On Friday August 23, 1929, Arabs armed with clubs and swords attacked Jews throughout Jerusalem. The next day, Arabs in Hebron rioted, killing some 67 Jews, injuring another 50, desecrating synagogues, and mutilating their victims. The British authorities convened a board of inquiry, which came to be known as the Shaw commission, to investigate. Douglas Feith and Sean Durns point to a familiar blind spot in the commission’s conclusions:
The commission noted that Arab objections to Zionism were ideological, comprehensive, intense, and inflexible. In its report, it nonetheless devoted thousands of words to minute details of specific Arab grievances. It plumbed complaints that Jews, on one occasion, brought a chair to Jerusalem’s Western Wall and, on another, set up a screen there to divide male and female worshipers.
All this brings to mind the story of a man who thoroughly detests his wife but makes his case for divorce on the grounds that she doesn’t put the cap back on the toothpaste tube. Obviously, what he gripes about is not what accounts for his detestation. Confusion on this score was characteristic of Middle East policy officials in 1929, and it still is.
Today’s conventional wisdom holds that Palestinian–Israeli peace will result from resolving the “final-status issues” (borders, water rights, security arrangements, settlements, etc.). This is to assume away profound Muslim religious and Arab national objections to Israel’s very existence. It is like believing that the man detests his wife because of the toothpaste cap. . . .
Similarly, today, enemies of the Jewish state blame anti-Israel terrorism less on the terrorists and jihadist ideology than on defensive actions by Israel—building security barriers and operating checkpoints in and around the West Bank and Gaza, for example—which are described as “provocations” that fuel Palestinian resentment. To commemorate the 1929 riots is to refute the common error that the conflict is about the “occupation” that began in 1967. Arab anti-Zionist violence predates not only 1967 but Israel’s birth in 1948. It started even before the Hebron massacre.
Read more on National Review: https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/hebron-riots-1929-consequences-lessons/