Key Takeaways:
- A disinformation campaign about Islamic holy sites “under threat” helped ignite the 1929 riots and the Hebron massacre, and the same narrative remains a recurring trigger for violence over the century that followed.
- The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem wasn’t just a historical footnote: he spread the Al-Aqsa lie, later collaborated closely with Nazi Germany, and helped shape political heirs who carried elements of that worldview forward.
- Schwartz sees a shift in Western coverage over time: earlier reporting more plainly described religious incitement and historical context, while more recent coverage often treats reality like a “he said, she said” dispute and loses institutional memory.
The arguments we hear today about Israel, Palestine, and the forces driving the conflict often choose 1948 as the start date. Sometimes it’s 1967. Almost never earlier.
But journalist and author Yardena Schwartz says that to understand why so many peace efforts have failed and why the same triggers keep producing the same explosions, you have to look at 1929, and at a massacre most English-speaking audiences were never really taught.
Schwartz’s book began with a literal attic discovery: hundreds of letters written by a young American Jew who moved to the British Mandate of Palestine to study at the Hebron Yeshiva. A year later, he was murdered in the Hebron massacre.
Those letters became a portal into a buried chapter of history — and, Schwartz argues, a blueprint for how disinformation and religious incitement still shape the conflict now.
An attic, a box of letters, and a story that wouldn’t stay buried
Schwartz began researching her book in 2019, while freelancing as a journalist based in Tel Aviv and writing for American outlets.
She was introduced to a family in Memphis, Tennessee that had found a box of letters in their attic. The letters were written in the late 1920s by their uncle, David Shainberg, who arrived in Hebron in 1928.
“He wrote these beautiful letters to his family every week describing what life was like in Hebron,” Schwartz said.
The family knew little about him because he was killed in the Hebron massacre of 1929, when 67 Jews were murdered. “At the time, it was the deadliest pogrom ever perpetrated outside of Europe.”
What stunned her wasn’t just the brutality. It was how rarely the massacre is treated as central to the conflict’s history, especially in English. “There’s no English language book focused on this massacre,” she said, calling it “a pivotal moment in Israel’s pre-state history.”
Schwartz’s conclusion after years of research was blunt: “This massacre was ground zero of the Arab-Israeli conflict as we know it.”
The throughline: A holy site hoax that still sparks violence
Schwartz argues the riots of 1929 were driven by a rumor campaign that began in 1928: a claim that Jews were plotting to take over Al-Aqsa in order to rebuild the Jewish temple.
She attributes the campaign to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who used his religious authority to spread the message through sermons and local leadership.
“He started to spread this lie that the Jews of Palestine were planning to conquer Al-Aqsa Mosque,” she said.
In Hebron, the incitement was localized to the Tomb of the Patriarchs — known to Muslims as the Ibrahimi Mosque — where Jews were historically barred from entering.
“Islamic officials convinced Muslims in Hebron that Jews there were also going to conquer the Ibrahimi Mosque and turn it into a synagogue,” she said.
“This lie that began a century ago has sustained itself and actually intensified,” she said.
Schwartz sees the modern echoes everywhere: the naming of attacks and uprisings like the Al-Aqsa Intifada (also known as the Second Intifada) or Al-Aqsa Flood (Hamas’ name for the October 7 massacre).
The holy site becomes a mobilizing symbol that overrides politics, governance, and even self-interest. She pointed to a wave of violence in 2015 sparked by an Israeli police measure to install metal detectors at the site. The move was intended to stop weapons from being brought into the mosque, but it generated a violent backlash anyway.
The Mufti and Nazi Germany: “He wasn’t just a supporter. He himself was a Nazi”
One of Schwartz’s most explosive revelations is also one she insists is simply documented history: the Grand Mufti’s deep collaboration with the Nazi regime.
“He wasn’t just a supporter of the Nazis. He himself was a Nazi,” she said.
Schwartz described him living in Berlin from 1941 to 1945, working within Nazi propaganda structures and broadcasting it in Arabic. “He was made the director of the Arab Bureau of the Nazis’ Ministry of Propaganda,” she said, “and he broadcast Nazi propaganda in Arabic throughout the Muslim world.”
She also described him recruiting tens of thousands of Muslim fighters into the Waffen-SS, touring concentration camps, and corresponding with senior Nazi figures. The Grand Mufti was even placed on a list of wanted Nazi war criminals at the end of the war.
And yet, the Grand Mufti has been minimized to a historical footnote, one of the most famous photographs of him sitting with Hitler framed as an incidental meeting.
“When we’re taught about the Holocaust, we really only hear about how the Holocaust played out in Europe,” she said, arguing that this erases the Middle Eastern dimension of Nazi alliances and Arab propaganda efforts.
Whether every detail is familiar to general audiences or not, Schwartz’s broader point is about the gap between what exists in the historical record and what gets taught — or erased from public memory.
From the Mufti to Arafat: The political heir most people never connect
The Grand Mufti’s foundational role in the region has been further diminished, challenging the common shorthand that treats Yasser Arafat as the “first” Palestinian leader.
“I was pretty shocked to learn that Yasser Arafat was the Grand Mufti’s cousin,” she said, adding, “He was actually his closest disciple. So often when you ask people who was the first Palestinian leader, they’ll say Yasser Arafat, [but] he became the leader… after the Grand Mufti became too old.”
They grew close in the post-WWII period when they were both living in Egypt, and the Grand Mufti was leading efforts to wage jihad against the Jews in Mandatory Palestine. She described Arafat’s early involvement in the efforts, including weapons-smuggling and cooperation with the Muslim Brotherhood. Meanwhile, Husseini was focused on gathering his allies. The efforts escalated greatly when the UN voted on the Partition Plan.
“Palestine had never been free and independent before the British ruled Palestine. It had been ruled by a rotating cast of other foreign powers from the Ottoman Empire to the Egyptians, the Crusaders, the Romans. And the UN Partition Plan would have given the Arabs of Palestine their first chance in history at self-governance.”
“Not only did the Grand Mufti, but every other Arab state and Arab leader rejected this separation, this notion of sharing the land with the Jews of Palestine. And the Grand Mufti and other Arab leaders declared jihad against the Jews of Palestine.”
The Grand Mufti led what he called the Army of the Holy War, and Schwartz was shocked to learn that among its ranks were about a thousand fighters who had previously been recruited to the Waffen SS.
“Bosnian Muslims who had joined the Waffen SS to execute Jews in Europe then went to Palestine to prevent the creation of the Jewish state.”
Schwartz did not present this as the entire story of Palestinian nationalism, and she explicitly said she did not research Arafat deeply enough for a full account of how Nazi ideology carried into later decades. But she did describe evidence she encountered of antisemitic texts circulating in some militant training environments and emphasized that the Mufti had already used antisemitic conspiracy literature in his own propaganda years earlier.
Deny it happened, then say the Jews did it: The propaganda pattern that keeps repeating
Schwartz says what followed the Hebron massacre in 1929 wasn’t just grief or political fallout — it was information warfare.
She described a two-track propaganda response in Arabic media and leadership: deny that atrocities occurred, and when denial fails, invert blame onto Jews.
She said one of the most shocking examples she found relating to the massacre was a statement put out by an Arab leader.
“The title was ‘Scandals of Jewish Propaganda,’ and alongside its denials of any atrocities committed against Jews by Arabs, there was this claim that in Hebron, Jews were slaughtered by Jewish Yeshiva students who wanted to raise funds from the Diaspora for their Yeshiva.”
In conversations about 1929, she said many people either didn’t know about the massacre or repeated claims that Jews started the violence.
She also described interviews with local leadership that rejected Jewish history in the land entirely. “He told me: Jews have no history in this land, that Abraham was not Jewish, he was Muslim, and that all archeological evidence of Ancient Israel was invented by Zionists.”
Schwartz emphasized how education shapes worldview, arguing that beliefs transmitted through schooling and leadership rhetoric can become normalized across society.
But she also said change is possible if leadership and education stop being organized around negating Jewish history and Jewish legitimacy.
The Western media shift: What changed in the 1980s
For Schwartz, the unnerving part is not only that such narratives existed then, but that she sees similar rhetorical moves today. “Fast forward 100 years, we saw the same justifications alongside denials after October 7th,” she said.
Schwartz contrasted how the mainstream press covered the 1929 massacre at the time versus how parts of the media handle contested narratives now.
“In newspapers like the New York Times, the massacre was presented as a massacre by Arabs of unarmed Jews,” she said. “What was really shocking to me was to see how journalism has fallen. Now journalism is ‘he said, she said.’”
“I saw the shift in the New York Times in the 1980s.” She described earlier decades when reporting more often included historical context, such as continuous Jewish presence in the land, or pre-State violence, and quoted Palestinians in ways that revealed motivations and goals plainly.
Her theory for the shift is familiar but consequential: Israel stopped being viewed as the underdog, and coverage changed accordingly. “Journalism has kind of always favored the underdog,” she said. “It’s about giving a voice to the voiceless. And so anyone who’s seen the party that’s seen as being weaker, being more vulnerable is generally reported on much more sympathetically.”
“In the 1980s, that significantly changed with Israel being seen more as the more powerful entity.”
Publishing reality in 2025: “If it’s critical of Israel, they’ll run it”
Schwartz also spoke about the media ecosystem now not only as an observer, but as a working journalist.
She said that since October 7, it has become harder to place certain Israel-related reporting in outlets she previously wrote for, especially if that reporting is critical of Palestinian leadership or historical narratives. ” I can probably speak for many Jewish journalists or Israeli journalists who, since October 7th, it’s been harder, much harder to get pitches accepted by the publications I used to write for.”
Reflecting on a recently published article about the Grand Mufti for The Spectator, she said, “I don’t think a piece like that would be accepted by them today. If it’s critical of Israel, they’ll run it. But if it’s critical of the Palestinians, it’s just not going to be touched.”
She described strong reviews and podcast invitations for her book, while noting the lack of engagement from some institutions she once worked with or contributed to.
“The only publication that is not Jewish that ran a review of my book was the Wall Street Journal,” she said.
She also described a book event protest in Woodstock, New York, where she said critics framed her work as Islamophobic — a label she rejects, especially because her book includes accounts of Arabs who saved Jews in 1929.
“I was really blown away by the stories of heroism. Arab families risking their lives to save their Jewish neighbors,” she said, estimating “at least 250 Jews were saved by their Muslim neighbors.”
She also stressed that she did not sanitize Jewish wrongdoing in Hebron’s history, pointing to her inclusion of the 1994 Baruch Goldstein massacre in the book.
What comes next: Refusing to surrender reality
If there was a single theme that kept resurfacing, it was the cost of losing shared facts and the danger of letting disinformation become the default lens for history.
Schwartz’s prescription wasn’t a single grand fix. It was persistence.
“We can’t afford to stop drawing attention to these cases of journalistic failure.” This applies not only to media, but to institutions like human rights organizations that shape public understanding.
“There’s only so much we can do to change those institutions that don’t want to change. But what we can and should and are doing, and I think we should continue to do, is shout from the rooftops about the inaccuracies, the falsehoods, that are being presented by news organizations.”
Schwartz added that she believes there is a “silent majority that still believes in truth and is still able to see who’s right and who’s wrong here.”
Despite the bleakness, she ended with something that sounded optimistic, at least in part: “I keep holding out hope that the world will turn back right side up.”
This interview was conducted by Ben Chertoff for The Honest Take, available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and all major podcast streaming platforms. [https://thehonesttake.transistor.fm/episodes/the-lie-that-lit-the-match-hebron-nazis-and-the-wests-vanishing-memory-with-yardena-schwartz]
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Image Credit: Hitler and Heinrich Hoffmann Collection/Wikipedia
© Divuach Ne’eman R”A, 2025
