The Bloody Day in Jaffa (Hebrew: יום הדמים ביפו) refers to a spate of violent attacks on Jews that began on 19 April 1936 in Jaffa. The event is often described as marking the start of the 1936–39 Arab revolt in Palestine.
Contents
Immediate background
The immediate prelude to this riot began on 15 April 1936 with the 1936 Anabta shooting in which Arab followers of Izz ad-Din al-Qassam set up a roadblock on the Nablus to Tulkarm road, stopping about 20 vehicles to demand cash and weapons; separating out 3 Jews from other occupants of the vehicles. The Arabs then shot the 3 Jewish men; only 1 survived. The 2 Jewish drivers who were murdered were, Israel (alt.: Yisrael) Khazan, who was killed instantly, and Zvi Dannenberg, who died five days later. In an act of vigilante vengeance, the following day members of the militant Jewish faction Irgun shot and killed two Arab workers sleeping in a hut near Petah Tikva. On 17 April, the funeral for Yisrael Khazan, one of the Jews shot at Anabta was held in Tel Aviv, attracting a crowd of thousands, some of whom beat Arab passersby and vandalized property.
On April 19, rumors circulated in the Arab community that "many Arabs had been killed by Jews," and Arabs began to attack Jews in the streets of Jaffa. An Arab Mob marched on the Jewish-owned Anglo-Palestine Bank, The British Mandatory police guarding the Bank defended themselves by firing into the mob, killing two of the rioters. This incited the mob to "fury" and Jews began to be killed in the streets.
Riot
According to Aryeh L. Avneri, the rioting "broke out" first among the Haurani dockworkers in Jaffa Port.
A mob of Arab men rampaged through the mixed Muslim, Christian and Jewish streets of Jaffa, killing and beating up Jews and wrecking Jewish homes and businesses.
11 people were reported dead in the first day's rioting. These included 2 Arabs "shot by British police in self-defense," and 9 Jews, with dozens of others wounded, "most of the Jewish injured bore knife woulds. The rioting went on for a total of 3 days, it was finally suppressed by the British military.
Refugees
The continuing threat of violence combined with the destruction of Jewish property and arson attacks that destroyed Jewish homes forced 12,000 Jews to flee Jaffa as refugees. 9,500 were housed by the Tel Aviv municipality, imposing a heavy financial burden on the city . 75 temporary sheters were created in schools, synagogues, government and industrial buildings. During may and June the Haganah was able to stabilize the security situation to the point where about 4,000 of the refugees were able to return to their homes. Others found housing privately, so that by July only 4,800 remained in public refugee camps; 3,200 of these were utterly destitute. By November, Jewish charities had placed even the destitute refugees in housing, and the refugee camps were closed.
Annexation of Jaffa to Tel Aviv
One impact of this pogrom was the start of a political demand that Jaffa be incorporated into the city of Tel Aviv.
In literary memory
Chapter 11 of Leon Uris's bestselling 1984 novel, The Haj, is entitled Jaffa - April 19, 1936." The chapter described that day, "Between the Ancient Arab port city and the new Jewish city of Tel Aviv stood a wasteland of hovels peopled by downtrodden oriental Jews, Arabs, and a purgatory of mixed marriages. In the middle of evening prayers agents of the Mufti ran into the mosques of Jaffa, on signal, screaming that the Jews were slaughtering Arabs in Tel Aviv..."
In The Blood of His Servants, Malcolm MacPherson writes of 19 April as the day on which his main character, a journalist who has survived the Holocaust although his family had not, began "to understand that events in Palestine paralleled events in Europe, with nearly the same disastrous effects. The British," he realizes, "appeased Palestinian Arabs," in order to protect their regional strategic interests, while "the proto-Fascist Mufti Haj Amin el-Husseini... created the Arab National Committee to coordinate" the "campaign of armed attacks" on Jews of which this was the beginning.
In is 1968 book, Days of Fire, Shmuel Katz, a member of the first Knesset, wrote of his personal horror on arriving in Tel Aviv from Jerusalem on April 19th to find himself in the midst of a pogrom.