Talk:Jaffa riots

Clean up tag?

Thinking of adding the clean up tag for this article, thoughts? Red1 08:09, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

It doesn't really need it, although a minor copyedit should take care of any problems. —Viriditas | Talk 08:44, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

Anti-Jewish Bias?

"Hearing of the fighting, the Arabs of Jaffa feared they were under attack by the Jews [citation needed] and went on the offensive."

This sentence implies a clear case of "Preventive war": a very questionable line of reasoning. Citation is very necessary here. If there is none, I will assume that this is a deliberate attempt to justify the unjustifiable and change it to "Hearing of the fighting, the Arabs of Jaffa went on the offensive." Arabs, including Jaffa Arabs, have been killing Jews for over a millennium, without any fear of Jews attacking them. If there indeed was a fear of Jewish attack, it would be important to add more details: fear by whom, by what parts of Arab Jaffa, and how justified it was. 75.84.97.215 10:27, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

Since there has been no response, I am changing the sentence.75.84.97.215 10:32, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

Ehh ... You actually had this sourced quote in the Investigative Commission section: "The raids on five Jewish agricultural colonies arose from the excitement produced in the minds of the Arabs by reports of Arabs being killed by Jews in Jaffa."

I believe that in this case, a revert would be appropiate MX44 11:48, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

---

Hi everyone. After reading a couple books on the Mandate period I pulled up this article to refresh my memory on the Jaffa timelines and stumbled upon this same sentence that caused debate a decade and a half ago.

While totally plausible, I don't remember seeing that mentioned in what I read, so I went back to the Haycraft Commission Report. While there are some lines about Arabs fearing they're being attacked later on in the timeline (I.e., the line User:MX44 referenced above), I could not find references of that on 1 May.

It looks like someone finally added a source, but it's from a 2021 opinion piece in Al Jazeera: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/5/2/why-the-events-in-jaffa-of-may-1-1921-are-important-today

First, under WP:RSOPINION, this probably shouldn't be used as a source.

Second, this sentence that's being listed as the "source" tracks very closely to the line in the original Wikipedia article from 15 years prior:

Wikipedia: "Hearing of the fighting, the Arabs of Jaffa feared they were under attack by the Jews and went on the offensive"

vs

Al Jazeera: "fearing the gunfire signalled a Jewish attack on the neighbourhood, they attacked first"

So it appears we've got some self-referencing problems too.

As such, I'm going to strike the whole sentence. That means we also lose the bit about the Arabs being "aware of a Communist pamphlet." That's also probably for the best. While pamphlets were printed (as noted earlier in the article), I don't think it's been assessed how much salience that publishing endeavor had.

On that note, I'm also going to make a couple changes to lead sentence correcting the date of the "night before," and adding Hebrew to the list of flyer languages. Here's the line from p. 22 of the Haycraft report:

"On Saturday night... distributing proclamations printed, some in Hebrew and Yiddish, others in Arabic."

The current source at the end of the paragraph references the Segev book. I double checked my copy and it appears that's only in reference to the sentence it's attached to, not the previous ones.

So if someone knows of later scholarship that found this to be incorrect, please correct the article and source!

Thank you! Reve (talk) 19:53, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

EDIT: I didn't see that the Al Jazerra opinion piece was also used to provide the numbers for the total dead and injured. These same numbers appear in the Haycroft report, so I'm switching the reference to that.

I removed the "hundreds homeless" part of the sentence since that's unsourced AFAICT.

Reve (talk) 20:09, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

GA Review

I am failing this article this time, unfortunately, because of several, very important issues:

1. The article refers to only three sources, onyl one of which is an inline source. This is a major problem, and I do not feel confident that the article will pass GA without at least 5 more references.
2. The lead is much too short for an article of this size, and needs to be expanded to summarise the whole article properly.
3. I think a general cleanup and improvement of prose might be required. Please not that this is a minor problem, and it is bordering in this regard. I'm not surprised however, that a cleanup tag is on this article.
4. While not an official criteria, it would be nice if this article had a couple of images. Not imperative, but would perhaps even tidy the text up a little.

Good luck in regards to improvements to this article. Any questions regarding my decision should be forwarded to my talk page. Thanks, and best of luck! Anonymous Dissident^Talk 13:52, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

POV

The first paragraph describe 'Riots' and 'Killing' in Palestine, as it was regular civil war. However, the article itself give report of Arabs attack Jews, when Jews with the British police use self-defence against the attackers, so 49 Arab attakers were killed. It is POV to describe the riots as just riots without mentioning that there was one side of attackers, and one side who use only self-defence. Netanel h (talk) 12:24, 8 October 2009 (UTC)

Sections?

Why on earth are the Jaffa riots placed under the "Anti-Jewish pogroms by Muslims" section? All official bodies of investigation agreed that the riots were a spontaneous affair—the result of a volatile political situation, not a desire to kill Jews. The word "pogrom" is far too loaded to be used with such a nuanced topic. Same for "ethnic cleansing." —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.228.59.220 (talk) 16:10, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

Casualties

Report of the Jaffa district governor, 9/5/1921, 7:15 pm:

41 dead Jews: 38 in Jaffa, 3 in Petach Tikva

42 dead Arabs Muslims: 11 in Jaffa, 14 in Petach Tikva, 14 in Yahoudieh, 3 in Rehovoth

2 dead Arab Christians: 2 in Jaffa

243 wounded Jews

130 wounded Arabs

Report on women and children:

1 Jewish woman and 1 Arab woman killed. 10 Jewish women and 2 Arab women wounded. 1 Jewish child and 1 Arab child killed. No Jewish child and 2 Arab children wounded.

Summary on the night of May 3rd:

30 Jews brought in dead, 4 died in hospital, 143 wounded and hospitalized, 77 wounded, treated and discharged (total: 34 dead, 220 wounded)

14 Arabs brought in dead, 2 died in hospital, 42 wounded and hospitalized, 47 wounded, treated and discharged (total 16 dead, 89 wounded)

Of the 47 Jewish victims:

• 42 were commemorated in the mass grave in the Trumpeldor Cemetery: 38 identified bodies, 1 unidentified body and 3 missing persons (2 of whom are also commemorated in the Garden of the Missing in Action). Another 3 casualties who were killed in separate attacks in June and July were laid to rest in the same grave
• 4 were buried in Segula cemetery.
• 1 was buried in Mount Scopus.

The man buried in Jerusalem, as well as one of those in Tel Aviv, died in hospital a few weeks after the attack. --ארינמל (talk) 09:55, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Commentary moved from article

I removed this commentary from the article. It deserves discussion but that is what this talk page is for. Zero^talk 10:06, 4 July 2021 (UTC)

[According to the Haycraft Commission, this entry is not an accurate representation of what happened. Indeed, the almost equal deaths of both "Jews" and "Arabs" clearly shows violence was perpetrated not just from one segment of society. Specifically, the referenced case in which perprators "split open the victims' skulls" could in fact be a reference to the murder of an Arab father and daughter committed by "a Jewish police sergeant from Tel Aviv" on the 2 May. The excerpt (on page 29 of the report) is as follows:

"In the other case an Arab living with his wife and family was about to send away his family for greater security, when a party of Jews, led by a man whom the Arabs identified as a Jewish police sergeant from Tel Aviv, broke open the door. The Arab was shot in the stomach and beaten as he lay, and when his little daughter ran to her father her head was cleft by a blow from an axe. The woman was beaten and a boy wounded."

While the British media at the time reported this incident as a "Race Riot" it is important to remember that the dichotomy of "Jew" and "Arab" is a direct result of British antisemitism and European racial theory. As Ethan Katz notes in his essay “Imperial Entanglement”, Britain’s antisemitic racialization of Jews, as well as the interconnectedness of religious communities within the region, made it difficult for colonial administrators to “establish clear categories such as ‘white,’ ‘non-white,’ ‘European,’ ‘native,’ ‘Jew,’ ‘Muslim,’ ‘Arab,’ and ‘Berber’.” This type of categorization erased Arab Jews, among others, from population statistics and official report at the time, and much of the historical record.]

— Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.138.8.151 (talk • contribs)

References