Journalist Yardena Schwartz has researched and written an investigative report that is book-ended by opinion pieces. Her subject is violence in the Holy Land, from 1929 to 2023, and she cites massacre after massacre in a litany of hate that can make for difficult reading.
In 1929, she writes in her Introduction, “3,000 Muslim men armed with swords, axes, and daggers marched through the Jewish quarter of Hebron. They went from house to house…. Until that day, the rioters had been their neighbors, landlords, friends.”
Nearly one hundred years later, on October 7, 2023, Hamas perpetrated “the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.” They went house to house on the kibbutzim just across the border with Gaza, slaughtering men, women, and children. Many were peace activists. Then they celebrated, just as in 1929.
The language in these attacks against Jews is shockingly similar across the decades, as are the lies told as justifications. This illustrates, notes Schwartz, a “direct line” from 1929 to 2023, with no indication of ending.
It is a holy war, and who rules the area – Ottoman Empire, Britain, Jordan, Egypt, Israel – has always been irrelevant. It is the Jews who cannot be tolerated anywhere in the Holy Land because, the false narrative goes, they have no historical claim to it.
Schwartz did not set out to describe or analyze October 7; she was writing about the Hebron massacre and its echoes through the years. She began with a box of letters and a diary from the 1920s, found in an attic in Memphis, Tennessee. They were written by David Shainberg, a young man who had moved from Memphis (where he was born to Ukrainian immigrant parents), to Palestine in 1928, to study in the Hebron Yeshiva. The following August, he was murdered in the massacre.
Hidden away for decades, the letters and diary were shared with Schwartz in 2019 by a family member who wanted her to tell David’s story. Schwartz was intrigued. She had previously visited Hebron, but as a self-described secular liberal Jew, she had little interest in this “godforsaken place” that after 1967 had been re-populated by religious right-wing Jewish settlers.
She would return to Hebron, she determined, this time seeking the truth from both Jews and Palestinians. It was her starting point, but she has continued through the 2023 massacre, detailing the barbaric acts of Hamas, assigning blame, and offering her own analysis. Schwartz has written a valuable work, reviewing the period in an accessible, engaging style that contributes to understanding what has been termed the world’s most enduring conflict.
