"…[Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak HaKo[h]en Kook’s] greatest strength — the lucid vision of his mysticism that encompassed both the sanctity of the Jewish people and that of the Temple’s location — was also his great blind spot. Two days before the [1929] massacre in Hebron…the British turned to the leaders of the Arab and Jewish communities in Palestine, asking them to call on their respective communities to exercise restraint and refrain from further inflaming the situation. The Arab leadership took upon itself to do so, even if perhaps only perfunctorily. Rabbi Kook, however, [refused].…"
Above: Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook
+972 Magazine has an article by Hillel Cohen that compares the situation in Israel today to what it was like in Mandatory Palestine during the 1929 riots that culminated in the infamous Hebron Massacre. Here's an excerpt:
…But [the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Palestine, Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak HaKoen Kook’s] greatest strength — the lucid vision of his mysticism that encompassed both the sanctity of the Jewish people and that of the Temple’s location — was also his great blind spot. Two days before the [1929] massacre in Hebron [by Arabs that killed 69 Jews, many of them yeshiva students], a day before the acts of lynching and attacks in Jerusalem, the British turned to the leaders of the Arab and Jewish communities in Palestine, asking them to call on their respective communities to exercise restraint and refrain from further inflaming the situation. The Arab leadership took upon itself to do so, even if perhaps only perfunctorily. Rabbi Kook, however, responded to the British appeal in the negative.
According to a report in the following day’s Haaretz (Friday, August 23 — the day the riots broke out) the rabbi said he could see no point in it, “because it is not the Jews’ intention to launch an attack on anyone.” His Ahavat Yisrael [love of the Jewish people] distorted his perception to the point that he simply missed the violence that was taking place all around him. [Jews had already attacked Arabs in what they said were revenge attacks for Arab attacks against Jews.] Thus he saw the “march of the flags” on Tisha B’Av (a Jewish day of mourning marking the destruction of the Jewish temples) as the “the eruption of the sanctity of the supreme soul of the Jewish people,” ignoring the provocative aspects that accompanied it.
He also paid no attention to the harshly violent atmosphere that prevailed during that week in Jerusalem. For there were quite a few incidents: during a fracas involving knives in the Bukharan Quarter, a Jewish youth had been killed, a young Arab was seriously wounded and another twenty people — both Jews and Arabs — were also injured. Jewish residents of the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood Mea Shearim and the Bukharan Quarter torched the homes of their Arab neighbors. It was only through a sheer miracle, and with the help of some other Jewish neighbors, that one Arab family escaped alive. Jews were also attacked on their way to Mount Scopus, while Arabs were set upon while passing through Jewish neighborhoods.
There were many more incidents. But the rabbi only saw the inner sanctity at the heart of the Jewish soul, repeatedly stressing the demand for extended Jewish praying rights at the Western Wall. In the midst of those tense days he proposed in an interview with the Doar Hayom daily to evict (with compensation) the Muslim residents of the Mughrabi Quarter in front of the Western Wall, in order to facilitate the creation of more amenable facilities for Jews to pray in.
[But later, t]hree months after the horrid massacres, Kook sounded quite contrite, his words indicating remorse. “I am sorry that the question of the Wall was exaggerated to that extent. The question of ownership is not a matter of negotiations; it should be decided by the One Above … If not for the irresponsible Arab leaders after World War I, the question wouldn’t have even arisen. By the same token we should not turn tables, chairs and a partition [i.e., setting up the then-narrow area in front of the Kotel as an Orthodox synagogue, something Kook and others demanded but the British and Arabs opposed] into a major religious matter. The main thing is to maintain the principle of the sanctity of the Western Wall for us and to allow us to pray next to it…”
The writer SY Agnon, who was close to Rabbi Kook, was not one of those who inflamed the situation, although he certainly did not try to calm things down. After the riots erupted, Agnon felt he had made a terrible mistake in not trying to douse down the nationalistic mood. “When I attended the Va’ad Leumi (Jewish National Council) plenum for the first and last time in my life,” he wrote to prominent Reform Rabbi Judah Leon Magnes, “and I observed the heroism disease of all the heroic speakers [i.e., the rabid unrestrained nationalism], I wanted to yell out: lay your hands off it. But by nature I am the reticent type and every day I regret not rising up to oppose it.”…