Tangled Roots (2019–2020): Season 1, Episode 2 - Episode #1.2 - full transcript
Northern Ireland, Vietnam,
Korea, the Falklands, Bangladesh,
the Iran-Iraq War,
the Greco-Turkish War,
World Wars One and Two.
These are just a few of the conflicts
that broke out and ended
while the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
goes on and on.
No!
What is it about our conflict
that won't let it end?
Is what happened between us really so
unforgiveable and insurmountable?
We deserve full rights!
Let's go back to this story again,
but let's try to tell it,
not as an argument
but as a lesson is taught.
Let's call it a refresher lesson.
Let's call it Homeland Lesson.
Homeland Studies
Perhaps the struggle over this territory
would be easier to end
if it were a little less holy,
if religious passion
didn't set it afire again and again,
but in the land that God
promised to Abraham,
where Jesus was born
and where Muhammad ascended
to Heaven in a whirlwind,
it's very hard to separate
the political from the religious
and very easy
to put them together.
Every holy site
becomes a ticking bomb
and every ticking bomb
becomes holy.
When did this process begin?
In 1919, for instance, two years
after the Balfour Declaration,
Jews were still welcome guests
in the Muslim procession to Nebi Musa.
But by the Nebi Musa Riots of 1920
something in the relations between
the peoples and religions had changed.
Since the British decided
to outlaw political demonstrations
in the summer of 1919,
the Palestinian Arabs
looked for a way
to demonstrate
without it appearing political.
in 1920 the Nebi Musa celebration
came out during both Easter
and Passover week
and, symbolically speaking,
this reminds us
that we're in a constant struggle,
both national and religious.
The Jewish Festival of Freedom,
masses of Arabs who oppose Jewish freedom,
they're celebrating different things.
The Nebi Musa procession turns into
a political demonstration.
Added to the traditional
flags of the prophet
is a picture of Emir Faisal.
After the war Faisal becomes
the favorite of the British.
He turns out to be the most
impressive military leader
and statesman
of the Hashemite family,
he sweeps public opinion
and manages to enter Damascus
and establish an Arab government
which ruled Lebanon, Syria,
Transjordan
and tried to control
Palestine as well.
At the time, Palestine was considered
Southern Syria.
These were the months
of high hopes
for a great Arab kingdom.
"We don't want a British Mandate,
we want Arab rule under Faisal."
That's why they used Faisal's picture
in their demonstrations.
Haj Amin al-Husseini,
future mufti of Jerusalem,
also came out with his picture,
saying: "Arabs, behold your king."
The leaders fanned the flames
with patriotic nationalist speeches
against British policy,
against the Balfour Declaration,
against Jewish settlement.
Gangs soon slip away
from the demonstration
and run rampant through
the alleys of the Jewish Quarter.
The mob entered the Old City...
broke into the Jews' shops,
beat and wounded
the people there
and stole goods and money.
Aharon Reuveni, 1920
Khalil al-Sakakini writes:
I saw a Hebronite Arab
go up to a Jewish shoeshine boy,
take his box
and hit him in the head with it.
He screamed and started running,
his head dripping blood.
Everyone shouted:
Muhammad's faith
has risen through the sword!
There had never been
violence to this extent.
Five killed. In retrospect,
nearly a century later,
what are five deaths?
At the time it was
a serious eruption,
surprising, in a sense.
The maddened crowd in Jerusalem
expresses its new nationalist frustrations
through the old religious holiday.
The Zionist leadership
applies its concepts
to the current Palestinian reality.
When Governor Storrs expresses
his regret for the tragedy
to Ussishkin,
head of the Zionist Commission,
Ussishkin replies:
Tragedy?
You mean pogrom.
1920 was the year of the pogroms
against the Jews in Eastern Europe.
Entire towns are destroyed,
and as a result
Jews come to Palestine
wanting to found a community here
without harming anyone,
living in peace with
their neighbors.
They come across
something very similar,
a scathing nationalistic enmity
as the authorities
turn a blind eye.
As Ussishkin sees it,
they're persecuted Jews
who are suffering injustice here,
while the Arabs, naturally,
see the opposite.
Remember, throughout
the conflict,
everyone who attacks,
from 1920
to current-day IDF soldiers
killing youths in Gaza,
are sure they're acting
in self-defense.
They're all sure they're being attacked
and acting in self-defense.
Governor Storrs doesn't stop
at consoling Ussishkin,
he dismisses Jerusalem mayor
Musa Kazim al-Husayni.
In his place he appoints
Raghib al-Nashashibi,
from a family that,
unlike the Husaynis,
likes the British
and is tolerant toward the Jews.
Musa Kazim, for the first time,
gets the cold shoulder
from an empire.
Kazim wasn't a belligerent man,
I don't think he enflamed the crowd,
certainly not to do violence,
since he was a dignified man
who conducted politics
in a dignified way.
Kazim al-Husayni
isn't the only one to be ousted,
the Arab hero Faisal,
King of Greater Syria,
is also ousted by the French army
which invades Damascus to implement
the Sykes-Picot Agreement.
And as if that weren't enough,
that summer the British appoint
their first High Commissioner to Palestine.
The Palestinian Arabs get the hint
when Herbert Samuel the Jew
is appointed.
A Zionist commissioner,
he was known to be a Zionist,
and that was a statement that,
naturally, enraged the Arabs.
On the other hand, Herbert Samuel
was the first Englishman
to point out the fact that the Arabs
here had a national identity.
In the summer of 1921
he told Weizmann:
If you don't realize
that the Arabs have interests
that conflict with those of the Jews,
the Zionist ship will crash
on the Arab shoal.
Under his commissionership
Samuel receives
almost 700,000 Arabs
and some 85,000 Jews
whose numbers grew
at the height of the Third Aliyah
to 11% of the population.
The Third Aliyah was also to change
the political makeup
of the Jewish settlement.
The first manifestation of this change
took place as early as December 1920
when leaders of the new
working class met in Haifa
to found the Labor Federation
of Palestine.
The Labor Federation was an abnormal
worker's organization to begin with,
it was an employer,
it dealt in politics,
it dealt in defense, of course,
it dealt in culture,
it was a state within a state.
This was the inception
of Jewish autonomy.
Exactly four days after the founding
conference of the Labor Federation,
in the same town of Haifa
the founding conference of the new
Arab Labor Union convened,
headed by ousted Jerusalem mayor
In his speech at the conference
Greater Syria no longer exists.
It's Palestine we must defend.
Musa Kazim al-Husayni, 1920
Here we have a new attitude
of Palestinian Arab nationalism
which says: If I don't look out
for myself, who will?
A Palestinian Arab national movement arises,
there's a national congress every year
where they repeatedly announce
three main goals. One:
No to Jewish-Zionist
immigration to Palestine,
two: No to transferring or selling
land to the Zionists,
and three: Independence
as soon as possible.
Not only Palestine
breaks away from Syria
the western part of Syria
is divided by the French
who turn it into a new country
called Lebanon.
The British, for their part,
vie with an attempted
rebellion in Egypt
and turbulent demonstrations
in Iraq,
events which bring new
Colonial Office Minister
Winston Churchill
to tour our region.
Churchill comes to sew the Middle East
together a little tighter.
His visit was essentially
an implementation of Sykes-Picot
with a much finer brush.
is the creation of a brand new state
Jordan, over whose
angular borders
will rule Emir Abdullah,
brother of the ousted Faisal.
Musa Kazim al-Husayni
and his executive committee
see how the superpowers
are dividing Arab territory
into new states
and they want one of their own.
When Churchill comes to Jerusalem
they have a meeting
which Musa Kazim opens
with these words:
Palestine appears to be in chains
with a sword held over her,
cut off from her sisters
the Arab countries.
She ran after an imaginary friend
but found an enemy.
By then the Palestinian Arabs realized
that being cut off
from the Arab states
pitted them against the Zionists.
The committee demands that Churchill
repudiate the Balfour Declaration.
Churchill replies:
Mr. Balfour spoke of "the establishment in
Palestine of a National Home for the Jews."
He did not say he would make Palestine
the National Home for the Jews.
Churchill is basically trying
to reassure them:
National home" doesn't mean
we're trying to get rid of you.
But his attitude toward
the Palestinian Arabs
as Colonial Office Minister
refutes this.
The Palestinian Arabs' experience
was the Weizmann,
i.e. the Zionist movement,
and Churchill, i.e. the British government,
were joining forces
to put them in their place,
and they were right.
In the early 1920s
British and Zionist interests
were closer than ever.
Thus, a year after
the Nebi Musa riots,
the Palestinian Arabs look for
another way to protest.
This time it happens
in secular circumstances
at the border between
Jaffa and Tel Aviv.
A Labor Day march through
the streets of Manshiyya
is seen as a provocation
and turns into an altercation
which escalates into unprecedented rioting
on the Jaffa streets and all over Palestine.
The League of Nations
hasn't yet given the British
the final mandate over Palestine.
he Palestinian Arabs
still hoped
that they could influence the future
British government of Palestine
and told the British: We won't sit idly by
as you apply your policy.
They attack the Jewish
Immigrant House.
That's symbolic. Why?
Because that's what they're opposed to,
Jewish immigration to Palestine.
The most famous victim
of the 1921 riots
is author Haim Brenner,
who was killed near
the Salome cemetery.
This was the realization
of Brenner's deepest fears
which he didn't hesitate
to reveal in his writings:
Before I came here,
for some reason I imagined a land
like a single city,
settled by free Jews,
surrounded by many bare fields,
but on my first night here
I went for a walk
and we were attacked
by a gang of Arab heathens.
So once again
we must suffer
at the hands of gentiles.
We must suffer at the hands
of this filth!
He came for flourishing houses
and a productive Jewish community
and found himself
facing violent Arabs.
Is this the Land of Israel
we yearned for?
How do we even deal with this?
The Jews are doomed to be
the minority wherever they go,
that's how he feels.
A member of the early settlement,
Yosef Eliyahu Chelouche,
sees things differently from Brenner.
He even sees Brenner as part of the problem.
Let's state the bitter, horrid truth -
many of those who came from the Diaspora
to build the Jewish settlement
completely disregarded
the great value
of neighborly relations.
Zionist propaganda
described Palestine
as an uninhabited
wasteland.
We didn't even try
to learn the language of the land,
the language of our neighbors.
Commissioner Samuel
responds to the outbreak of violence
with a precedent which
is to repeat itself:
He halts Jewish immigrations
until further notice.
But a year later
all that is forgotten
when the League of Nations
finally hands the British
the official writ of mandate
over Palestine,
granting international approval
to all its clauses
including the one calling for the establishment
of a national home for the Jews in Palestine.
The British Mandate.
July 1922
is the date of the establishment
of the State of Israel
in the sense that a Jewish minority
in the Ottoman Empire
that has no collective rights,
certainly no recognition as a nation,
only five years later
the Jewish minority here
is recognized, not only by Great Britain
but by the League of Nations.
At the same time the Zionist movement
further establishes its physical presence.
In 1921 the JNF purchases
the Jezreel Valley,
populated by no less than 23
Jewish settlements by the decade's end.
In 1927 Wadi Hawarat
turns into Hefer Valley.
The fellahin, the local farmers
who are thrown off the land,
fan the flames of rage
against the big families
who sell the land
and against the Zionists who buy it.
One man who see's where all this
is going is Ze'ev Jabotinsky.
In 1923 he publishes
"The Iron Wall,"
an article which is to become
the manifesto
of the new Revisionist movement,
later known as Herat, then Likud.
I consider the expulsion
of the Arabs from Palestine
absolutely impossible.
There will always be
two peoples in Palestine.
The peacemakers among us
try to convince us
that the Arabs are either stupid
or greedy,
willing to give up their homeland
for a good railway system,
but as long as the Arabs have even
a spark of hope to get rid of us
they won't sell out this hope,
and for this reason
they shouldn't be seen as riffraff
but as a nation,
willing to compromise on crucial issues
only when no hope remains,
and we will see
not a single crack in this iron wall.
Jabotinsky was unique
in that he recognized a national
Arab claim to Palestine
which almost no one else did.
"There is no Arab nationalism,
they're riffraff."
He sees a nation
that clings to be its homeland
and says: We refuse to renounce it.
He said: If it looks like a cat,
it's a cat,
and it can't be dealt with
without force.
He said: The Zionists who say
that if we develop the land
they'll accept us
are being foolish,
you don't give up your homeland
for a railway,
you don't give up your homeland
so Hadassah Hospital
will treat your sick.
Judah Leon Magnes
shares Jabotinsky's views
regarding the Arabs
but disagrees with his solutions.
In 1925 he founds Brit Shalom,
the Peace Alliance
and formulates its aims:
To pave a way of understanding
between Jews and Arabs
for coexistence in Palestine
based on absolute equality
of political rights
for both peoples.
Brit Shalom was a group
of intellectuals
who came here and recognized
that there were two peoples here.
They said: We have to find
a solution that won't undermine
either nation's rights,
and their solution
was a sort of binational state.
The Arabs aren't impressed.
They say:
You're one-third of the population.
Who are you to offer us equality?
Magnes' and Brit Shalom's notions
were to reappear later.
In real time
the movement was marginal.
The Hebrew University,
of which Magnes was chancellor,
would prove much more successful,
one of the prominent highlights
in an extremely fruitful period
for the Zionist effort.
The 50,000 immigrants of the 4th Aliyah
bring fortunes from Poland
which they mainly invest in
the rapidly growing Tel Aviv.
Jerusalem, too,
grows and flourishes
but one city square remains
as crowded and poor
as it has for centuries,
the Kotel (Western Wall) plaza.
The Kotel became
the main place of prayer
for Jews in Jerusalem
in the 16th or 17th century.
This was where Jews came
to weep,
the Wailing Wall,
with the tears of thousands of old Jewish
women who went there to weep.
This gave it the sanctity
of the generations,
the sanctity of Jewish suffering.
Almost adjacent was a
Moroccan Muslim neighborhood,
almost all of the people
living there were Muslim pilgrims
who came to Jerusalem
for very similar reasons
as the Jews - because it was
a holy place.
According to tradition,
when Muhammad ascended to Heaven
he ascended from al-Aqsa
and he tied his winged horse al-Buraq
to the Kotel.
Like many religious symbols
the Kotel was appropriated
by the Zionists as a national symbol.
Chaim Weizmann was even involved in
an attempt to buy it from the Wakf
and rescind the restrictions
imposed on worshipers
at the crowded Kotel.
The Jews weren't allowed to place
anything permanent here,
not even benches,
let alone a partition.
This prohibition was imposed
by the Ottomans
and strictly enforced
by the English,
until Yom Kippur of 1928.
A Hassidic Rebbe from Poland
came with many followers
to pray at the Kotel.
They need a partition
and he asks the Ashkenazi beadle
to put one up
and the beadle
puts up a partition.
The next day, in the middle
of the Yom Kippur service,
British police remove the partition
while battling the angry worshipers.
As the next Yom Kippur approaches
all Palestine is talking about
the Kotel partition.
Scandal at the Western Wall
Yom Kippur desecrated
in Jerusalem by the police
a call to Jews everywhere
For the Western Wall
in Jerusalem
Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini
presents it as a first step
toward a Jewish takeover
of the Temple Mount
and its mosques.
On the other side,
Ussishkin declares:
The Jewish people will not rest
nor be silent
until it builds its national home
on our Mt. Moriah.
This whole area,
including the Moroccan Quarter,
is sacred to the Muslims,
and what is sacred
can't be bought or sold.
The Muslims saw this
as a great danger
because a takeover
of the Kotel grounds
could lead to an attempt
to take over
the whole Temple Mount
and the holy mosques.
Rabbi Kook stated categorically that he was
taking the question of the Temple Mount
and the Temple of the table
and leaving it for the future, to God.
He certainly didn't advocate
blowing up the mosques
and didn't permit
prayer on the Temple Mount,
but at the same time his pupils
started to study
the laws of the Temple.
This is fascinating.
In the '20s, in yeshivas in Palestine,
they start to study laws
that they didn't study in the Diaspora.
This isn't a Jewish-Zionist
political plan,
it's an emotional state,
but it's threatening.
This place is called
the Holy Temple.
The Temple Mount was purchased
by King David.
On the eve of the Ninth of Av
Jabotinsky's new Beitar movement
marches to the Kotel.
The day after the Ninth of Av
the Arabs respond
with an angry march of their own
to the very same Kotel.
The week continues
with demonstrations from both sides
which the British break up by force
and the tension is challenged
into the event
that security forces in Jerusalem
have feared ever since,
Friday prayers on the Temple Mount.
There's no better place
for recruiting
than the mosques in Jerusalem.
The Palestinian Arab leadership
realized they weren't successful
in getting the British
to change their policy,
so they took advantage of
the incidents at the Kotel
to incite the entire
Arab population.
We must recall that the Zionist movement
is a religious movement,
even those who call
themselves secular,
they come along with a Bible and say:
This is our claim to land,
and the national Palestinian movement
has a very powerful
Muslim dimension, of course,
so in this conflict we can't separate
religion from nationality
because neither of the sides do,
and the emotions that drive them
are nationalist and religious,
inextricably intertwined.
On Friday August 23, 1929
thousands of Arabs
gather on the Temple Mount,
many armed with sticks
and knives.
At 11:00 the crowd enters
the market alleys.
The Al-Buraq Intifada, named after
the Prophet's horse, begins,
the 1929 Uprisings,
as the Jews call
the violence that erupts in Jerusalem
and comes to a head in Hebron.
Jerusalem and Hebron
are the two holy cities,
they're associated
with Abraham the Patriarch,
they're the site of the competition
over "who's the favorite son,"
they're the site of the competition
over "which is the true religion,"
in terms of Palestinian Muslims
they're the cities
that must be defended,
and in terms of the Jews,
they're the hub of Judaism,
the hub of the Bible,
the weekly Torah readings
and our yearnings.
The Hebronites who come home
from Friday's prayers and riots in Jerusalem
attack Hebron's Jewish Quarter
the next day.
And behold, hundreds of murderers
surround Slonim House,
charging at it furiously.
Some seventy souls
found refuge in the house
but the murderers broke in
through the roof.
A deathly silence reigned.
The only sound was that of
brandished swords
and the echoes of truncheon
and axe-blows
on the corpses.
This is the only incident I'd compare
to a pogrom against the Jews
in the history of the conflict
because this was a mob
that attacked peaceful citizens
who had no part in
what happened in Jerusalem.
Because the Jews in Hebron
were unarmed.
Not only that, when Hagana fighters
were sent to defend them,
they said: We don't need you,
we have good relations
with the Arabs.
And the people who were
far from the Zionist movement
were the victims of the bloody
1929 riots.
The city that served as
a role model of coexistence
over the course of a Sabbath
turns into a place where relations between
Arabs and Jews are changed forever.
Whore.
You're the whore!
-Whore! Whore!
But not everything
about Hebron is bad news,
there are several stories
about Arabs
who risked their lives
to protect their Jewish neighbors
and saved them from death
and from their houses being torched.
Underneath the fiery ideology
of both sides
of "this land is ours,"
"God is with us,"
"this is our city,"
"we have the right to pray here,"
there's another level:
I'm human and you're human.
For some people
this level is dominant,
the human level,
they won't kill a child
or an old person,
they won't kill anyone,
they can't.
There are people who'll
save lives if they can
because it's more important
than the argument over
who God loves. Who does God love?
Let God decide.
The 90 years that have passed
since the 1929 riots in Hebron
have only reinforced the belief
that God is involved in the conflict.
The status of the holy sites
is still the most volatile issue
of the conflict,
whose other aspects are determined by
Fatwas and Halacha (Jewish law) as well.
For Israel this is another aspect
of the inability or unwillingness
to separate religion from state.
For the Palestinians
there is no state
to separate from religion.
Korea, the Falklands, Bangladesh,
the Iran-Iraq War,
the Greco-Turkish War,
World Wars One and Two.
These are just a few of the conflicts
that broke out and ended
while the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
goes on and on.
No!
What is it about our conflict
that won't let it end?
Is what happened between us really so
unforgiveable and insurmountable?
We deserve full rights!
Let's go back to this story again,
but let's try to tell it,
not as an argument
but as a lesson is taught.
Let's call it a refresher lesson.
Let's call it Homeland Lesson.
Homeland Studies
Perhaps the struggle over this territory
would be easier to end
if it were a little less holy,
if religious passion
didn't set it afire again and again,
but in the land that God
promised to Abraham,
where Jesus was born
and where Muhammad ascended
to Heaven in a whirlwind,
it's very hard to separate
the political from the religious
and very easy
to put them together.
Every holy site
becomes a ticking bomb
and every ticking bomb
becomes holy.
When did this process begin?
In 1919, for instance, two years
after the Balfour Declaration,
Jews were still welcome guests
in the Muslim procession to Nebi Musa.
But by the Nebi Musa Riots of 1920
something in the relations between
the peoples and religions had changed.
Since the British decided
to outlaw political demonstrations
in the summer of 1919,
the Palestinian Arabs
looked for a way
to demonstrate
without it appearing political.
in 1920 the Nebi Musa celebration
came out during both Easter
and Passover week
and, symbolically speaking,
this reminds us
that we're in a constant struggle,
both national and religious.
The Jewish Festival of Freedom,
masses of Arabs who oppose Jewish freedom,
they're celebrating different things.
The Nebi Musa procession turns into
a political demonstration.
Added to the traditional
flags of the prophet
is a picture of Emir Faisal.
After the war Faisal becomes
the favorite of the British.
He turns out to be the most
impressive military leader
and statesman
of the Hashemite family,
he sweeps public opinion
and manages to enter Damascus
and establish an Arab government
which ruled Lebanon, Syria,
Transjordan
and tried to control
Palestine as well.
At the time, Palestine was considered
Southern Syria.
These were the months
of high hopes
for a great Arab kingdom.
"We don't want a British Mandate,
we want Arab rule under Faisal."
That's why they used Faisal's picture
in their demonstrations.
Haj Amin al-Husseini,
future mufti of Jerusalem,
also came out with his picture,
saying: "Arabs, behold your king."
The leaders fanned the flames
with patriotic nationalist speeches
against British policy,
against the Balfour Declaration,
against Jewish settlement.
Gangs soon slip away
from the demonstration
and run rampant through
the alleys of the Jewish Quarter.
The mob entered the Old City...
broke into the Jews' shops,
beat and wounded
the people there
and stole goods and money.
Aharon Reuveni, 1920
Khalil al-Sakakini writes:
I saw a Hebronite Arab
go up to a Jewish shoeshine boy,
take his box
and hit him in the head with it.
He screamed and started running,
his head dripping blood.
Everyone shouted:
Muhammad's faith
has risen through the sword!
There had never been
violence to this extent.
Five killed. In retrospect,
nearly a century later,
what are five deaths?
At the time it was
a serious eruption,
surprising, in a sense.
The maddened crowd in Jerusalem
expresses its new nationalist frustrations
through the old religious holiday.
The Zionist leadership
applies its concepts
to the current Palestinian reality.
When Governor Storrs expresses
his regret for the tragedy
to Ussishkin,
head of the Zionist Commission,
Ussishkin replies:
Tragedy?
You mean pogrom.
1920 was the year of the pogroms
against the Jews in Eastern Europe.
Entire towns are destroyed,
and as a result
Jews come to Palestine
wanting to found a community here
without harming anyone,
living in peace with
their neighbors.
They come across
something very similar,
a scathing nationalistic enmity
as the authorities
turn a blind eye.
As Ussishkin sees it,
they're persecuted Jews
who are suffering injustice here,
while the Arabs, naturally,
see the opposite.
Remember, throughout
the conflict,
everyone who attacks,
from 1920
to current-day IDF soldiers
killing youths in Gaza,
are sure they're acting
in self-defense.
They're all sure they're being attacked
and acting in self-defense.
Governor Storrs doesn't stop
at consoling Ussishkin,
he dismisses Jerusalem mayor
Musa Kazim al-Husayni.
In his place he appoints
Raghib al-Nashashibi,
from a family that,
unlike the Husaynis,
likes the British
and is tolerant toward the Jews.
Musa Kazim, for the first time,
gets the cold shoulder
from an empire.
Kazim wasn't a belligerent man,
I don't think he enflamed the crowd,
certainly not to do violence,
since he was a dignified man
who conducted politics
in a dignified way.
Kazim al-Husayni
isn't the only one to be ousted,
the Arab hero Faisal,
King of Greater Syria,
is also ousted by the French army
which invades Damascus to implement
the Sykes-Picot Agreement.
And as if that weren't enough,
that summer the British appoint
their first High Commissioner to Palestine.
The Palestinian Arabs get the hint
when Herbert Samuel the Jew
is appointed.
A Zionist commissioner,
he was known to be a Zionist,
and that was a statement that,
naturally, enraged the Arabs.
On the other hand, Herbert Samuel
was the first Englishman
to point out the fact that the Arabs
here had a national identity.
In the summer of 1921
he told Weizmann:
If you don't realize
that the Arabs have interests
that conflict with those of the Jews,
the Zionist ship will crash
on the Arab shoal.
Under his commissionership
Samuel receives
almost 700,000 Arabs
and some 85,000 Jews
whose numbers grew
at the height of the Third Aliyah
to 11% of the population.
The Third Aliyah was also to change
the political makeup
of the Jewish settlement.
The first manifestation of this change
took place as early as December 1920
when leaders of the new
working class met in Haifa
to found the Labor Federation
of Palestine.
The Labor Federation was an abnormal
worker's organization to begin with,
it was an employer,
it dealt in politics,
it dealt in defense, of course,
it dealt in culture,
it was a state within a state.
This was the inception
of Jewish autonomy.
Exactly four days after the founding
conference of the Labor Federation,
in the same town of Haifa
the founding conference of the new
Arab Labor Union convened,
headed by ousted Jerusalem mayor
In his speech at the conference
Greater Syria no longer exists.
It's Palestine we must defend.
Musa Kazim al-Husayni, 1920
Here we have a new attitude
of Palestinian Arab nationalism
which says: If I don't look out
for myself, who will?
A Palestinian Arab national movement arises,
there's a national congress every year
where they repeatedly announce
three main goals. One:
No to Jewish-Zionist
immigration to Palestine,
two: No to transferring or selling
land to the Zionists,
and three: Independence
as soon as possible.
Not only Palestine
breaks away from Syria
the western part of Syria
is divided by the French
who turn it into a new country
called Lebanon.
The British, for their part,
vie with an attempted
rebellion in Egypt
and turbulent demonstrations
in Iraq,
events which bring new
Colonial Office Minister
Winston Churchill
to tour our region.
Churchill comes to sew the Middle East
together a little tighter.
His visit was essentially
an implementation of Sykes-Picot
with a much finer brush.
is the creation of a brand new state
Jordan, over whose
angular borders
will rule Emir Abdullah,
brother of the ousted Faisal.
Musa Kazim al-Husayni
and his executive committee
see how the superpowers
are dividing Arab territory
into new states
and they want one of their own.
When Churchill comes to Jerusalem
they have a meeting
which Musa Kazim opens
with these words:
Palestine appears to be in chains
with a sword held over her,
cut off from her sisters
the Arab countries.
She ran after an imaginary friend
but found an enemy.
By then the Palestinian Arabs realized
that being cut off
from the Arab states
pitted them against the Zionists.
The committee demands that Churchill
repudiate the Balfour Declaration.
Churchill replies:
Mr. Balfour spoke of "the establishment in
Palestine of a National Home for the Jews."
He did not say he would make Palestine
the National Home for the Jews.
Churchill is basically trying
to reassure them:
National home" doesn't mean
we're trying to get rid of you.
But his attitude toward
the Palestinian Arabs
as Colonial Office Minister
refutes this.
The Palestinian Arabs' experience
was the Weizmann,
i.e. the Zionist movement,
and Churchill, i.e. the British government,
were joining forces
to put them in their place,
and they were right.
In the early 1920s
British and Zionist interests
were closer than ever.
Thus, a year after
the Nebi Musa riots,
the Palestinian Arabs look for
another way to protest.
This time it happens
in secular circumstances
at the border between
Jaffa and Tel Aviv.
A Labor Day march through
the streets of Manshiyya
is seen as a provocation
and turns into an altercation
which escalates into unprecedented rioting
on the Jaffa streets and all over Palestine.
The League of Nations
hasn't yet given the British
the final mandate over Palestine.
he Palestinian Arabs
still hoped
that they could influence the future
British government of Palestine
and told the British: We won't sit idly by
as you apply your policy.
They attack the Jewish
Immigrant House.
That's symbolic. Why?
Because that's what they're opposed to,
Jewish immigration to Palestine.
The most famous victim
of the 1921 riots
is author Haim Brenner,
who was killed near
the Salome cemetery.
This was the realization
of Brenner's deepest fears
which he didn't hesitate
to reveal in his writings:
Before I came here,
for some reason I imagined a land
like a single city,
settled by free Jews,
surrounded by many bare fields,
but on my first night here
I went for a walk
and we were attacked
by a gang of Arab heathens.
So once again
we must suffer
at the hands of gentiles.
We must suffer at the hands
of this filth!
He came for flourishing houses
and a productive Jewish community
and found himself
facing violent Arabs.
Is this the Land of Israel
we yearned for?
How do we even deal with this?
The Jews are doomed to be
the minority wherever they go,
that's how he feels.
A member of the early settlement,
Yosef Eliyahu Chelouche,
sees things differently from Brenner.
He even sees Brenner as part of the problem.
Let's state the bitter, horrid truth -
many of those who came from the Diaspora
to build the Jewish settlement
completely disregarded
the great value
of neighborly relations.
Zionist propaganda
described Palestine
as an uninhabited
wasteland.
We didn't even try
to learn the language of the land,
the language of our neighbors.
Commissioner Samuel
responds to the outbreak of violence
with a precedent which
is to repeat itself:
He halts Jewish immigrations
until further notice.
But a year later
all that is forgotten
when the League of Nations
finally hands the British
the official writ of mandate
over Palestine,
granting international approval
to all its clauses
including the one calling for the establishment
of a national home for the Jews in Palestine.
The British Mandate.
July 1922
is the date of the establishment
of the State of Israel
in the sense that a Jewish minority
in the Ottoman Empire
that has no collective rights,
certainly no recognition as a nation,
only five years later
the Jewish minority here
is recognized, not only by Great Britain
but by the League of Nations.
At the same time the Zionist movement
further establishes its physical presence.
In 1921 the JNF purchases
the Jezreel Valley,
populated by no less than 23
Jewish settlements by the decade's end.
In 1927 Wadi Hawarat
turns into Hefer Valley.
The fellahin, the local farmers
who are thrown off the land,
fan the flames of rage
against the big families
who sell the land
and against the Zionists who buy it.
One man who see's where all this
is going is Ze'ev Jabotinsky.
In 1923 he publishes
"The Iron Wall,"
an article which is to become
the manifesto
of the new Revisionist movement,
later known as Herat, then Likud.
I consider the expulsion
of the Arabs from Palestine
absolutely impossible.
There will always be
two peoples in Palestine.
The peacemakers among us
try to convince us
that the Arabs are either stupid
or greedy,
willing to give up their homeland
for a good railway system,
but as long as the Arabs have even
a spark of hope to get rid of us
they won't sell out this hope,
and for this reason
they shouldn't be seen as riffraff
but as a nation,
willing to compromise on crucial issues
only when no hope remains,
and we will see
not a single crack in this iron wall.
Jabotinsky was unique
in that he recognized a national
Arab claim to Palestine
which almost no one else did.
"There is no Arab nationalism,
they're riffraff."
He sees a nation
that clings to be its homeland
and says: We refuse to renounce it.
He said: If it looks like a cat,
it's a cat,
and it can't be dealt with
without force.
He said: The Zionists who say
that if we develop the land
they'll accept us
are being foolish,
you don't give up your homeland
for a railway,
you don't give up your homeland
so Hadassah Hospital
will treat your sick.
Judah Leon Magnes
shares Jabotinsky's views
regarding the Arabs
but disagrees with his solutions.
In 1925 he founds Brit Shalom,
the Peace Alliance
and formulates its aims:
To pave a way of understanding
between Jews and Arabs
for coexistence in Palestine
based on absolute equality
of political rights
for both peoples.
Brit Shalom was a group
of intellectuals
who came here and recognized
that there were two peoples here.
They said: We have to find
a solution that won't undermine
either nation's rights,
and their solution
was a sort of binational state.
The Arabs aren't impressed.
They say:
You're one-third of the population.
Who are you to offer us equality?
Magnes' and Brit Shalom's notions
were to reappear later.
In real time
the movement was marginal.
The Hebrew University,
of which Magnes was chancellor,
would prove much more successful,
one of the prominent highlights
in an extremely fruitful period
for the Zionist effort.
The 50,000 immigrants of the 4th Aliyah
bring fortunes from Poland
which they mainly invest in
the rapidly growing Tel Aviv.
Jerusalem, too,
grows and flourishes
but one city square remains
as crowded and poor
as it has for centuries,
the Kotel (Western Wall) plaza.
The Kotel became
the main place of prayer
for Jews in Jerusalem
in the 16th or 17th century.
This was where Jews came
to weep,
the Wailing Wall,
with the tears of thousands of old Jewish
women who went there to weep.
This gave it the sanctity
of the generations,
the sanctity of Jewish suffering.
Almost adjacent was a
Moroccan Muslim neighborhood,
almost all of the people
living there were Muslim pilgrims
who came to Jerusalem
for very similar reasons
as the Jews - because it was
a holy place.
According to tradition,
when Muhammad ascended to Heaven
he ascended from al-Aqsa
and he tied his winged horse al-Buraq
to the Kotel.
Like many religious symbols
the Kotel was appropriated
by the Zionists as a national symbol.
Chaim Weizmann was even involved in
an attempt to buy it from the Wakf
and rescind the restrictions
imposed on worshipers
at the crowded Kotel.
The Jews weren't allowed to place
anything permanent here,
not even benches,
let alone a partition.
This prohibition was imposed
by the Ottomans
and strictly enforced
by the English,
until Yom Kippur of 1928.
A Hassidic Rebbe from Poland
came with many followers
to pray at the Kotel.
They need a partition
and he asks the Ashkenazi beadle
to put one up
and the beadle
puts up a partition.
The next day, in the middle
of the Yom Kippur service,
British police remove the partition
while battling the angry worshipers.
As the next Yom Kippur approaches
all Palestine is talking about
the Kotel partition.
Scandal at the Western Wall
Yom Kippur desecrated
in Jerusalem by the police
a call to Jews everywhere
For the Western Wall
in Jerusalem
Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini
presents it as a first step
toward a Jewish takeover
of the Temple Mount
and its mosques.
On the other side,
Ussishkin declares:
The Jewish people will not rest
nor be silent
until it builds its national home
on our Mt. Moriah.
This whole area,
including the Moroccan Quarter,
is sacred to the Muslims,
and what is sacred
can't be bought or sold.
The Muslims saw this
as a great danger
because a takeover
of the Kotel grounds
could lead to an attempt
to take over
the whole Temple Mount
and the holy mosques.
Rabbi Kook stated categorically that he was
taking the question of the Temple Mount
and the Temple of the table
and leaving it for the future, to God.
He certainly didn't advocate
blowing up the mosques
and didn't permit
prayer on the Temple Mount,
but at the same time his pupils
started to study
the laws of the Temple.
This is fascinating.
In the '20s, in yeshivas in Palestine,
they start to study laws
that they didn't study in the Diaspora.
This isn't a Jewish-Zionist
political plan,
it's an emotional state,
but it's threatening.
This place is called
the Holy Temple.
The Temple Mount was purchased
by King David.
On the eve of the Ninth of Av
Jabotinsky's new Beitar movement
marches to the Kotel.
The day after the Ninth of Av
the Arabs respond
with an angry march of their own
to the very same Kotel.
The week continues
with demonstrations from both sides
which the British break up by force
and the tension is challenged
into the event
that security forces in Jerusalem
have feared ever since,
Friday prayers on the Temple Mount.
There's no better place
for recruiting
than the mosques in Jerusalem.
The Palestinian Arab leadership
realized they weren't successful
in getting the British
to change their policy,
so they took advantage of
the incidents at the Kotel
to incite the entire
Arab population.
We must recall that the Zionist movement
is a religious movement,
even those who call
themselves secular,
they come along with a Bible and say:
This is our claim to land,
and the national Palestinian movement
has a very powerful
Muslim dimension, of course,
so in this conflict we can't separate
religion from nationality
because neither of the sides do,
and the emotions that drive them
are nationalist and religious,
inextricably intertwined.
On Friday August 23, 1929
thousands of Arabs
gather on the Temple Mount,
many armed with sticks
and knives.
At 11:00 the crowd enters
the market alleys.
The Al-Buraq Intifada, named after
the Prophet's horse, begins,
the 1929 Uprisings,
as the Jews call
the violence that erupts in Jerusalem
and comes to a head in Hebron.
Jerusalem and Hebron
are the two holy cities,
they're associated
with Abraham the Patriarch,
they're the site of the competition
over "who's the favorite son,"
they're the site of the competition
over "which is the true religion,"
in terms of Palestinian Muslims
they're the cities
that must be defended,
and in terms of the Jews,
they're the hub of Judaism,
the hub of the Bible,
the weekly Torah readings
and our yearnings.
The Hebronites who come home
from Friday's prayers and riots in Jerusalem
attack Hebron's Jewish Quarter
the next day.
And behold, hundreds of murderers
surround Slonim House,
charging at it furiously.
Some seventy souls
found refuge in the house
but the murderers broke in
through the roof.
A deathly silence reigned.
The only sound was that of
brandished swords
and the echoes of truncheon
and axe-blows
on the corpses.
This is the only incident I'd compare
to a pogrom against the Jews
in the history of the conflict
because this was a mob
that attacked peaceful citizens
who had no part in
what happened in Jerusalem.
Because the Jews in Hebron
were unarmed.
Not only that, when Hagana fighters
were sent to defend them,
they said: We don't need you,
we have good relations
with the Arabs.
And the people who were
far from the Zionist movement
were the victims of the bloody
1929 riots.
The city that served as
a role model of coexistence
over the course of a Sabbath
turns into a place where relations between
Arabs and Jews are changed forever.
Whore.
You're the whore!
-Whore! Whore!
But not everything
about Hebron is bad news,
there are several stories
about Arabs
who risked their lives
to protect their Jewish neighbors
and saved them from death
and from their houses being torched.
Underneath the fiery ideology
of both sides
of "this land is ours,"
"God is with us,"
"this is our city,"
"we have the right to pray here,"
there's another level:
I'm human and you're human.
For some people
this level is dominant,
the human level,
they won't kill a child
or an old person,
they won't kill anyone,
they can't.
There are people who'll
save lives if they can
because it's more important
than the argument over
who God loves. Who does God love?
Let God decide.
The 90 years that have passed
since the 1929 riots in Hebron
have only reinforced the belief
that God is involved in the conflict.
The status of the holy sites
is still the most volatile issue
of the conflict,
whose other aspects are determined by
Fatwas and Halacha (Jewish law) as well.
For Israel this is another aspect
of the inability or unwillingness
to separate religion from state.
For the Palestinians
there is no state
to separate from religion.