1920 Nebi Musa riots
The Nebi Musa Riots or Meoraot Tarap (lit. 5680 incidents) of April 7-9 1920 offer a striking early example of the hostile and violent racist Arab response to Jewish presence in Mandatory Palestine.
These riots erupted during the so called Nebi Musa festival, a significant religious observance for Arabs, but quickly turned into a savage mob attack against Jews in Jerusalem.
As Khalil al-Sakakini, a prominent Arab "Palestinian" intellectual, recounts, a frenzy of violence swept through the streets, with Arab assailants indiscriminately throwing stones, shouting violent chants like "Muhammad’s religion was born with the sword," "we will drink the blood of the Jews," and attacking Jews in the most brutal ways. In one account, a Jewish shoeshine boy, merely trying to hide from the mayhem, was violently beaten over the head with his own box by an Arab attacker.[1] [2]
The violence was not an isolated or spontaneous outburst but part of a larger pattern of Arab opposition to the growing Jewish presence in Palestine. It was not the result of some external provocation, but rather stemmed from entrenched hostility towards the Zionist movement, which sought to establish a homeland for the Jewish people. At its core, it was nothing more than blatant, unprovoked anti-Jewish hatred.
Even during this early period, when Jews were still a minority, their national aspirations were already met with fierce resistance. The British authorities, who controlled Palestine at the time, eventually restored order but only after considerable bloodshed, underscoring the volatility and danger of the situation.
The leaders such as al Husseini and others' incited mob violence of the Nebi Musa Riots, where Jews were attacked simply for their identity and aspirations, reflects the reality of Palestinian rejectionism towards the Zionist project and the Jewish people’s right to self-determination, but more broadly, anti Jewish racism, pure and simple. It would not be the last time that Jews in Palestine would face such hostility, and it serves as an early chapter in the broader narrative of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where violence against Jews became a recurring theme in the years leading up to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.
In light of this history, it is crucial to acknowledge that the Arab leadership’s resistance to peaceful coexistence, and later to partition and negotiations, played a central role in shaping the conflict. The notion that the Palestinian Arabs were innocent bystanders to their fate is not only historically inaccurate but dangerously dismissive of the aggressive campaigns of violence that targeted Jews long before the events of 1948. This violent legacy, reflected in the riots of 1920, set the stage for decades of continued hostility, culminating in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, where Arab states and Palestinian forces rejected any form of compromise or peaceful coexistence with the Jewish state.
References
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A riot broke out, the people began to run about and stones were thrown at the Jews. The shops were closed and there were screams . . . I saw a Zionist soldier covered in dust and blood . . . Afterwards, I saw one Hebronite approach a Jewish shoeshine boy, who hid behind a sack in one of the wall’s comers next to Jaffa Gate, and take his box and beat him over the head. He screamed and began to run, his head bleeding and the Hebronite left him and returned to the procession . . . The riot reached its zenith. All shouted, “Muhammad’s religion was born with the sword” . . . my soul is nauseated and depressed by the madness of humankind.
Khalil al-Sakakini, Such am I, Oh World!, cited in Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001 (New York: Vintage, 2001), 95.
- ↑ The New York Times Misrepresents the History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. DailyAlert. 2024-02-29 (Quillette).
Prof. Benny Morris - The underlying narrative of the New York Times magazine piece of Feb. 6, 2024, "The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and the Long Shadow of 1948," is that the Palestinians have no responsibility for anything that has befallen them over the decades. This, plus a welter of factual errors and misleading judgments, has produced a seriously distorted description of the history of the first Arab-Israeli war and its origins. The Times article consists of a lengthy "discussion" between six Arab and Jewish scholars, five of whom can hardly be deemed experts on either the Arab-Israeli conflict or the 1948 war. The three Arab panelists almost uniformly toe the PLO (or Hamas) line. The drift of the Times article is that the innocent Arabs of Palestine just sat back and watched, as suffering victims, as the Zionists, Israel, and some international actors, principally Great Britain, did their worst. This is pure nonsense. Throughout the 1920s, '30s, and '40s, Palestine's Arabs consistently rejected all proposals for a political compromise and flatly demanded all of Palestine, "from the river to the sea." In April 1920, May 1921, and August 1929, Arab mobs, whose passions had been whipped up by religious and political leaders, attacked their Jewish neighbors and passers-by in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Hebron, and Safad, killing dozens in a succession of pogroms. (The Times studiously avoids this word, referring to them only as "assaults.") Times staff writer Emily Bazelon says the 1920 Muslim Nebi Musa festivities in Jerusalem "turned into a deadly riot," in which "five Jews and four Arabs [were] killed." She fails to mention that an Arab mob attacked, murdered, and wounded Jews, or that the crowd of perpetrators chanted "we will drink the blood of the Jews." After three days of rampage and despoliation, British mandate security forces finally restored order, killing all or most of the four Arabs Bazelon mentions in the process. The findings of the subsequent British investigation are included in the July 1920 Palin Report, which states: "All the evidence goes to show that these [Arab] attacks were of a cowardly and treacherous description, mostly against old men, women and children - frequently in the back." The 1948 War, Bazelon explains, simply "broke out." What actually happened is that the Arabs of Palestine and the surrounding Arab states rejected the UN General Assembly partition proposal of Nov. 29, 1947, and the following day, terrorists ambushed two Jewish buses near Tel Aviv and snipers fired at Jewish passers-by in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. In May 1948, the armies of the neighboring Arab states invaded the country. Canadian Derek Penslar of Harvard University, one of the three Jewish panelists, claims that "between 9,000 and 12,000 Palestinians fought for the Allied forces in World War II." In fact, as far as I know, it is doubtful whether any Palestine Arabs actually "fought" during the war, though perhaps some 6,000 of Palestine's 1.2 million Arabs signed up with the British and served as cooks, drivers, or guards in British installations in Palestine. By comparison, 28,000 of Palestine's Jews - out of a population of 550,000 - joined the British army, and many actually fought in North Africa and Italy in 1941-1945. The writer is professor emeritus of Middle Eastern Studies at Ben-Gurion University.
(Full article [1]).
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