It’s impossible for me to support any anti-Jewish pogroms. In fact, Henry Ford fiercely opposed pogroms and thought they were horrible. Even in his infamous book, he states that he does not want to see one Jew harmed. There are definitely antisemites of this variety, and I have a modicum of respect for them.
The pogromists killed women, children, and old men. No group was spared. In at least some of the pogroms, Jews were killed in horrific ways. I know this was true of the Hebron Massacre in 1929 and the Khmielnicki Rebellion in Poland in the mid-1500’s.
The Hebron Massacre
Reading reports of what was done to those Jews in Hebron almost made me sick to my stomach. Further, many Jews were just regular folks who were not wealthy or driving the non-Jews into poverty. They got targeted just the same. In Hebron, the native Palestinian Jews got massacred the same as the Ashkenazi Jews.
I will grant the pogromists one thing. Before the pogrom started, Muslims went to the homes of the Palestinian Jews and told them that the beef was not with them and was instead with the Ashkenazi Jewish colonists. They ordered the native Jews to hand over the European Jews they were sheltering, but the Palestinian Jews refused, so they got targeted too.
And in Hebron, as in most other recent anti-Jewish pogroms in the Arab lands, there were always Muslims who risked their lives to save Jews. The Jews who survived in Hebron were hidden by their Muslim neighbors. In the Iraqi Farhud, many Muslims hid Jews. Same thing in the pogroms in Libya and Egypt in the late 1940’s. In all of these cases, Muslims who got caught sheltering Jews would probably be killed. I don’t know what the take-home point is here except that Muslims and Muslim antisemitism is not monolithic.
I would also note that it’s not true that the PLO was out to kill every Jew in Israel. I think they just wanted them to leave. Arafat admitted to his friends that most Jews would take off after the Arab victory and any remaining Jews would be slowly terrorized into leaving. Sheik Yassin had the same view.
However, it is important to note that in the original PLO charter, it states explicitly that the PLO has no beef with native Palestinian Jews. Any Jew who could trace their ancestry back to before the Balfour Declaration could stay as long as they were peaceful.
Not sure what the message is here except that Palestinians and Arabs in general are not Nazis. Do you notice how jealously Arab states kept their Jews in recent decades? I know that in a number of states they were not even allowed to leave for fear that they would head straight to Israel. And the few remaining Jews were treated like precious treasures, at least in Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Iraq, and Syria.
Once again, all this shows me is that Arabs aren’t Nazis. Sure, they kill Jewish civilians and some of the time, that’s deplorable, but they’re not out to exterminate the Jews.
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Henry Ford was the ideal.