Key Takeaway:
- Hebron 1929 and October 7 were not isolated atrocities but manifestations of a long-standing anti-Jewish ideology adapted to different historical moments.
- Modern Islamist antisemitism emerged from the fusion of historic anti-Jewish attitudes, Arab nationalism, and European antisemitic influences.
- International responses have repeatedly downplayed or reframed anti-Jewish violence, contributing to “Erasive Jew-hate.”
On 24 August 1929, Jews were massacred in Hebron. On 7 October 2023, Jews were massacred in the western Negev. Both meet the UN’s definition of genocide. Both were fueled by lies and incitement, and both sought to eradicate the Jewish presence from the Land of Israel. The two crimes were separated by almost a century but are joined by a single, unbroken thread: Arab and Muslim Jew-hate.
These events were not isolated tragedies. The hatred that erupted in Hebron and again on October 7 was not born in the twentieth century. It has deep roots in Islamic history. The Qur’an contains verses that portray Jews as corrupt, treacherous, and cursed, shaping religious attitudes for centuries. In Surah Al-Baqarah (2:61), Jews are said to have “incurred wrath from Allah” and to be “abased and miserable.” In Surah Al-Ma’idah (5:60), they are described as having been “transformed into apes and swine” for their disobedience, imagery later invoked by clerics and rulers to legitimize contempt and persecution. While some Muslims interpret these verses metaphorically today, there are some who take them literally and weaponize them to sanction discrimination and violence against Jews.
Across the medieval Muslim world, this oppression was part and parcel of everyday life for the Jews. For centuries, Jews lived as dhimmis, tolerated but degraded, bound by terms such as those in the Pact of ‘Umar, which required that they “not imitate them… in dress,” and instructed by the Qur’an itself that non-Muslims pay the jizya “while they are humbled.” That was the norm, but it was repeatedly punctuated by extreme violence. In 1066, a Muslim mob in Granada slaughtered the city’s Jewish community, an estimated 4,000 people, after their vizier, Joseph ibn Naghrela, was accused of poisoning the king’s son and secretly conspiring with a rival ruler. The massacre was openly encouraged by anti-Jewish poetry, including Abu Ishaq al-Ilbiri’s incitement:“Do not consider it a breach of faith to kill them, the breach of faith would be to let them carry on.”
In Yemen, under the “Orphans’ Decree,” Jewish children who lost their parents as minors were seized by the state and raised as Muslims, a practice the poet Shalom Shabazi described as leaving “thousands of orphaned souls, both boys and girls… wrested from the arms of their parents.”
The idea that Jews should live humiliated and dependent was deeply ingrained. It is this centuries-old mindset, shaped by scripture that forms the foundation beneath both the mobs of Hebron in 1929 and the murderers of October 7, even before it later hardened into something far more lethal than submission had ever demanded.
Hebron: The 1929 Pogrom
Before 24 August 1929, Hebron was home to a small Jewish community numbering around 700. They had lived there for centuries, making their homes and raising families in the city which Jews believe holds the resting place of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah). Relations with their Arab neighbors were largely peaceful. The two communities mixed socially and were economically integrated.
By the late 1920s, tensions across the British Mandate of Palestine had been building. Since the Nebi Musa riots of 1920 and the Jaffa riots of 1921, Arab leaders had fused anti-Jewish religious sentiment with rising nationalist anger, creating an atmosphere ready for violence. At the center of this was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini. From the early 1920s onward, he rejected Jewish national aspirations, opposed continued Jewish immigration, and framed the Jewish presence as a threat to Islam itself. In the weeks before the Hebron violence, Husseini circulated rumors that Jews planned to seize the Temple Mount, destroy the Al Aqsa Mosque, and rebuild their Temple in its place. These lies, deliberately spread by the Mufti, created a climate in which any Jewish presence was seen as intolerable. The massacre that followed in Hebron was the culmination of this decade-long incitement. That same lie, that Jews intended to destroy Al Aqsa, is one Hamas leaders still repeat today. As the journalist Yardena Schwartz has documented, the Mufti’s disinformation campaign never ended. It was resurrected, almost unchanged, a century later.
Husseini would deepen this trajectory through his alliance with Nazi Germany, importing European anti-Jewish conspiracies into the Arab world and embedding them in political culture. In his November 1941 meeting with Hitler, he stated that “the Arabs were Germany’s natural friends because they had the same enemies… namely the English, the Jews, and the Communists.”
The ideology that movements like Hamas would inherit was shaped by this legacy, a hybrid of Qur’anic hostility and the genocidal language Husseini helped bring into the region.
On 24 August, Arab mobs murdered 67 Jews, bringing an end to the Hebron’s continuous Jewish presence. Armed with knives, axes, and clubs, they descended upon Jewish homes and yeshivas. The violence was extraordinarily brutal. The French journalist Albert Londres, reporting from the scene, described attackers who “cut off hands, they cut off fingers, they held heads over a stove, they gouged out eyes.”
Chief Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook called it “the worst slaughter Jews have experienced since the destruction of Jerusalem.” Men were hacked to death in front of their families. Women were raped, including one victim assaulted “by 13 murderous Arabs.” Babies were reportedly dismembered. Synagogues were desecrated. Torah scrolls were torn to shreds. A handful of Arabs risked their lives to save their Jewish neighbors, but the vast majority either participated in or watched the slaughter.
The survivors were evacuated by British authorities to Jerusalem. Their homes were looted. For the first time in centuries, Hebron was effectively Judenfrei (Jew-free). Similar pogroms occurred across the British Mandate of Palestine, including in Tzfat and Jerusalem. In total, 133 Jews were killed and more than 300 wounded. The violence was not spontaneous. It was not about “resisting colonialism.” It was the result of a campaign that fused traditional Islamic anti-Jewish tropes with modern nationalist rage. It was a message: Jews had no place in the Land of Israel.
October 7: The Modern Pogrom
On October 7, 2023, that same message was delivered, this time with guns, grenades, paragliders, and cameras. At 6:29a.m., Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups, joined by civilians from Gaza who crossed the border, launched “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood” with mass rocket fire and multiple breaches of the Gaza-Israel barrier. They launched a coordinated and systematic ground assault on kibbutzim, towns, and the Nova music festival. Fighters moved house to house, shooting families, burning homes with residents inside, and abducting civilians, as well as children and the elderly, including Holocaust survivors.
Independent investigations have confirmed that these attacks deliberately targeted civilians and involved mass murder, hostage-taking, mutilation, looting, and sexual violence. Killing civilians and seizing hostages were not accidents of war. They were the central aims of a planned assault.
Approximately 1,200 people were killed on and immediately after October 7, the majority of them Jewish Israeli civilians, and more than 250 were taken hostage into Gaza. Among them were children, including Kfir and Ariel Bibas, aged nine months and four years respectively. Numerous hostages were tortured, and survivor testimony tells us that many were subjected to sexual violence.
Despite what the world may have you believe, October 7 was not resistance. It was not liberation. It was an act of extermination. It was genocide in intent and practice. Hamas has never hidden this. Its 1988 charter invokes a hadith stating that “the Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees.”
Hamas’s leaders have repeatedly declared that their goal is not the end of “occupation” but the end of Israel itself. Their hatred is not political. It is the continuation of the same religiously sanctioned Jew-hate that inspired the mobs of Hebron in 1929.
Shared Ideology and Continuity
Both Hebron 1929 and October 7 2023 have their roots in the same ideological soil. Both were fueled by ideas that turned Jews into demons deserving of annihilation. In 1929, the rumor was that Jews planned to destroy Al Aqsa. In 2023, invoking the same name, the lie was that Israel had colonized Palestine and desecrated Muslim land. When Husseini incited the 1929 riots, he was not inventing a new hatred. He was modernizing an old one. Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Iran have simply updated its language for the twenty-first century.
But the mindset described earlier was only ever the foundation. What links Hebron and October 7 is not simple repetition of rhetoric and violence, but its evolution into something more lethal. For most of Islamic history, Jew-hatred demanded Jewish submission, not Jewish destruction. Twentieth-century Arab antizionism broke that pattern. It did not simply modernize the old prejudice. It radicalized it into something closer to the ideology that drove the Holocaust: what the historian Saul Friedländer termed “redemptive antisemitism,” the belief that the world can only be healed once the Jews are destroyed. As the researcher Tom Khaled Würdemann has documented, this was not confined to one faction. It became the shared ideology of the three rival movements that dominated twentieth-century Arab politics, nationalism, the Arab left, and Islamism, which agreed on almost nothing else. The Arab nationalist Constantin Zureiq, who coined the term Nakba, argued that only “a fundamental revolution in the Arab way of thinking, working, and living” could overturn the defeat by Israel. The Marxist Sadiq al-Azm, in Self-Criticism after the Defeat (1968), made the destruction of Israel inseparable from the socialist revolution he believed the Arab world still owed itself. Sayyid Qutb cast the same struggle in explicitly religious terms: Islam would redeem the world, and the Jews stood in the way. On the necessity of Israel’s destruction, nationalists, Marxists and Islamists were unanimous. For the Nazis, that redemption was racial. For Hamas and its allies, and the traditions that produced it, it is religious and civilizational: the Arab and Muslim world made whole only once Israel, and the Jews, cease to exist. Where the pact of dhimma demanded Jewish humiliation, this newer ideology demands Jewish annihilation.
Denial and Equivalence
After the Hebron massacre, the British inquiry that followed, the Shaw Commission, condemned the killings themselves in unambiguous terms, calling it “a vicious attack by Arabs on Jews accompanied by wanton destruction.” Yet in the same report, it located the deeper cause not in the incitement that produced the massacre, but in Arab “apprehension” over Jewish immigration and land purchases, and pointed to a peaceful Jewish march to the Western Wall weeks earlier as the spark. Haj Amin al-Husseini, the man who had spent months inciting the violence, was pardoned. The lesson taught, even by an inquiry that never doubted who did the killing, was that Jewish presence itself was the true provocation. Ninety-four years later, the international response to October 7 followed a similar pattern. Within days, global discourse shifted from Jewish suffering to Palestinian grievance. Universities issued statements about “cycles of violence.” Protesters justified the massacre as “resistance.” Major institutions, including the United Nations and prominent NGOs, issued statements that failed to even name Hamas. The pattern repeats because the underlying moral failure remains intact. Blaming Jews for the violence done to them denies Jews their victimhood and reinstates the anti-Jewish logic that holds Jewish existence itself responsible for the hatred it experiences.
This denial reached its cruelest point around the sexual violence itself. In Hebron, survivor testimony recorded that Ben Zion Gershon, a seventy-two-year-old pharmacist, had his eyes gouged out before he was stabbed to death; his twenty-two-year-old daughter, Esther, was raped and then murdered alongside him. Ninety-four years later, the pattern repeated, this time on camera. Israel’s Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes, drawing on more than 430 interviews and over 10,000 photographs and videos, documented thirteen recurring patterns of sexual violence across multiple sites: rape and gang rape, sexual torture, targeted genital violence, postmortem abuse, forced nudity, and the filming and circulation of it all as a further act of degradation. One survivor’s testimony records the same events in stark, plain language: “The men pulled a woman from the vehicle… forcibly removed her clothing, and raped her… they continued to rape her after death.”
A handful of individual accounts from the early weeks after October 7 were later disputed or walked back, but the systematic pattern documented independently by the UN, the European Union, Israeli rape crisis counsellors, and now the Civil Commission has held. And still the world hesitated. UN Women took nearly two months to condemn it. Commentators dismissed documented, systematic evidence as propaganda. The Commission titled its own report Silenced No More, because for more than two years, that is exactly what these victims were. Ninety-four years apart, the instinct was identical: doubt the Jewish victim first, and only reluctantly, if ever, believe her.
The continuity is even more chilling once you look past the moment itself. Three of the men convicted for the Hebron killings, Muhammad Jamjoum, Fuad Hijazi, and Ataa al-Zir, were executed by the British in 1930. Palestinian society still marks that date as “Red Tuesday.” Official Palestinian Authority media continues to call them heroes and martyrs, broadcasting songs, poetry, and documentaries in their honor nearly a century later. In 2023, celebrations erupted in parts of Gaza and Lebanon, and glorifying rallies were documented across the Arab world and throughout Western capitals, including London and Berlin. Sweets were handed out in the streets. Social media was filled with triumphal declarations. The massacre of Jews was not mourned in 1929, and it is not mourned today. It is embraced, then and now.
This refusal to recognize Jewish suffering on its own terms is part of a broader pattern I have described as Erasive Jew-hate. It is not only the hatred of Jews but the systematic erasure of Jewish peoplehood, history, and legitimacy. It insists that Jews cannot be victims, only oppressors. It was present in 1929. It is rampant today.
The Hebron massacre and October 7, separated by almost a century, expose the same core of modern radical Islamist ideology. The pogrom in Hebron sought to erase the Jewish presence from one city. October 7 sought to erase it from the entire land. Both ultimately failed. Yet survival alone is not enough. To understand these crimes, we must name this hatred for what it is. It is not “conflict” or “occupation.” It is a radical Islamist and Arab ideological Jew-hate, ancient in origin, modern in form, and genocidal in intent. From Hebron to Nova, from 1929 to 2023, the story is the same. The weapons evolve, but the ideology endures: the hatred of Jews for being Jews, of Jewish life, and of Jewish sovereignty for daring to exist. To understand why this violence recurs, we must confront its roots, the lies and ideologies that sustain it. Only by exposing those truths can we hope to defeat it.
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© Divuach Ne’eman R”A, 2025
