1929: Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict by Hillel Cohen, translation by Haim Watzman Brandeis, 312 pp,

1929: Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict by Hillel Cohen, translation byHaim Watzman
Brandeis, 312 pp, £20.00, November 2015, ISBN 978 1 61168 811 5

On September 2, 1929, several weeks after the deadly riots in Palestine, the newspaper Ha’aretz called for the British to impose collective punishment on the town of Deir Yassin, as the British had imposed on several other Arab towns in preceding weeks. I had not realized that many who participated in the Irgun raid on Deir Yassin in 1948 saw it as payback for what had occurred some twenty years earlier.



In 2009, I was conducting a public interview in a Rochester synagogue with a dear friend, a 90 year old man, born in Rochester, who as a young child in 1927 moved to Palestine. The subject of the 1929 riots came up, and an elderly woman told us how she saw Arab violence against Jews in the summer of 1929, and she remembered, as if it had just happened, her fear and the collective sense of fear from all the Jews she knew. And she had never forgotten the lesson she learned—Arabs are untrustworthy, duplicitous, and, whatever they say, all they want to do is kill Jews. More than eighty years on, the 1929 riots had lost little of their power to provoke.

This is the point of Hillel Cohen’s remarkable recent book1929: Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict: 1929—I like a book that contains its thesis in its title. It is one of very few books that focuses on the 1929 riots rather than treating them as one of the many sloughs on the road to 1948 and 1967. The author tells us that the Hebrew edition of this book was the first devoted to its subject to be published since 1930. It is an unusual book, less a straightforward narrative than a meditation that is not organized in strict chronological order. It looks backward and forward from the events of 1929, and takes its readers on a leisurely but intense historical and philosophical ramble around the issues the riots raised. For those who want a simple recounting and accounting of the many events of 1929, I recommend one of the standard histories of the period, such as Tom Segev’s One Palestine, Complete. For those who want a portal into the two hearts of darkness at the core of the struggle between Jews and Arabs in Palestine and Israel, it is a great journey.

Briefly, the conflict started over Jewish access to the Western Wall and the passage through the adjacent Maghrebi quarter (an area that was torn down by Israel immediately after the Six Day war, creating the large plaza that now exists.) Efforts to control the access led to riots, with both Jews and Arabs lynched, followed by a massacre of religious Jews in Hebron, and murderous attacks in other cities and communities. The Shaw Commission, investigating the riots, issued its report in March 1930, blamed the Arabs as the main assailants, though arguing the larger context for the riots was continued Jewish immigration. Lord Passfield’s White Paper, issued later in the year, suggested limits on Jewish immigration, a recommendation rejected by Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald the following year. The riots led to heightened suspicions and fears on both sides, exploding in the riots and battles after 1936.

1929, like many recent histories of controversial events, is less interested in determining “what actually happened” (though it does do that as well) than letting the participants describe the events in their own terms and own frames of reference. The book is divided into chapters detailing Jewish and Palestinian accounts of the events in its five main loci–Jaffa and Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Hebron, Motza, Safed. Cohen points out the inconsistencies and blind spots on both sides. One example: Arab accounts downplayed Arab violence but often emphasized Arabs who rescued Jews from mobs. Jewish accounts gave little coverage to Jews who rescued Arabs because they generally avoided the subject of Jewish violence altogether. As Cohen argues that “explanations of events are generally complementary rather than mutually exclusive” and that in times of tension, truth becomes increasingly elastic.

The 1929 riots for Cohen was Year Zero because it was the year, he states several times, the Yishuv came into existence. It was the first time that the largely secular Zionists in charge of the new Jewish political structures in Palestine realized that Zionism was about more than building the new Zionist man and woman or emptying the Diaspora, but about a struggle for control of ancient symbolic spaces of the land they were settling. And whether they really cared about the Western Wall or the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, spaces that could not be separated from their dense Jewish and Muslim histories, they would have to fight to control them. Early Zionism’s dreams of transcending the religious aspects of Judaism ended in 1929.

At the same time, for non-Zionist Jews, who still in 1929 probably outnumbered the Zionist true believers in Palestine, the riots were a demonstration that Zionism had so changed Palestine that old, longstanding ties with local Arabs had been superseded, and they needed protection by the Haganah and the Zionists, and that the old Ottoman rules governing interactions between Jews and Muslims no longer applied. And for Palestinians, the growing fear of Zionist ambitions colored questions of co-existing or challenging the Zionist newcomers, and helped foster a growing sense of Palestinian distinctiveness. As one reads 1929, one is reminded again that it is no accident that the epicenters of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today, as in 1929, are the contested spaces of Hebron and the Western Wall.

Amid the hardening of lines and hearts, there was a search for alternatives. Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism, wrote in 1931 of breaking the ties with “the imperialism we have attached ourselves to with the ring of the Balfour Declaration” argued that the sun was setting on the British Empire, and Zionists had to be sure, when revolution came to the Middle East, as it would, that they “were standing on the right side of the barricades,” with the Arabs. Yeshayahu Liebowitz, then 27 years old, a member of Mizrachi, the religious Zionist movement, as clear eyed as he would be decades later, stated at the same time that the Jews can “demand for ourselves in the Land only those rights and that status that we are prepared to recognize with regard to the Arabs.”

Cohen is a historian who had dedicated much of his career to a search for alternatives, for ways Jews and Palestinians could have or might have avoided coming to the impasse they created for themselves, in works such as Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917–1948 (2008). His is a history filled with counterfactuals, what ifs, and roads not taken, of possible collaborations, in all senses of the word, that proved unavailing against the logic of the Jewish and Arab struggle for Palestine. Left wing historians are often unduly dismissive of counterfactual historian thinking as overemphasizing contingency and chance, as opposed to the unfolding of great social and economic forces.

But this is to miss the point of Cohen’s work. We sometimes look to history to find what we can no longer locate in the present, or expect to see in the future. And what we cannot find in the current situation is a belief in plausible alternatives. All sides are tormented by a sense of negative inevitability, the belief that things are out of reach and control, and destined to get worse. This is certainly so for left wing Jews and Palestinians. And even right wing Jews have largely come to the conclusion that the problem with the Palestinians is beyond solving, and critique “solutionism.”

Israel and Palestine have become exhibit A for the case for inevitable historical deterioration; things will be worse five years from now, and will be worse still five years after that, and just when you think that Israel and Palestine can sink no lower, they will somehow find a way. The alternative to this is not sprinkling the fairy dust of hope and possibility. Instead it is a recognition, at the heart of 1929, that Jews and Arabs created this inevitability, the bed on which they both so uncomfortably lie, and only they can make it less inevitable. But the act of uncreation is probably more difficult than creation. A big part of uncreating the recent history of the Middle East is a great sensitivity to alternatives, and how, on any “roadmap” of the future, there are vastly more paths not taken than the one you are traveling on. And this surely is one of the lessons of the riots of 1929.

Michael Chabon: Israeli Occupation 'The Most Grievous Injustice I've Ever Seen in My Life'
Renowned author along with other writers recently toured West Bank led by Breaking the Silence to research book of essays marking 50 years of occupation.



Israeli soldiers and border police stand guard as Israeli settlers take over several houses, which are disputed between Palestinians and Israelis, in the West Bank old city of Hebron January 21, 2016.s

The author Michael Chabon was on a tour of Hebron in the West Bank when he met an unexpected fan in a nearby group of Israeli soldiers on duty in the divided city.
“I’ve actually read your books,” said one young soldier, recognizing the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.”

Other than that, fans were in short supply that day. Jewish settlers were dogging Chabon’s group, telling the participants that their guide was feeding them lies as he explained the restrictions on Palestinian life in the West Bank city. Indeed, the soldier who had read his novels was one of a group who had been following Chabon’s tour, presumably trying to keep the settlers’ confrontation from escalating. Chabon thanked the soldiers when one recognized him.

Chabon’s tour to the West Bank was led by Breaking the Silence, the controversial Israeli group that collects and distributes Israeli soldiers’ testimony about their service in the occupied territory. Chabon, along with his wife Ayelet Waldman, are two of the 24 leading novelists who will visit East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza over the next few months to research a book of essays marking 50 years of Israeli occupation. The couple will edit the book, which aims to illuminate what it’s like to live under Israeli military rule. Chabon’s essay will focus on Sam Bahour, a Palestinian-American businessman who moved to Ramallah to build the Palestinian economy in the wake of the Oslo peace accords, only to watch the Israeli occupation deepen around him.

Chabon, who deals with Jewish themes in his work, addressed Israel obliquely in “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.” The novel takes place in Sitka, Alaska, the central city of a settlement of Jewish refugees from World War II. The state of Israel lasted just three months before it toppled in an alternate telling of the Arab-Israeli war. “Jerusalem is a city of blood and slogans painted on the wall, severed heads on telephone poles,” Chabon wrote. In Sitka, there is tension - but also positive relations - between the Jews and the indigenous population, a possible reference to real life Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians.

Now, Chabon will address Israel’s darkest issues head on. His attention to the occupation, sparked by Waldman’s 2014 trip to Hebron, comes out of a place of deep concern for Israel. “I do love Israel. I do care about Israel,” he said. “To dehumanize others dehumanizes you. It is bad for Israel and if it ended it would be good for Israel.”

The Israel Boook Review, Managing Editor, Stephen Darori wh0 accompanied the authors’ Breaking the Silence tour for two days, sat down  for an interview with Chabon at the group’s hotel in the stately Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem. Chabon was visibly jarred by what he had seen the day before in Hebron, calling the occupation “the most grievous injustice I have ever seen in my life.” He talked about the role of authors in addressing human rights issues, his childhood relationship to Israel and whether he is worried about alienating Jewish readers with his anti-occupation stance. (He’s not.)

Yesterday you went to Hebron, one of the most challenging places in the territories. What was that like?
As a Jew and someone who has felt connected both to Israel and also to the Old Testament narratives, it actually does mean something to me to be in Hebron, to be where supposedly Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Rebecca and Leah are all buried. From my point of view, to see that place being dishonored and made less sacred and less holy by the presence of this incredibly cruel and unjust machinery, some literal machinery and figurative machinery of oppression, it offends me. I wish I could simply have gone and had a chance to experience the history and the past and the narratives that shape me without this vituperative hateful layer of supposed holiness spoiling it, not just for me but I think in some ways for the world.

What was your relationship to Israel and Zionism growing up?
I felt deeply connected to legends and folklore and Jews generally. They are the central metaphors of my way of thinking about things, like the Tower of Babel or the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel. In terms of Israel, I was four years old when the Six Day War happened. That is my first memory of Israel. First it was, “Oh my god, oh no” and it was terrible things happening and then it turned to incredible giddy jubilation and relief, but beyond relief, in hindsight it was almost gloating. Then in ’73, the Yom Kippur War brought a kind of dread, a prolonged version of the same thing. It was initial dread and anxiety followed by eventual relief, much less jubilation. There was a sense of “That was close.”

You went to Israel in 1992 as an adult when you had just started dating Ayelet Waldman. Did you travel there as a child too?
No. But my grandparents had come here and I remember them coming back and bringing me a hat from a kibbutz called Ayelet HaShahar. That was the first time I saw the word “Ayelet” in my life. When I met my Ayelet, I was like, “Oh the hat my grandparents brought me. The kibbutznik hat.”
The idea of the kibbutzim was important to my grandfather and my father. [The kibbutz project] was the only viable socialist thing that didn’t result in totalitarian excess and repression and so on. There was a political pride, too. It wasn’t just the quasi-militaristic or jingoistic, “Yeah, we showed them!” kind of thing. It was, “This is amazing what they are doing over there in many ways, making the desert bloom.” We were able to take pride in all of that.

There was no regard whatsoever for Palestine or Palestinians and they only came into my consciousness initially through terrorist incidents. It wasn’t until the invasion of Lebanon that some cracks started to appear for me and I started to have questions reading about the massacres in the refugee camps. I was like, wait, Israel? Is that what they are doing? And then there was a long, slow, heartbreaking process of continuing disillusion and dismay. But I was always [grasping] to this ultimately irrational idea that [Israel’s actions toward Palestinians] were justified or couldn’t be helped or were no worse than anything anyone else would have done under the same circumstances.
You said you had not dealt with the topic of occupation in your writing until now. You have a large Jewish readership. Are you concerned about alienating them?

I’m not so worried about that. All I’m really doing is going to try to see for myself. Once you see for yourself it is pretty obvious I think to any human being with a heart and a mind, it is pretty clear what to feel about it. It is the most grievous injustice I have ever seen in my life. I have seen bad things in my own country in America. There is plenty of horrifying injustice in the U.S. prison system, the “second Jim Crow” it is often called. Our drug laws in the United States are grotesquely unjust. I know to some degree what I am talking about. This is the worst thing I have ever seen, just purely in terms of injustice. If saying that is going to lose me readers, I don’t want those readers. They can go away and never come back.

What role do novelists have to play in changing the status quo in Israel and the Palestinian Territories?
What a creative writer, a fiction writer or a writer of creative non-fiction can bring is an overt point of view that doesn’t try to hide itself the way journalists are trained to be objective and conceal their biases and just “present the facts.” It is a strength to have a point of view, to implicitly or explicitly say to the reader: Here is where I am coming from and this is what I saw and this is what I thought of it and what I made of it and how it made me feel. It is all there on the page for the reader to accept or reject or connect to or not connect to, and it can be extremely powerful.
Without Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” there might not have been a Civil War fought to end slavery in the United States. It was a novel, more than anything else, more than preaching from the pulpits or the reports of travelers or whatever the equivalent of journalism would have been in that day, or first person slave narratives. Fiction invites the reader into the world of a novel in a way that no other kind of writing does. So you have got these people who are professional noticers, professional observers, professional connection-drawers, professional metaphor-crafters bringing all of those skills to bear to report on any aspect that they wish of their weeklong experience here.
As a Jewish writer who deals with Jewish topics, have you experienced this trip differently from some of the other writers on the tour?
The first day we were here they took us to Silwan, in the shadow of City of David [a national archaeological park managed by the Elad organization, which helps settlers move into Palestinian neighborhoods of East Jerusalem]. I’m hearing and seeing [Jewish settlers] illegally taking over houses and these [Palestinian] people are fighting for their neighborhood. Who does it turn out is one of the major sources of [support] for this whole City of David enterprise? The little blue boxes I put my pocket change in at Hebrew school every week growing up, the Jewish National Fund. That was in 1973 and the pennies I was putting in the boxes weren’t literally going to support the takeover of Silwan. It’s just I have that in my own personal history, not the history of my people, but in my own life I have a connection to something that does make me culpable. Not just through omission, not just through a lack of having taken any action or spoken up or said anything but actually through support of things that I didn’t know were being used in that way. It has given me a whole different viewpoint on the entire enterprise going all the way back to 1967 at least.
You are putting the finishing touches on your new book. Can you give us a peek into the subject matter?
It’s coming out in November. It has a lot of Jewish content. It is about an American Jewish family. In some ways there are definite echoes of “Kavalier & Clay” and the “Yiddish Policemen’s Union” and other books. It’s a novel disguised as a memoir of my grandfather, but it is not my grandfather. It is written as if it were a memoir by me. It is an attempt to explain an enigmatic advertisement I found in a copy of an issue of Esquire Magazine in 1958 for Chabon Scientific Company that sold a model rocket. This memoir is the fictional history behind that advertisement to explain it.