Re: Israel's long-term dream for itself and the world? When G-d is back

<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> In soc.culture.usa TonyaK911 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > Here in the good old United States we say: "high walls make good
neighbors!"
> > The rest is but a utopian dream.
> > The borders are being drawn as we speak. They go along the security
fence.
> > If Arabs learn to live behind it without violence and provocations they
will
> > be allotted their share of brotherhood-of-man. If not, the fence can be
> > moved further on.
>
> Ah, I see:  If the Palestinians resist their ethnic cleansing, they will
get
> more.
>
> Thress cheers for pax Judeo-Americana.

This miserable story is a coin with two sides and has deep historic roots.
So before you dwell in your "hip" analyses of what's going on, take some
time to get a bit informed on part of the other side of the coin, and start
here for instance:

One Palestine, Complete
Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate
by Tom Segev

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805048480/qid=1029251275/sr=8-1/ref=
sr_8_1/104-1095209-4700744

Part II, Terror (1928 - 38)


Chapter 14
HEBRON


[1] p.314-316

   In the early-morning of Friday, August 23, 1929, thousands of Arab
villagers began streaming into Jerusalem from the surrounding villages. They
had come to pray at the Temple Mount; many were armed with sticks and
knives, and the city was filled with a sense of tension and violence. Harry
Luke, as acting high commissioner, requested reinforcements from Amman.
Toward 9:30 the Jewish merchants began closing their stores. About an hour
and a quarter later, the mufti promised the Jerusalem police commander that
the worshipers were carrying sticks and knives only out of fear that the
Jews might try to create some sort of provocation. When one of the preachers
made a nationalistic speech calling on the Islamic faithful to fight against
the Jews to the last drop of their blood, mufti al-Husseini urged his
community to keep the peace.

   At roughly 11:00 A.M., twenty or thirty gunshots were heard on the Temple
Mount, apparently intended to work up the crowd. Several hundred worshipers
swarmed through the alleys of the marketplace and began attacking Jewish
pedestrians. Edwin Samuel, Luke's secretary, was in his office, not far from
the Nablus Gate. The sound of the mob was indistinct and seemed to come from
far away; Samuel at first thought he was hearing the buzz of a swarm of
bees. A crowd had gathered beneath his window. Luke quickly got the muft on
the phone and demanded that he take control of his people. The mufti came to
talk to the mob, but Luke's impression was that the religious leader's
presence was not calming the people down - in fact, it seemed to be having
precisely the opposite effect. Later, the mufti explained that by the time
he'd arrived, the crowd had been joined by Arabs injured by Jews, which made
keeping the peace very difficult. Edwin Samuel remembered the flash of the
rioters' daggers glinting in the noonday sun.

   At midday, Edward Keith-Roach was on a tour of the Old City. Near the
Jaffa Gate, he saw a Jew running for his life, followed by a crowd of Arab
thugs waving sticks. Yitzhak Ben-Zvi also saw a man fleeing from a gang - he
may have been the same one. Ben-Zvi had been sitting in the Zionist
Executive office on Jaffa Street. At first he was told that the worshipers
were dispersing quietly; then he heard there were problems. He rushed to the
Jaffa Gate, where he met the man, bloody and injured. Before being rushed to
the hospital, the man managed to tell Ben-Zvi that he had been sitting in
the doorway of his son's shop when the first of the worshipers came down
from the Temple Mount and pounced on him.

   While this was taking place, the tensions had reached the Jewsih Mea
She'arim neighborhood, and two or three Arabs were murdered there. A report
from the American consulate, which documented the events in nearly
minute-by-minute detail, determined that the killings occured between 12:00
and 12:30. Afterward there was much controversy over whether the day's first
victims had been Jews or Arabs.

   Violence spread quickly throughout most of the city and into its suburbs.
"Shots could be heard from both sides of the house," wrote Shmuel Yosef
Agnon, a resident of Talpiot. In all the noise he heard a voice calling,
"hawajah," "sir" in Arabic, and realized that the Arabs were close. He later
recalled, "The shooting grew louder. I rubbed my ears; I wondered whether my
sense of hearing had been impaired. Suddenly came the alarming awareness
that we were alone in Talpiot, there was no one to defend us...there was no
answer to the Arabs' gunfire from the English side. The English had deceived
us."

   The police were, for all intents and purposes, helpless. The force had
only 1,500 men in the entire country; the great majority were Arab, with a
small number of Jews and some 175 British officers. Since the general
situation had shortly before been judged peaceful, a larger police force was
deemed unnecessary; in fact, as later noted by an aide-de-camp to High
Commissioner Chancellor, the country's internal security was maintained
largely through the force of Lord Plumer's personality. The Arabs in the
force were reluctant to act for another reason; they were afraid of killing
rioting Arabs and then becoming the target of vendettas by the victims'
families. While waiting for the reinforcements Luke had requested, many
administration officials were required to attach themselves to the police
force, even though they were not trained; the Jews among them were called up
but then sent back to their offices. At some point, several English theology
students from Oxford who happened to be in the city were deputized. Until
extra troops arrived, Luke had the city's telephone lines disconnected and
declared a curfew.

   While only Jews were being attacked, the British police held back from
the mob. The same aide-de-camp to Chancellor later judged this was a wise
decision. Had they shot into the Arab crowd, he reasoned, the Arabs would
have turned their anger on the police, and the British force would have
faced the mob defenseless. The police were very tired the first day of the
riots, having slept little the previous night.

   In the Yemin Moshe neighborhood some residents greeted the Arabs with
gunfire, although most of Jerusalem's Jews did not defend themselves. The
Haganah defense organization, set up in the aftermath of the Jaffa riots,
was still only a loose confederation of local cells, not all of which obeyed
the central command; it had no real ability to take action. In Jerusalem's
Rehavia quarter, the Haganah met in Ben-Zvi's backyard. Margery Bentwich,
the attorney general's sister, lived not far away; she described a parade
conducted by a few youngsters in the neighborhood's streets. They carried
sticks and looked to her like the rabble in some Shakespearean play. At the
outbreak of violence, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi demanded that weapons be distributed
to the Jews but was turned down. In the days to follow he repeated the
demand and was again refused.



[2] p.316-321

   When Superintendent Raymond Cafferata received an order to leave Jaffa
and assume command of the police force in Hebron and the surrounding area,
he considered the post a challenge. "Divisional work especially in an area
like this is awfully interesting and full of experience and incident," he
wrote to his mother. He had about forty villages under his control, he said,
and "some of them are dashed bad ones and there is always tons of crime."
Bandits would cross the border from Transjordan to attack camel caravans;
every other man was armed to the teeth, Cafferata remarked. The environment
stimulated his love for adventure. There were about 20,000 people living in
Hebron then, mostly Muslim Arabs, with a few hundred Jews - 800 according to
the Jewish Agency; Cafferata put the number at 600.

   Cafferata came from a good home - his father was a Liverpool solicitor -
but he had been lax in his studies. In an unpublished memoir, most of which
was burned, Cafferata wrote that he was frequently beaten by his teachers;
once or twice he was expelled. Apparently, he excelled at soccer, a talent
noted many years later by his commanders in his personal file. At the age of
seventeen he began working as a railroad clerk and hated every minute of it.
Then, he wrote, fate smiled upon him and World War I broke out. Like many
young men, he lied about his age, claiming to be twenty-one and enlisted in
the army. He took part in the battle of Flanders; his commander described
him as an excellent officer - energetic, efficient, bold and capable,
winning the confidence of his fellow officers and them. The King of Belgium
decorated him. After the war, Cafferata joined the Royal Irish Constabulary
and took part in suppressing the riots in Ireland. From 1921 on he served in
the Palestinian police. When he was transferred to Hebron in early August
1929, he was thirty-two years old and a bachelor. His friends called him
"Caff".

   The transfer had happened very quickly: Cafferata's predecessor had to
return home suddenly, leaving barely enough time for Cafferata to pack his
personal belongings. There was another problem as well: he had just met the
love of his life. "It is a bit hard having to leave, " Cafferata told his
mother. Peggy Ford-Dunn was visiting Palestine, and the two had met at the
Jaffa hockey club. He felt lonely in Hebron - there were no British people
in the town except for two elderly missionaries. He spent his first days
getting organized, renting the house that had served his predecessor. He had
to pay the rent in advance, which also came as an unpleasant surprise, but
at least the house was furnished; except for linens, it had everything. The
house was large, and Cafferata felt a little odd living there alone after so
many years of army camps. He also had to buy an automobile. A five
horse-power Citroen cost him fifty-five Palestinian pounds; it was more
economical than American cars, he remarked. He hoped the bad roads in the
area would not wreck it.

   His many preoccupations may explain why Cafferata did not have more time
to devote to Hebron's problems. He would later tell a commission of inquiry
that he had managed to meet only a few local Arab leaders, and he had not
yet become closely acquainted with the small Jewish community. When news of
the escalating tensions in Jerusalem reached Hebron, Cafferata sent
plainclothes men into the streets to find out what was going on; the Hebron
police had no intelligence network. He himself visited some nearby villages
and met with the mukhtars to get a sense of which way the wind was blowing.
His impression was that the Arabs in the region had no serious grievences.
The harvest was good; with the exception of some minor brawls here and
there, everything was fine, they told him. They did not mention the Jews.

   Cafferata spoke to the city's Jews as well. He learned that they had been
living in Hebron for generations, that they knew their Arab neighbors well
and regarded many of them as friends. In fact, the Sephardic community had
been living in Hebron for eight hundred years, the Ashkenazim for perhaps
one hundred. Some were connected to the Slobodka Yeshiva; others engaged in
trade, crafts, and the dairy business or made their living as moneylenders.
The Zionist Anglo-Palestine Bank had a branche in the city. A few dozen Jews
lived deep within Hebron, in a kind of ghetto where there were also several
synagogues. But the majority lived on the outskirts, along the roads to
Be'ersheba and Jerusalem, renting homes owned by Arabs, a number of which
had been built for the express purpose of housing Jewish tenants. The rent
they payed was a significant component of the town's economy, and relations
between the landlords and their tenants was generally good.

   After the British conquest, as Jewish immigration increased and the
Zionist program progressed, and as the Arab national movement developed,
tensions arose in Hebron as well. Arabs harassed Jews on a daily basis,
cursing them on the streets and even on occasion waylaying and beating them.
On the face of it, the incidents were mostly minor, boys throwing stones at
Jewish houses and breaking windows, or a few young Arabs disturbing Jewish
prayers at the cave of Makhpela, Abraham's burial site. But by 1923 the
local Jewish committee believed the episodes were political in nature and
attributed them to the Muslim-Christian Association, which, the Jews
claimed, was preaching hatred. The association was teaching the Arabs
unpleasant songs about Jews and inciting them against their neighbors. The
Jews had made several complaints that the Hebron police force was not doing
enough to protect them.

   The force under Cafferata's command was quite limited: there were
eighteen constables on horseback and fifteen on foot. Of these, eleven were
elderly and in bad physical condition; only one was Jewish. Cafferata had
consulted with Abdallah Kardous, who was acting district commissioner, and
with the deputy commander of the Gaza police, who visited him a few days
before the violence broke out in Jerusalem. Both assured him there was no
cause for concern; regardless of events elsewhere, Hebron would remain
quiet. Being new in the city, he had no reason to doubt these assessments,
and, indeed, all was peaceful in Hebron - until the early afternoon of
Friday, August 23.

   At 2:45 Cafferata reported nothing unusual, but having heard of the
trouble in Jerusalem, he decided at 3:00 to station three of his men at the
outskirts of the town; their task was to search for weapons in the cars
coming back from prayers in Jerusalem. The passengers who stopped spoke of
what was going on there, and the rumors that Jews were killing Arabs spread
quickly. People soon began gathering at the municipal bus station, intending
to travel to Jerusalem. One man, Sheikh Talib Markha, made a speech.
Cafferata went to the station to persuade the crowd that the rumors were
baseless; as he approached, Sheikh Markha fell silent. Everything was quiet
in Jerusalem, Cafferata lied, estimating the crowd at around seven hundred.
He sent some men to patrol the Jewish houses and went along as well, taking
eight mounted policemen with him. Cafferata noted that many Jews were
standing on their roofs or balconies. He ordered them to go into their
homes, but they ignored him.

   Near the small hotel run by the Schneurson family Cafferata encountered
Rabbi Ya'akov-Yosef Slonim and his daughter. By one account they were on
their way to Cafferata's house. Cafferata's own impression was that they
were running back and forth in the street shrieking for no apparant reason.
Slonim harangued Cafferata and demanded protection, interrupting himself to
trade shouts with the crowd. This drew showers of stones. A Jewish woman
screamed at Cafferata from her balcony. In the meantime he managed to
persuade Slonim to go back into his house. The exchange between the two men
was later the subject of much debate; the principal charge was that
Cafferata had spoken rudely. No one disputed that he had done everything to
ensure that the Jews remained in their homes.

   After getting the rabbi and his daughter off his hands, Cafferata turned
his attentions back to the crowd. On horseback, he and his men, using only
their clubs, tried to disperse the people. At around 4:00 Arabs began
gathering at the Hebron yeshiva and hurling stones. The only people inside
the yeshiva were the sexton and a student, Shmuel Halevi Rosenholz,
twenty-four years old, born in Poland. Hit by a stone that came in through
one of the windows, he attempted to leave the building and found himself
facing a group of Arabs. He tried to retreat back into the yeshiva, but it
was too late: the Arabs grabbed him and stabbed him to death. The sexton
managed to hide in a well and escaped. The Jews prepared to bury Rosenholz
immediately, before the onset of the Jewsih Sabbath. Caffetara feared that
the funeral would inflame the rioters, so he ordered the attendence limited
to six people.

   Cafferata then proposed to Abdallah Kardous that he summon all the
mukhtars in the area and assign them responsibility for preserving the
peace. The Arab officer objected; he believed that passing the burden to the
Arab leaders would only ignite more violence. By 6:30 Hebron was quiet
again. Cafferata nevertheless asked for reinforcements from Jerusalem; he
was told that none were available. He tried his colleagues in Gaza and
Jaffa, who promised to help. Some two and a half hours later several
mukhtars from the region visited Cafferata. They had heard that Jews were
slaughtering Arabs in Jerusalem; apparently the mufti was demanding they
take action and threatened to fine them if they refused. Cafferata promised
that everything was now peaceful and instructed them to go home and stay
there.

   Indeed, Jerusalem had calmed down by that time. The day's dead amounted
to eight Jews and five Arabs. Fifteen Jews and nine Arabs had been injured.
During the night the residents of Talpiot were evacuated, after having spent
four hours entirely unprotected. One of them was the Hebrew University's
Joseph Klausner. His neighbor, Agnon, later remembered that while they were
crouching, bullets flying around them, Klausner said with great pathos that
he would choose to remain in Talpiot except that his wife was ill. But they
were soon resqued and sent to join refugees evacuated from other
neighborhoods. Before leaving his house, Agnon hastily packed several
manuscripts into a leather briefcase, but in the crush and panic he lost
them. "It had already occured to me that I should leave my writings and
trust them to God's mercies, as all these distraught people could not stand
and wait for me," he wrote. But then a neighbor lit a candle, and they found
the manuscripts.

   The Jews from Talpiot were brought to a community building on HaHabashim
Street. Rehavia's residents spent the night in Ratisbonne Monastery.
According to Margery Bentwich, the wretched events of the day were all
because of the wall. "This business of the wall, how pitiful it is indeed.
Is it a symbol of former glory? Much more of present humiliation. To see a
man fling himself on the stones, kiss them, isn't it revolting? Like praying
to an idol - as if a stone had ears. The best thing that could happen...were
to raze it to the ground...Strange that such a great number of people can
die for an untrue idea and so few can live for a true one." Raymond
Caffetara slept in his office that night.



[3] p.321-324

   On Saturday, August 24, 1929, at around 7:00 A.M. the Sabbath
morningprayer service was about to begin at the home of Eliezer Dan in
Hebron. Dan was Rabbi Slonim's son. The previous night, a few dozen Jews had
huddled there, too afraid to stay in their own homes. Among those present at
the morning service was Y.L. Grodzinsky, a tourist from Poland who had
arrived in Hebron on the thursday before. The prayers had just begun when
Grodzinsky looked out the window and saw several cars packed with Arabs
bearing sticks, swords, knives, and daggers driving in the direction of
Jerusalem. As the vehicles passed the house, the Arabs spied the Jews and
drew their fingers across their throats to signify slaughter.

   A short time later Sheikh Markha walked past the Schneurson hotel.
Schneurson invited him inside and served him a glass of tea. According to
the hotel owner's son, Markha said there was no reason for concern. Nothing
would happen. They could leave the hotel door open. The sheikh himself
testified that Schneurson had even escorted him to the door, arm in arm.
They were friends, the sheikh said. The previous day he had chased away
several Arab boys who were trying to harm Jews.

   Masses of Arabs from the surrounding villages had in the meantime begun
to stream into Jerusalem. At the Dan house, an argument arose. Though he was
a tourist, Grodzinsky was angry at the police order to remain indoors. If
the police could not protect the Jews outside, they would not be able to
protect them inside either, he said, and proposed that the group go to
Cafferata immediately. Some of the men then went out to look for the police
commissioner, but on the way they encountered a hail of stones. One of the
Jews claimed that when they reached Cafferata he sent them away; they were
forbidden to leave their homes, he repeated over and over again. Cafferata
himself denied that he had seen them that morning, and Grodzinsky backed him
up: after going halfway, the delegation returned to Dan's house.

   Cafferata had, however, also observed the convoy of armed Arabs setting
out for Jerusalem. Being short of policemen, he did not try to stop them -
in fact, he was glad they were leaving the city. At around 8:00, the Arabs
began throwing rocks at Jewish homes. The police chief together with all
eighteen mounted policemen tried to chase away the rioters. At this stage,
they were still not armed with rifles. Then he noted several Arabs
attempting to break into an isolated Jewish house, the Heichal home. Two
young Jews emerged from the house, and Cafferata and his men tried to
protect them with their horses, but one of the young men was hit by a stone
and the second was stabbed, right by Cafferata's horse. Both died. Next the
rioters attacked Cafferata himself; he fell off his horse but was not hurt.
He went to fetch another horse and a rifle and took the opportunity to call
again for reinforcements from Jerusalem.

   As prayers continued at the Dan house, Grodzinsky noticed a group of
attackers approaching. "Here come the Arabs," he said, and the worshipers
halted the service. "We went to reinforce the door and ran around the room
like madmen," Grodzinsky recalled. "The shrieks of the women and the babies'
wailing filled the house. With ten other people I put boxes and tables in
front of the door, but the intruders broke it with hatchets and were about
to force their way in. So we left the door and began running from room to
room, but wherever we went we were hit by a torrent of stones. The situation
was horrible. I can't describe the wailing and screaming.

   "In one room my mother was standing by the window shouting for help. I
looked out and saw a wild Arab mob laughing and throwing stones. I was
afraid my mother would be hit, so I don't know how, but I grabbed her and
shoved her behind a bookcase in the corner. I hid another young woman there,
as well as a twelve-year-old boy and a yeshiva student. Finally I went
behind the bookcase myself.

   "Suffocating, we sat on top of one another and heard the sound of the
Arabs singing as they broke into the room, and the shouting and groaning of
the people being beaten. After about ten minutes the house grew still except
for some stifled groans. Then there was loud gunfire, apparently from the
police."

   Outside, Cafferata found himself facing a huge throng attacking Jewish
homes. He ordered his men to shoot directly at the mob and began firing
himself. One man was hit, but Cafferata continued to shoot because he saw no
one fall; another two or three Arabs were hit and the crowd began to
disperse. Cafferata galloped to Jews Street, where he had stationed some of
his men to keep the rioters at bay. In spite of the police presence, the mob
was running amok. Cafferata shot again and knocked down two Arabs, his
report stated. People tried to escape through the marketplace, and in their
flight looted both Arab and Jewish stores.

   A scream came from one of the houses. Cafferata entered the house and
later described what he 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 police constable,
named Issa Sheriff from Jaffa....He was standing with a dagger in his hand.
He saw me and bolted into another room, shouting in Arabic, 'Your honor, I
am a policeman.' I got into the room and shot him."

   Grodzinsky: "I barely managed to get out of my hiding place. It was
difficult to move the bookcase because of the bodies that lay piled up
against it. My eyes were dark of the sight of the dead and the wounded. I
was overcome with terror and trembling. I could find no place to put my
foot. In the sea of blood I saw Eliezer Dan and his wife, my friend
Dubnikov, a teacher from Tel Aviv, and many more....Almost all had knife and
hatchet wounds in their heads. Some had broken ribs. A few bodies had been
slashed and their entrails had come out. I cannot describe the look in the
eyes of the dying. I saw the same scene everywhere. In one room I recognized
my brother's wife, who lay there half-naked, barely alive. The entire house
had been looted, it was full of feathers and there were bloodstains on the
walls....

   "I appraoched the window and saw policemen. I asked them to send a
doctor. That same moment some Arabs passed by carrying a dead man on a
strectcher. When they saw me they set down the stretcher and threatened me
with their fists. I returned to my hiding place. A moment later I heard
voices. They were the voices of the wounded who had gotten up and also of
people who had been miraculously saved by hiding in the shower room behind
the toilet. Apparently the Arabs had gotten as far as the toilet and killed
one of the people there.

   "I recognized my brother among the injured. He had a hatchet wound on his
head and a large bruise on his forehead, probably from a rock. I threw water
on him and he stood up, but died of his wounds a few hours later. Dubnikov
had apparently died of suffocation. His murdered wife lay next to him. I
again approached the window and asked for doctors, because many people could
have been saved with prompt medical help. One of the policemen outside
answered me in Hebrew - soon, he said. About a quarter of an hour later some
cars came to take us to the police. We began taking care of the wounded."

   In a letter to the high commissioner, the Jews of Hebron described other
atrocities: sixty-eight-year-old Rabbi Meir Kastel and seventy-year-old
Rabbi Zvi Drabkin, along with five young men, had been castrated. Baker Noah
Imerman had been burned to death with a kerosene stove. The mob had killed
pharmacist Ben-Zion Gershon, a cripple who had served Jews and Arabs for
forty years; they had raped and killed his daughter as well. Yitzhak
Abujzhdid and Dovnikov had been strangled with a rope. Yitzhak Abu Hanna,
seventy years old, had been tied to a door and tortured until he died.
Two-year-old Menachem Segal had had his head torn off. The letter detailed
other acts of rape and torture. There are photographs of hands and fingers
that had been cut off, perhaps for their rings and bracelets. Houses,
stores, and synagogues had been looted and burned. Some people had survived
only because they had lain under bodies and pretended to be dead. Toward
10:30 A.M. the riot ended and the Arab villagers returned to their homes.

   Sixty-seven Jews had been killed. Most were Ashkenazic men, but there
were also a dozen women and three children under the age of five among the
dead. Seven of the victims were yeshiva students from the United States and
Canada. Dozens of people had been wounded, about half of them women, and
quite a few children, including a one-year-old boy whose parents had both
been murdered. The American consulate reported that nine Arabs had been
killed. The Hebron Jews were buried in mass graves; the survivers, including
the wounded, were taken to Jerusalem.

   While the atrocities were taking place in Hebron, several Arabs from the
village of Kolonia attacked the Maklef family in their home in Motza, a
Jewish village just outside Jerusalem. They murdered the father, mother, and
their son and two daughters, as well as two guests staying in the house.
After the murders they looted the house and set in on fire. Only one son,
Mordechai, was saved; years later he became chief of staff of the Israeli
army. "A dreadful week has passed," Chaim Shalom Halevi wrote to his
parents. He found it hard to return to his daily routine, and could not
understand how other people managed to do so. He felt that life would never
be the same again.


[4] p.324-327

   David Ben-Gurion compared the massacre in Hebron to the Kishinev pogrom,
and he would later use the Nazi expression /Judenrein/ to describe Hebron
after the Jews left. "The pogrom was committed by hebron's Arab masses,"
wrote Rehavam Ze'evi, who edited a book on the event. "All the Arabs of
Hebron did this," he noted, "with the exception of individuals who provided
shelter for their Jewish neighbors." He added the Hebron massacre to the
historic roster of anti-Jewish persecutions. "Pogroms, slaughters, and
massacres have been part of our nations history in their Diaspora and now
this horrifying spectacle has been repeated in the Land of Israel," he
wrote. But he was wrong.

   The murder of Jews in Hebron was not a pogrom in the historic sense.
Unlike attacks on the Jews of Eastern Europe, the authorities did not
initiate the Hebron riots, and the police did not simply stand aside.
Raymond Cafferata did his best, but the Hebron police force was just too
weak to be effective. Thirty years later David Ben-Gurion wrote, "What can a
lone British officer do in a city like Hebron?" He could have been writing
about about British rule in Palestine as a whole. The British could do very
little.

   The riots struck at the professional honor of the men responsible for law
and order in the country and also violated their sense of fairness. Eric
Mills, assistent chief administrative secretary, said that one of the
bitterest moments of his life was when he, an Englishman, saw what had
happened under the British flag. At the same time, the police forces'
actions to save the Jews did not necessarily reflect sympathy for the
Zionist enterprise. Cafferata wrote to his mother that he would not be
surprised if there was another outbreak of violence and Palestine became a
"repetition of the Irish show," unless the government accepted some of the
Arab demands. He believed that the Arabs would not be satisfied with
anything less than a revocation of the Balfour Declaration, and he
criticized the government for refusing to do this.

   The attack on the Jews of Hebron was born of fear and hatred. The Muslims
believed that the Jews intended to violate the sanctity of Islam, and that
the Zionists wanted to disposses them of their country. According to the
American consulate, the Jews were also murdered for economic reasons, as
merchants and moneylenders. The Arabs hated them as foreigners - most had
come from Europe and America. And a few probably attacked Jews out of some
appetite for murder, without any clearly defined reason. many of the rioters
were not from Hebron but from the surrounding villages.

   Most of Hebron's Jews were saved because Arabs hid them in their homes.
The community confirmed this, writing, "Had it not been for a few Arab
families not a Jewish soul would have remained in Hebron." The Zionist
Archives preserves lists of Hebron Jews who were saved by Arabs; one list
contains 435 names. Over two-thirds of the community, then, found refuge in
twenty-eight Arab homes, some of which took in dozens of Jews. "Arabs were
hurt defending their neighbors," one Jew testified afterward. Dr. Abdal Aal,
an Egyptian doctor, received a letter of gratitude from Colonel Kisch for
the assistence he rendered the Jews of Hebron; in addition to the care he
gave the wounded, he himself protected an entire family.

   Some of the saviors may have been expected a reward in exchange for their
help. Still, most saved Jews out of human decency, putting themsleves at
risk, acting in the tradition of hospitality that had induced Khalil
al-Sakakini to open his home to Alter Levine so many years earlier. In any
case, Jewish history records very few cases of a mass rescue of this
dimension.

   In Jerusalem, the violence continued. Shmuel Yosef Agnon feared for the
historical archive he had left in his home. He went from person to person,
trying to enlist help; people had other concerns, however. "People laughed
with broken hearts at this man who came to tell them of crumbling
manuscripts at a time of such terrible trouble," he wrote. In the end
Avraham Krishnevsky, a member of the Haganah, declared, "An archive like
that is worth even human lives," and went with Agnon to Talpiot. The papers
were scattered throughout the house and yard; Agnon did not know what to
save first, and Krishevsky pressed him to hurry. He quickly gathered up some
manuscripts and went back to the city. Joseph Klausner's house had also been
ransacked and his library vandalized.

   Among those wounded in Jerusalem that day was insurence agent Alter
Levine. Soon after the disturbences began, several Arabs from the village of
Lifta entered Romema, Levine's neighborhood, and opened fire. Levine, his
wife, and his daughters lay on the ground for hours until British policemen
beat back the rioters. The house was damaged. Levine sued for compensation.

   The violence spread across the country; Arabs even tried to penetrate Tel
Aviv. The British called in reinforcements from Egypt and Transjordan, but
despite the additional forces the atrocities continued. Events in Safed were
much like those in Hebron. Colonel Kisch met five girls who had seen their
parents killed. Arab spokesmen reported acts of terror perpetrated by Jews,
including the lynching of Arab passerby and the murder of women and
children. In a few cases, the Arabs claimed, Jews attacked people who had
given them refuge. The Jewish Agency investigated some of these charges and
concluded that "in isolated cases" there were Jews "who shamefully went
beyond the limits of self-defence." One memorandum reporting that Jews had
broken into a mosque and set sacred books on fire bears a scibbled note:
"This is unfortunately true." When the violence finally subsided, 133 Jews
and 116 Arabs were dead: 339 Jews and 232 Arabs were injured.

   Shmuel Yosef Agnon changed his attitude towards the Arabs in the wake of
the Hebron events. "Now my attitude is this," he wrote. "I do not hate them
and I do not love them; I do not wish to see their faces. In my humble
opinion we should now build a large ghetto of half a million Jews in
Palestine, because if we do not we will, God forbid, be lost."

   High Commissioner Chancellor returned to Palestine on August 31. Colonel
Kisch returned the same day; he had been in London for the birth of his son.
Chancellor considered the possibility of bombing some Arab villages from the
air, but decided against it. A few days later, his aide-de-camp wrote in his
log that all was quiet in Palestine. Chancellor published a statement
condemning the violence against the Jews and found himself, like Raymond
Cafferata, caught in the middle; the Arabs decided to be insulted.
Chancellor issued a second, more diplomatic statement, and then the Jews
decided to be insulted. After a visit to Hebron, Chancellor wrote to his
son, Christopher, that he could not express the sense of revulsion that had
gripped him. "I do not think that history records many worse horrors in the
last few hundred years," he said. He wanted to go home. "I am so tired and
disgusted with this country and everything connected with it that I only
want to leave it as soon as I can," he wrote.

[end]