On April 13, 1948, a medical convoy on its way to Hadassah Hospital and The Hebrew University on Mount Scopus was ambushed in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. Doctors, nurses, patients, professors, and students-non-combatants on a humanitarian mission-were attacked for hours. Seventy-eight Jews were murdered.
This was not just a massacre. It was a revelation. It showed how easily Jewish lives could be abandoned, rationalized, and written off. That is why the Hadassah convoy massacre should not be remembered as a tragic footnote from Israel’s War of Independence.
It should be remembered as part of a much larger and uglier truth:
When Jews are murdered, the world has repeatedly found ways to excuse it, explain it, or ignore it.
The irony was grotesque. During World War II, Hadassah Hospital and The Hebrew University made major contributions to the Allied war effort in the Middle East. Hadassah’s staff offered lectures and training to British medical personnel on regional diseases and health threats, including jaundice, dysentery, anemia, high blood pressure, and insect-borne illnesses. The Hebrew University’s Department of Bacteriology and Hygiene produced anti-typhus and anti-dysentery vaccines. Its Zoology Department helped the British avoid cave fever. Its Parasitology Department contributed vital medical expertise.
Malaria was one of the greatest threats to Allied forces. The British Army established ten anti-malaria units for deployment across the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. Four were commanded by Jewish malaria experts, who helped pioneer the use of aerial pesticides to destroy mosquito breeding grounds.
But while Hadassah and The Hebrew University were helping the British fight tyranny, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, was aligned with the Germans. From Berlin in late 1941, he broadcast calls for Arabs to act as fifth columns, sabotage the Allies, and murder Jews. His agents supplied the Nazis with intelligence on British troop movements and carried out attacks on infrastructure. He also organized an Axis-Arab Legion, the Arabisches Freiheitskorps, whose members wore German uniforms with “Free Arabia" patches and served Nazi military interests in the Balkans.
After the United Nations approved partition on November 29, 1947, anti-Jewish violence escalated sharply. On April 13, 1948, the victims in the Hadassah convoy were not combatants. They were the equivalent of a Red Cross mission: doctors, nurses, patients, and academics on their way to heal, teach, and serve.
Among those murdered was the mother of David Cassuto, later a deputy mayor of Jerusalem, architect, and Holocaust survivor. Also among the dead were founders of the new medical faculty, a physicist, a philologist, a cancer researcher, the head of the psychology department, and an authority on Jewish law. One doctor was killed after stopping to say goodbye to his patients before leaving for his honeymoon with the nurse he had waited four years to marry.
Two weeks before the attack, one of the murdered doctors had treated Arab peasants from the village of Isawiye. It made no difference. The attackers wanted every Jew in the convoy dead.
The British High Commissioner and the British Secretary of State had personally assured protection for these convoys. Yet the attack lasted seven hours, beginning at 9:30 a.m., less than 600 feet from a British military post. Jewish pleas for help were ignored until mid-afternoon. By then, Jews had been shot or burned alive in their buses. There were 28 survivors. Only eight escaped uninjured.
The British did not merely fail. They stood by and watched.
One of the enduring mysteries is why the Palmach was not alerted in time. According to investigative reporter David Bedein, that question was raised even during the shiva for Cassuto’s mother. But one thing is clear: the British were close enough to intervene and chose not to do so.
Then came the moral evasion. The British Army dismissed the ambush as retaliation for Deir Yassin. That claim was as politically convenient as it was morally rotten. The slaughter of doctors, nurses, professors, and students was softened, contextualized, and effectively excused. Historian Eliezer Tauber later debunked the Deir Yassin “massacre" narrative in The Massacre That Never Was: The Myth of Deir Yassin and the Creation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem. But the lie had already served its purpose. It made Jewish death easier to digest.
The official Arab response was that Jewish gangs had supposedly gathered near Hadassah Hospital and the Hebrew University. R. M. Graves, the British-appointed chairman of the Jerusalem Municipal Commission, admitted that “the Arabs do not realize that the killing of doctors, nurses, and university teachers was a dastardly outrage." But the larger scandal was that others did realize it-and still failed to act.
That is why this massacre feels so current. The faces change. The slogans change. The alibis change. The pattern does not.
Jews are murdered, and the response is rarely simple moral clarity. Their killers are granted grievance. Their victims are denied innocence. The dead are quickly buried beneath “context." The burden shifts back to the Jews-even when they are the ones ambushed, butchered, burned, or kidnapped.
We saw it after October 7. We see it whenever Israeli civilians are targeted. We see it whenever more outrage is directed at Jewish self-defense than at the people who initiated the violence. The lesson of April 13, 1948, is not buried in the past. It is still with us: Jewish blood remains, in too many eyes, painfully cheap.
Hadassah endured. Through war, terror, and repeated attack, it continued treating Jews and Arabs alike. That speaks to its moral strength. But resilience is not the only lesson here. There is also a darker one. The Hadassah convoy massacre must be remembered because it exposed a truth that still has not disappeared: when Jews are killed, too many people look away, explain it away, or excuse it away.
To remember April 13, 1948, honestly is to admit that this is not only history. It is a warning.
Dr. Alex Grobman is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and serves on the advisory board of the National Christian Leadership Conference of Israel (NCLCI). He holds an MA and PhD in contemporary Jewish history from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.