Jewish Bubba: The Infamous Riots of 1929, in Palestine and Why It Happened

Nadene Goldfoot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAnogTH8Yyw

Below: A Palestinian protest meeting against Jewish settlement of then-British Mandate Palestine. (Courtesy Ian Black)

On 24 August 1929 in Hebron, Arab mobs attacked the Jewish quarter killing and raping men, women and children and looting Jewish property. They killed between 65 and 68 Jews and wounded 58, with some of the victims being tortured, or mutilated. It continued on actually starting on the 23rd to the 29th of August. The total deaths of Jews was 133.

Hebron, the city so dear to Jews, was an ancient city of Judah, 18 miles south of Jerusalem where Abraham bought from the Hittites, a plot of land that the Cave of Machpelah stood which he needed in order to bury his wife/niece, Sarah. This became their plot where Abraham and his line were buried. Abraham was the father of Judaism.

It was brought about by a longstanding dispute between Muslims and Jews over access to the Western Wall in Jerusalem that escalated into violence.

The Western Wall, also called the Wailing Wall, was the place where Jews could pray. It had been part of the wall that enclosed Herod's Temple that still stood in the Old City of Jerusalem. As it happened, the area in front of this part of the wall was Muslim property, which caused the dispute. Rabbis, feeling that Jews would be standing on the Holy of Holies area of the High Priest, dissuaded Jews from praying on the Temple Mount. The Jordanian religious leader was given the rights of ruling there by Moshe Dayan at the end of the 1967 War, so they absolutely didn't want Jews up there as they had a Mosque over the spot where Solomon's Temple had stood. So Jews could not pray on the Temple Mount where Arabs were praying. They had no choice left but Herod's wall, below the Holy Temple Mount.

Arabs were also incited to violence by rumors that Jews were planning to seize control of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The event also left scores seriously wounded or maimed.

The riots took the form, for the most part, of attacks by Arabs on Jews accompanied by destruction of Jewish property. During the week of riots, from 23 to 29 August, 133 Jews were killed by Arabs, and 339 Jews were injured, most of whom were unarmed. There were 116 Arabs killed and at least 232 wounded, mostly by the Mandate police suppressing the riots. Around 20 Arabs were killed by Jewish attackers and indiscriminate British gunfire. After the riots, 174 Arabs and 109 Jews were charged with murder or attempted murder; around 40% of Arabs and 3% of Jews were subsequently convicted. During the riots, 17 Jewish communities were evacuated. By 1931, a special commission of the League of Nations had to be called to regulate the rights of the parties.

Were the Middle Easterners affected by the 1929 Wall Street stock market crash causing the Great Depression in the USA? 10s of millions of humans suffered intense misery and suffering from this event. Was it world-wide?

From 1929–1933, production at the nation’s factories, mines, and utilities fell by more than half.
People’s real disposable incomes dropped 28%.
Stock prices collapsed to one-tenth of their pre-crash height.
The number of unemployed Americans rose from 1.6 million in 1929 to 12.8 million in 1933.
At the height of the Depression, one of every four workers was out of a job.

No doubt. What was happening to the USA would affect the world and everyone would at least be under stress from it. The Brits in Palestine no doubt were stressed by it. The spectacular crash of 1929 followed five years of significant credit expansion by the Federal Reserve System under the Coolidge Administration." In 1924, after a sharp decline in business, the Reserve banks suddenly created some $500 million in new credit, which led to a bank credit expansion of over $4 billion in less than one year. " This could be used in investments in Palestine!

After the crash in 29, the masses rushed on the banks to withdraw their money. The pressure on banks was great and tended not to decrease with the passage of time. In 1929, 659 banks failed; in 1930, 1,352; in 1931, 2,294, and in 1932, 1,456. Policy decisions made by the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, and the FDIC during the crisis of the 2000s can be linked to policies that go back as far as the 1930s. This history of bailouts reveals that the genesis of financial crisis is government policy, be it the mismanagement of monetary policy during the 1930s or the political push to expand homeownership that helped cause the 2000s crisis.

To think that these people could not come to terms on their own, and had to have the interceding of the LEAGUE OF NATIONS,, to solve the problem of letting Jews pray at the wall is simply ridiculous. This was just a preamble of what was to come and how the Jews and Arabs could not come to terms with each other, and that by 2021 they were just beginning to with the Abrahamic Accords, and 6 Arab nations are now willing to work together with the Jewish nation of Israel besides Jordan and Egypt.
The wall is still the only place allowed the Jews on the Temple Mount. 2022.