President Herbert Hoover’s Response to the Hebron Riots, 1929

Background

On August 15, 1929, a flag-waving demonstration by Jerusalem schoolchildren at the Western Wall was met with two weeks of pogroms; in Hebron, Arabs mobs mutilated, raped, and slaughtered their Jewish neighbors, while the occupying British forces were generally outnumbered and apathetic. Local Muslim leadership had used the demonstration at the Western Wall to incite violence against the Jewish communities in Palestine by claiming that the demonstration desecrated Al Aqsa Mosque. The Hebron Riots of 1929, as the violence came to be called, sent shock-waves around the world. Americans were particularly aghast: newspapers reported that of the 68 Jews massacred at Hebron, a dozen were American students from New York and Chicago. A deluge of letters flooded into Washington, urging the government to intervene on behalf of Jewish Americans, and their property, in Palestine. 

One such missive came from Ona Haverkamp - the wife of a Presbyterian minister in Florida – who had recently visited the Holy Land. This letter is Hoover’s reply: “I wish to thank you,” he writes, “for sending your very interesting observations on the situation in Palestine.” It was, typically, non-committal; Hoover, in the midst of cultivating an Anglo-American partnership as the cornerstone of his peace and disarmament policies, was not about to criticize the British for their behavior during the riots. However, Hoover did issue a statement to the Zionist Organization of America in which he expressed his sympathies to the bereaved families and denounced the violence. 

Physical Description