Hundred Years of War

Yardena Schwartz delivers a timely must read about the long Israeli-Arab conflict

Of the many things that have come to define the world after October 7th the one thing that keeps perplexing me is the widespread ignorance about the roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Yet at the same time many seem to have an opinion on it while only few are substantiated by any relevant historical knowledge of the problem at hand. It is also one of the more regular items that comes back to me as feedback here on the newsletter where creating historical context is one of the key goals. That said, there is still a lot that even I don’t know and my knowledge about the 1929 massacre in Hebron of Jews and their families was basic at best. A recent book by Yardena Schwartz, Ghosts of a Holy War: The 1929 Massacre in Palestine That Ignited the Arab-Israeli Conflict, more than addresses that vacuum.

But in reading it, it becomes clear fast that Schwartz is far more ambitious than just analyzing the gruesome pogrom which killed 79 Jews living in the city of Hebron in 1929. The massacre serves as the entry and reference point into a longer analysis of how Arabs living in British Mandate Palestine (1917-48) were steadily radicalized into hating Jews. Schwartz extends her research beyond Israel’s date of independence, diving into Israel’s recent history including the development of the settler movement in Judaea and Samaria and ending on October 7th, 2023. And in crafting that narrative she stitches the history of the conflict together in a way that makes it clear that the forces that unleashed terror in 1929 are not different from the ones that did the same in October 2023. As the sub-title of the book implies, it all started in 1929.

In those days, Arabs were still a majority in the land and the State of Israel was a faraway pipe dream. Yet, the Brits and the Arabs were increasingly unnerved by the presence of, and the growth of, the Jewish community. The mere concept of accepting a Jewish minority, or even cohabiting with a larger group of Jews somehow triggered the instinct that Jews could and should never live on Muslim land. And although at the local level Jews and Arabs would live together as friendly neighbours, doing business, socialize and eat together, radical Muslim clerics would find ways to disturb that peace. Concocted stories, targeted incitement and even the flimsiest rumour of Jews abusing holy Islamic sites were often enough to bring the worst human instincts to the surface where violence, torture, rape and murder became legitimate tools to protect the Muslim land.

And Jews in the land in 1929, which readers here will remember was a ‘crappy piece of land’, were a small minority, poorly organized and many of them - the Hebron community in particular - not interested in the Zionist vision of building a state. It is an eerie parallel but this particular religious community was not all that different in its disposition to life as compared to the peaceniks who lived on the kibbutzim that were ravaged on October 7th. Their lives were almost one hundred years apart, but their sole goal was to live on the land in peace with their neighbours without any deep nationalist ambitions. In times of peace relations between neighbouring Arabs and Jews were mostly harmonious where in particular Jews would deliver medical services and other supports that Arab communities often lacked.

It was the then Grand Mufti (religious leader) of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who envisaged a purely Muslim state to appear once the Brits would give up their mandate of the holy land. In fact the Mufti sought to hasten that goal by accelerating a British defeat as he teamed up with Hitler and even resided in Berlin for a number of years during World War II. There was an overlap in the long term plans both men had for the Jews, but the Mufti worked hard to ensure that emigration to the Middle East was not an option for Hitler to get rid of Jews. In the end this approach, while devastating the Jewish community, backfired for both men, Hitler lost the war and the Mufti lived to witness an independent Israel.

Schwartz’s book gives us a well-researched timeline that explains the dynamics of the Arab-Israeli conflict. More crucially, it also makes it very clear why every peace effort to date has failed: from the Mufti to Arafat to Abbas to Hamas, there never was a single Palestinian negotiator or representative who could abandon the real goal to never let a Jewish state emerge on the land. The objective has always been to drive the Jews back into the Mediterranean sea, the fallback, maybe, could be a servile Jewish population in a majority Muslim religious state.

It is that piece of fundamental knowledge that is lacking in the current debate. But there is more when you go through the book that can help you debunk the various myths that are now so pervasive in a lot of western media. So yes, there has been a contiguous Jewish presence in Israel going back thousands of years. And the Jews did precede Muslims, also by thousands of years. And not unimportantly, the baseless hate and misinformation that has fuelled the relentless terror against Israeli citizens has been funded and abetted by the UN and its UNRWA agency. The Mufti’s hate continues to be recycled through relief organizations and Hamas is the just the most recent group to harvest the fruits of that enduring education effort, at the expense of taxpayers in the rest of the world and Israelis and Jews on the ground.

Hebron in on August 24, 1929 and October 7th, 2023, are the two bookends and in between Schwartz gives you a truly informed and lively accounting with lots of witnesses from both sides of the enduring conflict. It ends with hope, of course, and it is not all that hard to see how Jews and Arabs could potentially co-reside in towns like Hebron or even Gaza. What is much more difficult to visualize is the amount of time it will take before we can arrive at a point where such a peace can be achieved as it will take generations to de-program the hate out of Palestinian and Arab systems. Yardena Schwartz’s book is a superb addition to understanding the conflict and in uncovering the elements that continue to obstruct peace.

Fellow Vancouverites reading this please note that Yardena will be in town on February 23 to discuss her book.