BYY ARDENA SCHWARTZ
In the days since Oct. 7, we have all grasped for words to describe the scale and brutality of Hamas’ massacre, comparing it to Israel’s 9/11 or the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. Yet we need not look beyond the borders of Israel itself for a massacre of civilians much like the one we witnessed on that black Sabbath. Before the State of Israel was born, long before its military occupation began, Palestine was the scene of what was until now the most gruesome pogrom outside of Europe.
Early morning on Saturday, Aug. 24, 1929, some 3,000 Muslim men armed with swords, clubs, axes, and daggers went from Jewish house to Jewish house in the holy city of Hebron, stabbing, raping, and in some cases castrating and burning their victims alive. Jewish children watched as their parents were butchered by their Arab neighbors. Infants were killed in their mothers’ arms. Houses and synagogues were looted and torched. Sixty-seven unarmed Jewish men, women, and children were murdered that day.
One of the world’s most ancient Jewish communities, composed of some 800 people before the massacre, was decimated, along with centuries of coexistence that had made Hebron a model of peace between Jews and Muslims. In the aftermath of the attack, the British authorities that ruled Palestine forced the Jews of Hebron to evacuate, turning them into refugees.
Jews had lived in Hebron since biblical times, their lives centered around the Tomb of the Patriarchs, where Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Joseph and Leah are believed to be buried. Much like the Jews who were killed on Oct. 7 were not settlers, the Jews killed in Hebron in 1929 were not Zionists. They did not need to be. They just needed to be Jewish.
The Hebron massacre of 1929 is not only ground zero of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but also a vital lesson for anyone who wishes to understand or resolve the existential war Israel is fighting.
When Israelis and Jews across the diaspora cry out that the war with Hamas is not about settlements, the blockade of Gaza, or the stalled peace process, it is 1929 that forms the bedrock of that conviction. In 1929, there was no Israeli oppression to rise up against. Then, as now, the blind rage directed at Jews rested on the refusal of Arab leaders to share this homeland of the Abrahamic faiths with the Jewish people. The line between 1929 and 2023 cuts through a century of Palestinian leaders’ refusal to accept a Palestinian state alongside a Jewish state. The similarities between these massacres and the causes behind them are a testament to how misunderstood this conflict is.