PALESTINE – JERUSALEM RIOTS

Photograph album including 4 rare photographs showing the Nebi Musa Riots 1920.

[Photograph album, Palestine, 1920.] 24 photographs (40 x 63 mm.) including 4 of the Nebi Musa riots, each with manuscript annotations, mounted on 6 leaves, 12mo (162 x 114 mm.) Original brown cloth (lightly rubbed). Provenance: ‘Easter 1920’ (inscription to front pastedown).

VERY RARE PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE 1920 NEBI MUSA RIOTS. Following rising tensions between the Arabs and Jews in Palestine across March 1920, demonstrations coinciding with the Nebi Musa festival April 4-7 saw violent clashes resulting in five Jews and four Arabs killed, with hundreds injured. The Palin Commission, sent by the British in May 1920 to examine the causes of the trouble, concluded that an important factor in the lead-up to the riots was the increasing Arab anger over the Balfour declaration and the perceived abandonment of British promises over independence. The commission did, however, suggest that blame was also to be shared by the Jews, ‘whose impatience to achieve their ultimate goal and indiscretion are largely responsible for this unhappy state of feeling’. A lasting effect of the riots was the breakdown in trust between the Arabs, Jews, and the British forces, whose own role in failing to control the demonstrations was heavily criticised. ‘The Nebi Musa disturbances above all confirmed the collision course that British policy for Palestine was on, at least so far as Anglo-Zionist relations over security matters were concerned […] The most important effect of the riots on the Yishuv, however, was to marshal support behind the formal establishment of a proper Jewish self-defense force’ (i.e. Haganah) (Hoffman, Anonymous soldiers).

Probably assembled by a British member of the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration. Other photographs depict Jews at the Wailing Wall, a ‘Jewish colony’, the Garden of Gethsemane, as well as other holy sites around Jerusalem.