Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.
This is a guest essay by Nissan Ratzlav-Katz, who writes the newsletter, “Letters from the Homeland.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
The attack lasted seven days.
Whole neighborhoods were targeted, Palestinian men, women, and children were killed in the streets and in their homes; businesses were vandalized and looted; arson attacks were rampant; and women were raped.
The worst single incident targeted a hostel housing about 100 people, many of whom were refugees from previous ethnic violence. The residents, who were unable to prevent the mob from breaking in, tried to hide. The police arrived — and joined in on the side of the attackers. Some people, including a 14-year-old girl, managed to escape, but they were chased down and beaten to death.
The bloodlust started in the city, but it did not stay there. Attackers swarmed nearby Palestinian villages and homesteads as well, killing several people, including a very well-known writer and journalist. His body, and those of six others murdered with him, were strung up on the walls of a nearby Muslim cemetery.
And it wasn’t just “extremists” or “fanatics.” Oh no. Members of the security forces took an active part in the mass assault.
After a week of violence, 47 of the targeted Palestinians were dead, over 100 were injured, and a complete ethnic cleansing took place. Hundreds of people (possibly as many as 2,500) were driven from their homes with little more than the clothes on their backs. Temporary tent cities and ramshackle huts were set up for the refugees along the Mediterranean shoreline and in open fields.
What happened to those Palestinians?
The Palestinian victims, in case you haven’t figured it out yet, were Jews. The roving mobs (and the policemen who helped them) were Arabs. And the massacre took place in 1921 in Yafo (Jaffa), with organized assaults on Jews in nearby Petah Tikva, Rehovot, Hadera, and Kfar Saba as well.
Thousands of Jews who fled the Arab violence in Jaffa and environs ended up in the relative safety of neighboring Tel Aviv, which had been established in 1910. Local Jewish authorities and civic organizers dealt with the sudden massive influx into the small suburb by rapidly setting up emergency tent cities along the beach and around what is today central Tel Aviv. They then began arranging shelter, food distribution, and longer-term solutions.
Why do I call these Jews “Palestinians”?
Because, as I am repeatedly told by pedantic terror apologists, there were Palestinian Muslims, Christians, and Jews living together in this land. They even point to an interview in which Israel’s Prime Minister Golda Meir says she’s a Palestinian to prove that Palestine was indeed a place of some kind. And in fact, in her 1973 autobiography, “My Life,” Meir repeatedly refers to Jews from the land of Israel simply as “Palestinians.”
In the Jaffa riots of 1921, there were also 48 Arab fatalities. They too can be called Palestinian, but their deaths were very different in nature. The primary cause was activity by British security forces intended to halt the Arab riots, reestablish order, and protect Jewish civilians.
On May 1 and 2, 1921, for example, British troops deployed into Jaffa and its suburban residences (populated primarily by Egyptians and others who immigrated to Jaffa from across the Middle East in the mid-1800s), where they opened fire on Arab looters and attackers. Similarly, when an estimated 400 to 1,000 armed Arab fighters and Bedouin besieged Petah Tikva on May 5th, a squadron of British cavalry launched a defensive operation with the support of Royal Air Force bombing and strafing runs.
A British officer named Major Lionel Mansell Jeune is credited with saving the lives of over 100 people at the port of Jaffa during the 1921 riots. When an armed Arab mob descended on the harbor area, Major Jeune gathered dozens of Jews who were passing through the port and the port workers into fortified warehouses and customs facilities. He placed the civilians under armed British protection and then personally commanded the force that repelled rioters attempting to force entry into the area.
Major Jeune’s actions were commemorated in May 2021, when the British Embassy in Israel and the Tel Aviv-Jaffa Municipality unveiled a memorial plaque in his honor near the historic Jaffa Port.
A smaller portion of Arab casualties occurred in direct combat with armed Jewish defense groups, the main such group having been established just one year prior in response to the “Nebi Musa riots.” During the 1920 attacks, Arabs killed five Jews and injured several hundred in Jerusalem. As the British authorities seemed unwilling or unable to defend the Jewish community from such aggression, some of the more activist Jews set up self-defense units (which came to be called the Haganah).
The Arab rioting of 1921 was not the first time that Jews had been driven out of Jaffa in the 20th century. During World War I, on the eve of Passover in 1917, imperial Ottoman forces ordered all civilians to leave Jaffa and Tel Aviv.
While the decree technically applied to the general population of the city, Arab residents were generally permitted to remain nearby or return to their homes within days. The Jewish population, on the other hand, was systematically forced out and kept away. By war’s end, then, the total number of refugees from Jaffa and Tel Aviv was 10,000, of whom at least 8,000 were Jews.
The Jewish refugees of 1917 headed north to Kfar Saba, Petah Tikva, Zichron Yaakov, Tiberias, Tzfat (Safed), and even Damascus. Severe shortages of food, harsh winter weather, and widespread outbreaks of infectious diseases led to around 1,500 deaths.
In late 1917, Allied General Edmund Allenby and his British forces defeated the Ottoman army and captured Jaffa and Tel Aviv. Only then were Jews able to return to the area, where they re-established their homes and communities — at least until 1921 and the Jaffa riots.
As a result of the 1921 riots, the population of Tel Aviv swelled with thousands of Jews who permanently abandoned their homes in Jaffa. Many Jewish merchants who uprooted their businesses ended up contributing to a new, self-sufficient commercial center that was taking shape in the young city.
Nonetheless, over the course of the 1920s, thousands of Jewish residents gradually returned to live and work in Jaffa. By the early 1930s, the ancient port city hosted a sizable Jewish population once again.
Another series of Arab attacks swept through the country from 1936 to 1939. Out of approximately 415 Jews killed across all of Mandatory Palestine during that three-year period, around 20 were killed in Jaffa and its immediate borderlands.
Once again, thousands of Jews fled Jaffa due to murder, arson, property crimes, harassment, and threats by Arabs. Temporary shelters went up once again for the refugees in Tel Aviv, this time in schools, synagogues, government buildings, and industrial facilities.
From the vantage point of tall structures along the seam-line between Jaffa and Tel Aviv, including the minaret of the Hassan Bek Mosque, Arab snipers fired directly into the nearby Jewish urban centers. During the 1936-to-1939 period, however, British forces made repeated attempts to prevent the attacks.
There was a tense calm for about eight years, until the Partition Resolution (United Nations Resolution 181) was passed on November 29, 1947. From then on, with the British focused on packing up their things and going home, Arab snipers again began shooting at Jews in Tel Aviv from the Manshiyya neighborhood of Jaffa every day.
This persisted for nearly five months, until April 1948, when the Irgun (a militant Zionist paramilitary group) launched a four-day assault to isolate the hostile neighborhood, conquer it, break the siege on Tel Aviv, and secure the border. Their massive artillery bombardment and infantry assault did more than that, it seems. There was widespread panic among the Arabs, many fled, their armed militias collapsed, and the city’s remaining notables surrendered on May 13, 1948.
The success of the Jewish forces may have been, as observed by British High Commissioner Sir Alan Cunningham at the time, due to the flight of most of Jaffa’s political and civic leaders. They abandoned the city early and quickly via the port, traveling to Lebanon and Egypt. Around 4,000 Arabs remained in the city (out of a pre-war population of over 70,000).
In the wake of the Israeli War of Independence that began on May 14th, Jews yet again returned to take up residence throughout Jaffa. Today, the city has a population of approximately 55,000 people, of whom 54 percent are Jews, 37 percent are Arabs (Muslim and Christian), and the remainder belong to other religious or ethnic minority groups.
In the wake of the Jaffa riots, the British government set up a commission to investigate what it called the “Disturbances in May 1921.” The Haycraft Commission of Inquiry reported that the “racial strife was begun by the Arabs, and rapidly developed into a conflict of great violence between Arabs and Jews, in which the Arab majority, who were generally the aggressors, inflicted most of the casualties.”
Regarding the British-appointed Arab police at the time, the report said that they were, “with few exceptions, half-trained and inefficient, in many cases indifferent, and in some cases leaders or participators in violence.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of the Muslim and Christian Arabs condoned the attacks, according to the report. And even in 1921, the claim pushed by antisemites and their apologists — that they are opposed to Zionists but not Jews — was shown for what it is: a convenient lie.
Actually, it doesn't complicate but clarifies why the conflict between Israel and the so-called gangster Palestinians continues to fester while the western world refuses to call the Palestinians to account but insists on rewarding them for their implacable hatred of Zionists and Zionism, aka Jews and Israel. It clarifies why only Israel can put an end to this intolerable situation. The question is why it will not.
Of course this was by far not the only massacre by Arabians after the Osmanians had abandoned the Levante and the British/French mandate was established.
And Golda Meir’s remark regarding the "P*lestinian passport" was, of course, never intended to imply that she identified—or wished to identify—as a "P*lestinian"; rather, she sought to counter the Arab appropriation of the term.
Jews dwelling in the Mandate Region, buying land, establishing enterprises etc. had to accept a passport named "Pale*stinian" because no other was available - first the Shoah had to appear before "The World" woke up and returned to the Jews their own land.
In fact, the term was rejected by both Jews and Arabs prior to 1948.
It was a term imposed from the outside.
Before 1948, Jews in Europe who were deemed unwelcome were told: "Go back to P*lestine, where you came from"—because, at that time, the existence of a new Israel was not permitted.
Now they *are* "in P*lestine"—and what happens?
They are accused of having "colonized" the land—a land known since time immemorial as Judea, Samaria, and Israel, and where they had lived for ages, as anyone can read a.o. in the Bible or read in history books.
In that same interview—a fact unfortunately often omitted—she also stated that "Pal*stine" was a name imposed from the outside and that there is/are "no people who could specifically call themselves 'Pal*stinians'"; there are no "Pal*stinian people"—
- a view exactly similar consistently held by all Arab nations ("there are only Syrians, Egyptians, Arabs, etc., but no P*lestinians").
It was only the Soviets who, together with Arafat, invented this term as a weapon against the State of Israel, creating the concept of a "Pal*stinian people" and inventing a "P*lestinian history"—a history that was, and remains, at best the story exactly of encroaching ARABIAN colonialists.
The hailed Edward Said scribble scraps contain nothing but lies and distortion invented to "accuse" `The West´ and totally avoiding any slightest self-criticism of "I*lam" and the "Arabian World".
The land allocated to the Arabians under the 1948 UN resolution is the Kingdom of Jordan, comprising 80% of the former Mandate territory. Yet they want it all; they do not want a "two-state solution," but rather to wipe Israel off the map.
I just can´t understand what should be so hard to see of that.