Did Zionists Start Every Violent Clash in Palestine between 1882 and 1930?
The evidence suggests yes. The basic pattern: Zionists initiated, Palestinians retaliated
“Palestine, thinly populated, in which the Jews constitute today 10 per cent of the population, must be evacuated for the Jews.” — Nachman Syrkin, founder of Labor Zionism, 1898
“We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and gun barrel, we shall not be able to plant a tree or build a house.” — Moshe Dayan, Israeli Minister of Defense, 1956
When I began studying the creation of modern Israel, I saw something that surprised me: Before 1930, every major violent incident in Palestine was either clearly or plausibly started by Zionist settlers. None were clearly started by native Palestinians.
A general fact surprised me too: Unlike European Jews who went to countries like the US, most Zionists were segregationists.
“Let us not be too familiar with the Arab fellahin lest our children adopt their ways and learn from their ugly deeds. Let all those who are loyal to the Torah avoid ugliness and that which resembles it and keep their distance from the fellahin and their base attributes.” — Moshe Smilansky, 1890
“A preservation of national integrity is impossible except by a preservation of racial purity, and for that purpose we are in need of a territory of our own where our people will constitute the overwhelming majority.” — Ze’ev Jabotinsky, 1904
Segregationism explains why Zionists bought land from absentee landlords and expelled the tenant farmers who had lived there for generations. The dispossession of Palestine’s natives began as early as 1882 at Rosh Pina.
“I can still hear the dirge of the Arab women on the day their families left their village of Ja’una, today Rosh Pina... The men rode asses and the women walked behind them, bitterly weeping, and the valley was filled with their keening. From time to time they would stop to kiss the stones and the earth.” — Yitzhak Epstein, “The Hidden Question”, 1907
The history of Zionism is a history of Palestinian weeping and keening.
The following short timeline focuses on Zionist-Palestinian conflicts that had lasting consequences. I’m leaving out incidents like killings of settlement guards during bandit raids — Palestine’s raiders attacked Muslims and Christians too. Anyone who talks about banditry in Palestine should note that the first Jews at Rosh Pinna “moved into al-Ja’una, living among the Arabs for fear of being unable to cope with Bedouin raids on their own.”
1882, Safed. Initial Violence: A Zionist killed a native Palestinian
…the accidental shooting death of an Arab man in Safed, during a wedding in December 1882, by a Jewish guard of the newly formed Rosh Pinna. In response, about 200 Arabs descended on the Jewish settlement throwing stones and vandalizing property.
1886, Petah Tikva. Initial Violence: Zionists expelled natives from their homes and seized their mules
…the Jewish settlers demanded that their tenants vacate the disputed land and started encroaching on it. On March 28, a Jewish settler crossing this land was attacked and robbed of his horse by Yahudiya Arabs, while the settlers confiscated nine mules found grazing in their fields, though it is not clear which incident came first and which was the retaliation. The Jewish settlers refused to return the mules, a decision viewed as a provocation.
The following day, when most of the settlement’s men folk were away, fifty or sixty Arab villagers attacked Petach Tikva, vandalizing houses and fields and carrying off much of the livestock. Four Jews were injured and a fifth, an elderly woman with a heart condition, died four days later.¹⁴
1913, killing of Moshe Barsky. Initial Act of Violence: A Zionist killed or wounded one or more natives
Barsky had gone on a mule to obtain medicine from Menahemia for his friend and fellow kibbutz member, Shmuel Dayan.⁸ When the mule returned without him, a search was undertaken and his body was discovered.⁹
According to the memoir of a fellow pioneering kibbutznik, “It wasn’t until late that night that we found him, lying with a stick and a pair of shoes on his head: this was a sign of vengeance, it meant that in the fighting he had killed or wounded someone.”¹⁰ ¹¹
No one knows what Barsky actually did or whether he did that accidentally, intentionally, or in self-defense, but the “sign of vengeance” made his friends believe he committed the first major violence. Barsky’s death is one of the few early incidents that were plausibly initiated by Zionists but may have been initiated by native Palestinians.
March 1, 1920, Battle of Tel Hai. Initial Act of Violence: A Zionist shot a native
During the Franco-Syrian War, Palestinians supported Syria while Zionists claimed to be neutral, but many Palestinians suspected the colonists were helping their fellow Europeans, the French. When Palestinians searched the settlement of Tel Hai for French soldiers, a colonist began shooting:
“Devorah Dreschler standing next to the window got startled and fired a shot, and then the mess began. People were killed one after another.” — Dafna Harpaz, granddaughter of Kalman Cohen, the leader of Tel Hai
Six settlers and five Palestinians were killed. Afterward, most people agreed the fighting was due to a tragic misunderstanding. The leader of the Palestinian searchers, Kamal Hussein al-Yusuf, supported the Jewish community both before and after the battle. Two future Prime Ministers of Israel, David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharett, defended him, and Hashomer, the Zionist vigilantes who killed Arabs that they thought had killed Jews, never harmed Hussein.
But militant Zionists like Ze’ev Jabotinsky use the fight at Tel Hai as propaganda, insisting it was a pogrom.
April 4–7, 1920, the Palestine/Nebi Musa riots. Initial Act of Violence: Zionists threw stones
By the end of March, Jabotinsky was holding daily militia training in Jerusalem with up to 600 volunteers. Palestinians like Amin al-Husayni saw that as proof the colonists were about to seize their land.
On April 4, al-Husayni made a speech about British plans to give Palestine to the Zionists. A colonist spat on a native’s nationalist banner, and when the native pushed the spitter away, Zionists began throwing stones. In the riot, five Zionists, four natives, and seven Britons were killed.
The Palin Commission put most of the blame on the Zionists, “whose impatience to achieve their ultimate goal and indiscretion are largely responsible for this unhappy state of feeling.” Al-Husayni was sentenced to ten years in prison for incitement. Jabotinsky was sentenced to fifteen because he had illegal weapons.
Most Palestinians denounced the riots:
“Sheikhs from 82 villages in the Jerusalem and Jaffa areas…issued a formal statement saying that, in their view, Zionist settlement was not a danger to their communities. Similar declarations [were] repeated in cablegrams sent to London in 1922, as hundreds of sheikhs and mukhtars lent their authority and support to Jewish immigration.”
All prisoners were pardoned in hope of restoring peace.
1921 Jaffa Riots. Initial Act of Violence: Zionist groups fought in the streets
After the American Zion Commonwealth expelled nearly two thousand native families, many of the expelled took refuge in Jaffa.
On May 1, two marching Zionist groups, the Socialist Workers Party and Labor Unity, met during their May Day marches and began fighting. The British fired shots to disperse them, and rumors spread that Zionists were attacking Muslims. Four days later, forty-seven colonists and forty-eight natives were dead.
Though the violence began with Zionists fighting each other, the British said, “the fundamental cause of the violence and the subsequent acts of violence was a feeling among the Arabs of discontent with, and hostility to, the Jews, due to political and economic causes, and connected with Jewish immigration.”
However, that claim was weakened by the report’s balancing conclusion: “Zionists were not doing enough to mitigate the Arabs’ apprehensions.”
For the next eight years, the contest between Palestinians and Zionists was fought mostly with words. The British made al-Husayni the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the cleric in charge of Jerusalem’s Islamic holy places, and he became the most militant Palestinian opponent of Zionism. Meanwhile, Jabotinsky started the fascist Revisionist Party with the goal of turning Palestine and Transjordan into a Jewish state by building “an iron wall of bayonets”.
1929 Palestine riots and Hebron massacre. Initial Act of Violence: Zionists killed Arabs
The 1929 Palestine riots erupted on August 23. Israeli historian Tom Segev wrote about the first violence that day in One Palestine, Complete:
“…the tensions had reached the Jewish 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 occurred between 12:00 and 12:30.”
The tensions began much earlier. In its report on the riots, the Shaw Commission noted,
“Between 1921 and 1929 there were large sales of land in consequence of which numbers of Arabs were evicted without the provision of other land for their occupation. … The position is now acute. There is no alternative land to which persons evicted can remove. In consequence a landless and discontented class is being created. Such a class is a potential danger to the country.”
The Commission concluded that the chief incident leading up to the riots was the Wailing Wall demonstration eight days earlier by Jabotinsky’s Revisionists:
The long series of incidents connected with the Wailing Wall…must be regarded as a whole, but the incident among them which in our view contributed most to the outbreak was the Jewish demonstration at the Wailing Wall on 15 August 1929.
That incident had ancient roots. The hill called Temple Mount is a holy site for Jews, Christians, and Muslims who all believe it was the site of Solomon’s Temple, aka the First Temple. The western retaining wall is all that remains of Herod’s Temple, aka the Second Temple. Jews called it the Wailing Wall and went there to lament.
Several centuries after Romans destroyed Herod’s temple, Muslims built Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock on the hill. Muhammad is believed to have tied his horse, Buraq, at the western wall before visiting Heaven, so they call it Buraq’s Wall.
When Zionists began colonizing Palestine, Temple Mount and the western wall took on political importance:
From the late nineteenth century onwards pictures and postcards often depicted a rebuilt Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount, sometimes next to al-Aqsa Mosque or the Dome of the Rock and sometimes in their place.⁷ The heads of the Yeshivot in the Old Yishuv also used photomontages showing the Dome of the Rock with the Star of David and flags of Zion superimposed in fundraising appeals to Diaspora Jews.⁸ It thus came to be widely believed that a Jewish conspiracy was at work to replace the Muslim holy sites by a rebuilt Jewish Temple.⁷
Historian Michael J. Cohen summarized the culmination of the conflict over the wall in Britain’s Moment in Palestine: Retrospect and Perspectives, 1917–1948:
“On 14 August 6000 Jews demonstrated in Tel Aviv, brandishing banners inscribed: “The Wall is Ours”. That same evening, some 3000 Jews held prayers at the Wall itself. The next day, large numbers of orthodox Jews gathered to pray at the Wall, accompanied by some 300 brawny youths with staves, members of a right wing youth group. After shouting slogans, they all dispersed. On the following day thousands of Moslems flocked to the Wall, listened to sermons, burned Jewish prayer books and removed the notes that pious Jews habitually pushed into the crevices in the Wall.”
In the next two days, several fights broke out between Zionists and native Palestinians— no one has determined who struck the first blow. A Sephardic Jew, Abraham Mizrachi, was knifed — he may have been the first Palestinian Jew to be killed by other Palestinians in the fight over Palestine’s future. When a policeman came to arrest the killer, a Jewish mob attacked him, then began beating Muslims and burning their homes. One Muslim, ‘Ali ‘Abdallah Hasan, was killed in retaliation even though he had nothing to do with Mizrachi’s killing.
Over the following week, the police recorded twelve attacks by Jews on Arabs and seven by Arabs on Jews. Then, on August 23, several Arabs were killed, and riots raged in Palestine. The worst incidents are remembered as the Hebron massacre. When the rioting subsided, 133 Jews were killed and 339 wounded; 116 Arabs were killed and 232 wounded.
After 1929, the history of conflict in Palestine becomes more complicated. Until then, Arab Muslims and Christians had distinguished between the Arab Jews they saw as “Ottoman brothers loved by all the Ottoman races” and the European Jews they saw as a threat to their homeland. In 1929, the emphasis shifted from Europeans versus Palestinians to Jews versus Palestinians. As the conflict became even more vicious, the binationalist dream of two people sharing one homeland began to die.
Related: Why Do Palestinians Deserve What Zionists Did?
Dueling Zionisms: The Best Lost, the Worst Won; or, Jabotinsky beat Einstein
