Mick Hartley

I just came across this, from Honest Reporting. Well worth a watch.

I’m currently reading Yardena Schwartz’s Ghosts of a Holy War, on the 1929 Hebron Massacre.

It was, she writes, a precursor of the 7th October pogrom. Arabs and Jews had lived together peacefully for years and years in Hebron, Judaism’s second holiest city. In the face of increased Jewish immigration the Arabs, led by Amin al-Husseini the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem – the same al-Husseini who spent most of the WW2 years in Berlin trying to persuade Hitler to extend his Jewish extermination plans to the Middle East – spread lies about Jewish plans to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque on Temple Mount. The increasing fervour of hatred climaxed in the 1929 massacre, when Arabs slaughtered their Jewish neighbours, destroying one of the world’s most ancient Jewish communities.

From the introduction:

There is a direct line between 1929 and 2023. The forces that drove Arabs in Hebron to slaughter their Jewish neighbours were identical to the forces behind October 7. Just as the riots of 1929 were fueled by passions surrounding the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam, so too was Hamas’s “Operation Al_Aqsa Flood”. On one level this is a conflict like many others, involving borders and other rational issues. But at the line connecting the 1929 massacre with the Hamas massacre makes clear, the religious dimension of this conflict cannot be ignored.

What’s interesting is that the Jewish community in Hebron, Sephardic Jews for the most part, were at the time very much opposed to the Zionist movement which was being imported by the recent Ashkenazi arrivals, and were totally dismissive of warnings about a coming Arab uprising. We’ve lived together for centuries, they said – of course they’re not going to suddenly turn on us, their friends and neighbours. But they did. After that, the Sephardic Jews joined the Zionist cause.

And what’s alarming is how readily the Arabs were prepared to put aside the centuries of (reasonably) peaceful coexistence with Jews – and, surely, their natural human instincts – in the name of Islam. Nothing much has changed there. Though there were then those few Arabs who didn’t join in, who sheltered their Jewish neighbours from the mob – just as, at Bondi Beach, the one hero who tried to stop the killing was himself a Muslim. It’s the natural human fellow-feeling, set against a cruel relentless ideology…

The official Palestinian line now, as taught in UNRWA schools, is that the Hebron massacre was conducted by the British, and that Jews never lived in Hebron before the 20th century and have no historic link to the city.

Also: what she has to say about the film Palestine 36, at 17 minutes in.