"They were using the only means they had to fight an invader": the violence in Palestine started in Jaffa in 1921

What a predictable and predicted disaster it is having the Jewish homeland in Palestine. It should have been carved out of Germany not Arabia, as the King of Saudi Arabia told Roosevelt in 1945.



The Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023 are the continuation of the story that began on 30 April 1921 when the Jewish Communist Party distributed Arabic, Hebrew, and Yiddish fliers in Jaffa calling for the toppling of British rule and the establishment of a "Soviet Palestine."


The party members were Eastern European immigrants some of whom arrived in Palestine before the Balfour Declaration but many of whom came after. Democratic socialists fought them and it somehow became fighting between Jews and Arabs that left 47 Jews and 48 Arabs dead.

Remember that in 1921 many of the most fanatical Bolsheviks in Russia and Hungary were Jewish. 

"They did not kill us because we were Jews, but because we were an invader. They were using the only means they had to fight an invader." Baruch Ram a Jewish pioneer settler said this of the riots. He left Palestine disillusioned by Zionism.

Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky said something very similar in his 1923 essay The Iron Wall.
"The Arabs are not executing pogroms against us in the style of the Russian tsarist police, which organized mob violence for its own political goals. They are fighting against the invasion of their country by a foreign people. They are using the only means they have." 

Actually the Czarist Russian authorities did not organise the pogroms. The last thing they wanted was violence or rioting of any sort. The pogroms were spontaneous and less the result of religious or racial prejudice than for class and economic reasons. The first anti Jewish pogrom after the October Revolution was however organised by the Bolsheviks.

"Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs." Gandhi, 1938

"I remember how it was in 1948 when Israel was being established and all my Jewish friends were ecstatic, I was not. I said: what are we doing? We are establishing ourselves in a ghetto, in a small corner of a vast Muslim sea. The Muslims will never forget nor forgive, and Israel, as long as it exists, will be embattled. I was laughed at, but I was right.” Isaac Asimov

Yes, he was right.


And what now?

I have absolutely no idea. I feel, however, that it is unlikely that Israel can survive indefinitely while it continues to behave in the way it does and I have a feeling that it cannot behave in any other way.