Safed - 1834

"This pogrom is known in Jewish history as 'The great plunder of Safed' and it lasted from the 15 of June 1834 to the 17 of July of that year. This pogrom had been forgotten because this whole era of pre – Zionist Palestine, (or the Land of Israel prior to the emergence of the Zionist movement) has been cast aside by more powerful events that happened later, namely the beginning of the Zionist enterprise..."

"The Palestinian Arabs of the Eastern Galilee took advantage of a regional crisis, the war between Egypt and Turkey, to attack their Jewish neighbors and strip them of everything they had: clothes, properties, houses, and the like. In the process people were beaten in the streets, many times to death, synagogues destroyed and holy books desecrated. An entire community of 2,000 souls (Kinglake says 4,000) was forced into hiding for 33 days, in caves, ruins, inhospitable mountaintops, and basements. In that mayhem there were good Arabs who saved lives, like the people of the village of Ein Zeitim and a few individuals, Muslims and Christians from the city itself, but there were also the double crossers who promised to help for a large sum of money, only to hand over the Jews to the rioting mob outside the hideout. For 33 days the lives of the Jews of Safed had practically no value, and anyone of them who showed his or her face in public was at risk of been beaten to death, sometimes by people they knew as neighbors or business associates.
As with all cases of mass racial violence, there were inciters and a government unwilling to do anything about them. In this case, an inciter, a self-proclaimed prophet by the name of Muhammed Damoor who, according to the English traveler Alexander William Kinglake, 'prophesied' the plunder for which he agitated.

Like all other pogroms, it demonstrates the helplessness of the Jewish condition prior to the formation of the state of Israel. Without it, Jews could not defend themselves, and cound not demand treatment as equals, thus the life of a Jew had no actual value. It may have been inevitable that the first Zionist settlers were not immigrants but natives of the land. People like Yoel Moshe Salomon from Jerusalem and Elazar Rokach of Safed and their followers, who saw the answer to their people's plight outside their walled cities and founded Petah Tikvah and Rosh – Pinah in 1878, beginning what is known as practical Zionism."