From Prayer to Pogrom: How the Western Wall dispute ignited the 1929 massacresby Dr. Alex Grobman The lesson of 1929 is not historical trivia. The pattern is painfully familiar. And a historian called the period “Year Zero," because it shattered the remaining illusions of peaceful coexistence.The August 1929 massacres did not begin or end in Hebron or Safed. They began in Jerusalem, around the Western Wall, when a local dispute over religious “status quo" rules was weaponized into a broader campaign of incitement. The riots followed a period of rising friction that Colonel Frederick Kisch, head of the Palestine Zionist Executive, had already flagged to the British Colonial Office as a major threat to peace. The crisis broke on August 15, when the British allowed a few hundred Jewish youths to march to the Western Wall. Kisch viewed the march as a protest against deteriorating conditions at the site; and while the group eventually left peacefully and without any clashes, one participant’s decision to raise a Jewish flag proved irresponsible. By the next day, August 16, a fundamentally different Arab demonstration was organized, also with the government's official blessing. The immediate spark came when Jewish worshippers placed a divider screen (to separate men from women worshipers, as is the norm in Orthodox prayer, ed.) at the Wall for Yom Kippur. Muslim leaders, led by the Grand Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, a rabid antisemite, portrayed the act not as a modest religious accommodation, but as the first step in a Jewish plan to seize the Al-Aqsa Mosque. A dispute over prayer was transformed into a national and religious rallying cry to “defend the holy sites. https://www.israelnationalnews... |
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