This might be one of the most sweeping episodes we have ever done on this show – and that’s saying something.
And I almost want to say that if you want to understand the core of this conflict in one sitting, like really understand it, this is the episode.
Last week, we re-released our episode about the Hebron Massacre of 1929, and if you didn’t get to listen yet, definitely check it out. And for this week’s episode, I sat down with Yardena Schwartz to talk about how the massacre both shaped and represented the conflict in a way almost no other moment has. I thought I knew the story, I’ve researched, written and did a podcast about the story, but Yardena reframed the entire thing for me, with a different lens. She showed me the through lines I had missed.
A through line about the power of propaganda.
A through line about the power of holy sites to capture imaginations and to intoxicate thinking.
A through line about Al Aqsa, located in the Old City of Jerusalem on the compound known as Al Haram al Sharif or the Noble Sanctuary. It is the third holiest site in Islam and the place where Muslims believe the Prophet Muhammad was taken during the Night Journey before ascending to heaven.
It is also the holiest site in Judaism, the Temple Mount or Har Habayit, where the First and Second Temples once stood.
There are more through lines as well, and Yardena lays them out with clarity, precision, and depth.
If you want to understand the conflict.
If you want to understand the foundations beneath the headlines.
If you want to understand what has played out in the holy city of Hebro, then buckle your seat belt for the most riveting, sad, and uplifting of stories.
Yardena Schwartz is an award winning journalist, an Emmy nominated producer, and the author of Ghosts of a Holy War. Her reporting has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Review of Books, The Economist, TIME, National Geographic, and Foreign Policy. She lived in Israel from 2013 to 2023, and before that worked at NBC News and MSNBC. She graduated with honors from Columbia Journalism School, earned an Emmy nomination in 2013, and received the Religion News Association award for excellence in magazine reporting in 2016. She now lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with her husband and children.
Ghosts of a Holy War is her first book and it is one of the best books on the conflict I have ever read.
Yardena, so awesome to have you on the pod.
Yardena: Great to be here, Noam, thanks for having me.
Noam: Okay. We have so much to talk about. You know, I am a nerd when it comes to the story of Israel and history in general. my friends used to call me, Overboard History Buff, OBHB, which is kind of funny going back to college and thinking about that. Like I was, I was a history major. I was very into it.
so let me tell you why history matters to me. It’s interesting. number two is it explains how we got to where our, where we are right now, like how we got to this moment. Like, how did we get here? How did this happen? And then there’s there’s a third part, though. I want to just tell you my feelings right now. The third part is I find history frustrating because once you know something, it’s like annoying when other people don’t. You know, I mean, it’s just like, oh, there’s like there’s a whole history here. How we got to this moment actually matters.
Yardena: That’s true, yes.
Noam: And there’s just this like, actually, it doesn’t matter. Actually, it’s hard. You know what mean?
Yardena: Not only does it explain how we got here, but once you know this history, you realize you cannot understand the present without understanding that history. And that’s what makes it so frustrating because it’s like, if you would only know, not only would you understand, but maybe we would not be in this devastating cycle of violence we continue to be in one century later, were people more aware of the history.
Noam: Right. Exactly, exactly, exactly. And with a major caveat, major caveat, here it is, that there are multiple perspectives, there are multiple different ways to view the same event. So all my history nerds out there, like this is going to be a sweeping history from the early 20s until today with Hevron as the, and I’m going to call Hebron Hevron the whole time. So Hebron, Hevron, all good.
I want to go back to the early twenties and I want to ask you a question that’s a general question, and then we’ll go into the specifics here. But here’s my general question. Yardena, from your understanding of Israeli history and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israel-Palestine, is the conflict about territory? Is the conflict about land? Is the conflict about religion? What would you say if someone were to ask you that question? And you had to choose one. What would your answer be?
Yardena: Both. It’s a really easy answer, actually. The way that land and religion intertwine in this conflict, that’s the only way really to understand why we’re still at this juncture we’re at. Because if it really was just about land, then in 1947, Arab leaders would have accepted the UN partition plan. They would have accepted after 1967, the overtures by Israel to return land conquered during the war of 1967 for peace. They would have agreed to trade that led for peace instead Of course, they there were the infamous three knows you can go on and on 2000 Arafat would have said yes to Palestinian state 2008 Abbas would have agreed, you know the the role that religion plays has been widely ignored throughout history by so many international leaders who have tried to bring about peace in this region. And yet if you ask the stakeholders, Palestinians and Israelis themselves, they will tell you that it can’t be ignored. And it really can’t be overstated the role religion has played.
Noam: And what about from a Jewish perspective, is there not also a desire from a religious perspective? In Hebrew, there’s terms called Yeshua are its kivush are its settling the land, conquering the land as religious precepts in Judaism. Is that not also part of it from the Jewish side of things or is it do you view it differently?
Yardena: Well, of course, religion plays a role from the Jewish perspective as well. I mean, Zionism is an inherently Jewish premise. Zion, we have prayed for the redemption and the return to Zion for thousands of years. Jews have faced Jerusalem when we pray wherever we are for thousands of years. And to my point earlier about the various deals that were turned down by Palestinian leaders, to that same point, Israel would not have given up control over parts of Jerusalem because of the religious significance they hold for Jews. So I think that while a very small number of Israelis actually believe in this idea of religious redemption through the conquering of Palestinian land or what they consider to be greater Israel, that might be on the fringes of Israeli society. But even secular Jews would recognize that Jerusalem is our home, as a people, even if they’re not religious at all.
Noam: Right, right, right, Okay.
Yardena: And to that same point, Hebron as well. think a lot of people think of Hebron as this place where only settlers live, but to the average Israeli, I think that if you ask them, you know, the burial place of Abraham and Isaac and, you know, the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Jewish people, should that be kind of amputated from any, from Israel in any future peace deal, I think most Israelis, including secular Israelis, would disagree.
Noam: Right. And I want to get into that in a bit. It’s also like the answer to the trivia question. Hey, what was King David’s first capital? People think the answer is Jerusalem. The answer is actually Hebron. That is King David’s first capital was Hebron until it was moved to Jerusalem. Hebron is considered one of the religious cities of Israel. There are four holy cities, I should say, of Israel, of the Jewish people. One is Tiberias, Tiberia, one is Safed, Tzvat, one is Hebron. One is Jerusalem. Those are the four, what people call the holy cities of Israel. It’s a big part of the story, both religiously for the Muslim Palestinians and for the Jewish Israelis and Jewish people.
So I wanna talk about the religious aspect. Let’s go through this. I think that in many ways, Al-Aqsa is what’s like a trigger technology. And what I mean by that is there’s this narrative throughout the history of the conflict that the Jews threaten Al-Aqsa. And that seems to be a through line throughout your entire book. You talk about in your book that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in the early 1920s, he would talk about that there was a campaign about Jews plotting to take Al-Aqsa. You know, there’s examples where in the most recent horrific massacre against the Jewish people was called Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. The second Intifada was called Al Aqsa Intifada. The brigades that were, the terrorist brigades known as Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, it’s Al Aqsa, Al Aqsa, Al Aqsa.
So what is this pattern and why is it so durable? This pattern of that the Jewish people are trying to flood Al Aqsa or take over Al Aqsa. Has this been a through line like I described and tell me what that looks like.
Yardena: So it actually hasn’t been the through line for hundreds of years. People talk about, this conflict goes back thousands of years, hundreds of years. Really, it goes back to when Al-Aqsa became the rallying cry for not only Palestinian Muslims, but for the wider Muslim world. And that only began around 1928 when the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al Husseini made it kind of epicenter of focus against Jewish immigration, against Jewish land purchases, against any kind of Jewish sovereignty or power in what was then Palestine.
So he began that rumor in 1928 as a result of actually an effort to dispel criticism from his own corruption. So he had been dogged for years by accusations of nepotism, misuse of religious funds, funneling religious funds for his own causes into building his homes, building a hotel, which he actually built atop an ancient Muslim cemetery. His builder was a Zionist who was actually a member of the Haganah who warned him that he was building this hotel above this ancient Muslim cemetery. And the Grand Mufti told him, don’t worry about it, just don’t let the word get out.
So he had been a really unpopular leader for several years after he was appointed by the British in 1921. And once he started this rumor in 1928 that the Jews of Palestine were plotting to destroy Al-Aqsa, that was the first time that this rumor had really taken hold, it not only spread like wildfire and became extremely galvanizing for the masses within Palestine and also throughout the Muslim world to oppose this supposed Jewish plot to destroy Al-Aqsa, but it also succeeded in distracting not only the people, the Muslims of Palestine, but also the Arabic press and Arab rivals from the Muftis’ corruption. So after he began that rumor, suddenly there was a much more menacing threat to the Muslims of Palestine than their leaders’ corruption. Now they had this threat to their religion, this threat to their holiest site in Palestine. Al-Aqsa is the third holy site in Islam after Mecca and Medina.
And so he was not only the Grand Mufti, essentially the chief rabbi of Palestine, but also the head of the Supreme Muslim Council, which oversaw all Muslim holy sites and Muslim funds. And through that position, he was able to instruct Imams throughout Palestine to speak about this plot, this threat, from the Jews of Palestine during their weekly sermons. His family, the Husseini family, is one of the most powerful families in Palestine. They own several newspapers, so the press was also circulating these rumors. And over the course of the following year, he also worked to restrict Jewish access to the Western Wall, which he depicted as kind of the ground zero of this Jewish plot. He convinced the Muslims of Palestine that Jews who were simply praying in peace at the Western Wall and demanding British protection to pray in peace at the Western Wall were really plotting to destroy Al-Aqsa. And he had some help in convincing the Muslims of Palestine that this was true.
His help came from the Jewish community itself, which wasn’t aware in the beginning of these rumors. And in a fundraising pleas to the diaspora, they would send postcards that depicted the Holy Temple standing atop the Temple Mount. We know this from Judaica stores and paintings in our grandparents’ homes that depicted the Temple. And what we know as just nostalgia or a symbol of the Jewish hope for the reestablishment of the Temple period when the Mashiach comes, the Mufti was able to convince his people that this was actually definitive proof that the Jews of Palestine were planning to conquer Al-Aqsa, to rebuild their holy temple.
Noam: So I want to pull on that thread in a bit, but I want to go back to an earlier part. First of all, when did when Hajj Amin al Husseini die? He died in the early 70s, right? Is that right?
Yardena: Yeah, yeah.
Noam: It’s like just like I think of him as a man from so long ago. But the reality is he died like the last time the New York Knicks won a championship. Well, I guess it’s not modern history. Sorry, New York Knicks fans. I didn’t mean to take a shot at you. But like that that’s like he was alive in the early 70s. might… Right. So he might have worn bell-bottom jeans. It’s possible, you’re saying. There’s a chance. Right.
Yardena: Yeah, I think it was 1974 and his cousin, maybe beneath his robes. Yeah, Arafat was, yes, Arafat was his cousin and his disciple and he attended his funeral.
Noam: Right.
Yardena: Wow. Okay, so we’ll get to that in a bit, but let’s go back to the early 20s. There’s a moment in Israeli history, or wasn’t yet Israel, but in the land of Israel, Palestine, what’s called the Nabi Musa riots. it was after the Balfour Declaration and it was after the Treaty of Versailles, I believe, and it was right after the Battle of Tel Hai in which, there’s just bubbling of tension going on. And the Nabi Musa riots killed five Jews, I believe, and four Arabs were killed also. And the, after these riots, Zev Jabotinsky was put into, was imprisoned and Hajj Amin al Husseini was imprisoned. I, right? What was he?
Yardena: He wasn’t imprisoned. There was an arrest warrant and the British didn’t manage to arrest him before he managed to flee. So he and his uncle fled to Transjordan. They went into hiding with Bedouin tribes, but he was wanted for incitement because he is one of the Arab leaders who incited the riots.
Noam: Wow. So he’s like, I’m just imagining the history unfold here. What would happen if during the Nabu Musa riots afterwards that I don’t know if Jabotinsky was kept in prison and, and Hajj Amin al Husseini never escaped, not comparing the two, but like that is such a interesting, you know, counterfactual to history of what, would have, what would it have looked like?
And the crazy thing is that Herbert Samuel, who was Jewish, but a British military officer or, or, or political figure. Herbert Samuel, he’s the one who ultimately appoints Hajj Amin al Husseini to the leadership position when it could have been the, the Nashashibis, right? And, and he, think in your book, you mentioned he came in fourth place initially, right?
Yardena: Last.
Noam: He came in last place and Herbert Samuel appoint Hajj Amin al Husseini. How did that happen?
Yardena: It’s actually mind boggling when you consider the fact that not only was Herbert Samuel Jewish, but he was a Zionist. He was a very prominent figure in British politics and he was actually the first British official to favor, to openly favor the establishment of a Jewish home in Palestine before Balfour. And he had come to Palestine as the first British high commissioner of Palestine after the mandate of Palestine was established. And he, one of his first acts was to pardon everyone who was arrested after the Nabi Musa riots. So Jabotinsky was released from prison in Akko, in Akre, the Hajj Amin al Husseini, not yet the Grand Mufti. I was about to call him the Grand Mufti, but Herbert Samuel was the one who did that.
So not only did he pardon him and allow him to come back to Jerusalem along with his uncle, who had also incited the riots, but when Hajj Amin al Husseini’s half-brother passed away, the position of Grand Mufti became open. And it wasn’t a given that that position had to go to Husseini. Hajj Amin al Husseini’s father had been Grand Mufti, his half brother had been Grand Mufti, but he actually didn’t have the qualifications to be Grand Mufti. He had never finished his Islamic education. That’s why he wasn’t a Sheikh. He was Hajj. He had, yeah, because he had completed Haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca.
Noam: Right, Hajj.
Yardena: And not only were his rivals more qualified than him on an Islamic level, but they weren’t such virulent antisemites as he had already proven himself to be. And also he had, during the Nabi Musa riots, not only spread anti-Jewish propaganda, but also he was very much trying to rile up the crowds against the British.
So if you think about Herbert Samuel never publicly explained in hindsight why he made that mistake of appointing Hajj Amin al Husseini, but the speculation is that he wanted to keep his enemies close. He wanted to also prove to the Arab majority of Palestine that despite him being Jewish, despite him being a Zionist, he was somebody that the Arabs of Palestine could trust, which was really important if you’re going to be the British High Commissioner of Palestine, the most important British official in this British territory.
Noam: Yeah, there’s a real danger of the desire to be beloved sometimes. There’s a real danger there.
Yardena: And the British have a tendency to do that.
Noam: Exactly. That’s why they call the land of Israel not the promised land, but the much too promised land. So, you’re right. It’s like constantly being promised to different people by the Brits in the early 20th century. Okay, so let’s go to 1929. You talk about the, the Hebron Massacre and we just had an episode last week where we did a whole episode just on the Hebron Massacre. So everyone should check that out. But your focus of the book is the Hebron Massacre and something that you’ve said and I think many others like the conflict. Starts like if you want to understand the high point or the trigger of the conflict, if you could pick a moment, some people might say, you know, in the middle of May 1948, some people might say 1947, some people might say the Peel Commission, some people from, you know, the riots from 36 to 39. Some people might say the Balfour Declaration. Some people might say when Ishmael and Isaac got into it, you know, like what, but you’re making the argument and others do too that the Hebron massacre, 1929, in which 133 Jews were killed during this time period, I think 67 in Hebron itself, right? Is that the right number, and then subsequently 116 Arabs being killed, that really, if you want to understand the conflict, you got to go back to this very moment. Make that argument.
Yardena: So this wasn’t the first time that there had been an interruption of violence between Arabs and Jews in Palestine. We just spoke about the Nabi Musa riots. You mentioned the Balfour Declaration. So there are other points in history you could point to before the Hebron massacre and the riots that gripped all of Palestine in August 1929. It was just over a matter of a week or so that these riots took place.
This was the first mass casualty event of this conflict. And it was also when the primary drivers of this conflict to this day, this is when they were born. So this weaponization of Al-Aqsa, this is when it began. This was also when the hope of coexistence, of peaceful coexistence between the Jews and Arabs of Palestine was really just evaporated in an instant because Hebron was a symbol of coexistence. It was the symbol of coexistence in Palestine. was the place where Jews, it was one of the only places where Jews felt safe, even in close quarters living alongside Arabs.
And it was also when Zionism became a rallying force among the Jews of Palestine, because before 1929, before these riots, many of the traditional Jews in Palestine, the Sephardim, Mizrahim, anyone who wasn’t European secular was very skeptical of the Zionist movement because it was a secular movement. It was led by secular Jews. It was in the eyes of many traditional Jews, this secular contamination of Judaism. was this nationalist version of Judaism that they didn’t agree with. They felt that, yes, we should all aspire to live in the land of Israel and the land of Israel is our homeland. But they believe that the return of the Jewish masses from exile to the land of Israel should only be realized through the will of God and the arrival of the Messiah. So what happened after 1929 was that these people who were so skeptical of Zionism realized that no foreign power was ever going to protect them if they wanted to live in their homeland in peace, they would need to live under the protection of their own army.
And so before 1929, Haganah, the underground Jewish defense force that would later form the nucleus of the IDF before 1929, it was almost exclusively an Ashkenazi secular operation. The riots of 1929, you saw Sephardim joining the Haganah because they recognized that despite their shared kind of way of life with the Arabs of Palestine. In many cases, Sephardim and Mizrahim in Hebron and elsewhere in Palestine had more in common with their Arab neighbors than their Ashkenazi neighbors, especially if those Ashkenazi neighbors were secular.
Noam: Meaning they spoke the same language, they ate the same food, they had similar cultures. That’s right, The dress the same? Right.
Yardena: They dressed the same way, their wives covered themselves the way Arabic women did. And so they realized after the riots of 1929, when they were also the victims of that violence, not just the Zionists, not just the secular Ashkenazi immigrants, it was also the native Arabic speaking Jews of Palestine who were massacred not only in Hebron, but elsewhere. They realized that they needed to get on board with Zionism if they were going to have any kind of future.
Not only that, the British had proved not only incapable of protecting the Jews of Palestine from the riots, but also unwilling to in many cases, both before the riots erupted and during the riots, after the British exhibited something that we would recognize today, this just lack of any desire to confront Arab violence or incitement at a fear of provoking more Arab violence and that lack of any kind of courage only encouraged more violence and more incitement. So, you know, the patterns that history has shown us continue to play out because so few people are aware of this history.
Noam: I think that I started getting anxiety when reading your book a few times. One time was I kept on thinking like, well, I’m not being glib here, I’m being quite serious, just again on this historical point. This is an example where anti-Zionism, to use a modern term that we view as a modern term, had violent implications in an antisemitic sort of way, that Zionism and anti-Zionism and antisemitism kind of blur into one another.
But the other aspect where I started getting nervous reading your book and anxious, was like, like where there were so many moments where 1929 you’re, you’re, Hebron needs protection, needs for that. No, we’re good. We don’t need protection. We’re good. No, you’re going to need protection. No, we’re good. The naivete, the ignorance, the Pollyanna ish way of thinking about the world, this hope may be that like, we’ll be fine, was so wrong. Was so wrong. And it was devastatingly wrong. The descriptions that you have there.
And whenever I studied the history of Hebron in 1929, of the castration, of the wanton murder that took place, the lack, the neighbors who knew each other by name, killing the Jewish people in Hebron in 1929. And really the thinking about modern times, whenever Israel, maybe this is true for other countries, but whenever Jewish people are attacked and thinking that it would somehow end Zionism by hurting the Jews, what it did is it constantly throughout history is it makes the Jewish people more Zionist. I don’t want to say more in the context of the revision of Zionists, but you know, after 1929, Jabotinsky sort of Zionism that ballooned in a way, you know, after 1975 when Zionism was declared racism, people became more Zionist. When October 7th happened, there was a groundswell of Jewish people saying, no, we are going to protect ourselves and we are not going anywhere. To not see that through line and the mistake to think that the Jewish people are not inherently connected to this land, not that there shouldn’t be compromise.
Not that there shouldn’t be different boundaries or borders. The mistake to think that you could engage violently and somehow end the Jewish Zionist story by severing the two is a catastrophic belief.
Yardena: Right. And we’ve seen that in so many ways. I mean, if you look at the growth of the settlement project, it has almost always been the case that a terror attack or waves of terror attacks not only lead to settlement expansion, but more restrictive measures taken against Palestinians who live in certain areas where those attacks emanated from, you know, the security barrier, the security fence, the wall, as some might call it, that was a direct response to the second Intifada and the suicide bombings that emerged from what is now behind that wall. And it led to a tremendous decrease in the frequency of those suicide bombings. And of course it ends up making the lives of Palestinians harder. So it’s always the case that not only does it strengthen Zionism or push Zionism further to a kind of militant end, but it also makes the lives of Palestinians ever more difficult.
Noam: Right. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yep. And speaking of extremism, I want to I want to go back to Hajj Amin al Husseini. I’m conflicted on this point and I want you to give me clarity on this. I speak to a number of Palestinian moderates often and sometimes there’s an argument that Hajj Amin al Husseini’s influence is overstated and that, you know,yes, we have bad guys. You have bad guys, meaning you, the Jewish people, bad guys, every, everyone, everyone has people that did bad things. Hajj Amin al Husseini is no different. and the Palestinians are no different. We, the, we being Palestinians, like, you know, there could have been Musa Alami, there could have been the Nasha Shibis, there could have been someone else, but what is Hajj Amin al Husseini was there.
In your book though, when I was reading and I was going through. I was unsure beforehand, before your book, to what extent did Hajj Amin al Husseini really, you know, cozy up with Adolf Hitler in the early forties? To what extent did he really? And then I read your book and I was like, no, no, no. They were, they were like, they had a little bit of a bromance. Because it seems that Hajj Amin al Husseini and Adolf Hitler had a very close relationship. And it wasn’t just one that was one photo op, but it was actually something that could have led to the ideology of Nazism to travel into curricula, to travel into mosques, to travel into militias. And it didn’t have to be the case. Meaning you see Arabs throughout, this is so important to say, there are Arabs throughout the world that do not harbor these ideologies. There many Saudis, UAE, beautiful relationship with Jews. Bahrain, other places throughout Arab society. But it seems like, certainly from the arguments that you made that Hajj Amin al Husseini’s ideology was either influenced by Hitler or influenced Hitler. I don’t know which one, but there was a symbiotic relationship between the two. It was almost too natural for them to have a relationship. Is that the case?
Yardena: Yeah, I mean, he already had that ideology before he fled, arrest in Palestine, eventually ending up in Berlin in 1941, where he remained until 1945, living in a Nazi-financed mansion in Berlin. You mentioned that they cozied up. I think that’s an understatement, and I think a lot of us are unaware of just how close his relationship was with not just Hitler, some architects of the final solution. He was a Nazi. I mean, Hajj Amin al Husseini led the Arab branch of the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda. for years, was broadcasting Nazi propaganda throughout the Muslim world, in Arabic, of course. And many of those broadcasts weren’t just straight up Nazi propaganda. They were Islamized. So he would quote hadiths, he would refer to Mohammed in these broadcasts and frame the killing of Jews and the joining of Muslims to the Nazi cause as something that would give glory to Allah and to Islam.
He recruited tens of thousands of Muslims to fight for the Nazis, Muslims from Bosnia and Herzegovina. He was actually placed, the first leader of the Palestinian people was placed on the UN’s list of Nazi war criminals. He was wanted for Nazi war crimes, which makes the fact that he lived out in the open until his death in the 1970s all the more baffling. I mean, there were so many other Nazis who went into hiding after the war, fled Nazi war crimes, and then were caught. He was never caught. He lived in Cairo and then Beirut. And I think that his legacy and his impact on the Palestinian leadership since the Grand Mufti, which has really just been Arafat and Abbas, and of course, Hamas. You can see his footprints, his fingerprints, sorry, in all of these leaders.
Abbas, of course, has engaged in his own little form of Holocaust denial, which is actually really interesting if you think about how intimately involved the Grand Mufti was in the Holocaust. Arafat was the Grand Mufti’s cousin and closest disciple. He joined the army of the Holy War that the Grand Mufti created in the immediate aftermath of the UN partition plan. He really took over the throne of the Grand Mufti. The Grand Mufti chose him to take over from him when he became too old to continue to be the leader of the Palestinian people and the Palestinian cause.
And I think it’s interesting that when you ask people who was the first Palestinian leader, the first leader of the Palestinian cause or the father of the Palestinian movement, people often point to Arafat, but it was actually the Grand Mufti.
And I think perhaps the reason why people want to skip over the Grand Mufti is because of his unabashed alliance with the Nazi regime. And not only, he went even beyond the Nazi regime. He lobbied, personally, leaders of various European countries who were going to allow their Jews, their Jewish refugees to flee Europe and to allow them to flee either to Palestine or to the US. And he lobbied them to prevent, to bar Jews from leaving their countries. This was Greece, Turkey, Romania. He lobbied these leaders to force the Jews who were fleeing their countries to go to Poland, where he knew full well what was happening in Poland. He had toured the concentration camps. He told them, allow them to come to Palestine. We don’t want them here, send them to Poland. And there’s no way of knowing how many Jews were prevented from arriving in Palestine as a result of the Grand Muftis efforts.
But it was also the British who had initiated these extremely restrictive quotas on Jewish immigration. We all know about the White Paper that led hundreds of thousands of Jews to remain trapped in Europe because they were prevented from arriving in British Mandate Palestine as a result of these quotas.
Noam: Yeah, what you’re talking about is the late 30s, there was a British White Paper that limited immigration to around 75,000 people over five years or something like that, which apparently Hajj Amin al Husseini felt was too many still. Right? Right.
Yardena: Right, he wanted zero. The White Paper of 1939 was a direct result of British appeasement. Was again, as we spoke about before, how the British reacted to the massacre of 1929. I mentioned how they failed to prevent it. They failed to quell the violence as it was happening. And also afterwards, they essentially blamed the victim by revising their immigration quotas and placing strict quotas on Jewish immigration and land purchases that was immediately after the riots of 1929 after the great ab revolt that began in 1936 that’s when they began these even stricter quotas that really prevented hundreds of thousands of Jews from arriving in land of Israel during and after the Holocaust. Tens of thousands of Jews who tried to reach Palestine were either sent back to Europe by the British or detained in British internment camps in Cyprus and in Palestine.
Noam: So let’s go to, put aside Hajj Amin al Husseini now, I want to put on a different hat. I want to just talk within and local to the Jewish people for a second. The city of Havron, like I mentioned earlier, is sacred to the Jewish people, majorly sacred to the Jewish people. First of all, biblically and historically, but also from the story of 1929, because the story of 1929 led many people to view this as a sacred place because there’s a term called Kiddush Hashem, sanctifying God’s name. And the fact that these Jews who lived there were then killed there and then there was a denial of the ability to live there. Was there a long time period in which Jews were not able to live in Hebron at all? Or were there always Jews there? How did that look?
Yardena: So prior to 1929, the Jewish presence in Hebron had existed for thousands of years, going back to the days of Abraham, even through periods of exile. There had always been a Jewish presence, even a small one, very small one. But after 1929, after the riots, the British evacuated every single Jew from Hebron.
So let’s go back a bit. Before 1929 or in 29 on the eve of the Hebron massacre, there were about 800 Jews living in Hebron amidst about 20,000 Muslims. A few days after the riots, once they had subsided, the British allowed the Jews who had been held in the British police station in Hebron in the immediate aftermath of the riots, they evacuated them, took them by buses to Jerusalem, told them never to return, because they were incapable of protecting them.
And so for about a year, there was not a single Jew living in Hebron, but about a year later, a group of mostly Sephardi, very impoverished, mostly rabbis started to return. So about a year later, there were about a hundred Jews living in Hebron again. They mostly relied on halukah, on donations from the Jewish community. They mostly had very good relations with their Arab neighbors. These were the same people who had lived there prior to 1929. We didn’t mention actually, you did mention it in your episode about the Hebron Massacre, at least 200 Jews were rescued from the massacre, saved from slaughter by their Muslim neighbors who risked their lives to hide them in their homes or stood guard outside of there. So there was a place for these Jews who returned in 1930.
But once again in 1936, when the riots began, the British once again evacuated the Jewish community of Hebron. And until 1947, there was just one Jewish man living in Hebron. His name was Yaakov Ezra. He had a dairy business with his Arab friend. And the day that the UN voted to partition Palestine into an independent Jewish state and an independent Arab state was the day that his Arab friends told him, you’re not going to be safe in Hebron anymore. You should go. And so he moved to his family’s home in Jerusalem because the rest of his family actually lived in Jerusalem. He didn’t feel that it was safe enough for his wife and children to live in Hebron. So he would stay in Hebron during the week working and then he would go home for Shabbat every Friday. And now he just moved to Jerusalem.
And so from 1947, once as once Jacob Ezra left until 1967, when Israel conquered the West Bank, including Hebron from the Jordanians who had been occupying it since 1948, not a single Jew was living in Hebron. If they entered, it was, because they had some somehow managed to secretly go there. We don’t know of any Jews who managed to go into Hebron between those years.
I should say that the Tomb of the Patriarchs, which is the reason why so many Jews have wanted to live in Hebron for thousands of years, because it’s the burial place of the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Jewish people, it was actually off limits to Jews until 1967. So the Jews who were living in Hebron in 1929 and for actually 700 years prior to that, they were forbidden from entering because after the Islamic conquest of Palestine, the Tomb of the Patriarchs became Ibrahimi Mosque, Ibrahim being the Arabic name for Abraham, who’s considered a prophet in Islam.
So for 700 years under Muslim rule, Jews were forbidden from entering the Tomb of the Patriarchs. And in 1967, when Israel liberated the tomb of the patriarch, suddenly Jews were not only able to return to Hebron, but were able to step foot inside this holy site, the second holiest site in Judaism for the first time in nearly a millennium.
Noam: And that’s the symbolism of the seventh step, right?
Yardena: Yes, so the seventh step was the closest Jews were permitted to get by the Muslim authorities in Hebron. If a Jew dared to go beyond the seventh step, he would be beaten. Even Jews who prayed outside of the Tomb of the Patriarchs, as they were permitted to do, often spat on. Sometimes kids would throw rocks at their heads from above, from inside the mosque. And the seventh step was actually blown up by the Israeli military after the war of 1967 as kind of an effort to erase this sign of humiliation.
Noam: So this is like, I wanted to lay that for everyone to understand, for me to understand, for everyone to understand. Hebron is a major part of the Jewish people, right? Historically, biblically, religiously, also a major part of the Jewish people because of the horrendous massacre that took place in 1929. And then also part of Jewish, the Jewish story, Jewish memory, because from 48 to 67, the Jewish people were not allowed to be there.
And then 67 happens. And Israel like triples, quadruples in size. And it’s still, there are not many Jewish people, as far as I understand, going to Hebron. It’s not big yet. And I want to talk now a little bit about the history from 67 till the present in Havron because the story changes a bit now. There’s a little bit of a, the narrative switches and how we think about things.
I remember my bedroom growing up. I do not have this in my bedroom anymore, but I had a poster behind me that said, Hebron me’az le’tamin. Hebron. How do translate that?
Yardena: From then and forever.
Noam: From then and always, for then and forever. I had that in my bedroom and I don’t think I knew anything about politics or anything like that. I just knew that, like, I don’t know, like what I was taught in Judaism always was like, chavron. You learn the story of the Hebrew Bible. It’s part of the Jewish story. So, but it has a deep, deep, deep, political ring to it now. So, but not until 1979, there was a crazy moment that took place where the women of Bet Hadassah do something. Tell me about this story of the women of Bet Hadassah in 1979. What did they do to catalyze the Jewish return? to the city of Hebron. And there was a whole attack in 1980 that took place as well that gets back to the theme about, well, there was a terror attack that happened there that led to the government formalizing the presence of the Jewish people there. So could you tell that story a little bit?
Yardena: Yeah, so from 1967, almost immediately after 1967, there were efforts by leaders of the settlement movement like Rabbi Moshe Levinger and also descendants of this ancient Jewish community in Hebron that had been extinguished in 1929. They were asking the government to allow them to rebuild the ancient Jewish quarter to bring Jewish life back to Hebron. The government, various Israeli governments were, you know, adamant that that was never going to happen.
Finally, around 1971, I think the government approved the establishment of Kiryat Arba as kind of a fig leaf to this movement to say, we won’t let you live in Hebron, but you can build a settlement just on the outskirts of Hebron. And that was supposed to suffice. It did not. And after the signing of the peace treaty with Egypt, where Israel for the first time agreed to sever peace of land in exchange for peace. While the vast majority of Israelis welcomed that peace agreement as one of the most amazing achievements Israel had had up until that point, the settlement movement was aghast, especially the fact that it was a right-wing prime minister who had agreed to it and they felt–
Noam: Menachem Begin.
Yardena: Yes, sorry, Menachem Begin, the first right-wing prime minister of Israel, and someone they thought was a friend of the settlement movement, they believed that they needed to take bold steps to prevent any kind of agreement that would see Israel, God forbid in their minds, give up Hebron and give Hebron back to the Jordanians, for example. So they devised this plan where in about two dozen, sorry, I think it was about 36 women and children, so wives of settler leaders and.
Noam: This story is crazy, sorry, just keep going, but this is such a crazy story, keep going. I think it’s crazy.
Yardena: Yeah, so these women and children set out from their homes in Kiryat Arba in the middle of the night, about 3 a.m. They drove this pickup truck to Beit Hadassah, which if you know the story of what happened during the massacre of 1929, Beit Hadassah was this Jewish, it was a Hadassah clinic where it was the only medical clinic in Hebron, and it was run by the Jewish community. They gave free treatment to needy Arabs and Jews alike.
And during the massacre, it was not only destroyed, but the pharmacist who had worked in this clinic for 40 years and lived right next door to the clinic, he and his entire family were slaughtered. His children, his young children survived, but he and his wife and their daughter were murdered in the most horrific ways. His daughter, they raped her in front of her parents. I won’t go into detail about what was done to this man and his family, but it was really gruesome. And Betia Hadassah became this symbol of the massacre. And these women chose to essentially take over this building, move in the middle of the night, move in with, they brought ovens, they brought washing machines. This building had been abandoned for decades. They cleaned it and they decided that they were going to live there and dare the Israeli army to try to evict them. And they had a sense that the army wouldn’t do that and that Menachem Begin wouldn’t be willing to do that. Wouldn’t be willing to use force against women and children to evict them from this building, which was itself a symbol of this ancient Jewish community and the massacre they had experienced.
So from 1979 until 1980, over a year, these women and children remained there. And they were essentially under siege. So the army surrounded the building, wouldn’t allow anyone inside. If you left, you would have to, you couldn’t come back. They hoped these measures would convince the women to give up and leave, but they didn’t.
And a tradition began where men and women who went to pray at the Tomb of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs on Friday nights after their prayers, So they would leave the Tomb of the Patriarchs, singing and dancing on their way down the road to Beit Hadassah, and they would welcome Shabbat for these women and children from outside of the building. And they would sing songs and say prayers with them.
And for months, this tradition went on and it became such a, was something that happened at the same time, the same night, every week. And eventually a few Palestinian militants caught on to that and realized that this was an opportunity to make their own variable statement, a different kind. So for men who had been trained by a close associate of Yasser Arafat, some of them had been trained in guerrilla warfare by the Soviets, in the Soviet Union, they stood with Kalashnikovs and hand grenades outside of Beit Hadassah waiting for this group of young men and women to come to Beit Hadassah from their prayers at the Tomb of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs. And once they arrived, they fired on them. They ended up killing six, I believe it was six young men. Most of them were Yeshiva students in their 20s. They injured about a dozen others, including young men and women. And at the time, this was in May of 1980, at the time it was the deadliest terror attack ever to take place in the occupied West Bank.
And there had been, you know, some attacks in the previous years where a Yeshiva student would be killed or a visitor from Kiryat Arba would be killed in Hebron, but nothing on this scale. And the Israeli government in response to this attack, as I mentioned earlier, responses to terror attacks usually end up in settlement expansion or approval. So this is when the government finally acquiesced to the settlement movements years long demands to resuscitate the ancient Jewish quarter of Hebron. This is when the Israeli government finally gave the approval for that. And they only approved the rehabilitation of a few buildings, including Beit Hadassah and also Beit Schneerson, several homes of Jews who had lived in Hebron in 1929 and whose homes were taken over by Arab residents after 1929 or whose homes were destroyed.
And this is how the Jewish community of Hebron was rebuilt. It started with just a few houses that were approved by the government in response to this terror attack in 1980. Over the course of the next few years, almost every time there was a major terror attack in Hebron, the government would approve another building, then another building. It eas always these very symbolic homes like Beit Hadassah, like Beit Schneerson. There was also the Abraham Avinu Synagogue that was destroyed in 1929 and during Jordanian occupation was turned into this animal pen.
Noam: And that’s a setting that exists for hundreds upon hundreds of years.
Yardena: Yes, it was established by the Jewish exiles of Spain who fled the Inquisition and arrived in Hebron and established Avraham Avinu in 1929. The synagogue was destroyed and ancient Torah scrolls were burnt. Some that had survived since the 11th century had been held by Jewish families in Spain and then brought to Hebron. after, it was a few years afterthis attack in 1980 that the government finally approved the rebuilding of the Abraham Avram Avino synagogue. And one of the perpetrators of this terror attack in 1980 is now serving his second term as the Arab mayor of Hebron. His name is Tayseer Abu Sneineh.
Noam: The story of Hebron just gets, get why you wrote a book on it because the story gets thicker and thicker and thicker. And you said something earlier. You said something earlier about Al-Aqsa. I want to come back to the threat of Al-Aqsa. You know, conspiracy theories are really dangerous. They’re really dangerous because they lead people to do horrible things because they believe crazy things.
You know, the danger of a conspiracy theory that has a little bit of truth to it is even more dangerous than a conspiracy theory that has no truth to it in some ways, because then people pull on that very small moment and they say, see, see, it’s true. So let me talk about a moment in 1984. Because what I really liked about your book is you actually, you don’t do the one sided thing. You share the problems on both sides. You’re not hagiographic about the Jewish people. You show, uh, moments about the Jewish people that that’s, that’s, that’s not, that’s not to be celebrated. One of those moments is a story in 1984 of the Jewish underground. And I want to quote directly from the book. You say:
A rogue cell of the Jewish underground was plotting to blow up the Dome of the Rock. And the days after that shocking discovery, police arrested dozens more, dozens more suspected members. Many were residents of Kiryat Arba and Hevron.
So I want to talk a little bit about that.
When you talked about Hajj Amin al Husseini earlier saying that Al-Aqsa and the desire to return to Al-Aqsa, know, the power propaganda to get the Arab world to be antagonistic towards Zionism. This was a huge way to do it, to say that they’re trying to, you know, make Al-Aqsa, make the Dome of the Rock, make the Temple Mount, make it the Jewish peoples one day. Well, let me, let me ask you this. One is, you know, 1984, that seems to be what the… this group tried to do. And number two is, well, you know, I don’t know, even the Neturei Karta are the most extreme Jewish group possible. They also believe ultimately that there will be a third Temple there, right there. Har Habayit, the whole concept of the Temple Mount, that it will be the Jewish people’s one day. So this conspiracy theory that the Jewish people are always ultimately want Al-Aqsa, historically, yes, it’s a very fringe opinion, but in 1984, this paranoia seems to have been a little bit justified. Is that wrong?
Yardena: No, that’s right. mean, the thing is, this plot was carried out by a rogue cell of an already extremely fringe movement. So Gush Emunim, the block of the faithful, the kind of core of the early settlement movement, the men who initiated and then sought to execute this plan, they themselves were fringe elements of the block of the faithful, of Gush Emunim. And their plan was secret to most members of Gush Emunim. And eventually when the Shin Bet arrested them, they did arrest many members of Gush Emunim who weren’t involved in this plot, but it was determined that the Israeli government would not be able to allow Gush Emunim to exist, if this is the kind of thing that its members were planning. And so you see this, and this plot was shocking to Israeli society, condemned across the board by rabbis, political leaders on the right and left. It led to the death of Gush Emunim. I mean, there is no Gush Emunim today.
Of course, the settlement movement continues. you know, there are, not just in Neturei Karta, but in the religious Zionist community, those who wish to see the rise of the third temple on the Temple Mount, which is where the temples once stood. Al-Aqsa was built atop the ruins of the ancient Jewish temples. But again, their wish, kind of going back to what I spoke about earlier with the traditional Jews of Palestine prior to 1929, most people who aspire to see a third temple on the Temple Mount don’t think that it’s something that men are going to do themselves and literally destroy Al-Aqsa and rebuild the temple. It’s this idea of redemption and once the the Mashiach comes when this is kind of a spiritual notion, not something that is nationalistic, but of course there are to this day nationalist extremist elements of Israeli society who might be planning, you know, their own plot to destroy al-Aqsa, I would not be surprised because these elements continue to be perhaps even stronger in Israeli society than they were in 1984. In 1984, you didn’t have far-right ministers in the government who follow or were followers of Kahane as we have today.
Noam: You know, with Meir Kahane, who we actually did an episode about him. I think they had maybe one seat at this point, Meir Kahane himself until he was outlawed from the government. I don’t know if it was which year he was there, which year he wasn’t there, but there was one point in time when he was there, but then his party got banned. But then 10 years after this, Yardena, another major Jewish terrorist attack takes place when Baruch Goldstein kills 29 Palestinians who were praying, in a mosque.
Yardena: In the hall of Isaac inside the tomb of the patriarchs, a place that was holy to Baruch Goldstein himself. And he managed to carry out his attack because he was a reservist medic. And so he was wearing his uniform, he was armed and soldiers who were stationed outside of the tomb of the patriarchs figured he was just going in to just make sure everything was okay. It was during Ramadan and hundreds of Muslim men and boys were praying during Ramadan and the 29 people who he killed included teenage boys and dozens more were injured. And the status quo in the Tomb of the Patriarchs today in which there’s a Muslim entrance and a Jewish entrance and the Tomb of the Patriarchs is split between the half that Muslims can pray and half that Jews can pray in. That was a direct result of Baruch Goldstein’s attack before his attack in 1994, Jews and Muslims would pray side by side inside of the Tomb of the Patriarchs.
Noam: Yardena, where does this take us to today? So we went through the sweeping history of Hevron. We skipped many moments, of course, but you know, that’s a lot to cover in an hour about the story of Hevron. What is the story of Hevron now? And what do you want to leave everyone with?
Yardena: So I’d like to take us back to the threat of Al-Aqsa because it has taken us to this day and sadly will probably continue to be a very central force in this conflict. We saw that on October 7th with Hamas naming its attack, the Al-Aqsa flood. Hamas is the direct heir of the Grand Mufti. They have framed themselves as the defenders of al-Aqsa against the Jews.
And it’s really telling that so many Palestinians believe this lie, that the Jews are planning to destroy al-Aqsa. Polls have shown that a majority of Palestinians believe that Israel is planning to destroy al-Aqsa and will destroy al-Aqsa. So where it takes us today in Hebron, is Hebron continues to be one of the most volatile epicenters, if not the epicenter of the conflict. So much of the violence we see between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank is centered in and around Hebron. And we spoke about…
Noam: How many Muslims live there? How many Palestinians live there? How many Jews live there right now?
Yardena: So the Palestinian population of Hebron is somewhere between 250,000 to 300,000. There are about 800 Jews living in Hebron around the same number as lived in 1929.
Noam: 1929.
Yardena: Yeah, so, and it is a very tense place because it is the only city in the West Bank where Jews and Palestinians live side by side. And when I say side by side, I don’t mean, you know, in the kind of, peace and harmony sort of side by side, anything but. It often feels like one giant military base because there are checkpoints on every street, soldier stationed on every corner. Hebron itself is divided into H1 and H2. So the Palestinian Authority controls 80% of Hebron. That’s where the vast majority of Hebron’s Palestinian population lives. Israel controls 20%, much of that 20 % is the historic ancient core of Hebron. So that’s where the tomb of the patriarchs is. And so the 800 Jews living in Hebron live on the Israeli controlled side, but about H2 and about 35,000 Palestinians live there as well.
And it’s extremely difficult for those Palestinians living on the Israeli side. It’s hard for them to visit their families and friends in H1 on the Palestinian side. Many of them can’t walk on their own street without special permission. They can’t have visitors without special permission. When I was interviewing Palestinians in Hebron for my book, in one case, I was not allowed to go into a man’s home, despite the fact that I had been inside the home of his Jewish neighbor who lives right across the street. I had been inside her home many times, never needed special permission.
And so when I went to interview him, we had to do his interview, which was hours long outside in the sun, in the heat during Ramadan, which is, you know, it wasn’t humiliating for me because I’m a journalist, I’ll do what I have to do, but I can only imagine how, you know, humiliating and, you know, just depressing that is for this man who lives there and other Palestinians.
Noam: Where does this leave us, Yardena?
Yardena: I always try to end on hope and despite the rest of our conversation, which was a bit dark, I would say, I think there are many glimmers of hope here. And I’d like to talk about one young man who I met in Hebron and became very close with during the course of my research of this book. His name is Mahmoud Jabari. He’s a native of Hebron who spent time in Israeli prison like many men in Hebron, and yet today he works at the World Economic Forum. He is outspoken against Hamas and against the Islamic extremism that has led so many Palestinian leaders up until now because it has benefited them in their own interests and their own power. He is one of many young Palestinians who wants a different future and a different kind of leadership that favors peaceful coexistence, favors a two state solution. And he’s just one of several Palestinians I met in Hebron who say these things. And so there are peaceful Palestinian moderates, if you’re willing to look for them.
And I think, a lot of people, it’s very easy for people to dismiss all Palestinians as being like their leaders, who truly have been, you know, I think a disappointment would be an understatement. And I think they would be the first people to say that. These Palestinian moderates and young people like Ahmed Fouad Al-Khatib, who I know you’ve had on your podcast, who’s one of my greatest sources of hope for a potential better kind of Palestinian leadership that will hopefully cease this century long narrative surrounding Al-Aqsa and change that narrative into one of hope, and brighter future.
Noam: Yardena, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for this grand history, the sweeping history of the story of Havron and how it has influenced, impacted the Israeli-Arab conflict, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and for your note of hope at the end. So thank you so much for joining us, Yardena.
Yardena: Thank you so much for having me. It was really a pleasure.
Noam: Unpacking Israeli History is a production of Unpacked, an OpenDor Media brand. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a rating on Apple or Spotify, it really helps other people find our show. And make sure you purchase Ghosts of a Holy War. It is an excellent, excellent, excellent book. One more time, I love hearing from you. So email me noam@unpacked.media share your thoughts, your feedback, your reflections, whatever it is, really love hearing from you.
