Hebron is a hot spot in many ways. Hebron and its immediately surrounding Arab areas are the single largest source of terror attacks during the so-called Knife or Stabbing Intifada.
It’s also a place where anti-Zionist and left-wing “liberal Zionist” American Jews love to gather to protest the Jewish “settlers” who live in a tiny section of the city. That section is under Israeli military control by agreement with the Palestinian Authority, with good reason. Hebron has a long history of violence directed at Jews.
Hebron also is the place of the Cave of the Patriarchs, which I visited in 2015.
[Cave of Patriarchs – Abraham]
On August 23, 1929, the Arabs attacked the Jews of Hebron along with numerous other Jewish communities.
But in Hebron it was particularly vicious. It was a blood frenzy in which the Jews were set upon with particular glee and slaughtered with knives, machetes and anything else available.
August 23, 1929, marked the beginning of two days of murderous rioting against the Jewish population of Hebron. More generally, it marked a week’s worth of disturbances in British-controlled Palestine, in which Arabs attacked and killed their Jewish neighbors, with there being some attacks by Jews on Arabs.At the end of a week of violence, 133 Jews were dead, and 110 Arabs had been killed, nearly all of the latter by British security forces.By far, the worst of the violence against Jews took place in Hebron, at the time a city of some 21,000 residents, of whom some 700 were Jewish and the remainder Arab Muslims.
[Elhanan Zelig Roch, a student at the Hebron Yeshiva, lost his hand in the attack against the town’s Jews in 1929][via Wikimedia Commons]
According to Dutch-Canadian journalist Pierre Van Passen who was in Palestine at the time, fabricated pictures of Muslim holy sites in ruins were handed out to Hebron Arabs as they were leaving their mosques on Friday, August 23, 1929. The captions on the pictures claimed that the Dome of the Rock was bombed by the Zionists. That evening, armed Arabs broke into the Yeshiva (Talmudic academy) and murdered the lone student they found. The following day, an enraged Arab mob wielding knives, axes, and iron bars destroyed the Yeshiva and slaughtered the rest of the students there. A delegation of Jewish residents on their way to the police station was lynched by an Arab mob. The mob then proceeded to massacre Hebron’s Jews — both Sephardi and Ashkenazi — who had lived peacefully with their Arab neighbors for years. With only one British officer supervising, the Arab police made no attempt to prevent the massacre.The head of Hebron’s Ashkenazi community, Rabbi Ya’akov Slonim, had been on good terms with his Arab colleagues and offered his home as a refuge to Hebron’s Jews, believing that they would be spared. But the mob broke in and killed the Rabbi, members of his family and all those assembled there….In total, sixty-seven Jews were killed and 60 were wounded. The Jewish community in Hebron was destroyed.
That Jewish community in Hebron would not be reconstituted until after the 1967 War, when Israel captured the area. In the same tiny section of town where the Jews were slaughtered in 1929.
We have shown this video several times in which an elderly Arab woman remembers fondly the massacre of the Jews, in which her family participated. Such joy and fond memories for her:
I wonder if this is one of the homes her father plundered:
[Jewish home plundered by Arab rioters in Hebron 1929][via Wikimedia Commons]
Hebron holds special meaning religiously, and historically.
If you want to understand the conflict, you need to understand the 1929 Hebron Massacre.
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