Lessons from 1929

What ‘Year Zero’ of the Arab-Israeli Conflict teaches us about October 7

In an excellent interview with Gilad Halpern on the Tel Aviv Review podcast about his recent book The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, Adam Shatz makes a crucial point about Fanon’s attitudes towards violence, paraphrasing him as follows: “An anti-colonial struggle worthy of the name has to recognize that the camp of the coloniser is not an undifferentiated monolith.” In the Algerian context in which Fanon was operating, this would have included French people who sympathized with the Algerian liberation struggle. “The anti-colonial struggle has to sow divisions in the enemy camp,” Shatz continues. “It has to find allies.”

There is nothing surprising about violent Palestinian opposition to Zionism. As Jabotinsky wrote: “The native populations, civilised or uncivilised, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists…Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised.” What is surprising, though, is both its lack of success and the fact that its outcomes have been consistently more catastrophic for the Palestinians themselves than they have been for the Jews. What explains this phenomenon? For answers, we must go back to 1929.

In August 1929, following false claims regarding Jewish ambitions towards the Temple Mount/Al Aqsa, violent riots broke out across Palestine, with the main focal points being Jerusalem, Jaffa, Tzfat and Hebron. They lasted around a week, and by the end 133 Jews had been killed – the vast majority of whom had been murdered by Arabs – and 116 Arabs were killed – around 20 of whom were murdered by Jews, with the majority being killed because of police and military activities.

One of the inevitable traps of history is a tendency to read events backwards and to interpret what eventually did happen as inevitable. In the context of Zionism, this paints all Jewish inhabitants of Palestine in the late Ottoman and Mandate period as singularly focused on the goal of achieving Jewish statehood. This, though, wasn’t the case. As well as the Zionists, there were also two non-Zionist communities present – the Sephardim and the Ultra-Orthodox - who together formed the Old Yishuv, the pre-Zionist Jewish community in Palestine.

The Ultra-Orthodox were generally opposed to Zionism for religious reasons while the Sephardim were generally more ambivalent (although there were some key exceptions to this), largely because they formed a more natural part of the Ottoman world. Despite this, they were not spared by Arab-Palestinian violence in 1929 – indeed most of the victims were from these very communities. The simple reason for this is that the Zionist communities had the Haganah (which had been established in 1920) to protect them. Predictably, following the riots, the non-Zionist communities sought Zionist protection, and began to be absorbed into Palestine’s Jewish mainstream. As Hillel Cohen writes in his magnificent 1929: Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (translated by Haim Watzman): “It was the attacks on Jewish communities in 1929 that forged the Yishuv…Jews who had kept their distance from the Zionist movement drew closer to it, and Zionist institutions accelerated their work to bring the Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origin under the movement’s wing.”

We are often told that Palestinians have no problem with Jews but only with Zionists. If this is true, then the question must be asked: Why were so many non-Zionist Jews murdered in 1929? Cohen questions the simplicity of the Jew/Zionist dichotomy, writing:

This was the summer that made it clear that the distinctions that meant so much to Jews within their community were virtually meaningless to the Arabs. They saw no appreciable difference between Haredim and secular Jews, between Old Yishuv and New Yishuv, and between the different streams within the Zionist labor movement or between the labor movement and the Revisionists. It was not that Muslims thought that all Jews deserved to die – that is not a Muslim belief – but because by the end of the 1920s they felt very powerfully that all these groups of Jews had much more in common than whatever it was that separated them. All of the groups maintained that the Jews were a nation, all of them believed that the Jews had an inalienable right to immigrate to what they viewed as the land of their fathers, and all of them aspired to establish a Jewish state in Palestine (whether that state would be founded by human action or by the Messiah, and whether it would be a capitalist or a socialist state). All of them believed that Jews should be first and foremost loyal to and responsible for each other. All these principles were utterly opposed to the way Palestine’s Arabs saw the place of Jews in their society, and thus all Jews now looked the same to them. As the Arabs saw it, in the summer of 1929 they killed not their Jewish neighbors, but rather enemies who were seeking to conquer their land.

“Paradoxically,” Cohen continues, “their [the Palestinians’] attack accelerated the very process they understood to be so dangerous.” To put it in Shatz’s terms, they viewed the Jews as an undifferentiated monolith that deserved to be targeted with anti-colonial violence. At the heart of this politics was a refusal to accept the basic veracity of the Jewish claim of being a people with an ancient connection and historic rights to Palestine under any circumstances, a refusal that has ebbed and flowed over the years but has haunted the Palestinians to today.

In the 1990s, at the height of the Oslo Accords, Hamas launched devastating suicide bombings in the heart of major Israeli cities. Violence is a form of communication, and the message these bombings delivered was: It doesn’t matter if you live in Hebron or Tel Aviv, whether you are a new oleh or your family has been here for generations – you are all illegitimate settlers and legitimate targets of violence. This dynamic intensified during the Second Intifada when, following the failure of the Camp David talks, there were even more suicide bombs in major Israeli cities. Large numbers of Israelis, including many who had supported Palestinian statehood, logically concluded that the problem was not the occupation (as terrible as it was), but Israel’s very existence.  

The fallout from October 7 reveals a similar dynamic. The victims were not settlers. They lived in sovereign Israeli territory, in areas known for leaning to the left politically, with a disproportionate number of residents active in Israeli-Palestinian peace activities like Road to Recovery. Indeed, many were surprised that they were targeted, just as people are sometimes surprised to learn that the non-Zionist Jews were targeted in 1929. Anyone with a basic understanding of Hamas’s ideology, though, would not have been surprised. In October 2021, for example, Hamas sponsored a ‘Promise of the Hereafter’ conference for the period that would follow the liberation of Palestine, including discussions about which Jews would be killed, who would be allowed to leave or remain, and how to prevent a brain drain that would lead to the country’s collapse. As Sinwar himself said: “We are sponsoring this conference because it is in line with our assessment that victory is nigh…the full liberation of Palestine from the sea to the river [is] the heart of Hamas’s strategic vision.”

On the eve of October 7, Israeli society was intensely divided because of the government’s decision to pursue deeply unpopular reforms to the legal system. Those cracks are beginning to reappear, but October 7 united us, because we concluded that it didn’t matter where we lived or what we thought about Palestinian statehood; by virtue of being Israeli-Jews and supporting the continued existence of a Jewish state we were considered legitimate targets for violence. This is also the message we receive from the protests sweeping across US campuses.

If Israelis think Palestinian violence is aimed at destroying the Jewish State, they will always be united in withstanding it, even if the price is international opprobrium. And while that opprobrium may one day force Israel to face a South Africa-style reckoning, despite recent developments, this still seems far off. The only way for Palestinians to change this dynamic – whether violently or otherwise - would be to follow Fanon’s advice and to try to seek fissures among Israeli-Jews. To do so, though, would mean abandoning the dream of Israel’s destruction, which makes such a change of strategy unlikely for the foreseeable future.