This 1929 massacre is key to understanding Israel

Telegraph

12-04-2025

Many years ago, I wrote a thesis on pre-state violence and conflict in Israel. The project involved several months in Israel, Jordan and Egypt interviewing people from all sides who had witnessed events first-hand.
One deliciously cool evening in east Jerusalem I sat with two elderly men, one Jewish and one Palestinian, who seemed angrier with their respective leaders than with each other.
Suddenly the Israeli said to me: 'It's all about Hebron in 1929 you know. It all began then.' I looked at his Arab friend, expecting dissent, but he nodded. 'Yes, he's right, he's right.'
The Hebron massacre in 1929 isn't widely known any more. Younger Israelis increasingly see the years before 1948 as ancient history, and their Palestinian peers have been fed an alternative narrative. As for the weekend warriors of the anti-Israel Left, their ignorance of the history of the region is notorious.
In brief, on August 24 1929, in the city of Hebron, over 60 Jews were murdered; many others were horribly wounded and sexually mutilated; women were raped; and homes and synagogues were destroyed.
A British police officer wrote that: 'On hearing screams in a room, I went up a sort of tunnel passage and saw an Arab in the act of cutting off a child's head with a sword. He had already hit him and was having another cut.'
British High Commissioner, Sir John Chancellor, also later wrote: 'The horror of it is beyond words. In one house I visited not less than twenty-five Jewish men and women were murdered in cold blood.'
Many of the reports sound horribly similar to those from October 7 2023.
The Jewish community in Hebron back then was divided between Ashkenazi Jews who had lived there for a century and Sephardim who had been there for 800 years. The latter spoke Arabic and adopted Arab customs, and both groups were more religious than political.
But Jewish immigration was increasing elsewhere in Palestine, and extremists such as Hajj Amin Al-Husseini, who would later praise and support Hitler, claimed that the Jews of Hebron were intent on conquering the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The propaganda was eagerly received.
435 Jews survived the pogrom, some of them hidden by Arab neighbours – though recent scholarship questions just how many of these cases there were, and it seems that it was the British police who saved most lives.
Those who did live through it all were removed to Jewish areas for their own safety. The direct result was that the long history of a Jewish presence in Hebron, a deeply holy place for Jewish people, was ended in the summer of 1929 until Israel won the Six-Day War of 1967.
The longer-term consequences were arguably more dramatic. Shortly before the massacre, Zionist defence leaders had visited Hebron and offered protection.
Rumours were already spreading of what might happen, and it was suggested that a squad of armed men from Haganah – the Jewish paramilitary organisation – would be sufficient to guarantee safety.
The offer was refused because the Jews of Hebron believed that their Muslim and Christian friends would not let anything happen. They believed in co-existence.
Hebron wasn't the only religiously mixed town, and from this point on the Jews of Palestine for the most part lost all confidence that they could be safe in majority Arab areas.
As for the Haganah, which would eventually coalesce with other groups to become the IDF, they increased in size, efficiency, and organisation. They also embraced a philosophy that their role was to protect all Jews, even those who might be naïve enough to assume that they weren't in any danger.
David Ben-Gurion, the first Israeli Prime Minister, was a socialist who had imagined a joint society of Jewish and Arab workers sharing in the struggle for human dignity.
Hebron shocked him into a new realisation that the Jewish people couldn't rely on foreign cooperation or protection. It was something his rival Menachem Begin, whose party is now led by Benjamin Netanyahu, had long argued.
Less than seven years after the massacre the Arab Revolt began, and for more than three years there would be urban warfare.
Any hope of a working relationship between Jews and Arabs, one that was once far more viable than we might now assume, had died in the streets and homes of Hebron in 1929 – and by 1948, after Britain's withdrawal from the region, the cycle of wars between the State of Israel and its neighbours began.
By the way, one of the synagogues abandoned in Hebron after the 1929 massacre dated from 1540, built by Jews expelled during the Spanish Inquisition. These Israeli colonial settlers – will they never learn?