by John Ellis
In 1929, American journalist Vincent Sheean pitched the pro-Zionist paper The New Palestine a series of articles detailing life within the Zionist communities of Palestine. He proposed immersing himself in Zionist communities and culture and then writing about his experience. The paper gladly accepted the respected journalist’s offer. In his book Personal History, Youth and Revolution: The Story of One Person’s Relation to Living History, Sheean confessed that he “had long had an exaggerated admiration for the Jewish people”[1] and “was already sympathetic to the Zionist views,”[2] but he dutifully informed The New Palestine that his articles would be non-political and uncontroversial. Although, he did leave himself an out by warning, “that I could not engage future opinions.”[3] It’s a good thing he provided that preemptive caveat in his pitch because his views on Zionism changed after spending time in Palestine.
After arriving in Jerusalem on June 25, taking in the many mosques and the muezzins’ frequent calls to prayer throughout the day, Sheean marveled at the Holy City. After the inevitable strangeness one feels upon encountering a new place settled, he was able to put into words his thoughts, writing, “That was, probably, the first impression I received of walled Jerusalem in the early days: that it was an Arab city. It was as Arab as Cairo or Baghdad, and the Zionist Jews (that is, the modern Jews) were as foreign to it as I was myself. … Two days in Jerusalem gave me a clearer perception of the fact than I could have received from a volume of statistics. I had enough political experience to realize that such things as these must determine feeling and action, and from my second or third day in Jerusalem I began to wonder if all was as well between the Arabs and the Jews as I had been led to believe. I knew nothing; but anybody could see, in half an hour, that here were the physical elements of a conflict.”[4] He explains that it took less than a month to begin having “serious misgivings about the wisdom of the Zionist policy,” confessing “I still knew nothing about the Arabs of Palestine, but I could see them all around me everywhere, and if my long experience in political journalism had taught me anything, it was that one people did not like being dominated or interfered with in its own home by another. These things seemed to me plain, beyond argument.”[5]
A little over a month after Vincent Sheean’s arrival, Jerusalem erupted in violence.
In September 1928, months prior to the start of Sheean’s journalistic mission in the region, a dispute arose between the Mufti (Amin al-Husayni) and religious Jews over Jewish rights at the Wailing Wall. Since the May Day riots of 1921, the Mufti, with consolidated political and religious power, had been largely successful at keeping the peace in Jerusalem (and Palestine, in general). Unfortunately, by 1928 simmering resentments had begun to boil over. An increasing Jewish population added fuel to the fire. According to the Shaw Report, the Jewish population of Palestine rose from around 55,000 in 1918 to a little over 130,000 by 1928.[6] The strain on the indigenous population created by the migrants and their foreign way of life had become too much. Mix in growing Jewish resentment at Muslim control over the region’s holy sites, and contemporary hindsight matches Vincent Sheean’s prophetic insights: violence was inevitable.
Zionists, including Chaim Weizmann, stretching back to Theodor Herzl had insisted that the Zionist program did not include exercising control over Palestine’s holy sites. Throughout the 1920s, contradicting that, a growing contingent of religious Jewish migrants demanded control over the Western (Wailing) Wall. To be fair, Philip Mattar, the Mufti’s biographer, points out that the Wailing Wall “was infinitely holier to Jews” than to Muslims.[7] That doesn’t mean that the Wall held no religious significance for Muslims. According to Muslim tradition, the Prophet stabled his horse in one of the Wall’s chambers during his nightly journey to heaven. That journey is commemorated by the Dome of the Rock, a mosque built on the site of the Prophet’s ascension to heaven and is considered Islam’s third holiest site. The spot where the Prophet is believed to have stabled his horse is called al-Buraq, named after the horse. And while it is a Muslim holy site, “the Wall itself was not so holy to Arabs, nor did they treat it with the respect due holy sites.”[8]
While Muslims agreed that Jews had the right to visit the Wall, the dispute about the level of worship they were allowed there extended back generations. As the Jewish population in Palestine swelled throughout the 1920s, the expectations and demands surrounding the Wall grew as well. Among the demands was the right to provide chairs and benches for the elderly along with a screen that would divide the men from the women. That was problematic since besides being a holy site for both religions, the pavement in front of the Wall was the only pathway entering and exiting a Muslim neighborhood called Maghribi. The Muslims were concerned that acquiescence to Jewish demands would result in further encroachments leading to a permanent Jewish synagogue being constructed, blocking not only Muslim access to al-Buraq but also hindering Muslim families from accessing their homes.
Over the previous decades, informal and even secret agreements between Jewish and Muslim leaders saw restrictions ebb and flow. Under the British Mandate, empowered by their interpretation of the Balfour Declaration, Jewish religious leaders became emboldened to push for greater access while flaunting current restrictions. And so, on September 23, 1928, a group of shammash (similar to a church custodian) from local synagogues descended on the Wall to set up in preparation for Yom Kippur. When they were finished with their work, a large screen blocked “the public thoroughfare along the narrow (eleven-foot-wide) lane used by the Maghribi residents and their donkeys.”[9]
Upon receiving complaints, Edward Keith-Roach, the deputy district commissioner of Jerusalem, demanded that the screen be removed. Even though Keith-Roach had received assurances from the shammash it would come down, the screen was still standing the next morning. Since September 24 was a Jewish holy day that year, the orthodox Jews couldn’t work and refused to remove the screen. British authorities removed the screen for them.
Turning somewhat comical, the worshippers clung to the screen but ultimately lost the “tug-of-war” to the British Mandate police. During the minor melee, “an elderly woman attacked a policeman with her umbrella.” Mattar sardonically assures us that “All injuries were minor.”[10] Unfortunately, the events sparked by the removal of the screen were not minor.
The Shaw Report – the findings from the first of the two commissions appointed by Britain to investigate the violence of 1929 – states that “The forcible removal of the screen led to immediate complaints by the Jewish authorities of which some were addressed to His Majesty’s government, while others were set out in petitions submitted to the League of Nations by the Zionist Organization.”[11] The Shaw Report also reveals that prior to the incident Arab leaders had been complaining to the British authorities about the continued violation of the restrictions at the Wailing Wall by Jews. The report makes the important note that the situation moved from being merely a religious matter into a highly charged political and racial conflict. It was at this point that the Mufti acted.
Sending emotionally freighted statements to both the British authorities and a local Palestinian newspaper, the Mufti contended, with some evidence, that the Zionists were pressuring England to turn the Wailing Wall and the surrounding area over to their control. Zionists occupied positions in every layer of the English government, including in the Mandate government, and many of them weren’t shy about making known their nationalist desires for all of Palestine. In response, the Mufti helped organize the Committee for the Defense of the Buraq al-Sharif, escalating already high tensions. Attempting to assuage fears and counter the Mufti’s propaganda, the National Council of Jews in Palestine “published an open letter to the Muslim community in which it declared that ‘no Jew has ever thought of encroaching upon the rights of Moslems over their own Holy Place,’ and that all the Jews wanted was to worship freely at the Wall.”[12] Pushing the opposite sentiment, however, Chaim Weizmann unwisely flung more fuel on the fire by writing in The New Palestine that “the only rational answer is to pour Jews into Palestine,” adding the even more inflammatory comment that Zionists must “reclaim our homeland and the Wall, even though the latter may take a year or two.” Mattar understatedly points out that, “Such language may have been designed to pacify an angry Jewish community, but it also intensified the suspicion and hostility of the Palestinians and helped turn the minor dispute into a major political struggle”[13] A more accurate observation notices that Weizmann’s statement of Zionism’s goal didn’t merely intensify “the suspicion and hostility of the Palestinians,” but confirmed those suspicions.
However, Weizmann wasn’t alone in helping turn a “minor dispute into a major political struggle.” The Mufti matched the Zionist leader’s inflammatory words with inflammatory actions. Those actions required that the Mufti conveniently ignore the fact that for generations stretching back centuries a legal precedent had been established for Jewish access to the Wall so they could worship. Although sympathetic, to put it lightly, to the Palestinian cause, David Hirst confesses, “Jewish devotional rights at the Wall had since time immemorial been governed by the so-called status quo, a repertoire of agreements and reciprocal adjustments between the three great faiths established in the city. The status quo had been supervised by the Moslem temporal authorities.”[14] The Mufti toppled the status quo during a time when tensions were already high enough to boil over at any moment. The Mufti’s response and actions aside, it should be noted (and repeated) that the instability and tensions in the region were a new characteristic of the Holy City. Muslims, Christians, and Jews had lived peacefully for generations prior to the political Zionists’ efforts to establish a Jewish national presence in Palestine; the Balfour Declaration then exacerbated the situation. The insertion of Zionists alongside England’s duplicitousness and imperial maneuverings were the variables that changed the region’s dynamic. While providing some historical context, none of that excuses what the Mufti did, though.
Using the propaganda arm of the newly established Committee for the Defense of the Buraq al-Sharif, the Mufti and his agents began spreading the belief that the Zionists not only wanted to control the Wall but also intended to take over the Temple Mount, raze both the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa (two mosques), and rebuild the Temple. Mattar argues that it’s difficult to ascertain how Jews in the early 20th century felt about restoring the Temple. Interestingly, as Zionism gained steam in the late 19th and into the 20th century, religious Jews denounced political Zionists for failing to trust God by taking matters into their own hands. The Passover Seder ends with the prayer “next year in Jerusalem.” For religious Jews at that time, the prayer was an expression of faith in God’s eventual divine intervention. From their perspective, the political Zionists were demonstrating not only their lack of faith in God but also their idolatrous willingness to usurp God’s Divine plan and authority. But political Zionists, by and large, had little interest in Judaism or the Temple, apart from how those things bolstered a Jewish national identity. The events of 1928 that led to the violence of 1929 were far more a product of an increasing population jostling for shrinking space that had long been peacefully shared than it was an explicit campaign by Zionists to gain control of the Holy sites. Nevertheless, even though the Mufti’s warnings didn’t necessarily reflect broader Jewish goals, his propaganda was bolstered by intemperate statements made by Zionists in positions of leadership within the British government who would occasionally make statements about the restoration of the Temple. The Mufti was able to take that rhetoric and easily insert it into the very real Palestinian concern that the Zionists had designs on turning their native lands into a Jewish state led solely by Jews and intended only for Jews. As Vincent Sheean noted (also quoted in the first paragraph) frightened people do “not like being dominated or interfered with in its own home by another.” The mood and fear of the Palestinians was the perfect grease for the Mufti’s machinations.
As a provocative compliment alongside his propaganda machine, the Mufti embarked on a construction project on the disputed Wall. Possibly the most inflammatory construction project pushed by the Mufti was the building of a zawiya (a small mosque with multiple functions) on the top of the Wall. He then placed a muadhdhin (a caller of prayers) in the zawiya to call Muslims to prayer five times a day. This, of course, interfered with Orthodox Jews who gathered at the Wall to pray and meditate. The Mufti defended his actions under the guise of promoting religious activity, but Mattar explains, “his real purpose was to confirm Muslim rights at the Wall.”[15] Incensed, the Zionists appealed to the British authorities.
Adding to (or at least not helping) the cultural and religious powder keg they had helped create, the British Mandate was in the midst of an administrative change, leaving bureaucratic gaps in the administration of the region. Sir John Chancellor, who had been appointed the new High Commissioner, wasn’t scheduled to arrive until December 1928, two months after the two sides had escalated the initial dispute into a raging conflict that was threatening to explode into violence.
Defending their removal of the Jew’s screen, England issued a White Paper in November that established, or confirmed, rather, Muslim control over the Western Wall. The paper’s authority was temporarily placed on hold because the British were still waiting for the Jewish religious authorities to produce the requested documents supporting their claims. Knowing no such documents existed, the Rabbis were stalling. As soon as the request was made, the Mufti had quickly provided the British authorities with documents demonstrating the legal precedence established under the Ottoman Empire. His promptness didn’t initially matter because while waiting for the Jews to provide evidence in their defense, the British stopped enforcing the status quo at the Wall, which was the purpose of the Rabbis’ stalling tactic. As the delay spread further into 1929, an irate Mufti demanded that the British authorities enforce the conclusion reached by the White Paper that Muslims controlled the Wall. Attempting to reassure him, the new High Commissioner, Sir John Chancellor, urged patience, explaining “that the contention of the Moslems as regards the bringing of benches and appurtenances to the Wall will be established” since it appeared that the Jews lacked any documentations supporting their arguments.
Zionist influence in London helped extend the delay into late Spring. Over the course of those months, trusting the Mandate government, the Mufti cooperated. He even halted construction on the Wall until the British authorities made an official ruling. In July, after the British allowed Muslim construction on the Wall to continue, so long as it didn’t interfere with Jewish worshippers, the tension filled delay passed its breaking point.
Fueled by the incendiary calls of action from Vladimir Jabotinsky, Zionists began mounting increasingly angry protests. On August 15, a planned Jewish demonstration at the Wall bled into the Maghribi neighborhood. Beating up Muslim inhabitants, the demonstrators chanted “The Wall is ours” and cursed the Prophet Muhammed. In retaliation, Muslims mounted a counterdemonstration the next day. The Mufti was able to use his influence to keep the Muslim protest limited to Muslim ground, but tempers were too high. “[W]hen a Jewish boy accidentally kicked a ball into an Arab woman’s tomato garden the following day, he was stabbed by an Arab man who had come to the rescue of the shrieking woman. An Arab youth, picked at random, was stabbed in retaliation.”[16]
The violence quickly escalated across Jerusalem and then spread across Palestine. Philip Mattar points the finger at both sides, accusing, “It is obvious that both the moderate Zionist leaders and the Mufti did their share to increase the tension over Jewish demands for free access and Arab fears of Jewish encroachment on Muslim property. But it took Jewish and Arab militants to turn these demands and fears of late July and early August into a violent confrontation.”[17]
Vincent Sheean provides a trained reporter’s firsthand account of the violence in his engaging memoir Personal History. Interspersed with his diary entries recorded during the summer of 1929 are his later observations shaped by hindsight and new information. Looking back, he reveals, “The first casualties, we were told, had been Arabs killed by Jews; the Jews were an armed majority in the city; the Arabs were a minority armed only with sticks and knives.” He goes on to explain, “What it looked like, at about two o’clock on Friday afternoon, was an outbreak of murderous hatred between the two parts of the population … an outbreak caused by the long, exasperating controversy over the Wailing Wall, and precipitated, made inevitable, by the raising of the Jewish national flag at the wall of the Mosque of Omar.”[18] By the time the British authorities were able to suppress the violence, Sheean reports “the official British casualty lists showed 207 dead and 379 wounded among the population of Palestine, of which the dead included 87 Arabs (Christian and Moslem) and 120 Jews, the wounded 181 Arabs and 198 Jews.”[19]
Published in 1930, relying on the findings of both the Shaw Commission and the Hope-Simpson Report, the two commissions tasked with investigating the violence of 1929, the Passfield White Paper provided a formal statement of British policy in Palestine. Right off the bat, the Passfield White Paper acknowledges that the Palestinian and Zionist residents held competing interests and objectives. The paper then points out that much of the conflict is the result of incorrect assumptions about the nature of the British Mandate, pointing a sharper finger in the direction of the Zionists with the scolding words, “It must be realized, once and for all, that it is useless for Jewish leaders on the one hand to press His Majesty’s Government to conform their policy in regard, for example, to immigration and land, to the aspirations of the more uncompromising sections of Zionist opinion.”[20] It then impatiently complains that since the start of the Mandate, British officials had been attempting to impress on the Zionists that the Balfour Declaration existed to protect and serve all the residents of Palestine and not to help them establish their own nation. The paper adds that “it is equally useless for Arab leaders to maintain their demands for a form of a Constitution, which would render it impossible for His Majesty’s Government to carry out, in the fullest sense, the double undertaking already referred to [of protecting the interests of both the Arabs and Jews].[21]
Angering Zionists, the paper reaches the conclusion that “the condition of the Arab fellah leaves much to be desired.”[22] Drawing on the research of the Hope-Simpson Report into the arable land in Palestine, the Passfield White Paper criticizes the land grabs of the Zionists. Drawing a direct line from the growing Zionist population to the increasing poverty of the Palestinian peasants, the paper sharply points out that the Zionist policy of only hiring Jews directly contradicts the long-standing Zionist argument that their program would also benefit the Palestinians. The paper reaches the conclusion that “as long as widespread suspicion exists, and it does exist, amongst the Arab population, that the economic depression, under which they undoubtedly suffer at present, is largely due to excessive Jewish immigration, and so long as some grounds exist upon which this suspicion may be plausibly represented to be well founded, there can be little hope of any improvement in the mutual relations of the two races.”[23]
The Passfield White Paper’s lack of support for the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine angered the Zionists. But the greatest injury, and greatest source of anger, was that the paper called for England to curtail Jewish immigration to Palestine. Chaim Weizmann immediately sprang into action, intensifying the Zionists’ lobbying efforts.
As Zionist pressure within England compelled many members of Parliament and government ministers to distance themselves from the Passfield White Paper, Prime Minster Ramsay MacDonald faced a growing crisis. Attempting to appease the Zionists, MacDonald wrote Weizmann on February 13, 1931 – called the “black letter” by Arabs. After assuring Weizmann that the Passfield White Paper overstepped its bounds in places and was misunderstood in others, MacDonald promised, “His Majesty’s Government did not prescribe and do not contemplate any stoppage or prohibition of Jewish immigration in any of its categories.”[24]
While Prime Minister MacDonald’s letter did succeed in quieting the growing Zionist anger for the moment, the damage had already been done. Combined with the previous reports and white papers placing the lion share of the blame for the unrest and violence in the region on Zionist actions, Chaim Weizmann and his fellow Zionists were now intractably suspicious of England and were beginning to cast their eyes to a future free of the meddling British Mandate. For their part, the Arabs were stunned by the quick reversal of England. They too began to cast their eyes to a future free of the meddling British Mandate. Both sides were beginning to find out, as Vincent Sheean put it, “I was to learn in Palestine that [the Balfour Declaration] had actually given the Jews little, had reserved little for the Arabs, and had achieved one certain purpose only: the installation of the British as the governing power in the country.”[25]
Turns out, though, that even though they were installed as the “governing power in the country,” the British had caught the proverbial tiger by the tail. The violence of 1929 was merely a prologue for the two acts to follow: the Arab Revolt of the 1930s and the Jewish Revolt of 1947 (discussed in the next two chapters). By finally letting go of that tiger in 1948, England unleashed on the world a raging problem that is still dominating news headlines.
[1] Vincent Sheean, Personal History, Youth and Revolution: The Story of One Person’s Relation to Living History (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1935) 333.
[2] Sheean, Personal History, 335.
[3] Sheean, Personal History, 335.
[4] Sheean, Personal History, 337.
[5] Sheean, Personal History, 344.
[6] Sir Walter Shaw, Report of the Commission on the Palestine Disturbances of 1929 (London: His Majesty’s Stationary Offices, 1930), 22.
[7] Philip Mattar, The Mufti of Jerusalem (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 39.
[8] Mattar, The Mufti of Jerusalem, 39.
[9] Mattar, The Mufti of Jerusalem, 35.
[10] Mattar, The Mufti of Jerusalem, 35.
[11] Shaw, Report of the Commission on the Palestine Disturbances of 1929, 29.
[12] Mattar, The Mufti of Jerusalem, 37.
[13] Mattar, The Mufti of Jerusalem, 38.
[14] David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch (New York: Nation Books, 2003), 185-186.
[15] Mattar, The Mufti of Jerusalem, 42.
[16] Mattar, The Mufti of Jerusalem, 46.
[17] Mattar, The Mufti of Jerusalem, 46.
[18] Sheean, Personal History, 363.
[19] Sheean, Personal History, 367.
[20] The Passfield White Paper, The Passfield White Paper (jewishvirtuallibrary.org)
[21] Ibid.
[22] Ibid
[23] Ibid
[24] The MacDonald Letter (February 1931) (jewishvirtuallibrary.org)
[25] Sheean, Personal History, 341.
Practically Known Theology 