Arab Pogroms Against Jews Predate Zionism and British Reports

The Claim Being Made — and Why It Fails

A recurring argument in anti-Israel and antisemitic discourse attempts to use British mandate-era documents — most notably the 1937 Peel Commission Report — to argue that Arab violence against Jews in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a justified or at least understandable response to Jewish immigration and land purchases displacing the Arab population.

This argument fails on multiple levels: historically, factually, and morally. It misrepresents what the British reports actually concluded, ignores a well-documented history of anti-Jewish violence that predates Zionist immigration by centuries, and applies a standard to Jewish victims that would never be applied to victims of any other ethnicity or religion.

It is also important to state clearly: even if displacement were occurring — and the historical record is far more complex than this narrative admits — it would not morally justify the massacres, rapes, and destruction of Jewish communities that took place. Blaming victims for the violence committed against them is not historical analysis. It is the perpetuation of hatred.

Centuries of Persecution: The Jizya and Structural Oppression

Long before the first Zionist settler arrived in the Land of Israel, Jews living across the Arab and broader Islamic world were subjected to a formalized system of second-class status rooted in Islamic law. The jizya — a per-capita tax levied on non-Muslims — was not simply a financial burden. It was a legal mechanism of humiliation and control.

Under classical dhimmi law, Jews (and Christians) were permitted to practice their religion but were required to publicly acknowledge their subordinate status. In many periods and regions, this meant restrictions on building or repairing synagogues, prohibitions on riding horses or carrying weapons, requirements to wear distinctive clothing, and bars on holding public office or testifying against Muslims in court.

The jizya was collected in ways designed to underscore subjugation. In some periods and places, the act of payment was accompanied by a ritualized strike or gesture of humiliation. Failure to pay — whether from poverty or circumstance — could result in imprisonment, enslavement, forced conversion, or expulsion. This was not a marginal or informal practice. It was institutionalized policy enforced across centuries and continents.

This context matters enormously. When examining the pattern of anti-Jewish violence across the Arab world, that violence did not emerge in a vacuum. It emerged from a cultural and legal environment in which Jews were formally designated as inferior, their safety contingent on payment and compliance. Pogroms were not aberrations within this system. In many cases, they were its logical extension.

Anti-Jewish Violence Predates Zionism by Centuries

Perhaps the most decisive rebuttal to the displacement theory is chronological. Documented anti-Jewish violence in the Land of Israel and across the broader Arab world occurred long before any meaningful Zionist immigration or land purchases.

• 1066 — Granada Massacre, Al-Andalus: A Muslim mob stormed the royal palace and murdered Joseph ibn Naghrela, the Jewish vizier of Granada, then proceeded to massacre the Jewish population of the city. Estimates range from 1,500 to 4,000 killed. This occurred in Muslim-ruled Spain, nearly nine centuries before the founding of the State of Israel.
• 1517 — Safed and Hebron Attacks: When Ottoman forces conquered the region, Jewish communities in Safed and Hebron suffered looting and violence. Jewish presence in both cities predated Islam itself. These attacks had no connection to immigration or displacement.
• 1834 — Safed Pogrom: Arab rioters attacked and looted the Jewish quarter of Safed during the peasant revolt against Egyptian rule. Jewish homes were ransacked and residents assaulted over a period of thirty-three days. The modern Zionist movement would not be founded for another half century.
• 1838 — Druze Attack on Safed: Another violent assault on the Jewish community of Safed occurred just four years later, resulting in further deaths and destruction. Again: no Zionist immigration, no land purchases, no displacement — just targeted violence against Jews.
• 1840 — Damascus Affair: A blood libel accusation in Damascus led to the imprisonment and torture of Jewish community leaders, including children. This was state-sanctioned persecution rooted entirely in ancient antisemitic mythology with no connection to Palestine.
• 1860 — Massacres in Damascus and Beirut: During broader sectarian violence in 1860, Jewish communities were specifically targeted alongside Christian ones. No Zionist presence, no land disputes — pure communal hatred.
• 1869 — Tunis Pogrom: Anti-Jewish riots in Tunisia resulted in deaths, destruction of property, and the terrorizing of the Jewish quarter. Tunisia is not Palestine. There was no Zionist movement to blame.

These events are not obscure footnotes. They are part of the documented historical record, available in university libraries and academic journals worldwide. The violence was rooted in religious animosity, social marginalization, and the vulnerability of Jewish minorities living under majority-rule societies in which their second-class legal status made them perpetual targets.

The 1929 Hebron Massacre

No honest examination of pre-state anti-Jewish violence is complete without confronting Hebron. The Jewish community of Hebron is one of the oldest continuously documented Jewish communities in the world, rooted in a city considered sacred in Jewish tradition for thousands of years. In August 1929, that community was destroyed in a single weekend.

Incited by inflammatory sermons and false rumors — spread by Amin al-Husseini's nationalist network — claiming that Jews were attacking Muslims and plotting to seize the Temple Mount, Arab rioters descended on the Jewish quarter of Hebron on August 23 and 24, 1929. Sixty-seven Jewish men, women, and children were murdered. Many of the victims were mutilated. Women were raped. Survivors described neighbors they had known for decades participating in the killings.

The Jewish community of Hebron had coexisted with its Arab neighbors for generations. They were not recent Zionist immigrants. Many families had lived in the city for centuries. The British Mandate authorities were slow to respond, and the Jewish community that survived was evacuated — effectively ending two thousand years of continuous Jewish presence in Hebron.

The Hebron Massacre was extensively documented by British officials, investigated by the Shaw Commission, and is part of the historical record of the Mandate period. It was not a spontaneous eruption of frustration over land disputes. It was an organized pogrom, incited by religious and nationalist leadership, targeting an ancient Jewish community that had nothing to do with any displacement of anyone.

The 1920 and 1921 Pogroms in the Land of Israel

The Hebron Massacre of 1929 was not an isolated event. It was part of a pattern of organized anti-Jewish violence that characterized the early Mandate period.

• 1920 — Nebi Musa Riots, Jerusalem: Arab crowds attacked Jewish residents of Jerusalem in April 1920 during the annual Nebi Musa procession, killing 5 Jews and wounding hundreds. The violence was directly incited by inflammatory speeches from Amin al-Husseini. Jewish immigration at this point was still minimal.
• 1921 — Jaffa Riots: Arab rioters attacked Jewish neighborhoods in Jaffa and surrounding areas over several days in May 1921, killing 47 Jews and wounding many more. The Haycraft Commission, appointed by the British to investigate, found that the Arab attack on Jews was the initiating act of violence.

Both of these events preceded the large waves of Jewish immigration that would occur in the late 1920s and 1930s. The narrative that violence was a reaction to displacement is undermined by the simple fact that the displacement being cited as a cause had not yet occurred at the time the violence began.

What the Peel Commission Actually Said

The 1937 Peel Commission Report is frequently cited in these arguments, often with selective quotations designed to suggest that British authorities blamed Jewish immigration for Arab unrest. A careful reading of the full report tells a more complicated story.

The Commission did acknowledge that rapid Jewish immigration created social and economic tensions and that Arab fears about demographic and political change were real. However, the report also documented widespread Arab nationalist and religious incitement as a primary driver of violence. It noted that Arab leadership — particularly under Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem — actively organized and inflamed violence against Jewish communities.

Crucially, the Commission recommended the partition of the land into separate Jewish and Arab states — a recommendation rooted in the recognition that both peoples had legitimate claims, not in a condemnation of Jewish immigration as the root cause of conflict.

Extracting a sentence or paragraph from this report to argue that the British themselves blamed Jews for the violence against them is a textbook example of historical misrepresentation. It ignores the report's full conclusions and the broader context of organized Arab nationalist violence of the period.

Pogroms in Arab Lands With No Connection to Palestine

If Arab violence against Jews were truly a response to displacement in Palestine, we would not expect to see similar violence occurring in countries thousands of miles away with no Zionist presence whatsoever. And yet, that is precisely what the historical record shows.

• 1941 — The Farhud, Baghdad, Iraq: A two-day pogrom during the Jewish holiday of Shavuot resulted in the murder of approximately 180 Jews, the wounding of over 1,000, and the looting and destruction of Jewish homes and businesses. Iraq had no Zionist settlement. The violence was driven by Nazi-influenced Arab nationalism and deep-seated religious antisemitism that had been cultivated for generations under the dhimmi system.
• 1945 — Tripoli Pogrom, Libya: Riots targeting the Jewish community killed over 130 people, destroyed hundreds of homes, and left thousands destitute. Libya had no connection to the land disputes in Palestine.
• 1947 — Aden Pogrom, Yemen: Following the UN partition vote, rioters killed approximately 82 Jews and destroyed the majority of Jewish homes in Aden. The violence was explicitly tied to the announcement of a prospective Jewish state — not to any displacement of anyone in Yemen.
• 1948 — Cairo and Alexandria Riots, Egypt: Following Israel's declaration of independence, anti-Jewish riots swept Egypt's major cities. Jewish businesses were bombed, homes were looted, and Jews were killed. The Egyptian Jewish community — which had existed for millennia — would be nearly entirely expelled within two decades.

These are not footnotes. They are the lived experience of hundreds of thousands of Jewish families across the Arab world — families who were ultimately driven from countries their ancestors had inhabited for centuries, in what historians have documented as one of the largest forced population transfers of the 20th century. Approximately 850,000 Jews were expelled from or forced to flee Arab countries between 1948 and the 1970s. They demonstrate conclusively that the hatred driving anti-Jewish violence was ideological and religious in nature — not a grievance rooted in land disputes in a distant territory.

Early Zionist Land Acquisition Was Largely Legal

The displacement narrative also rests on a distorted account of how early Zionist settlers acquired land. The historical record is clear: the primary mechanism of early Zionist land acquisition was purchase, not seizure.

The Jewish National Fund, established in 1901, purchased land from willing sellers — including large absentee Arab landowners, many of whom did not live in Palestine. The Ottoman Land Code of 1858 had already created a system under which much of the land was held by absentee landlords, and the tenant farmers who worked the land were not always displaced when ownership transferred — but when they were, this was a function of the broader Ottoman and then British land tenure system, not of Zionist policy.

Characterizing early Zionist settlement as violent displacement contradicts the documented land transaction records of the period. This does not mean that tensions did not exist — they did — but describing legal land purchases as equivalent to conquest in order to retroactively justify massacres of Jewish civilians is not a defensible historical argument.

The Moral Dimension Cannot Be Ignored

Even if every element of the displacement narrative were true — even if Jewish immigration had caused significant disruption to Arab communities — it would still not constitute a moral justification for pogroms. The deliberate killing of civilians, the rape of women, the burning of homes, the looting of synagogues: none of these acts become acceptable because the perpetrators had a grievance, real or imagined.

We do not apply this logic to any other group. We do not argue that economic grievances justified the Rwandan genocide. We do not suggest that land disputes explain away the massacre of Armenian civilians. The same standard must apply here, and the fact that it is routinely not applied to Jewish victims is itself a form of antisemitism — one so normalized by centuries of Jew-hatred that many people do not even recognize it.

The jizya, the blood libels, the pogroms, the forced expulsions, the Hebron Massacre, the Farhud — these are not isolated incidents separated by centuries. They are chapters in a continuous history of persecution of Jewish people that predates modern politics by millennia. Antisemitism is not a recent invention or a response to modern geopolitics. It has roots going back thousands of years, embedded in religious doctrine, social custom, and political ideology across cultures and continents.

Its persistence does not make it normal. It makes it a chronic, adaptive hatred that must be actively identified and rejected in every generation. The normalization of anti-Jewish hatred — the readiness to accept arguments justifying violence against Jews that would be immediately rejected if applied to any other group — is not neutrality. It is complicity.

Conclusion: History Requires Honesty

The argument that Arab violence against Jews was caused by Zionist displacement collapses under the weight of the actual historical record. Pogroms preceded Zionist immigration by centuries. Discriminatory taxation and legal persecution structured Jewish life as second-class under Islamic rule long before the first Zionist settler arrived. Violence against Jews occurred across the Arab world in countries with no connection to Palestine. British mandate reports, read in full and in context, do not support the conclusion that Jewish immigration was the root cause of the violence directed at Jewish communities.

None of this means that the history of the region is simple or that there were no legitimate grievances on any side of any conflict. History is rarely that clean. But intellectual honesty demands that we not selectively mine historical documents to construct a narrative that justifies violence against a people based on their ethnicity or religion.

Spreading this kind of misinformation does not advance peace or justice. It advances hatred. And in a world where antisemitic hate crimes are rising sharply, that hatred has real and deadly consequences. The antidote is not silence — it is accurate history, clearly told, and a firm refusal to apply one moral standard to Jews and another standard to everyone else.