited the Arab-Israeli Conflict, that some Arabs have been making war on Jews and committing atrocities against Jews in Israel since the 1920s when the Arabs greatly outnumbered the Jews, the British ruled there by mandate of the League of Nations, and the Jews of Mandate Palestine were politically powerless, unable to oppress anyone.
Schwartz also skillfully shows the vicious similarities between the Arab massacres of Jews in Mandate Palestine in the 1920s and the Arab massacre of Jews in southern Israel on October 7, 2023.
Ghosts of a Holy War begins with the letters of David Shainberg of Memphis, Tenn., son of a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant to the United States, who traveled to Hebron in Mandate Palestine in 1928 to learn at the yeshiva there. His letters from his year in yeshiva showed that the small Jewish community of Hebron, partly ancient Sephardi Jewish families and partly more recent arrivals who were connected to the yeshiva, were not Zionists who intended to dispossess the Arabs but religious Jews who wanted to be close to the Tomb of the Patriarchs, the Cave of Machpelah. The Jews of Mandate Palestine were politically powerless and greatly outnumbered by Arabs throughout the land. The Mufti of Jerusalem, nominally a religious figure but in fact a politician and a vicious Jew-hater, continually badgered the British authorities and incited Arabs against the Jews, for instance by claiming that Jews putting a temporary mechitza at the Kotel for Yom Kippur services in 1929 was an assault on the Al Aqsa Mosque and an attempt by Jews to desecrate it, tear it down and rebuild the Temple. The Mufti had a long reach and a willing audience and his message arrived in Hebron, where the small Jewish community had lived in peace with their Arab neighbors for a long time.
Yet, there must have been Arab hatred and resentment of Jews festering beneath the surface, because upon receiving the Mufti’s false message that the Jews were storming Al Aqsa a mob of thousands of armed Arabs descended on the small unarmed Jewish community of Hebron, murdering, maiming stealing and destroying. Having trusted their Arab neighbors, only a few of whom tried to help them and protect them, the Jews of Hebron including the yeshiva students, their rabbis, Jewish merchants, and Jewish women and children, were murdered and maimed in gory and grotesque ways. The Arab pogromists murdered David Shainberg that day along with many others.
Schwartz does not spare the details of the butchery and those details are very reminiscent of October 7. There were few officials and police available to protect the Jews in Hebron, and most of the policemen were Arabs, some of whom joined in the pogrom. To their credit, a few Arabs of Hebron not only refused to join in but protected Jews at some risk to themselves. Nevertheless, Arab pogromists killed more Jews in the Hebron Massacre of 1929 than European pogromists murdered in the more famous Kishineff pogrom of 1903.
From that pogrom Ghosts of a Holy War draws a straight line, mostly through the person of the Mufti, from the Hebron Massacre to the weak-kneed response of the British to the two year campaign of murder and destruction conducted by Arabs in Israel from 1936-1938 (sometimes called “The Arab Revolt”) to the Mufti being expelled from Mandate Palestine just before World War Two and obtaining refuge in Berlin with his hero, Adolph Hitler, who gave the Mufti the job of propagandizing the Arab world against the Jews and recruiting Arab soldiers to fight the Allies.
After Israeli independence, the Arab world seethed with even more hatred for Jews, made all the worse because the Arabs were unable to defeat Israel on the battlefield, even with substantial aid from their Soviet sponsors. By the 1960s the Arab war against the Jews – which after consultation in Moscow, the Arabs decided was a “national liberation movement” – was led by the Mufti’s cousin’s son, Yasser Arafat, in his campaign of murder, bombing and kidnapping against Jews. Schwartz recounts that Arafat was offered a so-called “two state solution” on multiple occasions and turned it down rather than recognize the existence of Israel as a legitimate state.
More recently, Schwarz visited Hebron to find that Hebron is an Arab city whose mayor is a convicted terrorist-murderer who was released by Israel in a prisoner swap and whose constituents see his status as terrorist and murderer as a feature not a defect. She found that after October 7, the Arab lies about what had happened were similar to those which had been spread by the Mufti after the Hebron Massacre. After the Hebron massacre the Mufti had spread the lie that it was the British who had murdered the Jews of Hebron, or the Jews murdered themselves in order to cause a wave of sympathy for Zionism, or that it was the Jews who attacked the Arabs and the Arabs murdered the Jews in self-defense and that, in any event, it was not nearly as bad as the Jewish victims and survivors claimed.
Likewise, after the October 7 massacres across southern Israel, the common talking points in the Arab world have included that it was not so bad, not that many Jews were killed, no one was raped, the victims did not include civilians or women and children but were only soldiers on military bases, and that the Israeli Defense Forces themselves killed most of the victims. The Arab apologists don’t explain why Hamas is still holding Israeli hostages more than a year later, except to say that October 7 was a legitimate reaction to Israeli oppression. Even the Arab apologists don’t explain why, if that is so, something so similar happened on multiple occasions before Israeli statehood in Jerusalem in 1920, in Hebron and Jerusalem in 1929 and throughout the 1930s. No one wants to say that some Arabs are so soaked in hatred of Jews that they will commit any atrocity and tell any lie to excuse it.
Shwartz is clearly ambivalent about the current situation in Israel and believes that Arabs within Israel ought to have full political and civil rights and be able to live in peace within Israel’s borders and that Israelis ought to have peace and recognition. She dislikes “settlers” in Judea and Samaria who unnecessarily provoke and torment Arabs. She also dislikes the violence of Arabs against Jews. That is to say, a sense of human decency permeates her book. To her credit, Schwartz has done a good job of telling the story of the Hebron Massacre and its consequences and showing the connections between that event almost one hundred years ago and today. If there is one failing to this well-researched and well-written book it is that Schwartz does not inquire deeply into the ideological, social and cultural factors that could turn Arab farmers and merchants into a howling, murdering, pillaging mob just on the say-so of one man most of them had never even seen or heard. Still, Ghosts of a Holy War is worth the reader’s time and attention as a solid history and review of the Arab War against Jewish civilians.
