Blaming the Jews for the 1929 Pogroms Is a New Low

By Seth Mandel

Monday, August 24, 2026

 

The casual dishonesty that permeates mainstream reporting on Israel serves a dual purpose: to manipulate and misinform on current events while also projecting back on the past this false picture of the present.

 

Readers are encouraged to believe what they are being told about modern Israel and then superimpose that portrayal onto history. This is how, for example, a failed multi-nation Arab war for the annihilation of the Jewish people on the heels of Auschwitz in 1948 can become “the nakba” in the popular imagination.

 

And so it is crucial that when we come across an article such as this recent one in the Guardian, from Julian Borger, we make an example of it.

 

Borger writes of a Jordanian-convened conference supposedly to brainstorm ways to stop Jews from worshiping at the their holiest site, the Temple Mount, atop which sits the world’s most ostentatious monument to imperial conquest, the Dome of the Rock and the al Aqsa mosque nearby.

 

The meeting announcement follows, Borger tells us, “an escalating pattern of government-backed incursions by Jewish religious extremists on the compound around the al-Aqsa mosque and Dome of the Rock.”

 

Incursions! By extremists! My goodness, what could Borger mean by that? Here’s one example: “On 23 July, more than 2,000 Israelis from the religious right — mostly settlers led by the national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir — stormed the area, known to Jews as the Temple Mount.”

 

Stormed the area! This is getting serious. Finally Borger lays it all out in black and white:

 

“They prayed and performed rituals all around the compound.”

 

Ah. They prayed. I will pause here because no doubt a certain number of readers will have rolled their eyes so far back into their heads that they briefly passed out at the phrasing “performed rituals all around the compound.”

 

But the article gets so much worse, believe it or not. Because on top of the demonic portrayal of Jews in the present, Borger sets his aim on the past. In so doing, he crosses so far over an ethical and moral red line that he has plunged the Guardian straight into an abyss from which it may never re-emerge. Here is what he writes:

 

“Infringement by Jewish extremists triggered riots in the British Mandate period between the world wars.”

 

What he is referring to is the blood libel that touched off the 1929 Hebron riots as part of a wider Palestine-wide pogrom. Two things about these massacres are famously known: 1. They were unprovoked; 2. They were egged on by the founder of Palestinian nationalism, a man who would go on to serve as a salaried Nazi official in Berlin during the Second World War, Grand Mufti Amin al-Husseini.

 

Borger says the Jews caused it. How? Here, from veteran reporter and producer Yardena Schwartz’s recent book on the massacres, is what the Jews did not at the Temple Mount but at the Western Wall:

 

“On September 23, 1928, the eve of Yom Kippur, hundreds gathered there for the holiest day on the Hebrew calendar, when Jews around the world fast, pray, and seek divine forgiveness. As they had done in years past, they brought in a wooden divider to separate men and women, a custom of modesty dating back to the Second Temple period. This time, Muslim authorities balked. The Grand Mufti and other members of the Supreme Muslim Council appealed to British officials. The Jews, they argued, were overstepping their rights, trying to take control of the Western Wall and, with it, Al-Aqsa. The seemingly innocuous cloth-covered wooden frame was merely the Jews’ first step in turning the wall into a synagogue, they claimed. In a meeting at the Muslim religious court with Edward Keith-Roach, the British district commissioner of Jerusalem, a group of sheikhs said they would not be responsible for the consequences if the divider was not removed.”

 

They prayed. What followed was an Arab campaign of incitement and then the pogroms, enabled by the British, during which more than a hundred Jews were murdered.

 

That’s the topline number, of course. But all those who try to minimize the carnage or fog up the history ought to read some of the details. Here’s one representative passage from Schwartz’s book:

 

“Down the street, smoke billowed from the Hadassah clinic. Flames licked the stone walls of the building where Hebron’s Arabs had received free medical care from the city’s Jewish community. Rioters ransacked the rooms, destroying the charitable institution and ensuring that wounded victims would not be treated there. Next to the clinic lived Ben-Zion Gershon, the 73-year-old one-legged pharmacist who had worked there more than forty years…

 

“Hearing the mob approach, Gershon was sure his family would be spared. He was mistaken. He and his wife, Zehava, cried as men raped their daughter Esther, a 22-year-old seamstress, before murdering her. Gershon’s nose and fingers were severed before he was stabbed to death, along with Zehava.”

 

This is, more or less, how every victim of the riot was killed. If it sounds familiar, it’s because in these passages one can hear the echoes of October 7. And why would the violence be any different? The propaganda that incited the violence isn’t any different either.