Massacre of Jewish residents of Hebron by Arab residents in 1929 Arab riots in Mandatory Palestine
The Hebron massacre was the killing of sixty-seven or sixty-nine Jews on 24 August 1929 in Hebron, Mandatory Palestine. The event also left scores seriously wounded or maimed. Jewish homes were pillaged and synagogues were ransacked.
The massacre was perpetrated by Arabs incited to violence by rumors that Jews were planning to seize control of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Some of the 435 Jews in Hebron who survived were hidden by local Arab families, although the extent of this phenomenon is debated. Soon after, all Hebron's Jews were evacuated by the British authorities. Many returned in 1931, but almost all were evacuated at the outbreak of the 1936–39 Arab revolt in Palestine. The massacre formed part of the 1929 Palestine riots, in which a total of 133 Jews and 110 Arabs were killed, the majority of the latter by British police and military, and brought the centuries-old Jewish presence in Hebron to an end.
The massacre, together with that of Jews in Safed, sent shock waves through Jewish communities in Palestine and around the world. It led to the re-organization and development of the Jewish paramilitary organization, the Haganah, which later became the nucleus of the Israel Defense Forces.
Background.
Simmering tensions.
The city of Hebron holds special significance in Judaism and Islam, it being the site of the Tomb of the Patriarchs. In 1929, the population of the city numbered around 20,000, the majority of whom were Muslim Arabs. A small community of around 700 Jews lived in and around Hebron.
A few dozen Jews lived deep within Hebron, in a kind of ghetto, where there were several synagogues and the Hebron Yeshiva, but the majority rented houses, many built specifically for Jewish tenants, from Arab proprietors on the outskirts. The Jewish community was divided between relatively recent European (Ashkenazi) immigrants and an older population of descendants of Sephardic Jews who had inhabited the town for eight hundred years. Ashkenazi Jews had been established in the town for at least a century. The two communities, Sephardic and Ashkenazi, maintained separate schools, worshipped in separate synagogues, and did not intermarry. The Sephardics were Arabic speakers, wore Arab dress and were well integrated, whereas many of the Ashkenazi community were yeshiva students who maintained 'foreign' ways, and had difficulties and misunderstandings with the Arab population. The tensions between the two Jewish communities, both very traditionalist, were not caused by diverging worldviews, but only by differences of culture and ritual practice.
The progressive trends of the new Western arrivals in Palestine, represented by both foreign powers and modernising Jewish philanthropists and organisations, were a different matter altogether. Since the Balfour Declaration of 1917, tensions had been growing between the Arab and Jewish communities in Palestine. The Muslim community of Hebron had a reputation for being highly conservative in religion. Though Jews had suffered numerous vexations in the past, and this hostility was to take an anti-Zionist turn after the Balfour Declaration, a peaceful relationship existed between both communities. During the riots of 1920 and 1921, Hebron's Jews had been spared the violence that broke out elsewhere. But by 1923, an ongoing series of low-level incidents had persuaded the local Jewish community that the Muslim-Christian association was spreading anti-Jewish hatred, and the Jewish community complained to the local police force that not enough was being done to protect them.
Another key source of tension concerned the status of the Western Wall and al-Aqsa in Jerusalem. On the one hand, the claim that Jews wanted to retake what Jews call the Temple Mount and Muslims call Al-Aqsa and destroy the Muslim structures there had been a persistent theme of Arab propaganda. On the other hand, led by Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, a campaign had begun in 1928 to reassert Muslim rights over the Western Wall, which was owned by Muslim authorities; al-Husseini ordered new construction in front of and on top of the Wall, and bricks from the construction fell on those who wished to pray there, while excrement from mules befouled the area in front of the Wall. Both sides viewed these developments as symbolically powerful to their respective causes. Jewish leaders appealed to the British authorities to intervene.
When they did not, hundreds of Jewish nationalists marched to the Western Wall on August 14, 1929 while British authorities were on leave, shouting slogans such as "The Wall is Ours" and raising the Jewish national flag. Rumours, apparently part of an organized campaign, spread that Jewish youths had also attacked Arabs and had cursed Muhammad; Husseini's activists handed out fliers that appeared to have been pre-published appealing, with inflammatory religious rhetoric, to Muslims to avenge "the honor of Islam." Following an inflammatory sermon the next day, hundreds of Muslims organized by the Supreme Muslim Council converged on the Western Wall, burning prayer books and injuring the beadle. The rioting soon spread to the Jewish commercial area of town and the next day, August 17, a young Jew was stabbed to death. The authorities failed to quell the violence. On the evening of Thursday, August 22 and early the next morning, Arab villagers armed with sticks and knives gathered at the Haram al-Sharif. During the morning prayers, a nationalist preacher exhorted the Muslim faithful to fight against the Jews until the last drop of blood; gunshots were heard coming from the compound to excite the crowd. Inflamed by rumors that Jews were planning to attack al-Aqsa, Arabs left the compound and were spoken to by Husseini, who was instructed by the British authorities to calm the crowd, but they became more excited. The crowd then began to attack Jews in the Old City of Jerusalem and burn shops.
Segev notes that whether the first victims were Jews or Arabs is a matter of much dispute; Laurens claims that the first murders of the day took place when two or three Arabs passing by the Jewish Quarter of Mea Shearim were killed. Rumours that Jews had massacred Arabs in Jerusalem then reached Hebron by that evening; the first murder, of a Jewish student alone in a yeshiva, occurred that evening.
Haganah offers protection.
Former Haganah member Baruch Katinka recalled that he had been informed by his superiors that 10–12 fighters were needed to protect the Jews in Hebron. On August 20, a group travelled to Hebron in the middle of the night and met with a Jewish community leader, Eliezer Dan Slonim. Katinka said that Slonim was adamant that no protection was needed as he was on good terms with the local Arabs and he trusted the "a'yan" (Arab notables) to protect the Jews. According to Katinka, Slonim postulated that the sight of the Haganah might instead cause a provocation. The group was soon discovered and Police Superintendent Raymond Cafferata, an officer recruited from the Black and Tans, ordered them to return to Jerusalem. Two others remained in Slonim's house, but the day after, they too returned to Jerusalem as requested by Slonim.
Hebron police force.
Hebron's police force was headed by Superintendent Raymond Cafferata of the Palestine Police Force and consisted of two Arab officers and another 40 policemen, only one of whom was Jewish. A number of the force were elderly and in a poor physical condition. Cafferata was later to explain that it was impossible to keep the situation under control, as he was the only British officer stationed in the town, and the reinforcements he had sent for never arrived. The Hebron police were greatly relieved, on the morning of the 24th, to note that a contingent of armed Arab locals had departed the city to lend strength to forces in Jerusalem. At the same time however, many peasants from surrounding villages began to flow into Hebron.
Prelude.
On Friday, August 23, after hearing reports of rioting in Jerusalem in the afternoon, a crowd of 700 Arabs gathered at the city's central bus station intending to travel to Jerusalem. Cafferata attempted to placate them, and as a precaution, asked the British authorities to send reinforcements to Hebron. He then arranged for a mounted patrol to be sent to the Jewish quarter, where he encountered Rabbi Yaakov Yosef Slonim who asked for police protection after Jews had been attacked with stones. Cafferata instructed the Jews to stay in their homes while he tried to disperse the crowds. Jewish newspaper accounts carried various claims by survivors that they had heard Arab threats to "divvy up [Jewish] women", Arab homeowners had told their Jewish neighbours "today will be the great slaughter," and several of the victims took tea with so-called friends who, in the afternoon, became their killers.
At around 4:00 pm, stones were thrown through the windows of Jewish homes. The Hebron Yeshiva was hit, and as a student tried to escape the building, he was set upon by the mob, which stabbed him to death. The sexton, the only other person in the building at the time, survived by hiding in a well. Some hours later Cafferata attempted to get the local mukhtars to assume responsibility for law and order, but they told him that the Mufti of Jerusalem Hajj Amin al-Husseini had told them to take action or be fined because of the 'Jewish slaughter of Arabs' in Jerusalem. Cafferata told them to return to their villages but, expecting some disturbances, he slept in his office that night.
Attack.
Rampage and killing.
At about 8.30 am Saturday morning, the first attacks began to be launched against houses where Jews resided, after a crowd of Arabs armed with staves, axes and knives appeared in the streets. The first location to be attacked was a large Jewish residence on the main road. Two young boys were immediately killed, and the mob entered the house and beat or stabbed the other occupants to death.
Cafferata appeared on the scene, gave orders to his constables to fire on the crowd and personally shot dead two of the attacking Arabs. While some dispersed, the rest managed to break through the pickets, shouting "on to the ghetto!" The requested reinforcements had not arrived in time. That later became the source of considerable acrimony.
According to a survivor, Aharon Reuven Bernzweig, "right after eight o'clock in the morning we heard screams. Arabs had begun breaking into Jewish homes. The screams pierced the heart of the heavens. We didn't know what to do…. They were going from door to door, slaughtering everyone who was inside. The screams and the moans were terrible. People were crying Help! Help! But what could we do?"
Soon after news of the first victim had spread, forty people assembled in the house of Eliezer Dan Slonim. Slonim, the son of the Rabbi of Hebron, was a member on the city council and a director of the Anglo-Palestine Bank. He had excellent relations with the British and the Arabs and those seeking refuge with him were confident they would come to no harm. When the mob approached his door, they offered to spare the Sephardi community if he would hand over all the Ashkenazi yeshiva students. He refused, saying "we are all one people," and he was shot dead along with his wife and 4-year-old son. From the contemporary Hebrew press it appears that the rioters targeted the Zionist community for their massacre. Four-fifths of the victims were Ashkenazi Jews, but some had deep roots in the town, yet a dozen Jews of eastern origin, Sephardics and Maghrebian, were also killed. Gershon Ben-Zion, for example, the Beit Hadassah Clinic pharmacist, a cripple who had served both Jews and Arabs for 4 decades, was killed together with his family: his daughter was raped and then murdered.
Account of Raymond Cafferata.
After the massacre, Cafferata testified:
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, but on seeing me he tried to aim the stroke at me, but missed; he was practically on the muzzle of my rifle. I shot him low in the groin. Behind him was a Jewish woman smothered in blood with a man I recognized as a[n Arab] police constable named Issa Sheriff from Jaffa. He was standing over the woman with a dagger in his hand.