Hillel Cohen - Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1929

Acknowledgments

I want to express my gratitude to many people who, sometimes without their knowledge, contributed to the writing of this book: to friends, colleagues, and lovers of literature who discussed with me ideas over coffee, read chapters of the manuscript, traveled with me to Hebron and other sites, and brought to my attention sources I was unaware of; to readers of drafts who told me how much they appreciated what I was doing, and to readers who were less enthusiastic; to friends and research assistants who went with me (and sometimes without me) to archives to photocopy documents; to historians whose understanding of history helped me to shape my own through agreement or through debates; and of course, to people whose friendship makes my life nicer. The following list does not include all of them, and I hope and believe that my friends whom I do not mention will not take it too hard. So, thank you Raanan Alexandrowicz, Noa Bar-Haim, Dina Berdichevsky, Amitai Barouchi-Unna, Sigi B. Beeri, Hillel Ben Sasson, Efrat Ben Zeev, Yigal Bronner, Karam Dana, Assaf David, Ron Dudai, Adva Falk, Yair Kunitz, Jeremy Hodges, Amos Noy, Iyad al-Sarraj, Hagit Ofran, Eli Osheroff, Amnon Paran, Assaf Peled, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, Yehuda Shenhav, and Yael Shenker. Special thanks go to Yosef Barnea, who shared documents from his collection with me, and to Avner Wishnitzer. Many thanks to the following archives for granting me permission to use photographs for this book: The Library of Congress; The Central Zionist Archives; and Israels Government Press Office. I also thank the Karkar family of al-Quds (Jerusalem), who lent me the photograph of the familys grandfather.

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem is my academic home, and it deserves a special thank you. And the Cohen-Bars of Jerusalemmy wife Efrat and my children Aya, Avshalom, and Osnatdeserve even more. Their love and happiness helped me not to fall into despair and depression while delving, day after day, into detailed descriptions of massacres and lynchings.

At the age of fifty-three, I come to realize how much my consciousness was shaped by my parents, Esther and Aharon, who both passed away during the writing of this book. My mother came to Jerusalem from Poland in 1933 at the age of five, and my father came to our city from Afghanistan in 1951 at the age of twenty-six. Both were happy and proud to be part of what they saw as the revival of the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland, and they had no qualms about the right of Jews to establish their national home in Eretz Yisrael, known in Arabic as Palestine. Nevertheless, this did not prevent them from seeing the Palestinian Arabs as equal human beings. Their generation, however, left to the next generations the question of whether it is possible to reconcile Jews and Arabs rights in this country. This book is dedicated to their memory, and to the memory of the rescuers, both Jews and Arabs.

AFTERWORD

The 1929 riots pose difficult questions. What caused Arabs in Hebron and Safed and other places in Palestine to murder their Jewish neighbors? What motivated Jews to lynch Arabs in Jerusalem? What triggered the general Arab offensive against Jews that summer? What leads individual human beings to turn against the tide and save the very people that most members of their own community see as enemies? And at another level, what were the long-range effects of the riots on Jewish-Arab relations and on internal relations within each community?

This book offers a number of insights into the 1929 riots. Some of these touch on the events themselves, and others are more general. Some are not new but here come into sharper focus, while others depart from the common wisdom. The fact that Jews murdered Arabs in 1929 does not change the larger picture, which is that of an Arab attack on Jewish communities. This larger picture does not change the broader historical landscape, in which Jews immigrated to Palestine beginning in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire under European (in particular, British) protection. These Jewish immigrants expressly intended to make the country they called the Land of Israel into a Jewish one. The corollary of that intention was that the Arabs would become a minority in their own land. Over the course of the book I have presented the range of views regarding the question of whether the Zionist project was a just one. Here I will offer my own opinion: the Jews, as a persecuted people whose property and lives were in constant danger, had a right to take refuge in the Land of Israel. But this right did not strip the Arabs of their own rights in Palestine, nor can it justify every action and policy pursued by the Zionist movement to achieve its larger goal.

Granting refuge to refugees does not necessarily run counter to the spirit of Islam, even if the refugees are Jews and the refuge they seek is the Holy Land. Proof of this is the fact that the Ottoman Empire permitted many Jews to settle in Palestine following their exile from Spain at the end of the fifteenth century. But in 1929, following a century or so of waves of Jewish immigration under the protection of foreign powers and almost fifty years of organized Zionist activity, the Jews were no longer merely refugees seeking shelter but settlers taking possession of land and seeking sovereignty. Under Zionist influence, the long-standing Jewish minority in Palestine, which had at first sought equality with the Arab majority, now gradually became enamored of the European Zionist goal of a Jewish nation-state in the Land of Israel. As that happened, the countrys Arabs gradually ceased to discern any sharp line that distinguished avowedly Zionist Jews from other Jews who declared themselves anti-Zionists or who did not take an unambiguous stand. Language, however, sometimes lags behind perception. In Arab speech and writing, as well as in daily life, the old vocabulary persisted. Al-Yahud al-Arab (Arab Jews) were considered part and parcel of Middle Eastern culture; the Siknaj (Ashkenazi Haredim), who arrived in several waves beginning in the early nineteenth century, were absorbed into the fabric of Palestines society because they accepted the hegemony of Islamic Arabs. Then there were the Zionists, whom the Arabs called Moskobim (Muscovites), who brought with them foreign habits and mores from Eastern Europe and, even more critically, had national and political aspirations. The terms remained in use, but by the bloody summer of 1929 they no longer meant much. When the Arabs attacked, they made no distinction between Jews of different political views, or between those who came from long-established families and those who were relative newcomers. The clearest proof of this comes from the screams of the Cohen and Afriyat families of Safed, and of the Abushedid and Kapiluto families of Hebron, who in vain beseeched the neighbors who were attacking them, saying that they were natives of the country who had done no harm to the Arabs.

This was the summer that made it clear that the distinctions that meant so much to Jews within their community were virtually meaningless to the Arabs. They saw no appreciable difference between Haredim and secular Jews, between Old Yishuv and New Yishuv, and between the different streams within the Zionist labor movement or between the labor movement and the Revisionists. It was not that Muslims thought that all Jews deserved to diethat is not a Muslim beliefbut because by the end of the 1920s they felt very powerfully that all these groups of Jews had much more in common than whatever it was that separated them. All of the groups maintained that the Jews were a nation, all of them believed that the Jews had an inalienable right to immigrate to what they viewed as the land of their fathers, and all of them aspired to establish a Jewish state in Palestine (whether that state would be founded by human action or by the Messiah, and whether it would be a capitalist or socialist state). All of them believed that Jews should be first and foremost loyal to and responsible for each other. All these principles were utterly opposed to the way Palestines Arabs saw the place of Jews in their society, and thus all Jews now looked the same to them. As the Arabs saw it, in the summer of 1929 they killed not their Jewish neighbors, but rather enemies who were seeking to conquer their land.