Ghosts of a Holy War stands out as one of last year’s most under-reviewed and yet most read-worthy books on the Middle East. It spans the Hundred Years' War between Arabs and Jews over a piece of real estate the size of New Jersey and was praised by Israel’s major papers. Apart from the Wall Street Journal, it was basically overlooked in the United States. It deserves better.
Even Mideast mavens will keep turning the pages after the first of 30 chapters complete with 20 pages of tiny-print footnotes. They will be rewarded with a first-rate blend of scholarship and boots-on-the-ground reportage—a far cry from the breathless fare served up by the daily media.
Yardena Schwartz does not present a one-sided view of the War for the Unholy Land. Her heart is with Israel, where she had lived and worked for 10 years as a prize-winning journalist, but her head is that of a scholar who knows how to dissect interests and ideologies.
This book is not yet another regurgitation of the world’s most intractable conflict, but a refreshingly original take. The centerpiece is Hebron, the West Bank’s largest town—hardly a headline-fetching hotspot. Hebron’s main claim to fame is its biblical stature. Arabs call it "Khalil" ("friend"), shorthand for Abraham as "Friend of God." According to Scripture, this is where the Patriarch bought a grave for himself, his wife Sarah, Isaac, and Jacob. It is a holy site revered by both Muslims and Jews.
Why focus on Hebron? Ghosts of a Holy War owes its birth to a sheer fluke, a box of letters, photos, telegrams, and a diary from the 1920s gathering dust in a Memphis attic—a bequest from an American named David Shainberg to his family, which it passed on to Schwartz. Young David had gone to study at the Hebron Yeshiva, the largest within the British Mandate. He was no Zionist—he just wanted to be nearer to God, to coin a phrase. The Tomb of the Patriarchs was close enough.
In Hebron, Shainberg studied Talmud and Torah in a world more hospitable than the Pale where the tsar’s Cossacks had routinely slaughtered Jews. Hebron was a place where Jews and Arabs had peaceably lived side-by-side for ages, sharing comity and coffee. Schwartz relates how the city’s "Arab leaders danced into the night alongside rabbis" during holidays and weddings.
On August 24, 1929, the old dispensation descended into a paroxysm of mass murder. Some 3,000 Arabs armed with daggers and axes invaded the Jewish Quarter, butchering 67 men, women, and children, including Shainberg. Fast-forward from Hebron to Hamas on October 7 in southern Israel, a far more deadly orgy exterminating 1,200 with unspeakable cruelty.
At that point, Schwartz’s project—retracing the Hebron Massacre with the help of Shainberg’s treasure trove—cried out for redesign. The author draws a "direct line" from Hebron 1929 to Hamas 2023. "The forces that drove Arabs to slaughter their Jewish neighbors in 1929 were identical to [those] behind October 7." She explains: "The parallels … were so overwhelming, haunting, and chilling" that she had to lay out the whole blood-curdling story in 432 pages.
Schwartz had felt like "walking into the pages of history," which keeps defying well-meaning attempts at conciliation, though Western diplomacy had labored hard since the late 1930s. Back then, the Jews were to get 20 and the Arabs 80 percent of the land, the most generous deal of all times. They tore it up. Shredding the U.N. partition plan of 1947, they launched a five-nation assault, which Israel defeated against all odds. In 1993, Yitzhak Rabin shook hands with Yasser Arafat at the White House; a bit later, the PLO chief launched a terror a campaign.
In 2000, Bill Clinton tried again at Camp David, and Arafat unleashed the Second Intifada. In 2008, Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, extended the best offer ever put on the table by Israel: two capitals in Jerusalem, almost all of the West Bank, plus territorial compensation within Israel proper. Arafat’s successor Mahmoud Abbas said "la," Arabic for "no." Even Ariel Sharon’s total withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 had been in vain. The fruit was not coexistence, but a totalitarian Hamas dedicated to the erasure of the Jewish state. After its two-front victory against Hamas and Hezbollah in 2024, "two states for two nations" has receded into Peter Pan’s Neverland.
Depending on whose side you are on, you will point the finger at the other or invoke lots of "yes, but." Or you might perorate about the ways of the world with its countless wars for aggrandizement. Yet that doesn’t explain why Egypt and Jordan made peace with their neighbor Israel half a lifetime ago—coldish as it is. Logically, there must be something else that keeps feeding Palestinian rejectionism. Ghosts of a Holy War lays out the reasons.
Schwartz certainly does not absolve killers like Baruch Goldstein, who murdered 29 Muslim worshippers at Hebron’s Tomb of the Patriarchs in 1994, nor any other outrage committed in the name of "Greater Israel." Is Palestinian routine refusal foreordained by a culture that will never accept the "Other"? That is "essentialism," vulgo: "This is how they have been and will always be." If so, why have Germans and Japanese, the most vicious predators of the 20th century, become as aggressive as sloths? Culture, nationality, or race are not destiny.
And yet, as you plow through the book, you keep scratching your head. Why the lethal continuity between 1929 and 2023? These massacres bespoke no rational interests ("we want more for us"), but annihilationism driven by sadism. To boot, October 7 was suicidal, given the entirely predictable outcome: thousands of civilians dead in Gaza and Lebanon. Why deliberately sacrifice your own? For the greater glory of Iran, which masterminded the twin assault? That favor came with astronomical costs.
Listen to Ghazi Hamad, member of the Hamas Politburo quoted by Schwartz: "We are proud to sacrifice our martyrs." His colleague Khaled Mashal shrugged off the toll with breathtaking cynicism: "In all wars, there are civilian victims." Hamad vowed to reenact the slaughter "again and again." This was "just the first time, and there will be a second, third and fourth time." "Until the end of Israel?" he was asked. "Yes, of course." He didn’t have to pay the price, having holed up in Lebanon before October 7.
The roots of self-defeating irrationality, the logic of a death cult, reach deeply into the past. Casual observers of the 1929 carnage may not have heard of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin Husseini. Schwartz recalls how he spread a deadly rumor. "The Jews" he claimed, "sought to conquer Al-Aqsa (Islam’s third-holiest place) to rebuild their Temple." The campaign "was wildly successful." Throughout the British Mandate, Arabs went on a murder spree, and the "Jews of Hebron paid the heaviest price."
During the British crackdown, Husseini managed to escape, finally ending up in Nazi Berlin, where he launched a career as "Honorary Aryan" and became a "fixture of the Nazi propaganda machine." His broadcasts were like Mein Kampf in Arabic. In 1943, he seethed: "The Jews cannot mix with other nations, but live as parasites and suck their blood." With the help of Germany, we "will eliminate the scourge that Jews represent in the world." In 1944, he implored Muslims: "Kill the Jew, wherever you find him." This foreshadowed a command enshrined in the Hamas Charter of 1988.
In other words, the cosmic battle was not against Zionists, but Jews. Nor is the Mufti a blast from the past. Listen to Yasser Arafat in 2002 when he hailed "our hero Husseini." In 2023, his successor Mahmoud Abbas argued that the Nazis did not kill Jews "because they were Jews," but because "they were dealing with usury and money"—a classic in anti-Semitism. Another routine: There was no Holocaust, or it was inflicted by Jews on Jews.
Doesn’t Israel’s hard right deploy hatred, as well? Yes, but with a difference. When they kill, they face prison; the nation does not squeal with pride. When it takes to the street, it is to defend the rule of law, not to unleash a pogrom against Palestinians. Unlike Hamastan and Abbas-Land, Israel has a free press. Count on Jewish orneriness. As the old joke has it: "Two Jews, three opinions, four parties."
In the conclusion of her magnificently crafted opus, Yardena Schwartz draws hope from despair. "The only way out is to empower the moderate, peace-seeking Israelis and Palestinians." Better than hope may be the strategic miracle owed to the Israeli Army, which resembles the demise of Pharaoh’s army in the Sea of Reeds. In 2024, the IDF decimated Hamas and Hezbollah, while punishing and deterring Iran. This should clear the way for a deal based on Arab realism and Israeli confidence, right?
The Hundred Years War whispers: "This is the Middle East." Moshe Dayan, Israel’s war hero, once called the Levant the "elephant path of history," the eternal battlefield of tribes, nations, and empires since the Bronze Age when peace was but a fleeting pause between two wars. Maybe the Almighty, who toppled the region’s idols, will take pity and lift the curse from his Children.
Ghosts of a Holy War: The 1929 Massacre that Ignited the Arab-Israeli Conflict
by Yardena Schwartz
Union Square & Co., 432 pp., $29.99
A distinguished fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, Josef Joffe has taught international politics at Harvard, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins University.