Ghosts of a Holy War: The 1929 Massacre in Palestine that Ignored the Arab-Israeli Conflict
By Yardena Schwartz
(Union Square & Co., 432 pages, $30)
In the immediate aftermath of the horrific Hamas attack on Israel of October 7, 2023, reasonably informed opinion in most of the world, excluding Muslim or Arab nations, expressed shock and sympathy. Who could not be horrified by a preplanned act of mass violence in which over 1,200 Israelis (men, women, children, and babies) were murdered, often following brutal rapes and torture, while some 250 were taken hostage?
Those foolish Americans (and visiting foreign students) who chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will all be free” … must, lamentably, be taken at their word.
Yet it wasn’t long before such reactions were widely replaced with ostensibly more “balanced” judgments that emphasized the sufferings of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank under…
