This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
A week of intercommunal violence swept Mandatory Palestine in August 1929, beginning with a dispute in Jerusalem over Jewish prayer rights at the Western Wall and spreading, after rumors that Jews intended to seize the al-Aqsa Mosque compound, into mob attacks on Jewish communities across the country. The worst violence fell on Hebron, where an Arab mob killed dozens of the town's ancient Jewish community over a single day, and on Safed, where a smaller but similarly deadly attack struck the Jewish quarter. British Mandate police and troops, thinly deployed, arrived too late to stop either massacre.
The proximate trigger was a dispute over Jewish prayer practices at the Western Wall, sacred to Judaism as the last remnant of the Second Temple, fused with Arab fears, stoked by rumor, that Jews intended to seize control of the adjoining al-Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock, sacred to Islam as the site of Muhammad's night journey. Anne Cohen reads the violence as fusing a religious dispute over sacred space with an emerging national conflict over the land itself, a combination historians treat as the moment the dispute over Palestine hardened from primarily a land and immigration conflict into an intercommunal one.