Book Review — ‘Ghosts of a Holy War’

On October 7, 2023, the world witnessed a day of Jewish slaughter unsurpassed since the Holocaust. Hamas terrorists in Gaza crossed the border to invade Israeli communities and went on a murder spree.

But”murder” is an inadequate description of what the terrorists did. They beheaded babies. They burned families alive. They raped. They tortured. They killed children in front of parents and parents in front of children. They sent videos of the agonies suffered by their victims to the victims’ families by the victims’ cell phones. They gloried in their sadism, sending videos of their exploits all over the world.

Besides the Nazi period, had humanity ever seen its like? It had, though few outside Israel now remembered.

Some 85 years earlier, in Hebron — site of the Tomb of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs, holy to both Jews and Muslims — Muslims had slaughtered 67 of their Jewish neighbors, religiously orthodox and non-Zionist, in ways equal in their appalling sadism to those of October 7. The toll would have been much worse but for courageous Arabs who, at great risk to themselves, saved hundreds of Jews.

“Ghosts of a Holy War,” by American journalist Yardena Schwartz, recounts the story of the 1929 Hebron Massacre, an event which the author views as an essential trigger of the Israeli-Arab conflict. It is a riveting read.

Schwartz’s own skills as a storyteller are enhanced by a Tennessee family whose members are no strangers to the Hebron story. Their great uncle, David Shainberg, had been a spiritually-inclined young man who wanted to pursue religious studies in the ancient city that was Judaism’s birthplace. In order to attend a Hebron yeshiva, he had arrived in the city about a year before the massacre. Schwartz uses his letters to his family, and interviews with survivors she was able to find, to create a vivid portrait of the ancient city and the young American who went there to study. He and his yeshiva friends are likable people, religious but in no way fanatical. Learning that David was murdered in the riots shocks the reader and makes the tragedy more concrete.

To understand the ongoing effects of the massacre, Schwartz travelled extensively in Gaza and the West Bank with her translators, speaking with many Palestinians. Her recounting of those conversations is striking and significant.

Virtually every Palestinian with whom she spoke, even those few wanting a peaceful settlement with the Jews, fully believes and accepts Islamist propaganda. No Jews lived in Palestine before arrival of the settler-colonialists who were intent on stealing Arab land. A Jewish Temple on the Harem al-Sharif (Temple Mount) is a Zionist myth, archeological evidence notwithstanding. The 1929 riots began when Muslims walking through the area near Al-Aqsa mosque after prayers were attacked by Jews. Contrary accounts in contemporaneous news reports only reflect Jewish control of the media.

Those “facts,” along with virulently anti-Semitic passages from the Quran, are hammered into the heads of Arab Muslim children from their youngest days. UNRWA, the United Nations agency established for the sole purpose of aiding Palestinian refugees, teaches these incendiary myths as part of its elementary school curriculum in the schools it runs. With this kind of indoctrination of the young, how can peace ever be possible?

Schwartz lived in and reported from Israel for ten years, has an Israeli husband and is Jewish. Her sympathies are clearly with Israel. But her book does not neglect the role of Jewish extremists in exacerbating the conflict. The story of Jewish terrorist Baruch Goldstein, who murdered 29 Muslims praying in the Tomb of the Patriarch, is given full play, along with the shocking veneration of Goldstein by some of the Jewish residents of Hebron. (Itamar Ben-Gvir, who was a minister in the Israeli coalition government until his recent resignation in protest of the ceasefire agreement, used to have a picture of Goldstein hanging on his wall.) Schwartz also details the ways in which some Jews living in the Hebron area harass their Arab neighbors and the difficulties that Israeli security restrictions entail for West Bank Palestinians, however peaceful they may be. Of course, those security restrictions are the result of acts of terror by Arabs, and Jews who mistreat Muslims are condemned by the overwhelming majority of Israelis and prosecuted criminally where appropriate.

As it concerns the Arab-Israeli conflict, the book can generally be characterized as evenhanded. Indeed, if there is any unfairness in “Ghosts of a Holy War,” its object is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom the author appears to blame for the plight of the hostages and whom she accuses of being interested primarily in his own political survival. She also says the government he leads is the “most incompetent” in Israel’s history.

Although these statements would almost certainly be deemed legally non-actionable expressions of opinion in the United States, from a broader perspective they are nothing less than defamatory. In the judgment of this reviewer, an American friend of Israel, the Prime Minister’s handling of the war has been outstanding, especially in his resistance to pressure from the Biden administration to end the fighting prematurely, thus allowing Hamas to survive and emerge as the victor. The author’s grossly unfair treatment of Netanyahu is unfortunate, since her book on the whole is excellent.

Perhaps the radically different views Ms. Schwartz and I have about Prime Minister Netanyahu stem from the different lessons we learn from the 1929 Massacre and October 7. Ms. Schwartz correctly writes that “[s]o long as Palestinian leaders refuse to accept the right of a Jewish state to exist, and continue their detrimental history of incitement and disinformation, this endless cycle of carnage will continue.” Therefore, she says, “[i]f protesters and world leaders truly wish for peace, their focus should be on ending this century of armed resistance, which has only bred more extremists and more suffering on both sides.”

Well, however much world leaders may “focus,” how does Ms. Schwartz imagine this will happen? Her answer, in essence, is that we can always hope.

Hope did not consign Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan to the ash heap of history, and turn two of the most horrific regimes ever known into the productive, friendly and peaceful countries they are today. What did so was the application of overwhelming military force, applied to bring about the total and catastrophic defeat of those evil governments, which was not achieved without massive death and suffering by the populations of those countries.

There is no ‘two-state” solution. Israel will not be so suicidal as to allow a state alongside it that is ultimately sure to be ruled by the heirs to the perpetrators of 1929 and October 7. President Trump’s proposal to turn Gaza into a Mideast Riviera is outlandish, but it has the virtue of moving the United States away from the two-state fantasy that has defined American policy for so long.

It isn’t pleasant to say, but the best hope for a more peaceful future in the Mideast is more war, with the object of totaI Israeli victory. Those who truly wish for peace should get out of Israel’s way.