On August 23, 1929, as a result of relentless incitement by the Jerusalem’s Grand Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, mobs of Arabs in and around Yerushalayim launched murderous attacks on Jews. From there, pogroms spread throughout Palestine. Chevron was hit the hardest as thousands of local Arabs marched through the city, shouting “Slaughter the Jews!” as they assaulted and mutilated men, women and children.
Part 2
A few days after the onslaught against Chevron’s Jews, the Jewish Telegraph Agency interviewed a number of survivors who recounted the horrifying events. Their testimonies capture the depravity of their attackers—barbaric crimes that foreshadowed the massacres of October 7th by Hamas terrorists almost a century later.
Almost as sickening, is the survivors’ description of how they were treated afterward by British authorities in Chevron. Instead of compassion, they encountered callousness. Denied even the smallest gestures of humanity—food, water, a word of comfort—the survivors, whose homes had been plundered and burned, were met with cold indifference.
“After the slaughter, all surviving Jews of Chevron were taken to the police courtyard,” recounted Rav Yaakov Yosef Slonim, head of the Ashkenazi rabbonim of Chevron. [His miraculous survival is detailed in Part 1 of this article]. “Our treatment there was very cold and unfriendly. No food or water was given to us. Three hundred people were huddled together in two or three rooms. The weeping and suffering was were intense.”
Rav Slonim stated that all his requests “for permission to telephone to Jerusalem were rejected.”
“Likewise,” added the rabbi, “my demands to the Chief of Police to give us an escort to gather the torn remnants of the community were rebuffed.”
As if they hadn’t suffered enough, the survivors were forced to witness their ancient kehilla come to an end when they were forcibly removed from the city by the British, and taken by bus to Yerushalayim.
In driving the Jews out of the city, the British cloaked their actions in the term ‘evacuation’—as though they were merely relocating residents in advance of a flood or hurricane, ostensibly for their own good.
Most histories of the period parrot the British rationale that expelling the Jews of Chevron was an act of ‘protection,’ when in truth it was a cowardly surrender to the Arab mobs against whom the British refused to use firearms.
[Only when the British themselves were targeted by Arab mobs, as in the 1936 Arab Revolt, did they shoot the perpetrators without hesitation or compunction. British troops killed hundreds of marauding Arabs at the time, crushing the revolt.]
For 34 years, Chevron was Judenrein. This state of affairs continued until after the 1967 Six-Day War when the City of the Patriarchs was liberated and the State of Israel encouraged Jewish settlement there.
Today, there are about 1000 Jews living in the city’s Jewish Quarter including 350 yeshiva students, with 80 percent of the city remaining under the control of the Palestinian Authority. About 6000 Jews live in the neighboring suburb of Kiryat Arba.
Escalating Terror Under the British Mandate
The Chevron pogrom was by no means the first Arab massacre in Palestine. Nine years earlier, in April 1920 during chol hamoed Pesach, some 70,000 Muslims poured into Jerusalem at the annual pilgrimage festival of Nebi Musa. Many were armed and chanting jihadist slogans.
The mayor —Musa Kazem al-Husseini — urged the crowd to “spill their blood” for Palestine, according to historical accounts of the incident. Over the next three days, mobs attacked Jews in the Old City, looting shops and homes. Five Jews were killed and over 200 injured, including 18 critically.
What followed a year later was far more deadly. May 1921 brought an outbreak of violence in and around Yafo that dwarfed anything seen the year before: nearly 50 Jewish dead and 150 wounded over six days of murderous rampaging, and a similar number of Arabs killed by British troops and police.
Turning back the pages of history to the period of the British Mandate over Palestine, the bloody fingerprints of Jerusalem’s Grand Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, instantly jump out. Historians note that this virulent Jew-hater, the most influential and powerful Arab in Palestine for over 20 years, “wrote the playbook” for the annihilationist creed of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other Arab terror groups today.
Haj Amin was the first to enshrine as official policy an uncompromising rejectionism fueled by a Jew-hatred so all-consuming it led him to reject the British partition proposal in the early 1940s. That plan would have created a Palestinian state in 80 percent of Eretz Yisoel, and a very small Jewish state in the remaining 20 percent.
But Haj Amin was implacably opposed to a sovereign Jewish state of any size at all.
For him and his cohorts, the very notion of a Jewish majority in the land was an intolerable insult to Islam. In the space of a few years after the 1917 Balfour Declaration that called for British support for a Jewish homeland in then Palestine, immigration had increased the Jewish population there from 56,000 to 88,000. (The Arabs then numbered about 300,000.)
Muslims were expected to rectify this “disgrace” through unrelenting assaults on Jews, even if it meant sacrificing their own lives to kill the infidels. That rejectionism and corrosive hatred has lived on, and over the last century has entrenched itself into radical Islam’s unceasing terror campaign aimed at destroying the Jewish state.
Fatal Flaw
The tragic irony is that Haj Amin and his poisonous ideology were swept to power through the agency of none other than a highly-placed Jewish official; Herbert Samuel, the British-Jewish High Commissioner of Palestine from 1920-1925.
For the Jews of the yishuv, Samuel’s appointment—the first Jew to govern the land of Israel in 2000 years–sparked tremendous excitement. Raised in an Orthodox Jewish home, Samuel left the fold during his college years but reportedly was careful to observe Shabbos and kashrus in public. To many Jews, his governorship over Eretz Yisroel appeared to be the dawn of a radiant new era.
As it turned out, rarely had something so full of promise descended into something so disastrous.
Samuel seemed driven to prove that his being Jewish had no influence on his Palestine policy. He bent over backward in accommodating the Arabs to convince them that he was impartial. One of his first acts as Commissioner was to issue a sweeping pardon to all the criminals serving jail sentences for murdering Jews during the 1920 riots, including Haj Amin, the key agitator.
The British had identified Haj Amin as the ringleader behind the 1920 Nebu Musa riots, forcing him to go into hiding to avoid imprisonment. But Samuel clung to the notion that the Arabs could be persuaded to cooperate with the new British administration in Palestine if only enough concessions were made.
In addition to pardoning Haj Amin, Samuel did something utterly reckless; he appointed the rabid Jew-hater not only the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, but head of the Supreme Muslim Council, a lifetime position that came with enormous power, money and prestige.
At the same time, Samuel wooed the Arabs by enacting legislation that significantly limited Jewish immigration to Palestine, further undermining British commitment to the Balfour Declaration and deeply alienating the Jewish community.
Within three weeks of his appointment, Haj Amin orchestrated the pogroms of May 1921, which began in Yafo, resulting in the deaths of 43 Jews. His actions fueled continued anti-Jewish violence and deepened the divisions between Arab and Jewish communities.
This unrelenting incitement continued through the 1920s and into the 1930s, reaching new deadly heights in 1936 when Husseini played a central role in inciting the Arab revolt of 1936 to 1939.
The pattern became predictable: The British would make little or no effort to prevent the Arabs from attacking the Jews. To stop the violence, the British commissions had a single solution: appeasement. They routinely recommended that restrictions be made on Jewish immigration and land purchases (from Arab landowners).
The Arabs under Haj Amin came to recognize that they could manipulate the British government and put a stop to Jewish immigration by staging violent riots. They were strikingly successful.
From Glory to Disgrace
Samuel’s tenure marked a fateful turning point, where his choices helped steer British policy onto a pro-Arab course that Britain approvingly embraced—shaping its stance for decades until the present day.
In the aftermath of the Chevron massacre, British policy tilted even further toward appeasing Arab demands, deepening the sense of betrayal within the Jewish community. In the mid-1930s, this policy became more firmly entrenched as the threat of another world war loomed.
Britain’s primary goal was to secure its strategic assets in the Middle East, particularly oil reserves and control over access to India. The British government feared that alienating the Arab population would jeopardize these assets. Securing Arab support, or at least preventing widespread Arab unrest, became a top priority.
Britain took surrender to a new level with the 1939 White Paper, which reversed the key promises made in the Balfour Declaration, effectively cancelling its support for Palestine as a Jewish National Home.
The document slammed the door shut on hundreds of thousands of Jews fleeing Hitler, reducing immigration to a tiny trickle just as Nazi-occupied Europe was turning into a giant death trap for European Jews.
Grand Mufti Aligns with Hitler
Samuel’s illusions about being able to control the Grand Mufti crashed when Haj Amin openly aligned himself with Nazi Germany as World War II broke out—at last forcing the British to confront the monster they had long enabled.
The Grand Mufti cast aside all pretenses and declared himself an implacable enemy not only of the Jews but also of Britain, culminating with his notorious alliance with the Nazis in World War II, and his meeting with Hitler to help plan the “Final Solution” in Eretz Yisrael.
In Baghdad, he played a pivotal role in the April 1941 pro-German coup and was instrumental in the Farhud pogrom against the local Jewish community while also disseminating Nazi propaganda.
Once he arrived in Germany, the Nazis provided the Grand Mufti with several residences and a lavish salary. The enormous size of Husseini’s monthly salary indicates the importance the Nazi regime attached to him and his entourage in advancing Hitler’s “final solution” in the Middle East.
During his stay in Nazi-occupied Europe, the Grand Mufti was involved in recruiting 25,000 Bosnian Muslims for the Waffen-SS. He made anti-Semitic radio broadcasts from Berlin, calling for attacks against Jews, and facilitated the dissemination of propaganda in Arab countries to stir up dissent against the British and French.
With Nazi Germany’s defeat in May 1945, Haj Amin was arrested by the French. While arrangements were being made to have him stand trial for war crimes at Nuremberg, he managed to escape French custody, fleeing first to Egypt and later to Lebanon where he spent his remaining years in forced exile. He died in 1974 of a heart attack, by then a political pariah who had long been a symbol of defeat.
Nevertheless, his poisonous legacy of Jew-hatred and uncompromising rejectionism lives on. Fueled by the British Mandatory Government under the profoundly misguided Herbert Samuel and his successors, it continues to animate Arab terror movements to this day.
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Taming the Tyrant: Deadly Delusion
History is littered with tragedies stemming from naïve delusions such as the one that led Samuel astray—that a tyrant bent on evil can somehow be placated or controlled.
One need only recall British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain who capitulated to Hitler on the eve of WWII under the illusion that he, Chamberlain, had secured ‘peace in our time.’
Or former president Barack Obama, who showered the Iranian ayatollahs with massive incentives in a futile attempt to coax them into a nuclear deal—which, as history shows, they never had the slightest intention of honoring.
Perhaps the best illustration of the misguided belief that one can tame a tyrant with concessions is the bitter saga of arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat. A nephew of Haj Amin al-Husseini and his ideological heir, Arafat earned the title ‘father of modern terrorism’ through a bloody trail of suicide bombings and bus massacres that claimed hundreds of Jewish lives.
Like his uncle Haj Amin, Arafat fled the country to evade justice for his crimes, only to be welcomed back by Western leaders in the 1990s to head the newly created Palestinian Authority. This mass-murderer seized the opportunity of a lifetime not to make peace and to create a Palestinian state, but to escalate his campaign of terror on an even greater scale
Samuel was cut from the same cloth as those who fancied they could coax wild-eyed fanatics to the negotiating table. He was convinced he could temper Haj Amin’s Jew-hatred and thuggery by investing him with the dignity of public and religious office—making him “the adult in the room.”
Samuel wanted so desperately to prove he was “impartial,” he ended up unleashing a virulent Jew-hater who orchestrated riots that claimed the lives of hundreds of defenseless Jews, and played an important role in radicalizing Islam.
In addition, the Grand Mufti ultimately turned against the British, aligned himself with Nazi Germany and did his utmost to assist in Hitler’s plan for the Final Solution and for world dominion.
Only someone who, like Herbert Samuel, was seemingly enamored with the fantasy of being the consummate statesman who could resolve the Jewish-Arab conflict, could have ignored the blatant evidence of Haj Amin’s ruthless character. He was a pitiless tyrant who didn’t hesitate to wipe out dissenters even among his own people.
“Samuel failed to perceive Hag Amin’s readiness to resort to any lengths of brutality against his own people as much as against the Jews and the British,” writes British-American historian Bernard Wasserstein. “Like Neville Chamberlain’s misplaced trust in Hitler, Samuel’s faith in the Mufti was a profound error of personal and political judgment.”
Due to emboldening the Arabs through major concessions and stripping much of the Balfour Declaration from its viability and force, Samuel went from being the most honored official in the yishuv in his day to the most despised.
