The Honest Take

In 1928, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was a man in trouble — dogged by accusations of corruption and nepotism. So he told a story: the Jews praying at the Western Wall were coming for Al-Aqsa. It worked. The criticism dissolved, and a year later 67 Jews were murdered in Hebron, ending a Jewish presence there that had lasted millennia.

Journalist Yardena Schwartz spent years tracing that lie — from a box of letters in a Memphis attic, to the Mufti's wartime estate in Berlin, to October 7th, when Hamas named its attack the Al-Aqsa Flood. Her book is Ghosts of a Holy War.

This week marks 97 years since the Hebron massacre. In 1929, The New York Times reported it plainly as a massacre of unarmed Jews, and New Yorkers marched in protest. Those articles are still sitting in the paper's archive. Almost nobody has gone back to read them.

A re-release of the conversation that opened this show.

The guest