The mosque is in danger
The toxic libel by Palestinian Muslim extremists that “Al-Aqsa Mosque is in danger,” and Jews are to blame, has been used to incite antisemitic violence for over a century.
So, it’s not surprising that Hamas leaders named their Oct. 7 invasion and massacre in southern Israel “Al-Aqsa Flood,” creating the false rationale that the mass murder, rape, torture and mutilation on that day was an act of defense against a putative Israeli scheme to destroy or take-over the mosque.
One of the earliest uses of this libel – which is used to this day by Palestinian leaders to fuel violence – took place in the city of Hebron, Judaism’s second holiest city, in 1929.
Background
As CAMERA’s Ricki Hollander previously documented in an in-depth post about anti-Jewish violence in pre-state Israel, in September 1928, a small group of Jews erected a mechitza (a divider to separate men and women during prayers) for Yom Kippur prayers at the Western Wall. The British dismantled the divider, but Haj Amin al Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and future Nazi collaborator, used the incident as a pretext to incite Muslims, accusing Jews of attempting to seize their holy sites, including the al Aqsa Mosque.
A propaganda campaign calling for jihad against the Jews resulted in the frequent attacks on Jews worshipping at the Wall and culminated in widespread, deadly riots across Palestine in August 1929.
Hebron Massacre
August 15, 1929 was Tisha B’Av, the day on which Jews commemorate the destruction of the Holy Temple, as well as other Jewish tragedies which took place on that date in the Hebrew calendar. Thousands of Jews marched to the Wall, peacefully protesting British restrictions on Jewish prayer there, and to reaffirm their Jewish connection to the holy site.
On August 17, a Jewish boy was killed by Arabs, in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Bukharan, who were inflamed by antisemitic sermons.
According to contemporaneous reports, including in the Davar newspaper of August 20, 1929, anti-Jewish incitement was rampant, especially in Jerusalem and Hebron. Rumors were spread that Jews had cursed Islam and intended to take over their holy places, while Muslims were told that it was their duty to take revenge. “Defend the Holy Places,” became the battle cry.
On August 23, more than 1,000 Arabs launched attacks on Jews throughout Jerusalem. Forty-seven people were killed. This was followed by widespread attacks on Jews throughout Palestine. The British forbade Jews to organise armed self-defense units and within several days, 133 Jews had been killed and 339 wounded.
According to Dutch-Canadian journalist Pierre Van Passen who was in Palestine at the time, fabricated pictures of Muslim holy sites in ruins were handed out to Hebron Arabs as they were leaving their mosques on Friday, August 23. The captions on the pictures claimed that the Dome of the Rock was bombed by the Zionists.
That evening, armed Arabs broke into the Yeshiva and murdered the lone student they found. The following day, an Arab mob wielding knives, axes, and iron bars destroyed the Yeshiva and murdered the rest of the students there. A delegation of Jewish residents on their way to the police station was lynched by an Arab mob. The mob then proceeded to Hebron, where Jews who had lived peacefully with their Arab neighbors for years.
Elhanan Zelig Roch, Victim of the 1929 Hebron Massacre, via Wikimedia Commons
The violence escalated, and mobs went door to door screaming, “Kill the Jews,” breaking into Jewish houses and torturing, castrating, raping and murdering the inhabitants – a deadly orgy of libel-fueled Palestinian violence foreshadowing the antisemitic barbarism we’d see – albeit on a much larger scale – on Oct. 7 2023.
Much like the Hebron rioters of 1929 praised Allah as they slaughtered men, women, and children, wrote Yardena Schwartz, author of “Ghosts of a Holy War”, so too did Hamas fighters, in footage they uploaded to social media.
In total, sixty-seven Jews in Hebron were killed and 60 were wounded over a two-hour period, while dozens more Jews were murdered in Jerusalem and in other cities. The Jewish community in Hebron – where Jews had lived since biblical times – was destroyed.
The Guardian
An Aug. 4 report at the outlet by Julian Borger (“Jerusalem’s most important Muslim religious site facing ‘imminent’ threat of Israeli takeover, says Jordan”) doesn’t merely legitimise the latest propaganda by Amman about the mosque being in danger. It also uses the incendiary language of extremists in the journalist’s own voice:
The…Jordanian warning – follow an escalating pattern of government-backed incursions by Jewish religious extremists on the compound around al-Aqsa mosque and Dome of the Rock, in violation of a status quo treaty overseen by Jordan’s Hashemite monarchy, by which only Muslims can pray at the site.
On 23 July, more than 2,000 Israelis from the religious right – mostly settlers led by the national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir – stormed the area, known to Jews as the Temple Mount.
Though the article later acknowledges that the Temple Mount is Judaism’s holiest site, which an editor’s note suggests came as the result of a complaint, it’s remarkable – even by Guardian standards – that they used the term “stormed” and “incursion” to describe what were peaceful Jewish visits to the Temple Mount/Al-Aqsa Mosque compound.
Such terms are typically used by PA-controlled and terrorist-friendly ‘news‘ sites to convey the dangerous lie that Jews are interlopers at the Temple Mount and that the mosque is in danger.
The article then reaches what we can confidently describe as a new low for the outlet in its coverage of Jerusalem:
Infringement by Jewish extremists triggered riots in the British Mandate period between the world wars…
It seems almost certain that the journalist is referring to the 1929 Hebron riots, as, though there were other periods of violence during the period between the wars, that was the only major incident that involved the alleged “infringement” by Jews on the Temple Mount.
While nothing much shocks us anymore about the Guardian’s institutional hostility to Israel and Jews, it’s important to stress that, until now, we’ve never previously encountered an inversion of the 1929 Palestinian pogrom that frames Jewish victims as the culprits at any other British outlet. They effectively endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory that resulted in the barbaric slaughter of Jewish civilians in Hebron – a libel that continues to fuel jihadist violence against Jews to this day.
There is literally no moral line within their pathological antizionist campaign that the Guardian won’t cross.