Chapter 2

Chapter 2 Coexisting with the 'Palestinians There was never anything but bitter Arab hostility, resentment, and hatred of the Jewish stranger who wanted "his" -- the Arab's -- land. Nothing the Zionist did contributed to this hate, except one thing: he existed. In 1921, in 1929, and in 1936-38 there were no Jewish "occupation" troops patrolling "the West Bank." There was no such thing as "occupied Arab lands of 1967." All the reasons for bloodshed, violence, war, and hatred that today's Arabs and confused Jews point to as being at "the heart" of the Arab-Jewish problem did not exist then. Hebron and Shechem and Tulkarm and Ramallah and Bethlehem and Jericho were not under Jewish military occupation, and there was no need for world organizations and national governments to issue resolutions calling for withdrawal from and return of the "occupied territories to their rightful owners." In fact, there was not even a Jewish state in existence, and by all logic the "Palestinians" should have coexisted peacefully and in friendship with the Jews. They did not. And it is important to recall the reality of the Palestinians' "coexisting" with their Jewish cousins before the "Zionist aggression of 1967," for it appears to me more than necessary to teach the past to a foolish generation that insists on repeating it. It is essential to rid ourselves of the illusion that if only Israel would be more "flexible" and "reasonable" and "compromising," peace can be attained. It is vital that we cease babbling about the "obstacles to peace" that are the Jewish settlements of Kiryat Arba or Kedumim or Tekoa. It is of paramount importance to realize that the Arab-Israeli conflict did not begin in 1967 or in the Sinai campaign of 1956 or when the state came into being in 1948. The conflict began many decades earlier, and it is not an ArabIsraeli one. It is an Arab-Jewish conflict. Jewish blood was shed in the land of Israel by Arabs long before 1967, or 1947 or 1927. And the issue then was indeed one of "settlements," but the conflict raged about the new Zionist settlements of Tel Aviv and Petah Tikva and Rehovot and Hadera and those in West Jerusalem. The "hate affair" between Arabs and Jews began before there was such a thing as Jewish settlements in Judea-Samaria and will continue even if by some madness the Jews of Israel should agree to give up the liberated lands. All kinds of foolish people today speak of the need to recognize the "Palestinians." I agree. Come let us recognize them for what they are. 14 Meet them and know them, just as the Jews of the Land of Israel knew them, thirty-five and forty-five and fifty-five years ago, long before the "Israeli aggression of 1967.” The Pogroms of 1921 On 23 Nisan in the year 5681 (May 1, 1921), Arab mobs began to gather in Jaffa. That city, unlike Jerusalem and others, was considered a model of Jewish-Arab coexistence. (It is remarkable how many Jewish illusions have risen and fallen during the past eighty years of struggle with the Arabs.) The Jews and Arabs of Jaffa had extensive commercial relations, and the Sephardic Jews, who had lived there for generations, were almost indistinguishable from the Arabs in their general daily deportment. Nevertheless, the mobs began to gather. The heavy sticks and metal bars they carried left no doubt as to their intentions. For days the Arabic paper Falastin had been agitating against Zionism with particular venom. Now, in the mixed Jewish-Arab neighborhoods of Nve Shalom and Menashiya, the mob began to attack Jews in the streets with stones and heavy metal rods, but their major targets were the Jewish stores and homes - with their property and women. The Jews attempted to defend themselves, and since the mob did not have guns, the police could have easily driven them off. But the police were Arabs - first and foremost Arabs. Most protected the Arab rioters, while others removed their badges and joined them, shooting at the Jews. In the first attack, thirteen Jews were killed, and the looting and pillaging spread to other areas of the city. Gradually, the mob focused on the center of Zionism in the city. Bet Ha'Olim (Immigrant House). In their simple naivete and belief that Arabs and Jews could coexist in peace, the Zionists had acquired a large, two-story building in the allArab Ajemi section of Jaffa. At the time there were about one hundred new immigrants in the building that was the symbol of Jewish immigration. So great was the confidence of the Jews in their ability to live in peace with their neighbors that they had no weapons of any kind. After all, this was not Czarist Russia. This was the Land of Israel, the land to which the Jews had come to ... escape pogroms. Around 1:00 P.M. the mob began to gather. Pioneers standing in the street were stoned and beaten. One Arab attempted to throw a primitive homemade bomb, but it blew up in his hands and he was killed. This only infuriated the mob, which began to approach the building. The Jews ripped iron posts from the gate and blocked the entrance to the front and side yards. They beat off the Arabs' first attack, and several Arabs were 15 carried away by their comrades. It appeared that despite the huge mob, the Jews would be able to defend themselves. At 2:00 P.M., the watchmen on the roof reported that several policemen were approaching. A general sigh of relief arose, until the police -- Arabs -- arrived. They suddenly began shooting at the Jews, and two grenades were thrown into the courtyard, killing and wounding several of them. According to The Book of the Haganah, the attack was led by the head of the prison, Hana Burdkush, a member of a "respectable" Christian Arab family. The police burst into the yard, shouting to the mob: "What are you waiting for? Kill them all!” Their spirits broken, most of the Jews attempted to flee. The males who were not fortunate enough to escape were brutally murdered. Several women pleaded with a policeman to save them. He took them into an alley, stripped them of their valuables, and tried to rape one of them. When silence descended on the building, thirteen were dead and twentysix wounded, and for the rest of the day, Arabs looted Jewish stores and houses. Except for the language, the clothing, and the palm trees, it might very well have been Kishinev. In the early-morning hours of May 2, six Jewish bodies were found in the Abu Kabir section between Jaffa and Tel Aviv. They included the famous writer Y. C. Brenner, and the news horrified the Jewish community. The six had been beaten to death, their bodies stripped and mutilated. The reaction of the Jews was instructive. Zionist leaders Nahum Sokolow, Pinchas Ruttenburg, Meir Dizengoff, and others met and decided to seek conciliation. The Jaffa Arab "notables" agreed to accept the offer of peace from the victims, but at the meeting held in the Jaffa municipality, and to the loud applause of the Arabs, Omar Al-Bittar, the mayor, declared that he could not speak for the "Arab nation" and each person would have to use his individual initiative to calm passions. Nothing daunted, the Tel Aviv Jewish town council announced that "the sheikhs have promised us that they will persuade the inhabitants to be calm." Those who had lived in European exile in which their safety and security depended on the whim of the Gentile felt right at home in the Exile of Ishmael. The results of the Jaffa massacre were 43 Jews murdered, 134 wounded, and untold property damage. It was now 27 Nisan, May 5. Petah Tikva's turn. 16 The news of the Jaffa pogrom encouraged the Arabs of the villages near the large settlement of Petah Tikva to cast covetous eyes on that thriving Jewish colony. By May 3 all the Arab workers had left, a sure sign of impending attack. The two small colonies of Ein Hai and Kfar Saba had heard of frenzied meetings in the nearby Arab villages of Kalkilya, Tira, and Miski, where plans had been formulated for destruction of the Jewish settlements. The Jews hastily evacuated the two colonies, and after being attacked and having part of their cattle plundered by the Bedouins of Abu-Kishk, they arrived, fearfully, in Petah Tikva. On the evening of 26 Nisan (May 4), watchmen saw the flames of Kfar Saba and Ein Hai, which had been torched by their Arab neighbors. Scouts reported that hundreds of Arabs from all the villages in the area were now on their way to attack Petah Tikva. A group of riders under the leadership of veteran Avraham Shapira rode out to meet the attackers and found them leading away 700 of the settlement's cattle. Under a hail of bullets the Jews had to flee. The Jews in the settlement awaited the Arab attack with sinking hearts. They had only forty guns, and the Arabs had large quantities of weapons and ammunition. The attack began. Desperately the defenders held on within a fixed radius. The Arabs attacked, looted, and burned houses outside the defense perimeter. Four Jews were dead, and the colony was on the verge of collapse and slaughter when British troops arrived to save them. Only courage and miracles saved the large settlement of Hadera and Rehovot from slaughter. The book History of the Haganah (Israel Defense Ministry) describes the attack on Rehovot by Arabs of Ramie: "Thousands of men, women and children came like locusts upon this settlement, with the usual battle-cries: 'Eleyhom' ["Charge them"] and Itbach Al-Yahud ["Slaughter the Jews"]. They approached the settlement looting everything in their path and burning huts in the orchards.” Coexistence in the month of May 1921, forty-six years before the Israeli "occupation" that is the real obstacle to peace in the Middle East. ... November 2, 1921, marked the fourth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration that had promised the Jews an enigmatic "national home." The Arab press, leaders in the drive for an end to Zionism, called for a day of mourning, a work stoppage, and demonstrations to protest the declaration, which they coined "the death sentence passed on the Palestinian people.” 17 In Jerusalem, 5,000 Jews were packed into the Jewish quarter, most of them totally unfamiliar with self-defense. The day of the general strike saw thousands of frenzied Arabs attacking those Jews, mostly Sephardic, who lived in the Muslim quarter. The Sephardim remained there in the mistaken belief that the Arabs were opposed only to the recent European, or Ashkenazic, immigrants. They were wrong. To the credit of the Arabs, they did not discriminate against Jews on the basis of communal background. They killed all - equally. Among the Jews killed in the first assault was a sexton in the Yeshiva Torat Chaim and nineteen-year-old Yitzhak Mesner, who was stabbed to death while escorting a group of women and children to safety. At 11:30 hundreds of screaming Arabs, headed by Sheikh Vad AlHalili, attempted to smash into the Jewish quarter. They were driven back after a sharp struggle in which the sheikh was killed. Five dead Jews and forty injured ones were brought to the hospital, the victims of Arab demands for an end, not to Jewish "occupation," but the Jewish existence in the land per se. The Pogroms of 1929 On Yom Kippur Eve in the year 5689 (1928), the Arabs of Eretz Yisrael discovered the Wailing (Western) Wall. More precisely, they discovered that the one remnant of the Holy Temple of the Jews was really a Muslim holy place. For hundreds of years, Jews had come freely to the symbol of their exile and suffering, to shed bitter tears and to plead with the Alm-ghty to redeem them from the four corners of the earth. But on Yom Kippur, 5689, a British policeman barged into the midst of the worshippers to forcibly remove the partition that separated the men and the women, and thus he put into motion the forces of pogrom. For years the British had claimed that they would keep the "status quo" for religious sites in Jerusalem. The Wall had no standing as a Muslim religious site at all, but the Muslims did not wish to see it granted Jewish religious status. The British viewed the partition between the sexes at the Yom Kippur services as an attempt to convert the Wall into a "synagogue.” The incident gave birth to Jewish indignation and to an Arab myth. The Mufti of Jerusalem at the time, the supreme Muslim leader, carved a historic niche for himself as a treacherous and murderous individual (he later spent the years of World War II in Berlin calling upon Muslims to join in a holy war on behalf of Adolf Hitler). His name was Haj Amin AlHusseini (a member of a Jerusalem family of "notables"), and in 1929, in 18 his position as a Muslim theologian, he decreed that the Wall was in reality a Muslim holy place. The reason? When Muhammad allegedly went up to heaven from Jerusalem on his wondrous horse, Al-Burak, he chose a spot near the Wall to tether it. This wondrous tale of a wondrous horse had, of course, not prevented Muslims, for centuries, from wondrously riding through the area on horses and donkeys who left their unmistakably wondrous presence behind, on the ground. But no matter. A political-religious legend was born, and for almost a year the Arabs incited, lied, and heated the atmosphere that led to the deadly pogroms of 1929. In many towns, "committees for the defense of the Burak," were formed. On November 1, 1928, the Mufti convened a "religious" conference, which demanded that Jews be prevented from bringing religious items to the Wall. The Mufti added his pious wish that the British enforce this "in order that the Muslims themselves not be forced to enact measures to defend at all costs this Muslim holy place.” For months the Muslims resorted to various measures to harass the Jews at the Wall. New houses began to be built that interfered with and disturbed the prayers. A new "religious ritual" known as Ziker was introduced. It involved loud chanting, singing, and dancing with a background of drums and cymbals -- to be performed exactly at Jewish prayer time. On 25 Tammuz (August 2, 1929) Jews were attacked and badly beaten at the Wall. Jewish horror was hardly helped through the stupid comment by the socialist writer Moshe Beilinson, who called for Jewish "moderation" and calm, saying: "The value of the Wall is great but let us not forget: Of central importance to the revival of the nation are other values of immigration, work, land." Thus spoke a socialist Jewish spokesman and a not-too-clever one at that. The Mufti could only smile. On Friday, 10 Av (August 16), thousands of Muslims, leaving prayers at the Al-Aksa mosque, marched past the wall, shouting: "Allah Akhbarl" ("G-d is great!"); "Din Muhamad Karl Basan" ("The Law of Muhammad with the Sword"); and "Down with Zionism!" A bitter diatribe against the Jews was delivered, and Jewish prayer books were burned. The following day, the Sabbath, Arabs stabbed to death a young Jew, Avraham Mizrachi. Tension grew steadily. The Mufti and other Arab leaders hastened to take advantage of the situation. Letters, reputedly signed by the Mufti (after the pogroms he claimed they had been forged), called on all Muslims to come to 19 Jerusalem the following Friday to prevent the Jews from "seizing AlAksa." Thousands of Arabs began streaming into Jerusalem with long sticks that had sharp nails protruding from them. Above all, the cry rang out throughout every Arab village and town: "Il Dula M'ana" -- "The government is with us!” And, indeed, it was. The British imperial, colonial government was represented by a new high commissioner named Chancellor, who - because of his recent arrival - allowed most of the decisions to be made by his chief aide, Harry Luke, a bitter anti-Zionist. Luke was the son of an assimilated Jewish family from Hungary named Lukach. The father had emigrated to England and in one fell swoop acquired a new country, religion, and name. The Hungarian Jew Lukach was now the British Protestant Luke. And having converted, Luke now acquired a gentile characteristic: he became anti-Semitic. No better friend in court did the Arabs have than Luke, whose policy of non-interference with the Mufti and Arab mobs led to the murder of scores of Jews. Jerusalem The pogrom in Jerusalem began on the Muslim holy day, Friday 17 Av (August 23). Thousands of Arabs streamed into the city carrying iron bars, sticks, and knives. In the courtyard inciters from Jerusalem and the two nearby villages of Lifta and Kalandia heated the atmosphere, and at 12:30 P.M. the mob burst forth, heading in two directions: toward the Jaffa and Damascus gates. At Jaffa gate, Jews who inadvertantly passed by were attacked. Despite the presence of police, the two Ruttenberg brothers were beaten and stabbed to death. On Jaffa Road, Jewish stores were smashed by some sixty Arabs from Lifta and a Jewish newsman murdered. In the small Georgian quarter, home of poor Jewish families, four Jews including a woman and child were slaughtered and the humble homes looted. An attempt to smash into the Mea Sh'arim quarter was thwarted. The worst attacks were on the outlying Jewish neighborhoods in the new, Jewish, part of the city. The neighborhood of Romema, through the Diskin Orphan Home, Givat Shaul, Montefiore, Bet Hakerem, Yefe Nof, and Bayit V'Gan, were targets of a large attack led by Arabs from the villages of Dir Yassin, Bin Kerem, and Lifta. Dir Yassin Arabs were the leaders and organizers of the attack, and the village became world-famous in 1948 when it received its just reward for the many Jews slaughtered by its citizens. 20 It was only an incredibly valiant defense by the Jews that prevented a massacre of major proportions. With few men and weapons, the defenders succeeded in throwing back thousands of Arabs. The situation in the outlying neighborhood of Bayit V'Gan was especially critical. All the women and children were evacuated and the defenders concentrated in homes near the woods. All the other homes were looted by Arabs from Ein Kerem, Maiha, and Walaja. Three Jews -- a student, David Vilnai; a guard, Mordechai Ben-Menashe; and a policeman, Gudel Yudelevitz -- were killed. The fighting continued for days. Saturday night, August 24, the first seventeen Jewish victims were taken from Hadassah Hospital to be buried. The British had provided only three policemen, who were weary and nervous. The burial ceremony was hurried as it came under attack from Arabs in Talpiot. The next day, Arabs from Bet Tzefafa, Tzur Bahir, and other villages overran, looted, and burned to the ground the settlement of Ramat Rahel on the southern border of Jerusalem. Never had there been such a lengthy and widespread pogrom in Jerusalem. Coexistence was not working, despite the absence of a "legitimate grievance" known as "the occupied territories.” Just outside Jerusalem, astride the road to Tel Aviv, sat the small Jewish settlement of Motza. For decades its residents thought that they had enjoyed the best of relationships with the neighboring Arab village of Kolonia. On Saturday night, August 24, as the Jews of Jerusalem were being buried, thirty villagers from Kolonia, longtime acquaintances, "visited" the home of the Maklaf family (the house was the last one in the settlement). They slaughtered everyone, including eighty-five-year-old Rabbi Zaiman Shach, a guest for the Sabbath. The women were first raped and then murdered, and the house was burned down. The small settlement of Hartuv was wiped off the face of the earth. Friday night, August 23, as the men huddled together in one house (the women and children had been evacuated), a mob of Arabs from the nearby villages of Dir Aban, Eshtaol, and Tzar'a attacked. They looted everything in the spacious farm of Y. L. Goldberg. Cows, horses, wheat, furniture - everything was plundered by the crazed mob. At midnight, two British armored cars arrived to rescue the men from a massacre. The settlement was left for the mob, who literally razed it to the ground. Destruction was also the fate of Migdal Eder, between Bethlehem and Hebron, as well as Kfar Uria near Hartuv. The settlement of Be'er Tuvya 21 was composed of some 120 people. Most of them, terrified and near panic, were together in the large stable of Devora Korovkov. Arabs from the surrounding areas began their attacks. From the nearby settlement of Gedera came a reply to the Jews' desperate request for help: "We cannot help you. We have not enough men or ammunition for ourselves.” Perhaps more than anything else, the following statement by one of the Be'er Tuvya settlers tells the chilling reality of the "Palestinians" and what any ultimate victory of theirs would mean for the Jews. In the words of D. Yizraeli: "Several of the women asked the doctor to give them poison so that they not fall into the hands of the Arabs. He refused. But he said that all would defend the women and children until their last drop of blood. And if there was no other way, they would use their guns to save the honor of their women.” In the attack that followed, with the Arabs burning houses on all sides, it was, ironically, the doctor, Haim Yizraeli, who was the first to be killed, shot down in his white coat as he stood near the gate. Just hours earlier he had gone out to bind up the leg of an Arab who had attacked the settlement and been wounded Herzl Rosen was slaughtered next, and Moshe Cohen, who had refused to leave his farm, pointing to the decades of good relations with his Arab neighbors, was stabbed numerous times and with his last remaining strength managed to reach shelter. The arrival of British troops saved the rest of the settlers. But they were evacuated to "safety," and when they returned, the entire settlement had been burned to the ground. Literally, nothing was left. Safad High in the beautiful Galilean hills stood the city of the Kabbalists, Safad. Its 3,000 Jews had lived for generations with the Arabs. All spoke Arabic, and the Sephardic Jews were hardly distinguishable in their dress. As the days of pogroms receded, it appeared that Safad would be spared the horror. But on 23 Av (August 29), at 5:30 P.M., a mob of Arabs burst into the Jewish quarter, led by Fuad Hajazi, a young clerk of the local government health office. The first place attacked was the Klinger gasoline storage house. As flames and smoke leaped into the air, the mob entered homes of the Jews they had known for years, stabbing, beating, raping, looting. The wind carried the flames onward; ironically, this saved many Jewish lives as the mob rushed to save their own homes. But eighteen Jews were dead and more than eighty others injured. Almost all the victims were elderly 22 or women, many of whom had pleaded with their slaughterers to remember the favors they had done them over the years. The same evening, the small Jewish settlement in Ein Zeitim was decimated. Three Jews were murdered, the rest fled to Safad, and their homes went up in flames. In the northeast part of the Galilee, the settlement of Yesud Ha'Ma'ale was destroyed by its "good neighbors" from the Arab village of TIail. In essence there was not a Jewish community of any consequence that was not attacked. Scores of Jews were slaughtered, and damage was estimated in the millions of English pounds. It was a shattering blow to the young Jewish community which had caught a glimpse of the reality of the "Palestinian." But nowhere was the full extent of "Palestinian" horror manifested more clearly than in the ancient city of Hebron. Hebron Long before the name "Palestinian" was invented, the Hebrew people, children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, lived in Hebron. There Abraham purchased the cave of Machpela, and there the Patriarchs and Matriarchs of the nation were buried. Hebron was the city given unto Caleb, the son of Jephune, for his faith in G-d. There David ruled as king for seven years before going to Jerusalem, and there Jews and Judaism were entwined for 3,500 years. There, in 1929, occurred a massacre that took more Jewish lives than Kishinev. It was a hot Friday morning, 17 Av in the year 5689 (August 23, 1929). Again, there was no Jewish state, no Jewish "occupation forces," no "occupied territories," to give the Arabs reason to cry out against Zionism. In Hebron there lived some 500 Jews, mostly Sephardic, many with roots going back hundreds of years. Just a few weeks earlier the city had been visited by the Rebbe of Lubavitch. Rabbi Moshe Mordechai Epstein, head of Yeshivat Slobodka, had moved the entire Yeshiva to Hebron just four years earlier, breathing new spiritual life into the ancient town. Such synagogues as Avraham Avinu, the synagogue named after Reb Yehuda Bibas, and two Chabad synagogues were there. The Chabad Yeshiva, Toras Emes, was founded there. Jews lived and worked and prayed and studied -- and then -- their Arab neighbors rose up to massacre, in cold blood, sixty-seven of them. Scores of others were wounded; all the rest fled, leaving their property behind. That was twenty years before Dir Yassin. 23 Throughout the land there was growing tension as roving bands of Arab gangsters, egged on by the Supreme Muslim Council and the Mufti, agitated against the Jews. Incidents had been reported in various places, but the Jews of Hebron were not particularly worried. In the first place, they had lived in peace for many, many years with their Arab neighbors. How was it conceivable that those neighbors, for whom they had done so much, would betray them? After all, despite various incidents that had taken place in the past decade in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Safad, and other places, there had never been trouble in Hebron. Second, Arab dignitaries had repeatedly assured them that no harm would come to them. Just how sure the Jews of Hebron were that no problem existed can be seen from the fact that Rabbi Avraham Yaakov Orlinski, the Rabbi of Zichron Ya'akov, had arrived the previous day with his wife to celebrate the Sabbath with their daughter and son-in-law, Eliezer Don Slonim. A delegation of rabbis who met with the Arab governor of the town were informed that there was nothing to fear. He had more than enough men to protect the Jews in case of any problem, and everyone knew that the Hebron Arabs were opposed to the Supreme Muslim Council. The Jews were reassured, but at a meeting of several leaders (Messrs. Slonim, Melamed, Shneirson, Chaim Bajayo, and others) it was planned to bring some of the Jews who lived outside the main concentration of Jews into the center of town. At about 1:00 P.M., after the Arabs had left the mosques, a group of notables visited Slonim to boast of the quiet atmosphere in town and again guaranteed that nothing would happen. At approximately 2:30, an Arab courier arrived by motorcycle and told the Arabs gathered around him that he had just returned from Jerusalem, where "thousands of Muslims had been killed and their blood spilled like water." The Arabs, seeking blood, marched through the streets. Suddenly, elderly Rabbi Slonim appeared, headed for the office of the police chief. The Arabs leaped upon him and beat the aged rabbi unmercifully. Frightened Jews watched from their homes, as did the chief of police. A woman, Mrs. Sokolov, watching from her window, could not stand to see the sight and ran to the police chief. He curtly told her that it was none of her business, and "furthermore, it is the fault of the Jews anyhow." He advised her to lock herself in her home. The mob then turned to the Grodzinski home. Y. L. Grodzinski, in testimony given later, stated: "When the riots began, there were people in our house. I saw a young Arab open the gate to our courtyard and tens of Arabs burst in. They surrounded the house and began banging on the doors. We hastily secured the doors as stones came smashing through the windows. When a shot was fired into the room, we went up to the second 24 floor and called for help. Eliezer Don Slonim saw us and managed to get a group of police, who finally scattered the mob. We then all decided to move to the home of Slonim, since he had excellent relations with the Arabs and we felt sure that his house would not be attacked." How false this was will be seen later. The bloodthirsty Arabs wanted Jews. They made their way to the Slobodka yeshiva. Because it was the eve of the Sabbath, most of the students were not there. Only the Yemeni shammas (sexton) and the perpetually diligent masmid, eternal learner of Torah, Shmuel Rosenholtz, were to be found. (Rosenholtz rarely left the study hall.) The mob, breathing fire, came charging into the courtyard. The shammas leaped into the well in time and covered himself; it saved his life. Not so Rosenholtz. Completely immersed in his Talmud, he did not even hear the mob come in. It was only when stones came flying into the hall, one smashing him in the head so that blood spurted over his Talmud, that he attempted to flee. But the mob was upon him and punctured his body with knife wounds, like a sieve. The Hebron massacre has its first victim. The tragedy unfolds. Evening now comes to Hebron, and the Sabbath will soon begin. The Arab mob that murdered Shmuel Rosenholtz in cold blood has scattered and the streets are now silent. The police arrive at the yeshiva and place the body of the martyr on a table, appointing a policeman to watch over it. In every Jewish home the Sabbath is greeted with trepidation and concern over what will happen tomorrow. The son of Rabbi Moshe Mordechai Epstein, head of the Slobodka-Hebron yeshiva, is called to the office of the Hebron governor, an Arab, who is flanked by two officers, one British and the other Arab. The governor tells the son of the Rosh Yeshiva ("dean of the seminary") that he must go to every Jewish house and warn the occupants not to walk out. He says: "Let the Jews stay in their houses and I will be responsible for their lives. ..." The Jewish promise is given, and the night passes in troubled silence, broken only by the sounds of police on horses passing through the streets and various Jewish families leaving their homes for the "safety" of the house of the respected Eliezer Don Slonim. Early Sabbath morning, at five, the Jews are already up, their leaders meeting to discuss what to do. It is suggested that a telegram be hurriedly sent to Jerusalem to inform the Haganah about the situation. But the telegraph office will not open until eight and by that time it will already be impossible. There is also a suggestion to send someone by automobile to Jerusalem, but for some reason it is decided that an Arab should be the 25 driver, and no Arab can be found to do it. In the end the Jews meet with an Arab police officer named Ibrahim Jarjura, who tells them in the name of the police chief that "the Jews must remain in their houses and only then can we take responsibility for their safety." The police chief, an Englishman named Capireta, tells the Jewish leaders the same thing. By 6:00 A.M., with Arabs now streaming into Hebron from the surrounding countryside, E. D. Slonim and a yeshiva student, along with a police detail, go from Jewish house to house, warning the Jews not to go out and not even to look out the windows. Arab neighbors, meanwhile, gleefully tell their Jewish "friends" that "today will be the slaughter." The streets are now packed with Arabs, armed with guns, swords, and knives. Cars speed through the streets with Arabs sitting on the roofs, shouting slogans calling for death to the Jews. The atmosphere is electric, and through it all walk the Arab and British police officers, calmly. The Jewish leaders of the community meet at the home of the Sephardic Rabbi Franco. Fear of a truly serious threat to their lives is now evident. It is clear that they must do something more than just sit and wait. It is decided to send a delegation to the British police chief to protest the forced penning of Jews in their homes instead of firmly letting the Arabs know that breaking the law will not be tolerated. A delegation is sent to the Britisher's office, and on the way they meet one of the heads of the Arab community, Isa Arafa. They tell him that if he can get the Hebron Arab leaders to announce publicly that they are responsible for the lives of the Jews, the Jews will continue their ties with the Arabs, including the continued bank credit that the Arabs need. If not, all commercial ties will be cut. The Arab agrees, but meanwhile he goes with them to see the British police chief. To everyone's amazement, the police chief refuses to see the delegation, shouting "What are you doing here? I told you a number of times that you must remain in your homes!” The Arab listens, and now his tone changes. He tells Slonim: "If you will hand over the strangers in your midst, you will save your own lives." Slonim replies angrily: "We Jews are not like you Muslims. We are one people; there are no 'strangers' among us." In deep worry the Jews walk home, watching as thousands of Arabs shout and march through the street, fully armed, while in their midst walk a few policemen carrying clubs. Without the knowledge of the Jewish leaders, the slaughter has already begun. In one of the houses, farther away from the center, lives the Abushadid family. The father, Eliyahu, fifty-five, is a storekeeper, born in Hebron. He suddenly appears on the balcony of his home, 26 screaming for help. No one hears or listens. The police are nowhere to be seen. Rocks begin flying into the house, smashing windows, and screams of terror are heard. Several women and children appear on the balcony. An Arab, his eyes filled with hate and lust, rushes at them, swinging a sword. He cuts and stabs again and again. Blood spurts over the balcony and drips into the street. Inside lie the bodies of Eliyahu Abushadid and his twenty-five-year-old son, Yitzchok, a simple tailor. Dead, too, are forty-five-year-old Yaakov Goslan, a smelter, also born in the city, and his eighteen-year-old son Moshe. The Arabs do not even look at the bodies; they are much too busy looting the house and throwing Jewish property over the balcony into the streets to the howling mob. The mob now turns to the home of the revered scholar Rabbi Meir Kastel. The sixty-nine-year-old Haham, also born in Hebron, watches as the mob breaks down his door. He is brutally murdered. The mob loots his house and then burns it down over his body. On to the next ... Rabbeinu Hason, sixty-five, is one of the heads of the Sephardic rabbinate in Hebron. He is also a son of the city. He and his wife, Clara, fifty-nine, watch in terror as the mob burns down their door and then storms in. Both die a terrible death at the hands of the mob, which loots and then turns to Beit Hadassah. Beit Hadassah. The building that in years to come will rouse the anger of the world and of too many Jews when "seized" by the Jewish "militants." Rabbi Meir Kahane will receive a sentence after "seizing" the building three times. Women from Kiryat Arba along with their children will "seize" it and be forced to remain for months without their husbands. It is a building in which the Israeli government will refuse to allow Jews to live. And six innocent Jews will be shot down in cold blood outside its doors. But it is also a building with a past that few know. ... n 1909 the cornerstone was laid in Hebron for a building that was to serve as both a medical clinic and a synagogue for the Jews of the city. The pious and wealthy Baghdadian Jew (who later moved to Calcutta) Yosef Avraham Shalom gave the money both to build and to keep up this institution, which came to be known as Chesed L' Avraham. It was officially registered under the Ottoman Empire laws. The Haham bashi, chief rabbi of Hebron, Rabbi Suliman ben Eliyahu Mani, traveled to India to raise money from wealthy Iraqi Jews for the yeshiva. The Sason family was especially generous. Eventually the Hadassah organization took over the clinic. (This is the same Hadassah women's organization that decades later will condemn the "takeover" of the building by the women of Kiryat Arba.) 27 This institution, which did so much for both the Jews and the Arabs of Hebron and which in later years is to serve as the symbol of Jewish shame as Jewish governments bar Jews from returning to the scene of the massacres, is the next to feel the wrath of the crazed Arab mobs. ... The mob moves to the attack. Chesed L'Avraham is a place of worship and study as well as a medical clinic for Jews and Arabs alike. That matters little to the inflamed Arab mob. Among those who attack are many who have received free treatment in this same building. They climb through windows and smash down doors. Inside they savagely destroy everything they see. Medical equipment, medicine, drugs -- everything is shattered in a hate-filled frenzy. And now flames leap toward the skies as the mob sets fire to the inside. The place is a raging inferno and the stones are blackened by the flames that lick at them. The synagogue is a scene of utter destruction, and the torn Torah Scrolls, desecrated by the Arab mob, now burn and become ashes. The building that served as a place of Jewish worship and study as well as a place of mercy and charity is gone. It does not matter to the howling Arabs that they will never again be able to heal their hurts and sicknesses as they did every day until now. Hatred perverts logic. Next door to the Hadassah building lives Ben Zion Gershon, a crippled druggist whose kindness to the Arabs is legendary. We will never know how many Arabs he treated, most for free or for absurdly low fees. How many times did the Arabs thank him by blessing his name as they left? Today the mob shows the way it repays kindness. They burst into the apartment. Fingernails gouge out the crippled druggist's eyes, and he dies as knives pierce his body. His wife is assaulted, and both her arms are cut off (she dies later in the hospital in Jerusalem). The Arabs attempt to rape the daughter, but she struggles so successfully that they kill her in a horrible way. The streets of Hebron are a nightmare of shouting Arabs. Screams are heard from dozens of houses -- the screams of dying men, violated women, weeping children. And the pogrom continues. On the road to Beersheba stands Beit Burland, where many yeshiva students from the Hebron yeshiva stay. The mob surrounds the house and breaks down both the front and back doors. The yeshiva student Avraham Dov Shapira stands and fights bravely with a knife in his hand until he is dead. The young genius Zvi Heller is hit again and again, as he cries out: "I am only a boy!" The mob redoubles its efforts. The young student dies on the way to Jerusalem. 28 Yet another student, Moshe-Aron Ripps, begs his murderers a moment to say Vidui, the final confession. As he begins, they kill him. Two other students, Shmuel Izak Bernstein and Yeshachar Eliyahu Sandrow, are also victims. The latter, almost cut in two by the cruel mob, lingers and suffers for almost a day before dying. No Jewish house is safe. On the road to Jerusalem the mob breaks into the home of the shochet (a ritual slaughterer), Yaakov Zev Reizman. The terrified Jew runs out the back door, but the mob catches him. He pleads with them and gives them all his money. For just a moment they leave him alone, but as he begins to run again, they chase him, catch him, and riddle his body with knife wounds. He dies in the gutter. His house is a scene of tragedy. On the floor lie his dead brother, another yeshiva genius, Moshe, and his mother-in-law, Frieda Haimson. The house is totally looted by the mob, which then leaves on its way to the next victims. The next is the home of Eliezer Don Slonim. His house is a prestigious one. Slonim himself is one of the most important Jews in Hebron. As director of the Anglo-Palestine bank in the city, he is also the only Jew to sit on the Hebron town council. He has many "friends" among the Arabs. He knows all the notables and leaders of the town. They have promised him protection and assured him safety. Because of this, Slonim tells as many Jews as possible to come to his home. "There we will be safe," is the concensus. Some seventy Jews are gathered. Wrapped in their prayer shawls, the men stand and pray the Sabbath service in fear and trepidation as they hear the howls of the mob and the screams of the victims outside. Many can see the terrible massacre in nearby Beit Burland. They can hear the mob pounding on the door of the adjoining house, that of Skolover. Suddenly, the windows of Slonim's house are smashed by a hundred rocks. The Jews scream. Men rush to bar the door. Outside, iron poles and beams are being brought up by the Arabs to smash down the doors. The house of Slonim will be no safer than all the rest. Outside the house now stand hundreds of inflamed Arabs calling for Jewish blood. They charge up the narrow stone steps leading to the house. For fifteen minutes they pound on the door, then smash it with iron staves and batter it with poles. Inside, the yeshiva students stand frantically against the doors, attempting to hold back the murderers. But suddenly there is a loud crash. A huge hole has been made in the front door! Shots ring out. Avraham Yanai, fifty-six, a poor Jew from Constantinople, falls, struck in the arm. A second shot catches twenty- 29 seven-year-old Zaiman Vilenski, secretary of Yeshiva Knesset Yisroel, in the face. He collapses in a pool of blood. Yet another bullet rips the stomach of Yisrael Mordechai Kaplan, a twenty-two-year-old yeshiva student from Vilkomir in Lithuania. Even as he falls, he continues to hold onto the door to try to keep the Arabs out. But only for a moment; he collapses and dies. The yeshiva students show superhuman strength and bravery as they hold back the hordes. But under the assault of bullets they are forced to retreat with the rest into the inner rooms. The door to the roof bursts open and Arabs leap into the house. Two more yeshiva students now fall, twenty-six-year-old Dov Ber Lipin of Vitebsk and Alter Haim Shor, twenty-four, of Rozalia, Lithuania. Their bodies tumble out onto the steps, and the mob tramples them as it rushes inside. Eliezer Don Slonim, cool and strong to the end, fires his pistol at the mob, but a heavy metal pipe strikes him viciously in the head; he collapses. Now there is no hope left, but the yeshiva students fight like lions. The sound of swords and knives slashing and cutting is mixed with the cries of women and children. Someone cries, "Shma Yisrael ...!" Yisrael Lazarovski, a student from Letsch, Russia, is brutally stabbed and dies. He is only seventeen. Yisrael Hillel Kaplinski is older; he is twenty-one. Lying on the ground, felled by a bullet wound, he is attacked by a dozen Arabs who stab him repeatedly. A survivor recalls him shouting, "I am already dead and they still hit me!" And in a corner, in a pool of blood, wrapped in his prayer shawl, lies the Rabbi of Zichron Ya'akov, Rabbi Avraham Yaakov Orlinski, next to his dead wife, who had come to Hebron to spend a quiet Sabbath with their daughter and son-in-law, Eliezer Don Slonim. Rabbi Tzvi Drobkin, sixty-seven, from Bobruysk, Russia, is known as "the lluy ["genius"] of Shklov." The Arabs literally rip his belly in two and his insides pour out. He arrived just half a year earlier from bloody Russia, hoping to live a life of Torah and peace in the Holy Land. And all the others, all the martyrs who died to sanctify G-d's name: Shiomo Yigal, twenty-four, from Slonim, Poland; Zev Berman, twenty-three, an American from Philadelphia; Yaakov Wechsler, just seventeen, son of a wealthy Jew from Chicago; and the son of the Rosh Yeshiva, Aharon David Epstein, also seventeen. Seventy-two-year-old Reb Aharon Leib Gotlovsky, from Herzeliyya, who had come to spend a happy Sabbath with his son-in-law, Bezalel Lazarovski. Both lie dead, along with Bezalel's five-year-old daughter, 30 Dvora. She will lie in a Jerusalem hospital next to another five-year-old, little Aharon Slonim, son of Eliezer Don and his wife, Hana. Yaakov and Leah Grodzinski have been married just four months. He comes from Warsaw and runs a small hotel for yeshiva students. She is from Hungary, from the house of Turman. They die together. Here die, too, the noted principal of the Tel Nordau school in Tel Aviv, Eliezer Dovnikov, and his wife, Leah. They, too, came to spend a happy Sabbath in the city of the Patriarchs. And here too lies a simple, pious Persian Jew, twenty-seven-year-old Shimon Cohen. In this one house, where they had gathered for safety, die twenty-four people; another thirteen are wounded, mostly gravely. Taking part in this awful slaughter are Arabs who just the day before did business and laughed together with Eliezer Don Slonim. They were his friends. ... The slaughter continues for half an hour. Every piece of property that can be moved is thrown out the door and windows. Pillows are cut, and the feathers fly through the air, some resting on the bodies of the dead, sticking to them, still wet with blood. The Arabs now leave, crying, "Let us go; there are no more Jews left to kill.” They are wrong. Miraculously, Jews have been saved - eleven of them are squeezed into a tiny bathroom that somehow the mob failed to notice. Still others lie under the bodies of the dead. They stagger out, fearfully, to look at the horrors the Arabs have left behind. There is a terrible quiet except for the moaning of the wounded and dying - and the sound of the mob, which has now moved on to its next victims. One of the survivors, Y. L. Grodzinski, tells how he was saved: "As I ran into one of the rooms, I saw my mother standing at a window and crying, 'Help us!' A crowd of jeering, laughing Arabs stood and threw rocks at her. I seized her and pushed her behind a bookshelf that stood in the corner of the room. I then placed a young girl and a boy of twelve there. Finally I and another yeshiva student pushed ourselves into the narrow space. We could hardly breathe but lay there terrified as the Arabs burst into the room. The cries of the Jews who were being murdered were terrible. Every moment we expected the Arabs to find us and kill us, too. It was a miracle of G-d that, somehow, they did not. After an interminable time they left, and the only sounds we heard were those of the wounded and dying. "I lifted myself up and tried to get out. It was very difficult because the shelves were very heavy and bodies blocked it. When I finally crawled 31 out, my head swam and eyes darkened at the horrible sight. At my feet lay Eliezer Don Slonim, his wife, and young child, Aharon. They wallowed in their own blood. Next to them lay the bodies of Slonim's father-in-law. Rabbi Orlinski, and his wife. The rabbi lay in his talis ["prayer shawl"] and I thought how just a little while earlier I had heard him blessing us with the priestly blessing, 'and may He give you peace.' Now he, his wife, his daughter, son-in-law, and grandchild lay in a final peace. "There were scores of other bodies, some dead, some wounded. The dead all had their skulls shattered and their intestines ripped out. The same picture was in the other rooms. There I saw my brother. I rushed to him. His head had been struck brutal blows with an ax. I threw water on him and he revived, but died of his wounds some hours later. "Eliezer Dovnikov, the principal of the Tel Nordau school, in Tel Aviv, lay dead but there were no marks on his body. He had been strangled, his body lying next to that of his wife. The room was a scene of horror, and the vision of Bialik's Ir Hatiareiga [City of Slaughter, concerning the Kishinev pogrom] stood as a living ghost before me in all its horror. "I went to the window and saw policemen passing. I called to them, asking them to send medical aid. Just at that moment, some Arabs passed by and saw me. They clenched their fists and waved them in my direction. I ran back to my hiding place, waiting to be rescued. ...” Meanwhile, the mob has moved on to new "adventures," the home of Moshe Goldschmidt, a Habad Hasid, thirty-one, from Yaktrinoslav, Russia. Some fifteen people are hiding in his house, and as the doors are broken down, they escape by jumping down into the adjoining yard. Moshe Goldschmidt, however, apparently counting on being able to appeal to the pity and mercy of the Arabs, remains behind. He falls to his knees and pleads with the Arabs, who only laugh at him and humiliate him before killing him in a brutal and indescribable manner. In the Grodzinski home there are only three people. Moshe Grodzinski, fifty-four, of Warsaw, is the director of the yeshiva. He is killed with the first charge of the Arabs. Shragai Feivel Mitevsky, twentyfive, a yeshiva student from Lawdowa, Poland, is brutally wounded and dies a few days later in Jerusalem. The house is looted and wrecked. On to the worst of the horrors. The mob is drunk on murder and brutality. Its cruelty is fed by atrocity. The scholar Reb Bezalel Smarik, from Zhitel in Lithuania, is seventy-three. The Arabs drag him outside and kill him obscenely on the 32 doorstep of his home. Inside they murder three North American yeshiva students: Binyamin Halevi Horowitz, twenty, of New York; Tzvi Halevi Freuman, twenty-one, from Canada; and twenty-two-year-old Memphisborn David Scheinberg. They now burst into the adjoining home of Shiomo Linger. The twenty-six-year-old is a huge man, a mechanic, from Zgug, Poland. He looked like a Gentile and the mob pauses. One shouts at him: "Are you a Christian?" He can say yes and save his life. He looks with contempt at the mob of Arabs and says, "I am a Jew!" They leap on him with fury, his courage maddening them. They attack his wife; she loses her mind and dies a few days later. They leave two orphans, one two years old and the other two months. ... More, more! The baker Noah Immerman, from Slutzk and Slobodka, is killed as the Arabs thrust his head into the oven. Nahman Segal, thirty, of Skola, Poland, watches in horror as his Arab landlord opens the doors for the mob. He is holding his three-year-old child, Menachem. An Arab ax cuts through his hand, wounding the child fatally. Segal dies a few hours later. His wife has three fingers cut off, and a yeshiva student in the house loses his left hand. In the same house the great masmid ("eternal learner of Torah") of the yeshiva, Simcha Yitzhak Broida, twenty-eight, of Vilkomir, Lithuania, is dangled head down from the window and tortured to death. With him dies sixteen-year-old Brooklyn-born Chaim Krasner and a couple that have come to Hebron for a Sabbath visit, Asher Moshe and Chaya Gutman of Tel Aviv. The Hebron yeshiva is looted and totally destroyed. All its records are ripped to shreds and the furniture destroyed in an orgy of madness. The home of the Rosh Yeshiva, Rabbi Epstein, is a major target of the murderers. They attack in a large force, throwing huge stones through the windows. The families inside are gripped by terror. The men desperately try to hold the doors against the mob, and the women cry out in panic. Across the street stands the home of the governor of Hebron. The cries of anguish move him to come out onto the balcony and order the police, who have been standing by the whole time, to chase the mob away. The mob is not impressed. Three times they return, and three times the governor calmly orders them to be dispersed. It is easily done, but not before sixtyeight-year-old Elimelech Zev Lichtenstein is murdered. The day before, when the first victim of the Arabs was killed in the yeshiva, Lichtenstein was in a side room. Today he has just been called up to the Torah, where he gave the traditional blessing of thanks, Hagomel, for having been saved. Now, fifteen minutes later, he is dead. 33 The day of horrors nears its end. Outside the small hotel, Eishel Avraham, according to The Book of Hebron (edited by Oded Avisar, 1970), Sheikh Talib, the Muslim religious leader of the town, walks up to the building in which dozens of Jews sit huddled in terror. He looks inside to see how many people he can count, then leaves. Some moments pass, and suddenly the sound of a large mob is heard. The Jews look out the windows to see hundreds of Arabs following the Sheikh. They stand around him, now, as he speaks to them: "You, Muslims! Inside are ten Americans whose parents are millionaires. Slaughter the Jews! Drink their blood! Today is the day of Islam! This is the day that the Prophet has commanded you! Allah and the prophets have commanded you to avenge the blood of your dead brethren in Jerusalem! Allah is great! Come with me and kill the Jews! Inside are beautiful Jewish women; take them!” The mob attacks the home of the Cheichal family near the hotel. The yeshiva students, inside, fight wildly to hold the doors. At the very moment that they begin to splinter, the students see what they take to be a miracle: a British officer with five Arab policemen suddenly appears on horseback! The two Cheichal sons, Yisrael-Aryeh, twenty, and Eliyah Dov, seventeen, rush out past the surprised mob to the policemen. They plead with them to save the Jews inside. The policemen stare. The mob now angrily rushes at the two Jews who are standing and imploring the British officer to save their lives. They attack Yisrael-Aryeh. Bloodied, he turns like a madman on his attackers, smashing them with his fists, until he falls dead at the feet of his "rescuers.” The younger brother seizes the reins of the Britisher's horse and pleads for his life. As he does so the mob stabs him again and again, one Arab laughing and shouting, "Does it hurt, Jew?” The two brothers die, but their deaths enable the other Jews, whose presence the Arab murderers have momentarily forgotten, to flee to safety. And in the Jewish quarter, the Jewish ghetto, every house is looted, every synagogue destroyed. Reb Alter Platshy, the twenty-nine-year-old Sephardic sexton, is brutally murdered. He is a poverty-stricken plasterer, sole supporter of his six children and elderly widowed mother. Another pauper, elderly Yitzhak AbuHana, sixty-nine, dies a terrible death, and two other destitute Jews, Avraham Yani, fifty-nine, and his wife, Vida, both born in Constantinople, also fall victim to the killers. The famous Sephardic synagogue, Avraham Avinu, built in the year 1501, is totally destroyed. The Arabs take the Torah Scrolls and with 34 shouts of animal joy rip them to pieces and burn the shreds. This is the synagogue that will later be turned into a sheep pen. It is the synagogue that, after Israeli liberation of Hebron, will remain a sheep pen for years, with the Arab shepherd paying IL 60 a year for the "privilege" to the Israeli military government! It is the synagogue that the Israeli government will refuse for more than ten years to repair, out of fear of changing the "status quo," giving in only after Russian Jewish hero Professor Ben Zion Tavgar single-handedly drives out the sheep. Only ghosts haunt the buildings today: the ghosts of Jews whose intestines were ripped out. The ghosts of Jews whose skulls were so viciously chopped that their brains poured out. The ghost of the elderly Jew who was castrated before being killed, of the young Jewish student whose body was found with a piece of flesh ripped from his throat, of the barber whose head was stuffed into a toilet, where he died. Of the woman who was hanged by her legs and whose hair was ripped from her head. Of the baker whose head was thrust into a lit oven. Of Rabbi Grodzinski, whose left eye was ripped out and whose skull was broken, even as the blood spattered the ceiling. Of the young woman teacher who was raped by thirteen Arabs before her parents' eyes. Of the young girl who was stripped naked and saved from rape only when she pleaded to be killed. The "merciful" Arabs agreed; they ripped open her belly before the eyes of her tiny sister, who hid under a bed. ... Hebron: where six more Jews die by Arab bullets in May 1980; nothing has changed. Hebron: where the impossibility of Arab-Jewish coexistence is written in blood. On the night of April 15, 1936, armed Arabs stopped several automobiles on the main road between Tulkarm and Shechem. They killed two Jews and injured two. It was the beginning of more than two years of terror, destruction, and murder of Jews. Four days later, Jaffa exploded in pogroms, with nine Jews murdered and fifty-seven injured on the first day, and the Jewish neighborhoods bordering Tel Aviv set ablaze and looted. Five more Jews were slaughtered the next day: Yehuda Siman-Tov, Zelig Levinson, Shiomo Morrison, and two brothers Tuvya and Yosef Prusak. The massacres spread. A crowd of Jews leaving the Edison Cinema in Jerusalem were mowed down by Arab bullets. Left dead in their own blood were Dr. Shavchovsky, Alexander Polonsky, and Isaac Yolovsky. In another incident, a bomb was thrown into a children's schoolyard. The murderous toll mounted as Jews were murdered near Kfar Saba, Yaknaam, Haifa, and Safad. In Safad, a gang of Arabs broke into the 35 home of a poor scribe and killed him and his three small children in cold blood, despite the heartrending pleas of the mother. An incident that particularly shook the Jewish community was the murder of two Jewish nurses, Marta Fink and Nehama Tzedek, struck down by Arabs who threw a bomb from a train in the heart of Tel Aviv. The main thing was to kill Jews - none were spared. Women, children, those who were "close" to the Arabs were killed. Lewish Billig, respected lecturer in Arabic literature at Hebrew University, who had devoted his life to Arabic studies and was a "good friend" of the Arabs, was murdered in his house in Jerusalem. The first phase of the Arab riots and attacks, April-October 1936, ended with 82 Jews murdered and more than 400 wounded. Property damage was extensive: 200,000 trees were destroyed along with 16,500 dunams (4,125 acres) of crops. Damage ran into the millions of dollars. Not until the end of 1938 did the murders end, in time for Hitler's Holocaust to begin. The Jewish community in Eretz Yisrael counted its dead: 517 men, women, and children. The cost in destruction to property was in the tens of millions. The Arabs had made it coldly clear that, for them, the very presence of Zionism in the form of Jews seeking their own homeland was unacceptable and would be met with death and destruction. Nothing has changed, and nothing need surprise us. On July 23, 1937, the Arab Higher Committee, speaking for Arabs of Eretz Yisrael, issued a statement of policy in regard to the Peel Commission's suggestion of the possibility of partitioning the country into Jewish and Arab states. The statement declared that "the Arabs of Palestine are the owners of the country. ... The Jews on the other hand are a minority of intruders who before the war had no great standing in this country and whose political connections therewith had been severed for almost 2,000 years. ... "The Arabs have always repudiated the declaration given to Jews as an undertaking which Great Britain should never have assumed, and which, moreover, was against all natural principles, insofar as it aims at establishing an alien people in a country where no sort of justification exists for their settlement as a nation and at transferring to them the land which was at the time, and still is, inhabited by its historic owners, the Arabs.” That is what they said then, before there were "occupied territories" or Jewish settlements in them that constituted an "obstacle to peace." That was before there was an "occupation army" to defy a United Nations 36 that was not even in existence. That is what the Arabs said, and those are the murders they committed -- the death and destruction they effected -- before there was even a Jewish state. All that they said then, they think today. All that they did then, they would do today if given the opportunity. Will we give it to them? The first Jew to be killed in the rioting of 1936-38 was Yisrael Hazan, murdered near Tulkarm, in April 1936. Forty-three years later, in October 1979, an automobile carrying Tzvi Laufer, twenty-four, crashed into a truck in Tulkarm. He was killed instantly and the driver of the car severely injured. When soldiers arrived at the spot, they were horrified to find young Arabs from the nearby school happily dancing, singing, and clapping around the car containing the two dead Jews. Nothing has changed, and if the Jew does not understand the real cause of the Arab-Jewish conflict, he will indeed, G-d forbid, give the Arab the opportunity for which he so longs: to liquidate the Jewish state.