The Shaw Commission and Hebron's Empty Decades

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The British government appointed the Shaw Commission, which reported in 1930 that the immediate cause of the riots was Arab fear over Jewish intentions at the Western Wall and recommended clarifying the status quo there; a companion inquiry, the Hope Simpson report, recommended limits on Jewish land purchase and immigration. The Commission's official inquiry named Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, and his allies as having stoked the rumor that touched off the unrest, without finding that they had planned the Hebron and Safed killings specifically, and a small number of Arab defendants were tried and executed by Mandate courts for those killings at the time.

Hebron's ancient, largely non-Zionist Jewish community did not return until Israel took the West Bank in 1967, thirty eight years after its survivors were evacuated under British escort. Estimates for the week's total dead range from two hundred forty nine to three hundred across the whole country, and no international body has since made a formal genocide or crimes-against-humanity determination on the riots, the Shaw Commission having been a British Mandate fact-finding inquiry rather than a criminal or human-rights tribunal.