'Ghosts of a Holy War': How the Israel-Hamas War is rooted in the 1929 Hebron massacre - review

Yardena Schwartz, author of Ghosts of a Holy War: The 1929 Massacre in Palestine That Ignited the Arab-Israeli Conflict, is an award-winning American-born journalist who spent 10 years living and working in Israel. In 2019, she was handed the sort of literary treasure that most journalists can only dream of.

Ten years earlier, Suzie Lazarov (née Shainberg) and her husband, Paul, were still living in the old Shainberg family home in Memphis, Tennessee, but were about to move. Clearing the attic, they found a box filled with documents.

Suzie found, together with cables, telegrams, photographs, and a diary, more than 60 letters, each up to 10 pages long, written from what was then Palestine and dated in the late 1920s, all sent from her uncle David to his family.

The letters fascinated Suzie’s daughter, Jill. Over the next decade, Jill organized and digitized all of them, and finally archived them at her synagogue. Then, feeling that the archive deserved to be more widely known, she located Yardena Schwartz and entrusted her with the letters and diary.

What Schwartz discovered was truly enthralling.

An amazing discovery connecting the 1929 massacre to today

Aged 22, David Shainberg, intensely religious and possessed of a deep feeling for Judaism, decided that his purpose in life was to travel to the Holy Land and study Torah. Against the wishes of his parents and family, who called his mission crazy, he set sail from New York Harbor on September 12, 1928.

When he landed in Palestine two weeks later, he spent a few nights in Tel Aviv, visited Jerusalem and the Kotel, and then made for the Hebron Yeshiva, the largest in the Holy Land.

His letters home provide a detailed picture of Palestine at the time and portray Hebron as a peaceful city, with Jews and Arabs living and working side by side. He tells of Jewish holidays and weddings, says Schwartz, “attended by Hebron’s Arab leaders and sheikhs, who danced into the night alongside rabbis.”

On August 24, 1929 – a Shabbat – some 3,000 heavily armed Arabs marched into Hebron and attacked the Jewish Quarter. They went from house to house raping, stabbing, torturing, castrating, and burning alive their unarmed victims. Sixty-seven Jewish men, women, and children were slaughtered – among them David Shainberg.

Schwartz perceives a direct link between that Hebron massacre and the Hamas pogrom of October 7, 2023, also a Shabbat.

“The forces that drove Arabs in Hebron to slaughter their Jewish neighbors in 1929,” she writes, “were identical to the forces behind October 7.” Schwartz’s title, Ghosts of a Holy War, indicates the centrality she ascribes to the religious element in the two episodes – in 1929, passions about protecting al-Aqsa Mosque, and in 2023 the fact that Hamas named its onslaught Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.

Schwartz takes her readers through the hundred years separating the two pogroms. She records how Britain tried to reconcile the opposing interests of the peoples under its control – the Arabs and the Jews – and finally admitted the failure of its Mandate government and withdrew. She recounts the foundation of the State of Israel, the refusal of many of its Arab neighbors to recognize it, and their several attempts to crush it.

Extensive research and detailed interviews with people on both sides of the conflict lie behind Schwartz’s accounts of how controversy surrounding the Temple Mount and the Western Wall helped fuel Arab-Israeli conflict on and off throughout the century.

Always present were Arab fears, easily ignited, that Israel intended to restrict Muslim rights over al-Aqsa Mosque and the adjacent Dome of the Rock. Yet she is also alert to political realities and does not fail to mention that in waging the deadliest attack in Israeli history, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s “alleged goal was to scuttle an imminent peace agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel.”

Schwartz does her readers a real service by providing the historical background to the extremist philosophy at the core of Hamas jihadist rejectionism. She does this by tracing the rise of Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, endorsed in that position by the British Mandate authorities. She describes his anti-Jewish fanaticism and his powerful influence on Arab opinion. Among the numerous photographs that illustrate her text, Schwartz includes the notorious shot of al-Husseini in close discussion with Adolf Hitler in Berlin in 1941; and another, less well known, showing him giving the Nazi salute as he inspects Waffen-SS troops in November 1943.

Al-Husseini is on the record as participating in the planning of Hitler’s “Final Solution” and urging the Nazis to hasten the elimination of Europe’s Jews. The line of philosophy from these beliefs to the founding principles of Hamas is clear.

What Schwartz might have made a little more of are the realpolitik considerations that led the Shi’ite revolutionary regime of Iran into supporting, financing, and weaponizing the Sunni Hamas organization to help achieve their common goal of eliminating the Jewish state.

Ghosts of a Holy War tells a gripping story, recounting not only events of historical magnitude but also the reasons behind them. Schwartz has an especially attractive writing style, which keeps the reader turning the pages. For anyone interested in understanding the back history of Black Sabbath – namely, October 7, 2023 – this is a must-read volume. 

The writer’s latest book is Trump and the Holy Land: 2016-2020. Follow him at: a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com.

• GHOSTS OF A HOLY WAR: THE 1929 MASSACRE IN PALESTINE THAT IGNITED THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT
• By Yardena Schwartz
• Union Square & Co.
• 432 pages; $27