Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1929

Hillel Cohen, Haim Watzman

• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781611688122
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In late summer 1929, a countrywide outbreak of Arab-Jewish-British violence transformed the political landscape of Palestine forever. In contrast with those who point to the wars of 1948 and 1967, historian Hillel Cohen marks these bloody events as year zero of the Arab-Israeli conflict that persists today. The murderous violence inflicted on Jews caused a fractious—and now traumatized—community of Zionists, non-Zionists, Ashkenazim, and Mizrachim to coalesce around a unified national consciousness arrayed against an implacable Arab enemy. While the Jews unified, Arabs came to grasp the national essence of the conflict, realizing that Jews of all stripes viewed the land as belonging to the Jewish people. Through memory and historiography, in a manner both associative and highly calculated, Cohen traces the horrific events of August 23 to September 1 in painstaking detail. He extends his geographic and chronological reach and uses a non-linear reconstruction of events to call for a thorough reconsideration of cause and effect. Sifting through Arab and Hebrew sources—many rarely, if ever, examined before—Cohen reflects on the attitudes and perceptions of Jews and Arabs who experienced the events and, most significantly, on the memories they bequeathed to later generations. The result is a multifaceted and revealing examination of a formative series of episodes that will intrigue historians, political scientists, and others interested in understanding the essence—and the very beginning—of what has been an intractable conflict.

1	JAFFA AND TEL AVIV

Sunday, August 25, 1929

We will open with an account of what happened in Tel Aviv, Acre, and Jaffa in 1929 because these cities were on the margins of the disturbances. We will learn of the triangle of relations between Mizrahi Jews, Ashkenazi Jews, and Arabs and the way these relations were shaken, and we will meet, among others, Mustafa al-Dabbagh, Yosef Haim Brenner, Simha Hinkis, Nisim Elkayam, and Ahmad al-Shuqayri. One thing leads to another, and one person leads to another.

In the summer of 1929 the Jews provoked the Muslims: thousands of their young and old people gathered on the streets of Jerusalem with the Zionist flag, adorned with black ribbons, waving over their heads. They marched in an organized fashion to the Western Wall—al-Buraq—enthusiastically singing the Zionist anthem, “Hatikvah.” Their voices rang out: “The Western Wall is ours, beware all who sully our holy site.” It was this provocation that led to the clashes that spread through the country in August 1929.

In Jaffa Jews, led by a Jewish policeman in the government service, attacked the home of Sheikh ‘Abd al-Ghani ‘Awn, the imam of the Abu Kabir neighborhood mosque, next to Tel Aviv. They killed him and all six members of his family and defiled the bodies criminally. They slashed open the father’s belly and smashed the heads of his nephew and his wife and son, who was three years old at the time. (Dabbagh 2002, 4:265)

This description appears in the volume on Jaffa and its environs, of the ten-volume work titled Biladuna Filastin (Our land of Palestine) by Mustafa Murad al-Dabbagh (2002). It is not a work of history but rather a geographical encyclopedia, arranged by region. Neither does it offer in-depth analysis. Rather, it surveys all the cities and villages of Palestine, noting significant events that took place in each one. An important reference work, it is frequently consulted by readers of Arabic. Given its nature, it does not offer a comprehensive survey of the events of 1929. Yet it cites a significant event—unfamiliar to Israeli and foreign readers as well as to many Arabs—the murder of an Arab family and the mutilation of their bodies by Jews.

The picture is a harsh one. It is not easy to read about the smashing of children’s skulls, the mutilation of bodies, and the slitting open of bellies. Furthermore, what connection is there between the riots of 1929 and the slaying of an Arab family by Jews? After all, the theme of the events of 1929—at least as far as Jews are concerned—is Arab brutality. But this is what al-Dabbagh tells us about what happened in Jaffa and Tel Aviv in 1929. In short order we will examine the truth of the story, but in any case it is important to keep in mind that it was not the start of the 1929 riots.

Not the Start

The 1929 riots officially started not in Jaffa but in Jerusalem, two days earlier, on Friday, August 23. The climax came the following day, Saturday, when Arabs massacred Jews in Hebron (the events in those cities are recounted in the chapters that follow). Violence continued, in various forms, throughout the country in the days that followed. But the events of that Friday were not in fact the start. The disturbances of August 1929 grew out of the relations between Jews and Arabs in Palestine throughout the 1920s. And those relations were built on the foundation, and in cognizance, of hundreds of years of Jewish-Muslim and Jewish-Arab encounters preceding the advent of Zionism. These relations were not static; they varied over time and space. Competition and cooperation, animosity, discrimination, feelings of superiority and compassion and hatred, as well as a complex of other human emotions and behaviors, all played a role. The recent and distant past are parts of human consciousness, and they were part of the emotional and political substrate of what people experienced in 1929 and how they acted during the violence. The historical memory of the inhabitants of Tel Aviv and Jaffa included a previous round of riots in 1921, eight years previously; the Jews remembered the dozens of their compatriots who had been killed then. Among the victims was the seminal Hebrew writer Yosef Haim Brenner.

Yosef Haim Brenner

Brenner was a symbol, both in life and in death. An essayist and novelist, he arrived in Palestine as part of the Second Aliyah, that wave of Jewish Zionist immigration lasting from 1904 to 1914. Central among the newcomers were young Eastern European Jews of socialist ideology who believed in the importance of manual labor and the revival of the Hebrew language, and who established the first communal Zionist settlements. Brenner was a man of great contradictions. He despaired and offered hope. He loved but suffered because of it. A tough critic of other people’s work, but a nurturer of talents. One of the great figures in the revival of the Hebrew language. One of the Zionist labor movement’s most prominent intellectuals. He often behaved, looked, and dressed oddly—some said like a prophet. For some he was the best and purest man in the Yishuv. He was killed, along with five companions, by Arabs from Jaffa on May 2, 1921, on the second day of that year’s riots, not far from an isolated Jewish farmhouse where he had been living, a short way outside the city, near Abu Kabir. The story was that the other residents had urged him to leave for safety when the violence began, but he insisted on remaining with them.

Brenner was painfully aware of Arab hostility toward the Zionist enterprise; among Arabs he felt just like he had among the gentiles who inflicted pogroms against Jews in Eastern Europe. Unlike a number of his friends, he had a hard time believing that the Jews would be able to forge an alliance with Palestine’s Arabs or with the Arab working class. Deep down, the Orient terrified him. He was certain that he would be killed by Arabs. About a year before his murder he wrote words that later seemed prophetic:

Tomorrow, perhaps, the Jewish hand writing these words will be stabbed, some “sheikh” or “hajj” will stick his dagger in it in full sight of the English governor, as happened to the agronomist Shmuel Haramati, and it, this hand, will not be able to do a thing to the sheikh and the hajj, because it does not know how to wield a sword. Yet the remnants of the people of Israel will not be lost. The stock of Jesse [the Davidic line] will not be extinguished. He will tell of our enemies to his sons—it will be told to those who remain. It will be told that we are the victims of evil, victims of the malicious ambition to gain power and property, victims of imperialism. Not us. We had no imperialist aspirations. (Y. Brenner 1985, 4:1758)

And eulogizing Avraham Sher, who had been slain in the Upper Galilee in February 1920, Brenner wrote in the monthly journal Ha’adamah: “Our savage neighbors, as always, know not what they do, whom they murder: humanity’s best” (1985, 4:1479). Many Jews felt the same way when Brenner was killed.

The Savages Know Not

The “savages” did not know who Brenner was, not before and not after they murdered him. Palestinian writing on the events of 1921 hardly mentions Brenner. When it does, it makes no reference to his important place in the life of the Yishuv or to how beloved he was. But there is another side to this story. Brenner himself knew nothing about his neighbors. His worst nightmare was Jewish integration into the Orient. Every bone in his body sensed the weakness of Zionism, the difficulty of living in the Land of Israel, and the horrors of the never-ending pogroms of Eastern and Central Europe. With all that in mind, he could not understand by what right the Arabs of Palestine opposed something that seemed to him so simple and clear and just: the desire of Jews from Romania, Lithuania, Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and everywhere else to save their lives and honor and to rebuild themselves as whole human beings, as a nation in the land of their fathers. Thus, the Arabs could only be savages, fighting against everything human and decent.

Humanity

Brenner arrived in Palestine in 1909. Between 1904 and 1911, Ibrahim al-Dabbagh of Jaffa published in Cairo a periodical called al-Insaniyya (Humanity), which was distributed in Jaffa as well. Brenner never read it, nor could he have read it had he wanted to. It presumably never occurred to him that there might be a periodical with such a name available in the port city where he disembarked. Neither did he know the extent to which the Arab press of the time identified with the persecuted Jews, and how furiously it condemned the pogroms in Eastern Europe—as shown by Shaul Sehayek in his PhD dissertation “Demut haYehudi beRe’i ha‘Itonut ha‘Aravit bein haShanim 1858–1908” (The image of the Jew in the Arabic press 1858–1908; 1991). So great was Brenner’s terror of the Arabs and so potent his disappointment at the fact that in Palestine, too, the Jews were no more than a powerless minority that he could think of no solution other than insularity and isolation from the non-Jewish environment. Only in the last essay he wrote, just before he died, did he express a shred of regret for the path he had chosen. He related an encounter with an Arab youth who addressed him as he was walking along the edge of Jaffa: “He asked me something in a clear, somewhat strident voice, clearly accented and precisely pronounced. I am sorry to say that I did not know how to respond to him, because I never taught myself to speak the Arabic tongue . . . at that moment I castigated myself harshly for never having taught myself to speak the Arabic tongue” (Y. Brenner 1962, 212).

It is a rare confession on his part. His writing makes it clear how far he was from an understanding of Arab society or even from a desire to understand it. He saw his position clearly, but he was also willfully blind to its implications. The world, in his experience, was full of hatred of Jews, and to cope with it one had to fill oneself with hatred. So he wrote to his pacifist friend Rabbi Binyamin (the pen name of the journalist Yehoshua Radler-Feldmann): “What, R. Binyamin, we are supposed to talk about love for our neighbors, natives of this land, if we are sworn enemies, yes, enemies. . . . We must, then, be prepared here also for the results of hatred and to use all means available to our weak hands so that we can live here as well. Since becoming a nation we have been surrounded by hatred, and as a result are also full of hatred—and that is as it should be, cursed are the soft, the loving” (1985, 4:1038).

Unlike Jewish political leaders, Brenner saw no reason to conceal Jewish hatred of the gentiles, the joy of having the opportunity to kill and be killed for the Jewish homeland. He felt no compunctions about declaring that war and bloodshed could be salutary, inasmuch as they could help shape and forge the nation. Others also spoke of the joy of dying for one’s homeland and the benefits of war, but it is difficult to find such clear-cut praise for hatred of the Arabs and gentiles in the works of other Zionist thinkers.

Uri, His Son

Uri Brenner was seven years old when his father was murdered. When violence broke out in Palestine in 1921, he was living in Berlin with his mother, Chaya Broide. By 1929 they had moved back to Tel Aviv, and Uri was a fatherless boy of fifteen. His uncle, Yeshayahu (Isaiah) Broide, was then serving as vice-chairman of the Zionist Executive in Palestine. Just prior to the riots Uri was tapped to enlist in the Haganah, the Yishuv’s defense force, and he immediately agreed. Along with other teenagers, he served as a messenger between the organization’s headquarters and outposts on the dividing line between Jewish and Arab neighborhoods, not far from the place where his father had been murdered. And not far from the home of the ‘Awn family. Forty years later, Uri Brenner gave his testimony for the Haganah History Archives: “The subject of the Haganah is connected to my father, and his death in 1921 was a painful subject that was repressed, perhaps because it was not spoken of at home, and perhaps because of an urge for revenge. The offer [from a member of the Haganah to enlist] was for me a saving moment in a certain sense, because I was suspended between an aggressive, avenging spirit and a defensive one” (HHA, testimony 11/7).

Uri Brenner chose an aggressive defense. In 1937 he was one of the founders and defenders of Kibbutz Ma‘oz Hayyim in the Beit She’an Valley, and a year later he joined the Special Night Squads organized by a British officer Orde Wingate, who taught that the best defense was an offense. In HaKibbutz HaMe‘uchad baHaganah (The united kibbutz movement in the Haganah; 1980), Uri Brenner wrote of the squads’ cruel and vengeful streak. In 1943 he enlisted in the Palmach, the Yishuv’s elite strike force that was closely tied to the kibbutz movement, and in the 1948 war he served as its deputy commander. In a sense, he embodied what his father had written about: “Yet the remnants of the people of Israel will not be lost. The stock of Jesse will not be extinguished.” But if Uri bore hatred of non-Jews in his heart; if he reveled at the opportunity to spill blood, as his father had; if he shared the complexities of his father’s attitude to the Arabs and the culture of force, he did not say so in anything he wrote.

Keep in Mind

The riots of 1921 were just one memory in the minds of the people of Jaffa and Tel Aviv in 1929. That is, those involved in the riots—assailants, victims, horrified onlookers, provocateurs, journalists and readers, poultry merchants, thinkers, warriors, pacifists, Jews, Arabs, Britons, washers of hands, assumers of responsibility, criers for peace—all went into these disturbances with heavy historical baggage that played a role in how they understood and responded to events. In this respect, the genesis of the disturbances long preceded their actual beginning and even the births of their protagonists. The riots’ roots reach deep into oral traditions and myths, stories of famous people; tales of real and imagined enemies told by grandparents; and legends from the Old and New Testaments and Qur’an that the people involved heard as children, in arguments their parents had with friends before the protagonists’ bedtime, while they were trying to fall asleep in their homes in Eastern and Western Europe, in the Hebron highlands and the orange groves of Jaffa, in the glens of Scotland, in Baghdad, and everywhere else they came from—while they lay in beds in proper houses or slept on rags with their siblings in a hut. The events began in souls imprinted with stories and were shaped when children had their first encounters with strangers. Traditions and stories provided the templates, and experiences were the material that, melted together, was cast in these molds—except that sometimes what came out was not the shape imprinted there but its reverse, and at other times the figure that emerged was twice as sharp as the mold itself. But it did not end there—the templates themselves were melted down and recast at junctures in these people’s lives, when they were at school or under the instruction of an Eastern European melamed or a local sheikh, when they helped their parents in the fields or served as cheap hired labor. That was when their political and nationalist consciousness awakened—or did not.

It would be best, then, to start in all those places at once, but that is not possible. A writer has no choice but to choose a starting point and to move forward and backward in time, keeping in mind always the gap between what he knows and what people knew at the time.

Knowledge Gaps

The participants in and observers of the events of 1929 knew their times better than anyone who did not live through them. However, we have knowledge of what happened in their future, which they obviously lacked at the time. We know what happened in Hebron and Motza and Jaffa and Safed and Hulda and Jerusalem and Acre and Migdal ‘Eder and so on, while they, in real time, saw only what was happening before their eyes. We also know how events progressed after the riots, that animosity between Jews and Arabs did not end, and that there was a fateful war in 1948 in which the Arabs were defeated and during which the State of Israel was founded. We know that hundreds of thousands of Arabs became refugees and that the conflict continues. This knowledge makes it difficult for later generations to view events from the perspective of those who lived through them. Jews today have trouble really feeling the dread felt by Jews who lived as a persecuted minority (even if some observers believe that existential fear is the key to understanding Israel’s actions in the present). Palestinians today have trouble imagining Palestine as it was at the end of the 1920s, part of a spacious Arab land from which one could travel unimpeded to neighboring Arab countries and within which were scattered, here and there, Jews who were trying to gain a foothold in the country and to take control of it.

But all that is connected to how the events played out and turned out. We are still at the beginning, in Jaffa in 1929, seeking to understand what happened in this city and what we can learn from what happened there regarding the 1929 riots as a whole. Before we investigate what occurred in the ‘Awn family’s house, let’s take a look at the book in which their story appears: Biladuna Filastin (Our land of Palestine).

Our Land of Palestine

The first volume of the Biladuna Filastin encyclopedia was published in 1947. The set was completed in 1965. Al-Dabbagh relates in his introduction to the new complete edition: “When I issued the first volume of my book, I did not imagine that the Nakba would take place in the country within the year and disperse its inhabitants as a storm scatters the sand” (2002, 1:7). He goes on to describe how, at the height of the fighting, before Jaffa fell, his cousin arrived on a boat from Egypt and persuaded him to sail away, in so doing saving his life:

I did not take anything on the trip except for a small suitcase containing the manuscript of more than 6,000 pages of my book on the history and geography of Palestine, my only book, the product of more than a decade of collecting material and writing. I blessed God for the fact that, a few days earlier, I had sent my wife and children to ...