Who attacked first before Israel even existed?

1920 · 1921 · 1929 · 1936

Two decades before Israel existed, Arab mobs were already killing Jews in Palestine, in riots and massacres with no state, no occupation and no refugee crisis to blame. In April 1920, May 1921, August 1929 and again from 1936 to 1939, Jewish communities that had bought land legally, farmed it and lived under Ottoman and then British law were attacked, murdered and in one case wiped off the map entirely. Anyone who explains this conflict as a reaction to 1948 or 1967 has to explain these four dates first, because the killing came first.

What set the stage

The modern dispute begins with paperwork, not war. The 1917 Balfour Declaration committed Britain to “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine; the Allied powers ratified that commitment at San Remo in 1920; and the League of Nations wrote it into the 1922 British Mandate for Palestine, a binding international document. None of it dispossessed anyone. Jewish immigrants bought land at market prices, often from absentee Arab landlords in Beirut and Damascus, and built towns like Petah Tikva, founded in 1878, decades before the Mandate existed. The Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, grew from roughly 60,000 in 1918 to over 400,000 by 1936, mostly through legal immigration and purchase, not conquest. That growth, not any Israeli policy, is what the riots that followed were aimed at stopping.

The riots, in order

April 1920, Jerusalem. During the Muslim Nebi Musa festival, Arab crowds attacked the Jewish Quarter of the Old City over three days, killing 5 Jews and wounding around 200. It was the first organized anti-Jewish violence of the Mandate era, and it happened before the Mandate was even ratified.

May 1921, Jaffa and the coastal towns. Rioting that began as a clash between rival Jewish factions spread into a general Arab assault on Jewish neighborhoods; Arab rioters killed 47 Jews, including writer Yosef Haim Brenner, and dragged Jewish immigrants from an immigrants’ hostel and murdered them. A British inquiry, the Haycraft Commission, found Arabs were the aggressors in nearly every incident.

August 1929, nationwide. After the Mufti Amin al-Husseini spread the false claim that Jews were seizing the al-Aqsa mosque and plotting to destroy it, coordinated Arab attacks broke out across the country in a single week. The worst was in Hebron, a community with an unbroken Jewish presence stretching back millennia: an Arab mob murdered 67 Jews, often neighbors they had lived beside for years, and the survivors were evacuated by the British. Hebron’s Jewish community, gone in a week, would not be reestablished for decades. Smaller massacres hit Safed (18 dead) and Motza. The total nationwide death toll reached 133 Jews and roughly 116 Arabs, most of the latter killed by British police restoring order.

1936 to 1939, the Arab Revolt. What began as a general strike against continued Jewish immigration escalated into a sustained guerrilla campaign, the 1936 to 1939 Arab Revolt, that killed hundreds of Jews in bombings, sniper fire and ambushes on roads and in towns, alongside attacks on British forces and Mandate infrastructure.

The casualties, and who actually did the killing

Roughly 300 Jews were killed across these four episodes, mostly civilians, in attacks that targeted them specifically as Jews. Arab losses were far higher, especially during the 1936 to 1939 revolt, where British forces killed an estimated 2,000 to 5,000 Arabs suppressing the uprising, and Palestinian factional fighting killed hundreds more Arabs accused of collaboration or insufficient militancy, a bloodletting that gutted the Palestinian Arab leadership on the eve of 1948. The numbers cut against every side’s convenient story: Jewish civilians died in pogroms they did nothing to provoke, and the Arab dead were overwhelmingly killed by the British Empire and by other Arabs, not by Jewish forces, which had no army and were barred by British law from carrying most weapons at all.

Who lit the match

Al-Husseini, appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem by the British in 1921, ran the same play in 1920 and 1929: a fabricated threat to Muslim holy sites, spread through mosques and pamphlets, followed by riot. It is the template for the blood libel pattern that recurs through the conflict’s history, up to and including modern “al-Aqsa is in danger” incitement. Al-Husseini would go on to spend the Second World War in Berlin as Hitler’s guest, recruiting Muslim SS units and lobbying against Jewish refugee rescue, a record documented on the longer history of the region’s oldest hatred.

What Britain did in response

Each riot triggered a British commission and, each time, a policy retreat that rewarded the violence: the 1930 Shaw Commission and Passfield White Paper curtailed Jewish land purchase after 1929, and the 1939 White Paper, issued as the Holocaust was beginning in Europe, capped Jewish immigration to 75,000 over five years and gave Palestinian Arabs an effective veto over any more, precisely as European Jews had nowhere else to flee. In between, the 1937 Peel Commission concluded the two communities could not be governed together and proposed the first two-state partition, a small Jewish state alongside a larger Arab one. The Jewish leadership accepted it as a basis for talks. The Arab Higher Committee rejected it outright and the revolt continued, the same pattern that would repeat in 1947.

How this era is misrepresented today

The most common distortion is chronological: framing Arab-Jewish violence as beginning with the “Nakba” of 1948 or the “occupation” of 1967, as if nothing came before. It erases the fact that Jews were being murdered in Hebron and Jaffa while the West Bank was still Ottoman and then British territory, decades before a single Israeli soldier, settlement or refugee existed. A second distortion recasts the period as spontaneous “resistance to colonization,” which requires ignoring that the land in question was bought, not seized, under the law of the day, and that the violence was organized top-down by a Mufti who later allied with the Third Reich. A third distortion, common in retellings that soften the record, drops the word pogrom from Hebron and Jaffa entirely, describing coordinated massacres as generic “unrest” or “clashes,” language that would never be used for an attack on any other minority.

Who attacked first after the UN partition vote · The Grand Mufti, Amin al-Husseini · Is Hebron a Jewish city or a Palestinian city? · Who started the wars · Who attacked first, every war · The history they skip

Sources

From Who attacked first on the main site.