Latest / In These Times with Rabbi Ammi Hirsch / Yardena Schwartz

Transcript

Yardena Schwartz · In These Times with Rabbi Ammi Hirsch

0:01
I'm Rabbi Ammi Hirsch of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York, and
0:04
you're listening to In These Times.
0:11
In an era where narratives move faster than facts, story of Israel is not
0:16
just contested, it is often distorted.
0:19
Since October 7th, that distortion has intensified, shaping
0:22
global perception in real time.
0:25
But this is not new.
0:27
In Ghosts of a Holy War, my guest today, award-winning journalist and
0:31
author Yardenna Schwartz, revisits the 1929 Hebron massacre, a moment
0:37
of brutal violence fueled by incitement, misinformation, and denial.
0:42
Her argument is unsettling.
0:44
The patterns that ignited that violence have not disappeared.
0:48
They have grown exponentially and are with us again.
0:52
Yardenna Schwartz spent a decade reporting from Israel for major
0:55
American media, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
0:59
Her work forces us to ask, what happens when falsehoods harden
1:03
into beliefs?
1:12
Yardenna,
1:12
welcome to In These Times.
1:15
Thank you so much for having me, Rabbi Hirsch.
1:17
I've been looking forward to spending this, uh, time with you.
1:20
I read your book, Ghosts of a Holy War, and it was just fascinating to me.
1:25
I, of course, had heard about the Hebron massacres as part of the history that we
1:30
all studied on the history of Israel and Zionism, I had never actually so deeply,
1:37
one, into the personal details, and two, into the ramifications of history.
1:42
prompted you to research this and want to write about this book?
1:46
And if you can also give us the main thesis of the book.
1:51
So I was like you before I embarked on the journey of writing this book.
1:56
I had heard about the massacre in Hebron in 1929, yet I knew almost nothing
2:03
about what caused it, what took place during that massacre, and particularly
2:09
what the consequences and the lasting impact of that massacre were for Israel,
2:15
for Zionism, for the Jewish people.
2:17
And I didn't just wake up one day and decide I want to write a book
2:21
about the 1929 Hebron massacre.
2:24
The book technically came to me through Yossi Klein Halevi, who was approached by
2:29
a family in Memphis, Tennessee years ago.
2:32
They had discovered a box of letters in their attic, and those letters had
2:37
been written by their late uncle, David Shainberg, who had sailed to Palestine in
2:42
1928 to study at what was then the most prestigious yeshiva in the land of Israel,
2:48
the Hebron Yeshiva, also known as, as the Slonim Yeshiva Over the course of the
2:54
next year, he wrote these beautiful, vivid letters describing what life was like in
3:00
Hebron, what it was like to be an American in British Mandate Palestine at the time.
3:06
He described the beautiful, peaceful relations between Hebron's Jewish
3:11
minority and the Arab majority, and his letters stopped in August 1929.
3:19
His last letter was written just a few days before he was murdered in
3:23
the Hebron massacre on August 24th, 1929, along with 66 other unarmed
3:29
Jewish men, women, and children, in what was effectively the worst pogrom
3:35
ever perpetrated outside of Europe at the time, up until the Farhud of 1941.
3:40
It was actually more deadly and more horrific than the infamous Kishinev
3:46
pogrom, which had driven tens of thousands of Jews to flee Eastern Europe.
3:50
Many of them had arrived in the land of Israel, building new lives in
3:54
Holy Land, many of them in Hebron, actually, and the pogroms that they
4:00
had left behind in Europe essentially followed them to the city of their
4:05
forefathers and mothers in the place where they had least suspected it.
4:09
For 1,000 years in Palestine under Muslim rule, Jews had been second-class citizens.
4:14
In Hebron, they couldn't actually enter the Tomb of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs.
4:18
They had to pray outside of the tomb.
4:21
But the relationships David described in his letters, and that I would come to
4:24
read in other testimonies and other books written by survivors of the massacre,
4:29
described this really unique kind of beacon of coexistence, where Arabs and
4:35
Jews attended each other's holidays and weddings and family celebrations,
4:39
and drink coffee in each other's homes.
4:41
And so when the riots of 1929 broke out, the Jews of Hebron were so sure that
4:49
these riots wouldn't affect them, that they had repeatedly rejected offers of
4:54
protection from the Haganah, who had come to warn them that riots were going
4:58
to erupt because the tensions had been brewing, and it was very clear that
5:03
something horrible was going to happen.
5:05
And the Jews of Hebron said, "You know, what happens in Jerusalem, what
5:08
happens elsewhere won't happen to us.
5:11
The Arabs of Hebron are our friends.
5:14
We trust them.
5:14
They'll protect us if anything goes wrong.
5:17
If anyone comes from Jerusalem to hurt us, our Arab neighbors will
5:20
protect us." And sure enough, there were two dozen families, Arab
5:24
families that day, who risked their own lives to save more than 200 Jews
5:30
from the slaughter that took place.
5:32
But 3,000 Arabs in Hebron took part in the massacre, and that was a huge ratio.
5:38
I mean, there were 20,000 Arabs living in Hebron at the time, and 3,000 of them
5:42
Hmm.
5:42
took
5:42
part in this massacre
5:43
I just ask you, uh, so you spent a lot of time with this family who had gone
5:49
up to the attic they were moving, or there was some reason for them to move
5:54
these boxes and they discover all these dusty boxes they didn't really know about
5:59
this history of the family beforehand.
6:00
Is that right?
6:02
That's right.
6:02
So Susie Lazaroff was a 70-year-old Jewish grandmother moving out of her
6:07
home with her husband to an- another part of Memphis, and her husband had
6:11
taken down all the boxes from the attic.
6:14
And as she was going through them, she saw one that she didn't recognize, and
6:17
it had said, you know, "Important papers.
6:18
Do not throw away." And when she opened them, she was shocked to
6:21
discover these letters because she had known about her Uncle David.
6:24
She knew that he had been killed in this massacre in Palestine, yet she
6:29
had no idea that these letters were sitting in her attic all these years.
6:32
And she knew very little about David himself because the family, his
6:36
parents almost never spoke about David or the massacre that took his life.
6:41
It was such a painful memory for them because they had
6:44
opposed his move to Palestine.
6:47
They had not wanted him to go there.
6:49
This was 1928.
6:50
This was not a time when young American men left their family and moved to Israel.
6:56
I mean, the state of Israel did not exist.
6:58
It was not something you did, and especially not someone like David, who
7:04
had attended Wharton Business School.
7:06
He actually dropped out of Wharton because he wanted to spend more
7:10
time learning Torah and Talmud, and his parents were Jewish.
7:15
You know, they were immigrants from the Ukraine who had fled the pogroms
7:17
of Ukraine, come to their version of the Promised Land in America to live a
7:22
life rid of antisemitism and pogroms.
7:25
But for David, this was not his Promised Land.
7:28
He was just completely unsatisfied by assimilated life, by the life
7:33
of someone who just lives their Jewish existence in hiding, in a
7:37
sense, just behind closed doors.
7:39
He wanted to be out in the open, studying Jewish texts with other young Jews,
7:46
and he became just infatuated with Jewish history and Jewish tradition.
7:49
And so first he moved to New York to study at yeshiva there, and
7:53
still there, he was dissatisfied.
7:55
He felt it was just too materialistic and too... Just not this spiritual
8:01
atmosphere that he craved, and that was what brought him
8:04
to Hebron
8:05
I'm just thinking about the drama.
8:07
You could write a whole play about just discovering what they were 90-year-old
8:11
letters of some uncle that you heard about in the family lore, but you
8:18
never really-- nobody ever talked about him, and all of a sudden you
8:21
open this dusty box and it's all there.
8:24
itself is a play or a novel or something.
8:27
That must have been really exciting.
8:29
So he's a 22-year-old.
8:30
He was filled with this ideological fervor that was characteristic
8:35
of the time in the Jewish world.
8:37
decides just simply on his own, contrary to his parents and his
8:40
family's desires, just to make his way from New York eventually to Hebron
8:47
to devote his life to Jewish studies
8:49
Well, he didn't really get there on his own because he was very
8:52
influenced by various rabbis.
8:54
So as a teenager growing up in Memphis, he attended Baron Hirsch Synagogue, and
9:00
the rabbi there was a French rabbi who ended up awakening this infatuation among
9:08
many of his students, infatuation with their Jewish traditions and Jewish history
9:12
that they hadn't really had at home.
9:14
Their parents all came to really resent this rabbi for, you know, the kids,
9:19
many of them convinced their parents to close their shops on Shabbat 'cause
9:22
many of these families were merchants.
9:24
You know, David's father had arrived as a poor, penniless immigrant from
9:28
Ukraine and came to become a very successful merchant and businessman
9:32
with haberdashery, a dry goods store in Memphis that eventually became this
9:37
chain of department stores across the South, I think in seven different states.
9:42
And so he was destined to follow in his father's footsteps.
9:46
His parents thought that he would take over the business one day, and he said,
9:50
"No, I wanna devote myself to studying." And I think he was the only one of
9:55
his friends in Memphis who did that.
9:56
When he went to New York, he made friends there who were similar to
10:02
him, but they talked about their desire to go and live in the land
10:06
of Israel, but none of them did it.
10:08
On- only he did.
10:09
And this was at a time when Zionism was not yet a unifying
10:14
force in the Jewish world, not in Palestine, not in the land of Israel,
10:20
and not in the Jewish diaspora.
10:22
In fact, I think you write there that David, he himself was opposed
10:26
to the secular Zionists of the time.
10:29
He believed in living in the land of Israel, which of course is an
10:32
ancient Jewish mitzvah commandment.
10:35
But he himself, when he arrived, he, he wasn't a Zionist, and partially
10:39
because they were mostly secular
10:42
Exactly.
10:43
So he was kind of representative of a very typical point of view at
10:48
that time among traditional Jews.
10:49
He saw Zionism as a contamination of Judaism.
10:53
He felt that the return of the Jewish masses to Zion from exile should
10:58
be achieved through the will of God, the arrival of the Mashiach,
11:02
and not through the will of men.
11:04
Yet he himself took upon the Zionist calling in a way to return to our ancient
11:09
homeland, and it was really interesting reading his letters, how there was
11:13
this really drastic juxtaposition of sometimes on the same pages of him calling
11:20
Zionism this vile anti-Jewish movement, and yet him speaking as a full-fledged
11:25
Zionist saying how amazing it felt to be walking on the ancient soil of our
11:31
homeland in the same places where the various holidays and biblical stories
11:37
he had grown up on had actually taken place, and how awe-inspiring it felt to
11:43
be celebrating holidays like Passover and like Shavuot on the land where these
11:48
stories were meant to unfold and where his prayers were every day wishing to
11:56
return to Zion, and he had returned.
11:58
So it was really interesting to see that clash of perspectives, and I
12:02
often wondered if he had survived the massacre, if his perspective on Zionism
12:09
would have changed, and my guess is it would have because after the massacre,
12:13
when the Jewish community of Hebron, one of the world's most ancient Jewish
12:17
communities, and at the time one of the most anti-Zionist communities, they were
12:22
the victims of the worst atrocities and the highest number of casualties during
12:28
the riots of 1929 despite their rejection of Zionism, despite their peaceful
12:33
relations with their Arab neighbors, and it made many of these traditional
12:41
anti-Zionist Jews in the Old Yishuv realize whatever their disagreement with
12:47
the secular foundations of Zionism, they needed to embrace Zionism, they realized,
12:54
because no foreign power was going to protect the Jews in their homeland.
12:59
Tell us sensitively as you can why these riots were so vicious, so consequential
13:07
in terms of their long-lasting impact, and what triggered them, what set them off?
13:13
People started to compare October 7th to the massacre of 1929, and in my book, you
13:19
can see there are vast parallels between October 7th and the massacre of 1929.
13:25
But in many ways, the massacre of 1929 was even more vicious and more gruesome
13:30
because The people who were killed on August twenty-fourth, nineteen twenty-nine
13:35
in Hebron weren't slain with guns.
13:38
They were slaughtered with knives and daggers, machetes and axes.
13:43
And much like October seventh, entire families were butchered.
13:48
Children watched as their parents were slaughtered by their neighbors.
13:53
Infants were killed in their mother's arms.
13:56
Women and teenage girls were raped.
13:59
Yeshiva students and rabbis were castrated.
14:03
Synagogues, ancient synagogues were looted and destroyed.
14:07
And the cruelty that was exhibited that day was just beyond cognition.
14:14
I mean, these were people who knew each other.
14:16
These weren't strangers.
14:17
These were neighbors killing their own neighbors.
14:20
And many of the victims, as they were killed, were crying
14:24
out to their assailants saying, "Why are you doing this?"
14:27
And naming their assailants by name.
14:30
They knew them.
14:32
And it was just a few hours, the massacre.
14:35
It was... It-- So the riots of nineteen twenty-nine, they erupted
14:38
on August twenty-third, a Friday.
14:40
It was after afternoon prayers at Al-Aqsa Mosque that the riots erupted when
14:45
thousands of armed worshipers who had gathered at Al-Aqsa descended from Al-Aqsa
14:50
down to the old city, began to kill Jews wherever they could find them, set
14:55
fire to Jewish businesses, and the riots just ricocheted throughout Palestine,
15:00
reaching nearly every Jewish community.
15:02
The British had to evacuate the entire Jewish community of Gaza and
15:06
bring them to places like Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, because in Jerusalem
15:09
and Tel Aviv, the reason many of the Jews who were there ended up
15:13
being safe was because the Haganah was very active and organized there.
15:17
And it was in these far-flung areas like Hebron and Safed or, you know, outer-lying
15:22
neighborhoods outside of Jerusalem where there was no defense force.
15:26
There were no armed Jews, so they were just completely defenseless, and
15:31
this is where you had these massacres.
15:32
There was actually also a massacre in Safed several days
15:35
after the massacre in Hebron.
15:37
But the massacre that began in Hebron was early Saturday morning.
15:44
The Jews of Hebron, there were about eight hundred Jews living in Hebron,
15:48
they had been told by the British police chief in Hebron that as long
15:52
as they stayed in their homes and locked their doors and kept their
15:55
windows closed, they would be safe.
15:57
And that proved completely false because the British police chief,
16:03
who had been warned that this would happen, not only by Jews, but by Arabs
16:09
who told him that this was going to happen, he had failed to evacuate the
16:14
Jews or arm the policemen in Hebron.
16:17
All but one of the policemen in Hebron were Arabs, many of them
16:22
joined the riots, or just allowed the slaughter to take place as they
16:28
stood outside of the homes where Jews were being effectively hunted down.
16:33
These homes were just being invaded by mobs who broke down doors with
16:39
axes, broke through windows, even climbed in through roofs to reach
16:45
the Jews who were hiding inside.
16:48
And there was one home where 70 Jews had taken refuge because it was thought
16:54
to be the safest place in Hebron.
16:57
It was the home of Eliezer Dan Slonim.
16:59
He was the son of the chief Ashkenazi rabbi of Hebron, and
17:05
their family had been in Hebron for generations, since the 1800s.
17:09
They spoke Arabic.
17:10
He, Eliezer, was the director of the bank in Hebron, and so he had many
17:16
friends among the Arab nobles and leaders of the Arab community in Hebron.
17:21
His Arab friends had told him days before that they would
17:25
protect him and his family.
17:26
That morning, they actually were sitting outside his home, but when the mob
17:30
arrived, someone said to him, "As long as you turn over the foreigners among
17:34
you," so those who had taken shelter in his home, "As long as you t- turn them
17:38
over, you'll be safe." And he said to them, "There are no foreigners among us.
17:43
We're all family." And they killed him first before slaughtering at
17:50
least two dozen others in his home.
17:52
They killed Eliezer, his wife.
17:54
They raped his wife.
17:56
They killed their five-year-old son.
17:59
Her parents, Chana Slonim's parents, were butchered, um, in
18:04
the most horrific ways, and their 11-month-old son barely survived.
18:10
He was found by another survivor, crying next to his mother,
18:15
and he had been stabbed in the head, but he ended up surviving.
18:19
And many of the Jews who survived that day survived, like Shlomo, just by the luck of
18:26
being presumed dead by the rioters because they were covered in the blood of others.
18:31
So I want to ask you, uh, both on a historic perspective as well as a personal
18:36
level, prompts this kind of this savagery?
18:41
Just on a nationalistic level, it was shocking but not completely surprising.
18:46
It didn't come out of the blue.
18:47
There were riots the day before.
18:49
were rumors that violence was going to explode.
18:53
So what was the nationalistic background?
18:56
What was the historical background that triggered this kind of response from
19:02
neighbors who knew their neighbors?
19:05
So if you look at many of the pogroms throughout history,
19:09
they were usually triggered by
19:11
the same thing, disinformation and lies
19:15
What information did they receive that was offensive to them?
19:19
The disinformation campaign that began in
19:21
1928, spearheaded by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Husseini, claimed
19:27
that the Jews of Palestine were plotting to conquer and destroy Al-Aqsa Mosque
19:32
in order to rebuild the ancient temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
19:37
And he planted that lie around Yom Kippur of 1928, and it grew and grew, and because
19:42
he was the Grand Mufti, he was the most powerful Islamic official in Palestine.
19:47
He'd been appointed by the British.
19:49
He oversaw all of the appointments of imams, clerics, Muslim
19:53
teachers, Sharia courts.
19:55
And so that lie was spread throughout Palestine in mosques and in schools.
20:02
And in Hebron, the local Muslim official, the most important Islamic official in
20:09
Hebron, localized that disinformation campaign, telling the Muslims of
20:14
Hebron that the Jews in Jerusalem were planning to destroy Al-Aqsa.
20:18
The Jews in Hebron were planning to turn Ibrahimi Mosque, the Arabic name for
20:23
the Tomb of the Patriarchs, they were planning to turn that into a synagogue.
20:27
And so this threat, this menace to Islam from the Jewish population, was
20:34
considered so dangerous and such a great threat to their livelihood, to their
20:41
identity, to their religion, which was so important to them, that they were
20:46
convinced by their leaders, by their religious leaders, that they needed to
20:50
defend Islam and Al-Aqsa with their blood.
20:53
And the reason those riots broke out on August 23rd, 1929, was because on
20:59
Tisha B'Av of 1929, so less than 10 days earlier, there was a demonstration
21:07
of Jewish activists, young Jewish activists, who marched to the Kotel,
21:11
to the Western Wall, on Tisha B'Av, the day after thousands of Jews had
21:15
prayed at the Kotel, just as they had years earlier, to commemorate
21:19
the destruction of the temples.
21:20
But again, this is following a year-long propaganda campaign claiming that Jews
21:26
who are praying at the Kotel, praying at the Western Wall, are actually seeking
21:32
to destroy Al-Aqsa, which is above.
21:34
At the time, Jews could not access the Temple Mount.
21:37
It was completely off limits.
21:39
You know, unlike today, Jews can access it.
21:40
They just can't pray there.
21:41
But then you couldn't even ascend the Temple Mount if you were Jewish.
21:46
The only place you could go was the Western Wall, and at that
21:48
time was a very tiny alleyway.
21:51
And the Mufti, part of his campaign of propaganda was also to limit
21:55
Jewish access to the Western Wall.
21:57
So it wasn't enough to incite violence against the Jewish worshipers, who
22:01
were increasingly being attacked on a weekly basis by Muslims who
22:07
considered these peaceful Jewish worshipers a threat to Islam.
22:11
He was also making it harder for Jews to pray there.
22:14
He had a doorway built into the Western Wall to allow Muslims to
22:19
access Al-Aqsa through the wall, and that was what led to this march by
22:24
young Jewish activists, many of them followers of Jabotinsky, on to Shabbat.
22:29
And their march was actually in protest against the
22:31
British, not against the Arabs.
22:32
They were protesting the British failure to protect Jewish worshipers
22:36
from increasingly frequent attacks by Muslims, protesting their failure
22:40
to ensure free Jewish access to the Western Wall, to the holiest site
22:46
accessible to the Jews of Israel, and to the holiest site in Judaism.
22:51
And their march was peaceful.
22:53
It was, it was provocative.
22:54
They were chanting, "The wall is ours." They were singing Hatikva.
22:57
They were carrying what would become the Israeli flag, the Star of David flag.
23:03
Yet for the Mufti and his propaganda campaign, this march was exactly
23:07
what he needed to point to his people and say, "Look, it's happening.
23:10
Look, here's your proof." They claimed that Jews had raped Muslim women, attacked
23:16
Muslim men, cursed the prophet Muhammad.
23:18
None of that was true, but at this point the truth had become irrelevant.
23:22
And this horrific march to the Western Wall was really what sparked the riots.
23:32
But it wasn't the actual march, it was the lies about the
23:35
march that sparked the riots.
23:36
And this shouldn't have caused riots, but it was a result of this propaganda
23:41
campaign and these lies that led over the coming days to attacks by Muslims against
23:48
Jews in the Old City in Jerusalem and counterattacks by Jews against Muslims.
23:52
And on August twenty-third, Friday prayers had been this
23:56
focal point of this resistance, essentially, to this Jewish plot.
24:02
And the imams had called on Muslims to come to Al-Aqsa armed in order
24:08
to defend Islam with their blood.
24:10
And in sermons at Al-Aqsa that day, there were clerics who stood with a sword in
24:15
their hands and demanded that after Friday prayers, that they go out and defend
24:21
Al-Aqsa with their blood, and that's what they did
24:23
In listening to you describe this, it sounds so much like modern
24:27
times too, and I know that's one of the points that you make.
24:30
I wanna ask you about that second.
24:32
I just-- In researching this for your book, unfortunately and sadly,
24:37
you've had to delve into these extreme cases of violence and savagery that
24:43
human beings inflict on one another.
24:46
I, as a rabbi, you know, I always try and ask the basic questions of human nature,
24:51
try and understand the human composition.
24:54
So you've had an opportunity to look at this carefully
24:57
and deeply, extreme violence.
25:01
What have you concluded about human nature?
25:03
What sets this off?
25:04
How could people be so cruel one to another, even if they have grievances,
25:10
whether they're legitimate or not?
25:14
I think people
25:15
are capable of the most horrible things when they're part of mobs.
25:21
I think that individually, these people would not have done what they ended up
25:26
doing that day, and I think it was because they were wrapped up in this fervor,
25:31
and also because they were instructed by their leaders, the people who they
25:36
looked up to most, the people who they saw as being the living embodiment
25:41
of what it means to be a good Muslim.
25:43
I mean, it was... The people who were leading the mobs in
25:46
Hebron were Muslim teachers.
25:49
They were the imams, and they were telling them, "Go into that home. You
25:54
know, you have to take vengeance on your brothers in Jerusalem," because
25:57
they were telling them that it was Jews in Jerusalem who were killing
26:02
Muslims in the streets of Jerusalem, which the exact opposite was happening.
26:06
When Arabs were killed during the riots, it was because they were carrying
26:11
out attacks and were killed in the process of waging those attacks, and
26:15
most of them were actually killed by British police, not by Jews.
26:19
In Jerusalem, some of the Haganah defenders did end up
26:22
managing to quell the riots.
26:25
But in Hebron, no Jews were armed there, and they were just waiting in fear,
26:30
knowing that their life was about to end.
26:32
And I think that when people feel that powerful and they're part of a mob, it
26:38
leads them to perpetrate horrific things that they would never do on their own,
26:45
and I think that leadership is to blame.
26:49
I don't think that these people were born evil or would have felt the
26:57
desire to do any of this if they hadn't been convinced of the necessity
27:02
of doing so
27:13
Do you think
27:14
every human being has that in them, or do you think this is a
27:17
product of culture or history?
27:21
And it kind of begs the question, so if the leaders provoked the people to
27:25
riot and pogrom, what was the idea?
27:28
What were the values that the leaders were provoking in the people themselves?
27:32
It's hard for me to imagine, but I fear myself and I fear my capacity because
27:38
I know what human beings are like.
27:40
But it's hard for me to envision actually doing the things that happened on October
27:47
7th and the things that you no matter what grievance I might have with somebody else.
27:54
is that true?
27:55
Is every human being, in your view, capable of this kind of
27:59
extreme violence and savagery?
28:01
Or is there something about cultures that promotes this and liberates
28:05
somebody to be able to do this?
28:08
I don't think every person is capable of it, and I don't think every
28:11
people or culture is capable of it.
28:14
I think it-- there has to be that value of violence, that glorification of
28:20
violence in a culture to enable that.
28:22
And I think, you know, if you listen to what the rioters were saying on August
28:28
24th, 1929, they were praising Allah, saying that they were fighting for Al-Aqsa
28:36
and defending Al-Aqsa against the Jews.
28:40
And in the sermons that encouraged them to do these things, they were
28:43
told, "You need to defend Al-Aqsa.
28:47
You need to defend Islam with your blood." This is, you know, violent language,
28:51
"With your swords." They said, you know, "Islam conquered with the sword.
28:55
It needs to remain with the sword." They were chanting, "Palestine is our lamb.
29:01
The Jews are our dogs." It was very much a religious experience, these riots,
29:10
and it was very much done in defense of religion, in the name of religion.
29:15
For that to occur, you need to have a religion that does place
29:20
some sort of value in violence.
29:24
And sadly, there are streams of Islam, not all, that do place a great value on
29:32
jihad and violent jihad, and it can't be ignored, not in this bout of violence.
29:39
And also, you know, October 7th was called the Al-Aqsa Flood for
29:43
a reason because this idea of protecting Al-Aqsa from this supposed
29:48
Jewish plot, it didn't end in 1929.
29:51
That was when it began, this lie that has withstood a century.
29:56
And many Palestinians and Muslims around the world continue to believe
30:00
that Israel is planning to destroy Al-Aqsa to rebuild the ancient temple.
30:06
And we even heard Tucker Carlson say this weeks ago when he claimed that
30:10
Chabad was behind the war against Iran in order to destroy Al-Aqsa.
30:15
I mean, it's absurd on so many levels, but I certainly never imagined
30:18
that I would hear these points being spread by Tucker Carlson.
30:23
We live in a very strange world.
30:24
But since the Grand Mufti began that lie in 1928 and saw how effective it
30:30
was in silencing his own critics and his own criticism from the Arabic
30:37
press and his political rivals, and the Muslim masses in Palestine had
30:41
opposed his role as Grand Mufti.
30:43
I mean, he was appointed by the British to a role he was not qualified for.
30:47
It was effectively like placing a rabbi who never finished rabbinical
30:52
school, so not a rabbi, in the role of chief rabbi of Palestine.
30:56
He was completely unqualified, and he was so corrupt that he was using
31:03
religious funds meant for the waqf.
31:05
He was so corrupt, and until this lie that he started to spread in 1928,
31:10
he had been a very unpopular leader.
31:12
And once he created this far more menacing threat to the Muslims of
31:19
Palestine, so much of that criticism just disappeared because suddenly,
31:24
why did corruption matter when you had this threat to the holiest site
31:30
for Islam in Palestine?
31:31
And he, of course, later met He was an ally of the Nazis in
31:38
the... He was a really bad guy.
31:39
He didn't just meet Hitler.
31:41
I mean, he was essentially a Nazi.
31:43
He was wanted for Nazi war crimes.
31:45
After World War II, he was based in Berlin throughout the Holocaust, spreading
31:50
Nazi propaganda, recruiting thousands of Muslims to fight for the Nazis.
31:55
He worked directly under Joseph Goebbels.
31:57
He was the director
31:58
of the Arab Bureau of the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda.
32:01
So this leads me to one of the points in your book, which is that there is
32:05
a direct connection between the events of 1929 and the events of today.
32:11
And in fact, in reading your book, and even just somebody who didn't read your
32:16
book, but just listening to you describing the language the motivations, initial
32:23
reaction would be, this is just describing today what happened almost 100 years ago
32:29
to the T in terms of the rhetoric, the impulses, the role of religion, the actual
32:35
savagery that is inflicted on people.
32:39
What is the connection in your mind between 1929 October 7th?
32:46
So aside from The centrality of Al-Aqsa and this idea of defending Al-Aqsa from
32:53
the Jews, and of course, the chilling parallels between the atrocities that
32:56
took place in August 1929 and October 7.
32:59
Beyond that, I think the even more disturbing parallels lie in the
33:05
aftermath of both massacres, because in both cases, the atrocities were
33:11
simultaneously denied by Arab leaders and the Arabs of Palestine at the time
33:16
and the Arabic press in Palestine, and blamed on their Jewish victims.
33:21
One of the statements I found that was put out by the Arab executive,
33:25
like the leadership of Arabs in British mandate Palestine, was
33:30
titled Scandals of Jewish Propaganda.
33:33
It said that the Jews who were slaughtered in Hebron were in fact killed by their
33:37
fellow Jews, by yeshiva students who wanted to raise funds from the diaspora
33:41
for their yeshiva, and denied that there were any massacres by Arabs.
33:47
They claimed that Jews had attacked Arabs.
33:49
And of course, all eyewitness testimony, whether it was Jewish or the British
33:54
police testified for hundreds of hours in the course of the Shaw Commission,
33:58
the British Commission that was sent from London to Palestine in
34:01
the aftermath to study the causes of this massacre and what should happen.
34:06
And those hearings make very clear what led to the massacre, the incitement,
34:11
the disinformation, and the fact that this was, you know... And, and the Shaw
34:14
Commission concludes that this was a slaughter of defenseless Jews by Arabs.
34:20
And yet, the victim-blaming also came from the British.
34:24
In the aftermath of the riots one year later, the Shaw Commission concluded
34:30
that despite all of that, they said that the riots were actually caused by fears,
34:38
legitimate fears by Arabs of rising Jewish immigration and land purchases.
34:44
So at the time, Jews were about twenty percent of a population
34:48
of less than one million people.
34:50
This land today is inhabited by more than ten million people.
34:54
So there was no lack of land, and the reason I use the word purchases
35:01
and the reason the British were using the word purchases and even
35:03
the Mufti was using the word land purchases is because contrary to the
35:06
disinformation campaigns of today, none of this land was being stolen by Jews.
35:11
It wasn't being confiscated.
35:12
It wasn't being handed to Jews by the British and taken
35:15
from their Arab landowners.
35:18
This land was being sold at exorbitant above-market prices by wealthy Arab
35:23
landowners to Jews who were coming in, many of them refugees from pogroms,
35:29
later on refugees from the Holocaust.
35:32
And The British responded to the massacre by limiting Jewish immigration,
35:39
limiting Jewish land purchases, and against the backdrop of Nazi
35:43
persecution, and even against a backdrop of concentration camps, these strict
35:48
quotas against Jewish immigration to the land of Israel withstood.
35:54
And during and after the Holocaust, tens of thousands of Jews who arrived
35:58
on the shores of the land of Israel, of Palestine, were either sent back
36:02
to Europe by the British, or they were detained in British internment
36:06
camps in Cyprus and in Palestine.
36:08
So essentially, Holocaust survivors or people fleeing the Holocaust were held
36:13
in these camps surrounded by barbed wire.
36:17
Up until 1948, when Israel declared independence, there were still about
36:21
50,000 Jews being held in these British internment camps just in Cyprus alone.
36:25
This was a direct result of this Arab violence, and that was the goal.
36:29
The Mufti made very clear his goal of ending Jewish immigration.
36:34
He told the British when they proposed the first two-state solution in 1937, not
36:40
only would he not even discuss the idea of a two-state solution of sharing the
36:44
land, he said that the 400,000 Jews living in Palestine at the time, this was in
36:49
1937, that they would all have to leave.
36:51
So this idea of sharing the land, of having, you know, a binational
36:56
state, this utopian society where Jews and Arabs have equal rights,
37:00
this was proposed by the British.
37:01
It was actually embraced by the Zionist leadership at the time.
37:06
And the Grand Mufti and other Arab leaders rejected
37:09
it out of hand vehemently.
37:10
And do you think that ever since, is there something formative about riots
37:16
beginning in 1929 that set into motion the entire rest of the century that we've
37:23
experienced in terms of the relationship between and the Arabs and what became
37:29
the Israelis and the Palestinians?
37:32
Absolutely.
37:32
In so many ways.
37:33
I'm not arguing that this conflict began in 1929.
37:37
There had been tensions between Arabs and Jews in Palestine for years.
37:41
The Grand Mufti, before he was appointed to his role by the British, he had
37:45
actually fled Palestine, fleeing arrest by the British following riots
37:50
in 1920 that he had also incited.
37:52
But those riots were much less deadly.
37:55
The massacre of 1929, the riots of 1929 were really the first mass casualty
38:00
event of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
38:03
And not only that, it was the first time that the driving forces of this
38:07
conflict today were set into motion.
38:10
This argument This claim about a Jewish plot to destroy Al-Aqsa, which
38:16
continues to galvanize so much violence and hatred today, whether it was
38:22
Al-Aqsa flood, the Al-Aqsa Intifada, so many bouts of violence over the
38:26
past century have had Al-Aqsa at their core and this idea of defending Al-Aqsa
38:32
from this Jewish plot to destroy it.
38:35
That began with the riots of 1929 and so many other forces that
38:40
continue to drive this conflict.
38:41
So Zionism before 1929, there was a very small militant stream of Zionism.
38:49
The revisionists were very a fringe element of Zionism.
38:53
And after 1929, the revisionist side of Zionism became so much stronger.
39:00
Many people who had until then embraced the idea of a binational state, of just a
39:06
Jewish home, not an actual Jewish state, became convinced of Jabotinsky's arguments
39:11
that nothing short of a Jewish state with a Jewish majority were necessary.
39:16
And also the idea of coexistence that had really just not
39:23
been questioned before 1929.
39:25
It wasn't controversial.
39:26
There was coexistence in Hebron, in Jerusalem, in
39:29
Spat, in so many other places.
39:31
And this is why you had parties like Brita Shalom, these Zionist parties
39:35
that argued for binational state.
39:38
And after 1929, many of those members fell away, realizing that it just
39:43
wasn't realistic, that if what happened in Hebron could happen there, what's
39:48
preventing it from happening again?
39:50
And that trust in neighbors of their neighbors was tragically lost after 1929.
40:00
I hope that we can someday see a return to the beautiful relations that the
40:07
Jews and Arabs of Hebron enjoyed prior to the massacre and Jews and Arabs
40:12
elsewhere in the land of Israel had.
40:15
And when the Mufti rejected that first two-state solution in 1937, of course,
40:22
he and every other Arab leader rejected the UN's two-state solution in 1947.
40:29
And so much of the violence that we have seen over the past century could
40:34
have been prevented if Arab leaders had embraced two states for two people in
40:40
1947 in the way that the Jewish leaders of Palestine and Jewish leaders around
40:46
the world and the Zionist movement embraced the two-state solution in 1947.
40:50
I mean, they even embraced the British partition plan in 1937, which would have
40:56
seen just 20% of the British mandate Palestine become the Jewish state.
41:02
10% was going to be an international zone with the Temple Mount and the
41:07
Arabs of Palestine would have had 70%.
41:11
as the Arab state of Palestine.
41:13
And I think what's often missing from the discussion of all of these
41:17
solutions and offers were that this would have represented the first
41:21
free Palestine, the first independent state of Palestine in history.
41:26
Because Palestine had never been free and independent, and it had always been ruled
41:29
by foreign powers long before the British.
41:31
The British conquered Palestine from the Ottomans, who had
41:34
ruled it for over 400 years.
41:36
Prior to them, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Crusaders, the Romans.
41:40
I mean, it was the Romans who named the ancient land of Israel Palestine.
41:45
It was not an Arabic name.
41:46
It was a Latin name, and it was named that as punishment to the Jews of Judea for
41:53
rebelling, for the Bar Kokhba rebellion.
41:55
This was their punishment.
41:56
The Romans renamed the land after the ancient biblical enemies of
42:00
the Israelites, the Philistines.
42:02
You're a, uh, seasoned, experienced, and award-winning journalist.
42:07
can you tell us about your observations on how Israel is covered traditionally and
42:15
in particular recently since October 7th?
42:19
Since October
42:20
7th, it has become painful to call myself a journalist and to be a
42:25
journalist because I feel completely betrayed by my own profession.
42:31
I attended Columbia Journalism School.
42:34
When I went to school there, it was very clear that the job of a journalist
42:39
is to seek truth wherever it is found, regardless of who facts help or hurt.
42:45
Truth was the core of your mission.
42:47
It wasn't about advocacy.
42:49
It wasn't about arguing in favor of a certain conclusion or narrative.
42:53
And since October 7th, and even before October 7th, it was very clear that
42:58
many journalists and entire news organizations no longer rest on those
43:04
values, those core values of journalism.
43:08
What are their values?
43:10
It seems that their values have become advocacy and activism.
43:14
And, you know, Matti Friedman makes this argument better than anyone else,
43:17
that it now seems as if so many of the articles we read about Israel aren't
43:25
in service of truth, but in service of a specific narrative, the conventional
43:30
wisdom of Israel being the oppressor and the Palestinians being the victim.
43:37
There are, of course, cases when that is true in certain instances,
43:40
but at an overall picture of an entire people or two different
43:44
peoples, that is just not reality.
43:47
There are flaws on both sides.
43:49
There are virtues on both sides, and you won't see that from the
43:52
way Israel is covered today.
43:54
And I think it's because so many of the journalists and leaders of
44:00
news organizations today are Afraid.
44:04
Afraid of the mobs, afraid of the consequences if they report accurately
44:11
and fairly and in a balanced, neutral way because many of their
44:16
readers do not want to see the truth.
44:18
They want to read the stories that reaffirm their own conventional
44:24
wisdom and what they have been told.
44:27
And much of what they have been told is propaganda, is disinformation.
44:31
And I think that a result of so many years of this conflict being mistaught,
44:38
certain parts of the story being left out, whether it's the Grand Mufti,
44:43
whether it's the 1929 Hebron massacre, whether it's starting the conversation
44:47
about how this conflict began in 1948, which is itself propaganda.
44:52
I mean, that, that is like starting a story halfway through.
44:55
This conflict had begun long before 1948.
44:58
And the way in which even just 1948, what happened then is depicted by so
45:04
many news organizations today, it's with- without any context of what preceded
45:08
1948, namely the 1947 partition plan that would have created two states.
45:14
And when you talk about these things, you're immediately labeled a propagandist
45:21
or, you know, a Zionist propaganda.
45:23
These are just facts.
45:24
This is truth.
45:25
And, you know, I've seen it in the way that my book, despite the fact that I
45:29
worked for over a decade for liberal news organizations, NBC, MSNBC, wrote for Time
45:37
Magazine, USA Today, Foreign Policy, so many magazines and news organizations
45:41
that do cover books, and you see the books that they are reviewing or that
45:46
they are mentioning or recommending.
45:49
My book was never mentioned by any of them, any of the newspapers and
45:54
magazines I wrote for, because it is not in line with that conventional wisdom.
46:00
And, you know, my book is not one-sided.
46:02
It talks about also the 1994 Hebron massacre by Baruch Goldstein.
46:09
I write at length about the way in which Palestinians live today in Hebron.
46:16
And, you know, I don't ignore the mistakes of either side,
46:21
and yet in today's climate, it's seen as favoring a certain side.
46:25
And I think that the second journalism enters a place in which facts are
46:31
seen as helping a side and hurting a side, and so those facts are left
46:36
out of stories or just not covered at all, journalism is no longer serving
46:41
its mission of informing people.
46:43
And I think this is why so many people are just completely
46:47
misinformed about the conflict.
46:49
My undergraduate degree is in US foreign policy in the Middle East.
46:53
I took many courses on the Arab-Israeli conflict, and never
46:57
had I learnt about the Grand Mufti.
46:59
I had never learnt about the centrality that Al-Aqsa and this lie
47:04
about a Jewish plot to destroy it.
47:06
I never learnt about that.
47:07
It was all about the occupation and the settlements.
47:10
And of course, those are not lies.
47:13
You know, there is a military occupation of the West Bank.
47:16
Settlements have grown.
47:17
You know, none of these are lies.
47:18
But when you place that as your only context for understanding a conflict
47:23
that is so much more complex than that, so much more nuanced than that,
47:27
you're really not helping anyone.
47:29
And I think that a lot of this failure to accurately depict and accurately
47:35
understand the conflict for what it is precisely why this conflict
47:38
remains 100 years later unsolved.
47:40
Because when you don't understand a problem, you're never going to solve it.
47:46
This has been a rather sobering conversation.
47:48
My last question to you is, is there any room for optimism?
47:52
Are you optimistic about the next period of time?
47:56
Yeah, I know.
47:56
It is very hard to come away from this history with optimism, but
48:02
if you read the book, it actually does end on a hopeful note.
48:06
And despite the sobering, depressing research I did for this book, I actually
48:14
came away more hopeful than I had been going into it because, like I said,
48:19
when you understand a conflict and realize what's truly driving it, then
48:25
you realize it actually isn't that hard to solve if you address what's
48:32
truly driving this violence, the incitement, the disinformation, you
48:36
know, the Palestinian education system that is built around these lies and
48:40
around this glorification of violence and martyrdom and defending Islam.
48:45
When you realize that is what is leading so many children who are innocent
48:52
children, educating them to become something other than that, educating
48:56
them to want to aspire to become martyrs, not only are you encouraging
49:02
child abuse, but you're encouraging the perpetuation of this conflict.
49:05
And I think when you realize that through a re-education campaign, through an
49:09
absolute reformation of the Palestinian education system, and also an empowering
49:16
and elevating of the peace-seeking Palestinian voices who are there, who
49:21
want to be heard, and who have been sidelined for decades, not only by their
49:26
own leadership who prefers continued violent resistance 'cause it serves
49:30
their own interests, but also these peace-seeking voices being sidelined by
49:36
those outside of Palestine, those in, you know, the West who are glorifying
49:41
violence and glorifying actors like Hamas who have brought only more death and
49:46
destruction upon the Palestinian people.
49:48
And so when you meet these Palestinians who are risking their lives to speak out
49:54
for peace and for a two-state solution, despite all odds, you realize if they
50:01
can do that, how are we not, we as in whether it's the Jewish community,
50:06
whether it's Western organizations who claim to be working towards peace,
50:11
whether it's Western leaders who are striving to achieve a two-state
50:17
solution or some kind of peaceful negotiation, that is the only hope.
50:21
These peace-seeking, moderate Palestinians who understand the mistakes of the past
50:27
and wish that their leaders had chosen a different path in the past, but are
50:32
determined to pave a different path for the future, and they need help.
50:37
They cannot create any kind of movement if their voice is seen as somehow treacherous
50:45
to the Palestinian cause, if their argument is seen as somehow pro-Israel.
50:50
It is not pro-Israel.
50:51
It's pro-Palestine.
50:52
When you think about what they want, they want self-determination, and they realize
50:56
that the only way to self-determination for the Palestinian people is to recognize
51:01
the necessity of two states living side by side in peace and to reject
51:05
this idea that a Palestine will only be free when Israel ceases to exist.
51:09
And there are many Palestinians who think this way and would love to be
51:14
able to speak out, but they can't.
51:17
Many of those who have have had to flee the West Bank and
51:20
Gaza and seek asylum abroad.
51:23
And so long as that is the atmosphere, we're not going to see a different
51:28
kind of Palestinian leadership.
51:30
So I think that what's absolutely necessary is an empowerment of these
51:35
kinds of Palestinian voices in society.
51:38
And also only once you have a different kind of leadership can you then have
51:43
that reformation and re-education within the Palestinian education system.
51:48
Yardenna Schwartz, thank you very much.
51:50
The book is Ghosts of a Holy War.
51:53
I highly recommend it.
51:54
Keep writing, speaking truth, and, uh, we're looking forward
51:59
to your next monumental work.
52:02
Thank you so much, Rabbi Hirschen.
52:03
I'm sorry if that was too much of a downer.
52:06
It's funny, my friends always talk about how I'm one person in my professional
52:11
writing life and another kind of happy, cheerful person outside of it.
52:15
So I always try to end with a smile, and I hope, uh,
52:19
No, the truth is sobering.
52:20
yeah, I hope I didn't bring you too down
52:22
today.
52:23
it wasn't sobering, this
52:24
would've been resolved long ago.
52:35
Speaking
52:36
with Yardenna Schwartz about the Hebron massacres of 1929, all
52:40
of the memories of October 7th, 2023 came flooding back to me.
52:44
Yardenna asserts that the murderous impulses embedded within some quarters
52:48
of Palestinian society in the early 20th century inflicted again on
52:53
Jews practically a century later.
52:56
It is no coincidence, she feels, that the same acts, the same brutality,
53:00
the same savagery was perpetrated by the descendants of the same people.
53:06
It's an exceedingly difficult message to hear, especially for liberals like me.
53:11
At the same time, we need to be honest with ourselves and admit that
53:16
for many of us, dramatic shifted in our thinking after October 7th.
53:21
With the passage of time, some memories soften.
53:25
But try to remember your feelings the first week of October 2023
53:29
when the news came seeping out.
53:31
It was devastating.
53:33
We saw in vivid reality what a pogrom looks like, mass mayhem and murder.
53:39
The horror still shakes me to my core.
53:41
Even now, two and a half years later, there are many moments when I want to
53:45
look away a matter of self-preservation.
53:48
I just can't bear the pain.
53:50
I can't shake the memories of utter helplessness, knowing that 250
53:55
brutalized Israeli hostages were languishing in dank, dark tunnels.
54:00
But we need to force ourselves to not look away.
54:04
We need to fully absorb what is in the nature of the human creature, what we
54:08
are capable of doing to each other.
54:10
And as Jews, we need to be honest about our enemies.
54:15
They massacred entire families in their homes.
54:18
They mutilated corpses and paraded them in public on Gaza streets while delirious
54:23
crowds hollered their crazed approval.
54:26
They slaughtered babies.
54:28
They assaulted young women as the bodies of their dead friends lay all
54:31
around them They took men, women, children, mothers, and infants
54:36
hostage into the bowels of Gaza.
54:40
Among them was an elderly grandmother, a Holocaust survivor.
54:44
The youngest hostage was nine-month-old Kfir Bibas, who was seized
54:48
with his four-year-old brother, Ariel, and his mother, Shiri.
54:52
All three of them were strangled to death in captivity, according
54:56
to Israeli forensic investigators.
54:59
Husband and father Yarden Bibas, who was also taken hostage and did not know what
55:04
had become of his family, was released after four hundred and eighty-four
55:08
days, only learning in Israel that his wife and children were no more.
55:14
We must keep a clear moral compass.
55:17
This is not freedom fighting.
55:19
This is not resistance.
55:21
It is rank, anti-Semitic, evil, wicked, villainous, abominable, heinous barbarism.
55:28
And anyone in the Middle East, in the United States and the West, in the
55:31
halls of Congress, in the media, or in schools or university campuses, anyone
55:38
whitewashes, apologizes for, or justifies this repugnant degeneracy is morally
55:45
compromised and morally complicit.
55:47
Any educator, any head of school or university cannot actually bring
55:52
themselves to call out terrorism, name the terrorists, condemn their
55:57
inhuman and atrocious brutality the most important test of pedagogical,
56:01
moral, and civic leadership.
56:04
Any religious leader prays for peace but cannot call out terrorism, name
56:09
the terrorists, and condemn their inhuman and atrocious brutality
56:14
practices faux morality, cowardly, fake, evasive armchair ethics
56:19
masquerading as spiritual leadership.
56:21
It's not moral courage.
56:23
It's moral preening.
56:26
These are difficult days for the Jewish people.
56:29
But history unfolds in phases.
56:30
There are brighter days on the horizon.
56:33
Remember, Israel was founded to empower Jews with self-determination.
56:39
After two thousand years, a persecuted, abandoned, decimated people
56:43
finally rose up and said, "Enough.
56:46
The days of murdering and massacring Jews with impunity are over.
56:50
We will protect ourselves.
56:52
defend our people.
56:54
We will be masters of our own fate.
56:57
They will not break us." There is no force in the world more
57:01
powerful than the united spirit of the Jewish people in urgent times.
57:07
It broke the will of Pharaoh, of history's tyrants who couldn't fathom how we were
57:11
still around, and it will eventually break the will of Israel's contemporary enemies.
57:18
Until that day, there is no alternative but to fight back.
57:23
I wish with all my heart it was not so.
57:26
Until next time.
57:28
This is In These Times.