April 4, 1920
The Nebi Musa festival, a pilgrimage to the site near Jericho believed by Muslims to be the grave of Moses (Musa is the Arabic name for Moses, considered a prophet in Islam), erupts into violence that kills five Jews and four Arabs in three days of fighting in the Old City of Jerusalem. Hundreds more, mostly Jews, are wounded. The violence occurs amid rising Arab-Jewish tensions over increased Jewish immigration and attacks on Jewish settlements in the Galilee.
Speeches by Arab religious leaders during the festival spark assaults on the Jerusalem’s Jews.
In his memoirs, Ronald Storrs, the British military governor of Jerusalem, writes: “Enough that for the time all the carefully built relations of mutual understanding between British, Arabs and Jews seemed to flare away in an agony of fear and hatred. Our dispositions might perhaps have been better (though they had been approved by higher authority), but I have often wondered whether those who criticized us in Europe and America could have had the faintest conception of the steep, narrow and winding alleys within the Old City of Jerusalem, the series of steps up or down which no horse or car can ever pass, the deadly dark corners beyond which a whole family can be murdered out of sight or sound of a police post not a hundred yards away. What did they know of the nerves of Jerusalem, where in times of anxiety the sudden clatter on the stones of an empty petrol tin will produce a panic? The Police were but partially trained and wholly without tradition. There was no British Gendarmerie: we had not one single British Constable.” (The Memoirs of Sir Ronald Storrs, 1937, p. 348.)
The riots take place on the second day of Passover and lead, among other things, to the formation of the Haganah, the precursor to the Israel Defense Forces, in June 1920. The British respond to the violence by changing from a military administration of Palestine to a civilian one.
In 1922, to reassure the Arab population of Palestine of Britain’s aim to be even-handed in managing the Mandate, Winston Churchill, then colonial secretary, publishes a policy statement asserting Britain’s goal not to make Palestine wholly Jewish or to subordinate the Arab population. Among other pledges, the 1922 White Paper ties the rate of Jewish immigration to the “economic absorptive capacity of the country.”
