 Plundering the Judengasse in a Jewish ghetto during the Fettmilch uprising. Frankfurt, 22 August 1614 |
A pogrom is a violent riot incited with the aim of massacring or expelling an ethnic or religious group, usually applied to attacks on Jews. The term entered the English language from Russian to describe late 19th- and early 20th-century attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire (mostly within the Pale of Settlement). Retrospectively, similar attacks against Jews which occurred in other times and places were renamed pogroms. Contemporarily, the word is also used to describe publicly sanctioned purgative attacks against non-Jewish groups. The characteristics of a pogrom vary widely, depending on the specific incident, at times leading to, or culminating in, massacres.
Significant pogroms which occurred in the Russian Empire included the Odessa pogroms, Warsaw pogrom (1881), Kishinev pogrom (1903), Kiev pogrom (1905), and Białystok pogrom (1906). After the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917, several pogroms occurred amidst the power struggles in Eastern Europe, including the Lwów pogrom (1918) and Kiev pogroms (1919). The most significant pogrom which occurred in Nazi Germany was the 1938 Kristallnacht. At least 91 Jews were killed, a further thirty thousand were arrested and subsequently incarcerated in concentration camps, a thousand synagogues burned, and over seven thousand Jewish businesses destroyed or damaged. Notorious pogroms of World War II included the 1941 Farhud in Iraq, the July 1941 Iași pogrom in Romania – in which over 13,200 Jews were killed – as well as the Jedwabne pogrom in German-occupied Poland. Post-World War II pogroms included the 1945 Tripoli pogrom, the 1946 Kielce pogrom, the 1947 Aleppo pogrom, and the 1955 Istanbul pogrom.
Other ethnic and religious minorities have also been victims of this type of violence. Events include the 1984 Sikh massacre in which 3,000 Sikhs were killed and the 2002 Gujarat pogrom against Indian Muslims.
The word pogrom
Etymology
First recorded in English in 1882, the Russian word pogróm (погро́м, pronounced [pɐˈɡrom]) is derived from the common prefix po- (по-) and the verb gromít' (громи́ть, [ɡrɐˈmʲitʲ]) meaning 'to destroy, wreak havoc, demolish violently'. The noun pogrom, which has a relatively short history, is used in English and many other languages as a loanword, possibly borrowed from Yiddish (where the word takes the form פאָגראָם). Its modern widespread circulation began with the antisemitic violence in the Russian Empire in 1881–1883.
Usage of the word
According to Encyclopædia Britannica, "the term is usually applied to attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, [and] the first extensive pogroms followed the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881". The Wiley-Blackwell Dictionary of Modern European History Since 1789 states that pogroms "were antisemitic disturbances that periodically occurred within the tsarist empire." However, the term is widely used to refer to many events which occurred prior to the Anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire. Historian of Russian Jewry John Klier writes in Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881–1882: "By the twentieth century, the word 'pogrom' had become a generic term in English for all forms of collective violence directed against Jews." Abramson points out that "in mainstream usage the word has come to imply an act of antisemitism", since while "Jews have not been the only group to suffer under this phenomenon ... historically Jews have been frequent victims of such violence."
The term is also used in reference to attacks on non-Jewish ethnic minorities, and accordingly, some scholars do not include antisemitism as the defining characteristic of pogroms. Reviewing the word's uses in scholarly literature, historian Werner Bergmann proposes that a pogrom should be "defined as a unilateral, nongovernmental form of collective violence that is initiated by the majority population against a largely defenseless minority ethnic group, and occurring when the majority expect the state to provide them [sic] with no assistance in overcoming a (perceived) threat from the minority". However, Bergmann adds that in Western usage, the word's "anti-Semitic overtones" have been retained. Historian David Engel supports this view, writing that while "there can be no logically or empirically compelling grounds for declaring that some particular episode does or does not merit the label [pogrom]," the majority of the incidents which are "habitually" described as pogroms took place in societies that were significantly divided by ethnicity or religion where the violence was committed by members of the higher-ranking group against members of a stereotyped lower-ranking group with which they expressed some complaint, and where the members of the higher-ranking group justified their acts of violence by claiming that the law of the land would not be used to prevent the alleged complaint.
There is no universally accepted set of characteristics which define the term pogrom. Klier writes that "when applied indiscriminately to events in Eastern Europe, the term can be misleading, the more so when it implies that 'pogroms' were regular events in the region and that they always shared common features." Use of the term pogrom to refer to events in 1918–19 in Polish cities (including the Kielce pogrom, the Pinsk massacre and the Lwów pogrom) was specifically avoided in the 1919 Morgenthau Report; the word "excesses" was employed instead because the authors argued that the use of the term "pogrom" required a situation to be antisemitic rather than political in nature, which meant that it was inapplicable to the conditions which exist in a war zone. Media use of the term pogrom to refer to the 1991 Crown Heights riot caused public controversy. In 2008, two separate attacks in the West Bank by Israeli Jewish settlers on Palestinian Arabs were characterized as pogroms by then Prime Minister of Israel Ehud Olmert.
Werner Bergmann suggests that all such incidents have a particularly unifying characteristic: "By the collective attribution of a threat, the pogrom differs from other forms of violence, such as lynchings, which are directed at individual members of a minority group, while the imbalance of power in favor of the rioters distinguishes pogroms from other forms of riots (food riots, race riots or 'communal riots' between evenly matched groups); and again, the low level of organization separates them from vigilantism, terrorism, massacre and genocide".
History of anti-Jewish pogroms
The first recorded anti-Jewish riots took place in Alexandria in the year 38 CE, followed by the more known riot of 66 CE. Other notable events took place in Europe during the Middle Ages. Jewish communities were targeted in 1189 and 1190 in England and throughout Europe during the Crusades and the Black Death of 1348–1350, including in Toulon, Erfurt, Basel, Aragon, Flanders and Strasbourg. Some 510 Jewish communities were destroyed during this period, extending further to the Brussels massacre of 1370. On Holy Saturday of 1389, a riot began in Prague that led to the burning of the Jewish quarter, the killing of many Jews, and the suicide of many Jews trapped in the main synagogue; the number of dead was estimated at 400–500 men, women and children. Attacks against Jews also took place in Barcelona and other Spanish cities during the massacre of 1391.
The brutal murders of Jews and Poles occurred during the Khmelnytsky Uprising of 1648–1657 in present-day Ukraine, then within the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Modern historians give estimates of the scale of the murders by Khmelnytsky's Cossacks ranging between 40,000 and 100,000 men, women and children, or perhaps many more. However, these figures are contested as being too high, with the lowest estimates suggesting that 18,000–20,000 Jews died out of a total population of 40,000, many due to disease and famine.
An outbreak of violence against Jews (Hep-Hep riots) occurred at the beginning of the 19th century in reaction to Jewish emancipation in the German Confederation.
Pogroms in the Russian Empire
The Russian Empire, which previously had very few Jews, acquired territories in the Russian Partition that contained large Jewish populations, during the military partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793 and 1795. In conquered territories, a new political entity called the Pale of Settlement was formed in 1791 by Catherine the Great. Most Jews from the former Commonwealth were allowed to reside only within the Pale, including families expelled by royal decree from St. Petersburg, Moscow and other large Russian cities. The 1821 Odessa pogroms marked the beginning of the 19th century pogroms in Tsarist Russia; there were four more such pogroms in Odessa before the end of the century. Following the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 by Narodnaya Volya, anti-Jewish events turned into a wave of over 200 pogroms by their modern definition, which lasted for several years. Jewish self-governing Kehillah were abolished by Tsar Nicholas I in 1844.
There is some disagreement about the level of planning from the Tsarist authorities and the motives for the attacks.
The first in 20th-century Russia was the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 in which 49 Jews were killed, hundreds wounded, 700 homes destroyed and 600 businesses pillaged. The Kishinev pogrom occurred after a newspaper promoted a blood libel (a false claim that Jews had murdered a boy to use his blood in a ritual). Local authorities supported the perpetrators of the pogram, and Tsar Nicholas II excused the murders they committed.
Also in 1903, pogroms took place in Gomel (Belarus), Smela, Feodosiya and Melitopol (Ukraine). Extreme savagery was typified by mutilations of the wounded. They were followed by the Zhitomir pogrom (with 29 killed), and the Kiev pogrom of October 1905 resulting in a massacre of approximately 100 Jews. In three years between 1903 and 1906, about 660 pogroms were recorded in Ukraine and Bessarabia; half a dozen more in Belorussia, carried out with the Russian government's complicity, but no anti-Jewish pogroms were recorded in Poland. At about that time, the Jewish Labor Bund began organizing armed self-defense units ready to shoot back, and the pogroms subsided for a number of years. According to professor Colin Tatz, between 1881 and 1920 there were 1,326 pogroms in Ukraine (see: Southwestern Krai parts of the Pale) which took the lives of 70,000 to 250,000 civilian Jews, leaving half a million homeless. This violence across Eastern Europe prompted a wave of Jewish migration westward that totaled about 2.5 million people.
Eastern Europe after World War I
Large-scale pogroms, which began in the Russian Empire several decades earlier, intensified during the period of the Russian Civil War in the aftermath of World War I. Professor Zvi Gitelman (in A Century of Ambivalence, originally published in 1988) estimated that only in 1918–1919 over 1,200 pogroms took place in Ukraine, thus amounting to the greatest slaughter of Jews in Eastern Europe since 1648. The Kiev pogroms of 1919, according to Gitelman, were the first of a subsequent wave of pogroms in which between 30,000 and 70,000 Jews were massacred across Ukraine; although more recent assessments put the Jewish death toll at more than 100,000.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his controversial 2002 book Two Hundred Years Together provided additional statistics from research conducted by Nahum Gergel (1887–1931), published in Yiddish in 1928 and English in 1951. Gergel counted 1,236 incidents of anti-Jewish violence between 1918 and 1921, and estimated that 887 mass pogroms occurred, the remainder being classified as "excesses" not assuming mass proportions. Of all the pogroms accounted for in Gergel's research:
- About 40 percent were perpetrated by the Ukrainian People's Republic forces led by Symon Petliura. The Republic issued orders condemning pogroms, but lacked authority to intervene. After May 1919 the Directory lost its role as a credible governing body; almost 75 percent of pogroms occurred between May and September of that year. Thousands of Jews were killed only for being Jewish, without any political affiliations.
- 25 percent by the Ukrainian Green Army and various Ukrainian nationalist gangs,
- 17 percent by the White Army, especially the forces of Anton Denikin,
- 8.5 percent of Gergel's total was attributed to pogroms carried out by men of the Red Army (more specifically Semyon Budenny's First Cavalry, most of whose soldiers had previously served under Denikin). These pogroms were not, however, sanctioned by the Bolshevik leadership; the high command "vigorously condemned these pogroms and disarmed the guilty regiments", and the pogroms would soon be condemned by Mikhail Kalinin in a speech made at a military parade in Ukraine.
Gergel's overall figures, which are generally considered conservative, are based on the testimony of witnesses and newspaper reports collected by the Mizrakh-Yidish Historiche Arkhiv which was first based in Kiev, then Berlin and later New York. The English version of Gergel's article was published in 1951 in the YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science titled "The Pogroms in the Ukraine in 1918–1921".
On 8 August 1919, during the Polish–Soviet War, Polish troops took over Minsk in Operation Minsk. They killed 31 Jews suspected of supporting the Bolshevist movement, beat and attacked many more, looted 377 Jewish-owned shops (aided by the local civilians) and ransacked many private homes. Morgenthau's report of October 1919 stated "there is no question that some of the Jewish leaders exaggerated these evils." According to Elissa Bemporad, the "violence endured by the Jewish population under the Poles encouraged popular support for the Red Army, as Jewish public opinion welcomed the establishment of the Belorussian SSR."
After the First World War, during the localized armed conflicts of independence, 72 Jews were killed and 443 injured in the 1918 Lwów pogrom. The following year, pogroms were reported by the New York Tribune in several cities in the newly established Second Polish Republic.
Pogroms in Europe and the Americas before World War II
Argentina 1919
In 1919, a pogrom occurred in Argentina, during the Tragic Week. It had an added element, as it was called to attack Jews and Catalans indiscriminately. The reasons are not clear, especially considering that, in the case of Buenos Aires, the Catalan colony, established mainly in the neighborhood of Montserrat, came from the foundation of the city, but could have been the result of the influence of Spanish nationalism, which at the time described Catalans as a Semitic ethnicity.
Britain and Ireland
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In the early 20th century, pogroms broke out elsewhere in the world as well. In 1904 in Ireland, the Limerick boycott caused several Jewish families to leave the town. During the 1911 Tredegar riot in Wales, Jewish homes and businesses were looted and burned over a period of a week, before the British Army was called in by the then Home Secretary Winston Churchill, who described the riot as a "pogrom".
In the north of Ireland during the early 1920s, violent riots which were aimed at the expulsion of a religious group took place. In 1920, Lisburn and Belfast saw violence related to the Irish War of Independence and partition of Ireland. On 21 July 1920 in Belfast, Protestant Loyalists marched on the Harland and Wolff shipyards and forced over 11,000 Catholic and left-wing Protestant workers from their jobs. The sectarian rioting that followed resulted in about 20 deaths in just three days. These sectarian actions are often referred to as the Belfast Pogrom. In Lisburn, County Antrim, on 23–25 August 1920 Protestant loyalist crowds looted and burned practically every Catholic business in the town and attacked Catholic homes. About 1,000 people, a third of the town's Catholics, fled Lisburn. By the end of the first six months of 1922, hundreds of people had been killed in sectarian violence in newly formed Northern Ireland. On a per capita basis, four Roman Catholics were killed for every Protestant.
In the worst incident of anti-Jewish violence in Britain during the interwar period, the "Pogrom of Mile End", that occurred in 1936, 200 Blackshirt youths ran amok in Stepney in the East End of London, smashing the windows of Jewish shops and homes and throwing an elderly man and young girl through a window. Though less serious, attacks on Jews were also reported in Manchester and Leeds in the north of England.
Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe
The first pogrom in Nazi Germany was the Kristallnacht, often called Pogromnacht, in which at least 91 Jews were killed, a further 30,000 arrested and incarcerated in Nazi concentration camps, over 1,000 synagogues burned, and over 7,000 Jewish businesses destroyed or damaged.
During World War II, Nazi German death squads encouraged local populations in German-occupied Europe to commit pogroms against Jews. Brand new battalions of Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz (trained by SD agents) were mobilized from among the German minorities.
A large number of pogroms occurred during the Holocaust at the hands of non-Germans. Perhaps the deadliest of these Holocaust-era pogroms was the Iași pogrom in Romania, perpetrated by Ion Antonescu, in which as many as 13,266 Jews were killed by Romanian citizens, police and military officials.
On 1–2 June 1941, in the two-day Farhud pogrom in Iraq, perpetrated by Rashid Ali, Yunis al-Sabawi, and the al-Futuwa youth, "rioters murdered between 150 and 180 Jews, injured 600 others, and raped an undetermined number of women. They also looted some 1,500 stores and homes". Also, 300–400 non-Jewish rioters were killed in the attempt to quell the violence.
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In June–July 1941, encouraged by the Einsatzgruppen in the city of Lviv the Ukrainian People's Militia perpetrated two citywide pogroms in which around 6,000 Polish Jews were murdered, in retribution for alleged collaboration with the Soviet NKVD. In Lithuania, some local police led by Algirdas Klimaitis and Lithuanian partisans – consisting of LAF units reinforced by 3,600 deserters from the 29th Lithuanian Territorial Corps of the Red Army promulgated anti-Jewish pogroms in Kaunas along with occupying Nazis. On 25–26 June 1941, about 3,800 Jews were killed and synagogues and Jewish settlements burned.
During the Jedwabne pogrom of July 1941, ethnic Poles burned at least 340 Jews in a barn (Institute of National Remembrance) in the presence of Nazi German Ordnungspolizei. The role of the German Einsatzgruppe B remains the subject of debate.
Europe between World War II and 1948
After the end of World War II, a series of violent antisemitic incidents occurred against returning Jews throughout Europe, particularly in the Soviet-occupied East where Nazi propagandists had extensively promoted the notion of a Jewish-Communist conspiracy (see Anti-Jewish violence in Poland, 1944–1946 and Anti-Jewish violence in Eastern Europe, 1944–1946). Anti-Jewish riots also took place in Britain in 1947.
Asia and North Africa before 1948
1834 pogroms in Ottoman Syria
There were two pogroms in Ottoman Syria in 1834.
1910 Shiraz pogrom
The 1910 Shiraz pogrom was a violent anti-Jewish riot that took place in the Jewish quarter of Shiraz, Iran, on October 30, 1910. Sparked by false accusations of ritual murder, the event resulted in the deaths of 12 Jews and left the city's Jewish community entirely destitute.
1921 Urga pogrom
The 1921 Urga pogrom occurred during the final stages of the Russian Civil War, while Urga (present-day Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia) was occupied by forces loyal to Russian White Army warlord Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg.
1929 in Mandatory Palestine
In Mandatory Palestine under British administration, Jews were targeted by Arabs in the 1929 Hebron massacre during the 1929 Palestine riots. They followed other violent incidents such as the 1920 Nebi Musa riots and 1921 Jaffa riots.
Thrace pogroms in Turkey in 1934
The 1934 Thrace pogroms (Turkish: Trakya Olayları, "Thrace incidents" or "Thrace events", Ladino: Furtuna/La Furtuna, "Storm") were a series of violent attacks against Jewish citizens of Turkey in June and July 1934 in the Thrace region of Turkey. One of the main crucial factors behind the events was the Resettlement Law passed by the Turkish Assembly on 14 June 1934.
Constantine Pogrom in French Algeria in 1934
The 1934 Constantine riots were an incident of antisemitic violence in the Algerian city of Constantine, targeting the local Jewish population. A mob of around 300 local Algerians attacked the Jewish quarter and targeted Jewish businesses and homes over a period of several hours, with the violence spreading to nearby towns. The French colonial authorities did little to rein in the violence.
It is uncertain what the exact cause of the riots was, but various accounts suggest that the riots were triggered by an altercation between a Jewish man and some Muslims at the Sidi Lakhdar Mosque in Constantine. Multiple sources report that 25 Jews and 3 Muslims died over the course of the three-day riot, and several Jewish establishments were pillaged. The events have been described as a pogrom.
British North Africa in 1945
Anti-Jewish rioters killed over 140 Jews in the 1945 Anti-Jewish Riots in Tripolitania. The 1945 Anti-Jewish riots in Tripolitania was the most violent rioting against Jews in North Africa in modern times. From 5 November to 7 November 1945, more than 140 Jews were killed and many more injured in a pogrom in British-military-controlled Tripolitania. 38 Jews were killed in Tripoli from where the riots spread. 40 were killed in Amrus, 34 in Zanzur, 7 in Tajura, 13 in Zawia and 3 in Qusabat.
In Syria in 1947 and Morocco 1948
Following the start of the 1947–48 Civil War in Mandatory Palestine, a number of anti-Jewish events occurred throughout the Arab world, some of which have been described as pogroms. In 1947, half of Aleppo's 10,000 Jews left the city in the wake of the Aleppo riots, while other anti-Jewish riots took place in British Aden and then in 1948 in the French Moroccan cities of Oujda and Jerada.
Pogroms after 1948
1955 Istanbul pogrom
The Istanbul pogrom, also known as the Istanbul riots, were a series of state-sponsored anti-Greek mob attacks directed primarily at Istanbul's Greek minority on 6–7 September 1955. The pogrom was orchestrated by the governing Democrat Party in Turkey with the cooperation of various security organizations (Tactical Mobilisation Group, Counter-Guerrilla and National Security Service). The events were triggered by the bombing of the Turkish consulate in Thessaloniki, Macedonia, Greece, – the house where Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was born in 1881. The bomb was actually planted by a Turkish usher at the consulate, who was later arrested and confessed. The Turkish press was silent about the arrest, and instead, it insinuated that Greeks had set off the bomb.
The pogrom is occasionally described as a genocide against Greeks, since, per Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, despite its relatively low number of deaths, it "satisfies the criteria of article 2 of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (UNCG) because the intent to destroy in whole or in part the Greek minority in Istanbul was demonstrably present, the pogrom having been orchestrated by the government of Turkish Prime Minister Adnan Menderes" and "As a result of the pogrom, the Greek minority eventually emigrated from Turkey."
A Turkish mob, most of whose members were trucked into the city in advance, assaulted Istanbul's Greek community for nine hours. Although the mob did not explicitly call for the killing of Greeks, over a dozen people died during or after the attacks as a result of beatings and arson. Armenians and Jews were also harmed. The police were mostly ineffective, and the violence continued until the government declared martial law in Istanbul, called in the army and ordered it to put down the riots. The material damage was estimated at US$500 million (equivalent to $6 billion in 2025), including the burning of churches and the devastation of shops and private homes.
The pogrom greatly accelerated emigration of Christian Greeks from Turkey, in particular the Greeks of Istanbul. The Greek population of Turkey declined from 119,822 in 1927, to about 7,000 in 1978. In Istanbul alone, the Greek-speaking population decreased from 65,108 to 49,081 between 1955 and 1960. The 2008 figures released by the Turkish Foreign Ministry placed the number of Turkish citizens of Greek descent at 3,000–4,000; while according to the Human Rights Watch (2006) their number was estimated to be 2,500.
The attacks have been described as a continuation of a process of Turkification that started with the decline of the Ottoman Empire, as roughly 40% of the properties attacked belonged to other minorities. The pogrom has been compared in some media to the Kristallnacht, the 1938 pogrom against Jews throughout Nazi Germany.
Pogroms against Alevis in Turkey (1978 and 1980)
Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982
The Sabra and Shatila massacre is occasionally referred to as a pogrom.
1984 anti-Sikh riots
Sikhs were targeted in Delhi and other parts of India during a pogrom in October 1984.
May 1998 pogrom of Chinese Indonesians
Indonesia's minority ethnic Chinese population were targeted in a pogrom in the lead-up to the downfall of the Suharto regime. The events were mainly in the cities of Medan, Jakarta, and Surakarta, with smaller incidents in other parts of Indonesia.
Under the Suharto regime, there had been rampant and systematic discrimination against Chinese Indonesians. During the pogrom, there were extensive looting and torching of Chinese Indonesian properties. There were also widespread murders and rape against this minority group.
Pogroms and race riots in the 21st century
2002 Gujarat pogrom
The 2002 Gujarat riots, also known as the Gujarat pogrom, were a three-day period of inter-communal violence in the Indian state of Gujarat.
The violence was connected to the Ayodhya dispute and the demolition of the Babri Masjid. The burning of a train in Godhra on 27 February 2002, which caused the deaths of 58 Hindu pilgrims and karsevaks returning from Ayodhya, is cited as having instigated the violence.
Following the initial riot incidents, there were further outbreaks of violence in Ahmedabad for three months; statewide, there were further outbreaks of violence against the minority Muslim population of Gujarat for the next year.
2005 Cronulla riots
The 2005 Cronulla riots (also known as the "Cronulla Race Riots" or the "Cronulla pogrom") were a series of race riots in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.
Attacks in the Israeli occupied West Bank in 2008
In 2008, two attacks in the Occupied West Bank by Jewish Israeli settlers on Palestinian Arabs were labeled as pogroms by then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
2017 anti-Rohingya pogroms
The 2017 Rohingya genocide, was a series of pogroms and other violence committed against the Rohingya minority of Myanmar, particularly in Rakhine State. Facebook was accused of inciting mob violence via social media.
West Bank settler pogroms in the early 2020s
There were many attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank leading up to and during the full scale war in the Gaza Strip starting in 2023.
The Huwara rampage in February 2023
On 26 February, 2023, violent riots broke out from Israeli settlers in Huwara after two Israelis were shot and killed by a Palestinian gunman there earlier that afternoon. The rioters killed one Palestinian, 37-year-old Sameh Aqtash, and wounded dozens, while torching houses and cars.
Top Israeli general in the West Bank, Yehuda Fuchs, referred to the Israeli settlers' actions as a "pogrom": "The incident in Hawara was a pogrom carried out by outlaws," and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned "vigilantism".
Journalist Gideon Levy wrote an editorial in Haaretz saying that Israel's military had failed to stop the violence stating: "whether out of apathy and complacency, or because they were very deliberately turning a blind eye." A legal expert said that the rioters could face war crime charges if Israel did not conduct an investigation into the perpetrators.
Jewish American documentary maker Simone Zimmerman also used the term pogrom to describe the attacks on Palestinians by Israeli settlers in Hawara in February 2023. Zimmerman described these attacks as being committed by settlers while the Israeli army stood by and let it happen.
Hamas-initiated attacks on 7 October 2023
On 7 October 2023, Hamas' Al Qassam Brigades militant wing (based in the Gaza Strip), and other groups and individuals incited to join them, initiated an attack on Israel. In addition to the military, the attack also targeted civilian communities and resulted in the deaths of over 695 Israeli civilians, most of whom were Israeli Jews and some of whom were Arab Israelis. In the attacks Al Qassam and other armed groups from Gaza also took approximately 250 people, many of which were non-Israelis hostage, including infants, elderly, and people who had already been severely injured.
The 7 October attacks were described as a "pogrom" by Suzanne Rutland, who defined a pogrom as a government-approved attack on Jews and pointed out that the attacks were initiated by the Hamas, the governing authority of Gaza. Others who have described the 7 October attacks as a pogrom include then-UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron, and think tanks such as the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. An editorial by the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board referred to 7 October attacks as a pogrom.
Survivors of October 7 have also described the attack on their kibbutzim as pogroms.
Some historians have objected to the characterisation of 7 October as a pogrom, saying the events on 7 October do not resemble the original historical pogroms in Russia. The Jerusalem Post described the 7 October attacks as "historically unique", as well as "foreseeable" and "expected". Judith Butler, controversially described the attacks as an "act of armed resistance".
West Bank pogroms in 2023
Khirbet Zanuta is a Palestinian Bedouin village in the Hebron Governorate in the southern West Bank, 20 km (12 mi) south of Hebron, which was ethnically cleansed during the Gaza war. Some farmers remained or returned and the attacks continued. The location has previously been attacked in 2022.
In a surge of Israeli settlers' violence after the October 7 attacks by Hamas, 16 Palestinian villages of total population of about 1,000 were violently depopulated by settlers' pogroms or under the threat of pogrom, including Al-Qanoub (north of Hebron), Southern al-Nassariyah (Jordan Valley), Wadi al-Siq (south of Ramallah), Zanuta (South Hebron Hills), Ein al-Rashash (near Ramallah). In the hearings before the Israeli Supreme Court Palestinians complained that the Israeli police ignores complaints about settlers' violence and refuses to collect evidence.
2024 riots against Syrian refugees in Turkey
In 2024 there were pogroms against Syrian refugees in Turkey.
November 2024 Amsterdam riots
The November 2024 Amsterdam riots preceding and following the AFC Ajax - Maccabi Tel Aviv football match were described by some as a "pogrom". Israeli diplomat Danny Danon stated that, "We are receiving very disturbing reports of extreme violence against Israelis and Jews on the streets of Holland. There is a pogrom currently taking place in Europe in 2024". The Mayor of Amsterdam later said that the word "pogrom" was inappropriate and that it had been misused as "propaganda". In the weeks after the event, the initial media coverage was widely criticized for misrepresenting the event. Targets of the violence included Israeli Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, an Arab taxi driver, and pro-Palestinian protestors. In the run-up to the match, some Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were filmed pulling Palestinian flags from houses, making anti-Arab chants such as "Death to Arabs", assaulting people, and vandalising local property. Calls to target Israeli supporters were subsequently shared via social media.
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