HOLY LAND. HOLY WAR – THE SEEDS OF A CONFLICT
GHOSTS OF A HOLY WAR – THE 1929 MASSACRE IN PALESTINE THAT IGNITED THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT by Yardena Schwartz
Union Square & Co New York 2024
ISBN: 978 1 4549 4921 3
RRP: $55.99 (HB)
Reviewed by Anne Henderson
How does anyone explain the realities of a “holy war” to a twenty-first century Western secular audience? Not easily. In many ways it is impossible, certainly at a time of 24/7 sound bites and subjective misinformation online along with casual attention from busy people with other lives. For the ordinary observer of the attacks of October 7 in Israel and the many searing events which have followed, there is one book that can help solve the puzzle. The book is Yardena Schwartz’s Ghosts of a Holy War.
Schwartz is no unattached observer having worked for NBC News and filed news stories in the United States for a host of the top news outlets. Her early professional life also saw her spend a decade reporting from Israel earning her the 2016 award for excellence in magazine reporting. Inspired by the atrocities of the October 7 attacks and their aftermath, Schwartz has gone in search of answers. The result is an insight that is both hard hitting and frank, yet empathetic in its exploration of the plight of so many individuals on both sides of the conflict. Sadly, it is a history told in blood with only small glimmers of hope for any solution.
For many of those supporting the October 7 chants – at universities and in the streets of Western Europe, Britain, the USA, Canada and Australia – “from the river to the sea Palestine will be free”, the 7 October 2023 atrocities perpetrated on innocent Israelis by Hamas is believed to have a history beginning only after the Six-Day war of 1967. This was when Israel, responding to Egyptian aggression over Israel’s use of shipping lanes in the Tiran Straits, defeated the armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan and took possession of territories in the Golan Heights, West Bank, Gaza and the Sinai. While the Sinai has since been returned to Egypt, and the West Bank and Gaza handed over to the control of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, the debate continues as to how Palestinians can forge a peaceful state of their own alongside the existence of Israel.
Yardena Schwartz, challenging the chanters, seeks deeper answers. Why, if this is just a matter of borders, does the chanting inspire such hatred and the atrocities such barbarity. In a single chapter late in her book, Schwartz captures the agonies and brutality of October 7 in cameo pieces around individual victims – it is a powerful glimpse of pogroms against Jews down through history. This breach in relations is far deeper than a matter of borders.
As Schwartz sees it, the war between Jews and Muslims can be seen to evolve from a century earlier with the massacres of Jews in Hebron in 1929 – a time when increasing numbers of Jews, with the end of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 and the British Balfour Declaration in 1917, were seeking to reconnect with their roots in Palestine, while others were seeking refuge there. Thus began the tensions with the older, long settled Arab inhabitants, soon to be exploited by radical Muslim leaders such as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, whose legacy, spirit and Nazi-style anti-Semitism would be later claimed by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. The massacres are summed up by Schwartz initially:
On the morning of August 24, 1929, 3000 Muslim men armed with swords, axes and daggers marched through the Jewish Quarter of Hebron. They went from house to house, raping, stabbing, torturing and, in some cases, castrating and burning alive their unarmed Jewish victims. The rioters … did not distinguish between men, women and children. Infants were slaughtered in their mothers’ arms. … Women and teenage girls were raped. Elderly rabbis and yeshiva students were mutilated.
The way this brutality evolved and the murderous path it engendered is the spine of Schwartz’s book. Told in the records of historical events and the personal experiences of individuals, Schwartz has produced a readily accessible answer to a complex tragedy of modern times.
In her introduction, Schwartz explains how her interest in Hebron developed out of access to a series of letters from a young Jewish man, David Shainberg, from Memphis who was murdered in Hebron during the Jewish massacres of 1929, after going there to continue his Jewish religious studies. The letters drew Schwartz to re-examine Hebron. She had visited there when a young journalist and found it “a godforsaken place” that she “never wished to see again”. In David’s letters, he recorded a very different Hebron, albeit just before the devastating events of the Jewish massacres there in 1929. David’s Hebron was a peaceful city in the Judaean hills – as Schwartz puts it, “a symbol of co-existence, the safest place to be a Jew in Palestine”. Indeed, the Jews who would survive the 1929 Hebron massacres, for the most part, owed their survival to courageous acts of their Muslim neighbours.
Hebron today is the only city on the West Bank populated by both Israelis and Palestinians. It is home to the ancient Tomb of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs, designated a Palestinian heritage site by UNESCO in 2017 in a document that made no mention of Hebron’s historical Jewish connections. In spite of recounting its history from the year 4500 BCE, the first mention of Jews/Israelis in Hebron in the UNESCO papers is 1967 and only as “occupation forces”. Herein lies the complex tussle that has caused so much bloodshed.
The Tombs are sacred to Jewish history as they are believed to be where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and their wives are buried. However, Muslims, who also revere Abraham, have prayed there from the 14th century and from 1929 have resisted Jewish claims. Yet, in spite of attempts by Muslim leaders over a century to expel all Jews, today, some hundreds of Jews live in Hebron protected by the Israeli military against some 200,000 Palestinians. That these Jews have staked a small claim to Hebron, has been the result of a persistent fight by groups of extreme Zionists led by Rabbi Moshe Levinger, at one time advanced by the women/wives led by Miriam Levinger who staged a sit-in at the former Jewish Beit Hadassah in a part of Hebron Jews were forbidden to access.
However, with the Levinger push-back came more extremist Zionists from Brooklyn who were centred on Rabbi Meir Kahane. His Jewish Defense League would go on to be declared a terrorist organisation and be banned from the Israeli parliament (Knesset). Kahane was assassinated in 1990 but one of his disciples, Barach Goldstein, in 1994 would open fire on hundreds of Muslims during Ramadan in the Cave of the Patriarchs, murdering 29 and injuring another 125 before being beaten to death by those surviving. As Schwartz witnessed it during her visit, the result in Hebron today is tension and reverence for terrorists on both sides. Jews now have limited access to the sacred tombs while the Israeli military are harsh in the control of Muslims who are known to want the Jewish residents expelled.
While Schwartz gives a detailed yet concise rendering of Jewish resettlement in Palestine from the 1920s, the effects of Jewish immigration to Palestine through the 1930s up to the establishment of the state of Israel and the conflict between the Israelis and its Arab neighbours, her real achievement is to document the link between the anti-Semitism behind the massacres in Hebron in 1929, with how that aspiration would continue with Yassar Arafat – who would don the Grand Mufti’s mantle – and evolve into the current stream of Muslim extremism that supports the Hamas leadership.
Schwartz writes: “The parallels between 1929 and 2023 are haunting, and too dangerous to ignore.” This is not to avoid charting the violence by Israeli nationalists on the way to gaining the State of Israel, or the dispossession of Arabs by Israelis after the armistice of May 1949 at the end of Israel’s War of Independence, both of which Schwartz covers in detail. But the thread of the zealotry to see all Jews pushed from the lands of Palestine can be traced from the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem’s involvement in the 1929 massacres.
The massacres in Hebron came with the interference by the Grand Mufti who spread false information that Jews were seeking to destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque. Couched in religious terms, protests from a small group of Jews in Jerusalem soon came to be seen as a fight for control of Palestine. An iman, speaking before the Grand Mufti to the kneeling crowd at the mosque, proclaimed:
I ask you to take the oath of God the Great to swear by your right hand that you will not hesitate to act when called upon to do so, and that you will, if need be, fight for the Faith and the Holy Places to the death. … Then go, pounce upon your enemies and kill that you in doing so may obtain Paradise.
With that, the Grand Mufti led the crowd outside and what followed was the massacres in Hebron. The Grand Mufti would escape Jerusalem during the Second World War to find safety under Hitler in Berlin where he was given salubrious accommodation. After the war, the Grand Mufti condemned Hitler for not having done more to eliminate the Jews of Europe
Against this mentality on the part of Arabs resisting the settlement of Jews in Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s, the British authorities were weak and unable to pacify hostile relations between Jews and their Arab antagonists. Schwartz demonstrates how British policies zigzagged back and forth, so often lending a blind eye to Arab violence. Attempts to fashion any suggestion of a two-state solution invariably were refused by the Arab leaders or sabotaged. The historic meeting in April 1933 at the King David Hotel where Israeli leader Chaim Weizmann met Transjordan’s Emir Abdullah ended with the Grand Mufti organising Abdullah’s assassination.
In spite of the Grand Mufti’s violent anti-Semitism and links with Hitler, Palestinians continued to revere him, a sign that Jewish extinction, for Palestinian Muslims, outweighed any notion that the Holocaust or anti-Semitism should be denounced in favour of a peace settlement. On the Jewish side, every Arab attack on Jewish settlers only increased Zionist sentiment. Schwartz shows how the lines of war that exist in Israel and Gaza today were drawn long before the State of Israel came into existence. Elected chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation in 1969, Yasser Arafat embraced the legacy of the Grand Mufti. In 1970, the PLO recruited two former Nazi officials. The aim of the PLO was the extinction of Israel and the establishment of a Palestinian state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. In today’s Gaza, Hamas continues to emphasise the propaganda against Jews used by the Grand Mufti, propaganda such as the long disregarded and denounced Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
In her final chapters, Schwartz talks with individuals on both sides in Hebron and records little change in hardened attitudes. The mayor is Abu Sneineh who himself took part in a terrorist act against Jews in 1980 but was released from prison during a prisoner exchange. Sneineh, when asked, opposes any increase of Jewish inhabitants in Hebron. He refutes any Jewish connection to any part of the Holy Land.
Writes Schwrartz: “Although the mayor’s revisionist history stunned me at the time, I came to understand that such views are mainstream.” When she asked her Palestinian translator how this could be, Schwartz was told that Palestinian children learnt this in school, many run by UNWRA, the UN body tasked with helping Palestinian refugees. On conducted tours in Hebron, the misinformation about the lack of Jewish roots in Palestine and the mistruth that Jews were working to destroy all Muslim holy places continued. For all that, Schwartz reflects how strange this could be when even the Grand Mufti had recognised that the First Temple on the Temple Mount was Solomon’s Temple.
As with all attempts to crush Israelis and the right of Jews to a homeland in Palestine, the carnage of October 7 has only increased Israel and Jewish determination to resist its attackers. This has not only seen extremist members of the Knesset such as Itamar Ben-Gvir take significant roles in the National government but has left even liberal minded Israelis more strongly committed to national survival above all. As Schwartz witnessed it, “In a world that seems indifferent to Israeli suffering, many Israelis have experienced a drastic shift rightward … so many formerly left-wing Israelis were now sounding a lot like settlers from Hebron.”
Yardena Schwartz, in her search for answers, has unwrapped the tragic complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian impasse in a crucially accessible volume. Her exposé challenges us in its frankness. Whether there are any solutions is up to others.
Anne Henderson is Deputy Director hard of The Sydney Institute and author of Menzies at War, which was shortlisted for the 2015 Prime Minister’s Award for Australian History.