THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
BOOK THREE
CHAPTER I
"A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR"
DOES AN ARAB RACE EXIST ?
Book 3 of 4 BOOK THREE CHAPTER I "A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR" DOES AN ARAB RACE EXIST ?
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
BOOK THREE
CHAPTER I
"A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR"
DOES AN ARAB RACE EXIST ?
The British, who were later to talk imposingly of `Arab nationalism
in Palestine
British Peace Handbook No. 6o declares briskly that "the people
west of the Jordan
. . . In the Gaza
elsewhere they are of the most mixed race ." As late as 1921
the Administration was still officially claiming that the word
`Arab' as applied to Palestinians was a misnomer .'
Actually there are no `Arabs' anywhere . There is not even
a fairly homogeneous mixed race. Throughout the Peninsula
the Arab has ceased to exist . Those who have taken his place
are a motley assortment of peoples, low in the scale of human
development, who speak the Arabic tongue . Even the courtly
Saladin was no Arab, but a Kurd . Hussein of the Hejaz, himself,
was mothered by a Circassian and had his official heirs by a
woman of Turkish blood ..2
The countless cities, tribes and nations incorporated at
sword's point into the swollen host of Allah, soon drowned the
Arab out by the very suffocation of their numbers . An even
more dreadful revenge was exacted by that cruel institution, the
Harem. How enormous this practice was can be seen in Sykes'
description of the empire of fabled Haroun-al-Raschid, with its
tremendous seraglios stocked with women from every conceivable
corner of the globe .3 He marvels at the unending supply
of female slaves, of every color and kind . Since purity of
blood in the community of Mohammed always gives way to
purity of line, where are the descendants of Qoraish 3a now ?
Even in the very core of desert Arabia , the race has been steadily
adulterated by an incoming flow of slave girls, most of them, in
366
"A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR"
367
recent centuries, from the Sudan Africa .
The offspring of these stolen creatures are not slaves but free
Moslems, since the moment a woman conceives she attains the
status of a legal wife .
Pilgrims from such faraway places as Java and Morocco,
streaming like columns of magnetized ants toward the holy
cities of the Hejaz , contributed liberally to this melange . The
Moslem habit of giving a slave girl to an overnight guest for
his comfort, the frequent looting of visiting caravans of the devout,
all sweetened the mixture . "If we make exception of the
Sherifian families - the descendants of the Prophet - and some
very few other people of undoubted Arab origin," writes the
great Turkish scholar, Dr. Riza-Tewfik, "all the population of
describing the population of the Arabian coast, is even
more emphatic .5
History gives it as a fact that the Arabs never settled Palestine
merely taking control and providing the usual military and
administrative caste . They imposed their religion on the native
peoples but failed to exterminate them. Here, too, gradual racial
suicide was the price of uncontrolled lust . As far back as
the Latin Kingdom Jerusalem
number of captive females required to satisfy the wants of these
amorous gentlemen . He reports slaves brought from all parts
of Africa and the East, with good-looking Nubian girls most in
demand. The Crusaders found a country peopled by a mixture
of all the races of the Orient, intermarried with Greeks .
On the founding of the Kingdom they had to recognize the
existence of five types of Moslems (each of different racial antecedents),
as well as Jews, Druses, Samaritans, and others.°
By i 120, when the Council of Nablus
were already reported half absorbed in this churning stew
of races.
Of even greater significance than the loose social habits of
the Moslems was the physical position of this little land, which
turned it into a bloody charnel house for unending centuries.
Spoliation, destruction, rapine, extermination, claimed the land
368
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
like an ever-recurring plague. The invasions which regularly
smashed against its stricken borders were countless . It had been
devastated by the Scythians from north of the Caucasus . The
Romans populated it with vast settlements of Greeks and other
races from everywhere . It was scoured soon after by the wars
of the Seleucids and Ptolemies . In 634 A .D . occurred the Arab
conquest. By 868 A .D . an Egyptian invader named Mehmet
Tulum had wrested the country from them in the usual blood
bath. Now for a period of centuries Turks, Egyptians, Crusaders,
alternated in control, periodically baptizing the shuddering
country in a bath of blood .
After the Twelfth Century, Palestine
again by wild hordes from Asia who plundered, slew and violated
without halt . In 1256 the Mongol, Hulagu Khan, sacked
the stricken area and put the entire population to the sword . A
scarce hundred years later, Timur the Lame, a sanguinary destroyer
who called himself `The Wrath of God,' made this
whole sector the scene of one of the cruelest massacres of his
blood-drenched career. Now for generations Palestine
an outspread altar on which human sacrifices were offered continually.
In their savage unending struggles for mastery, Mongols,
Mamelukes and the fierce Charismean tribes of Middle
When the next conquerors, the Ottoman Turks, came in, rapine
and slaughter had left an indelible mark in the character of
the survivors. "In few parts of the world," says Lieutenant-
Colonel Stafford, "were there more different types ." 7
It was always the foreign soldier who was the police power
in Palestine
The Fatamids introduced Berbers, Slavs, Greeks, Kurds and
mercenaries of all kinds . The Mamelukes imported legions of
Georgians and Circassians . Each monarch for his personal
safety relied on great levies of slave warriors . Saladin, hardpressed
by the Crusaders, received one hundred and fifty thousand
Persians who were given lands in Galilee and the Sidon
district for their services.
"A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR"
369
Out of this human patch-work of Jews, Arabs, Armenians,
Kalmucks, Persians, Crusaders, Tartars, Indians, Ethiopians,
Egyptians, Sudanese, Turks, Mongols, Romans, Kharmazians,
Greeks, pilgrims, wanderers, ne'er-do-wells and adventurers, invaders,
slaves and backwash of all corners of creation, was
formed that hodge-podge of blood and mentality we call today
'Levantine .' As this wild medley of ungovernable, lawless men
were killed off from time to time by incessant wars, raids and
plagues, more from everywhere were constantly merged into
the common melting pot. In the Fourteenth Century, drought
caused the immigration into Palestine
of Yurate Tartars from the Euphrates . Soon followed twenty
thousand Ashiri under Gaza
Moulai, who occupied the Jordan Valley Jerusalem
south . Kaisaite and Yemenite tribes followed in their trail .8
In 1830 the Albanian conqueror Mehemet Ali colonized Jaffa
allies. Fourteen years later Lynch estimated the thirteen thousand
inhabitants of Jaffa
Turco-Egyptians, four thousand Greeks and Armenians, and
one thousand Jews and Maronites . He did not consider that
there were any Arabs at all in that city .®
During the middle of the Nineteenth Century the entire territory
of the National Home, east and west of the Jordan
computed to have held no more than sixty thousand people all
told. Of this number, non-Moslems, living under the bitterest
persecution, were still heavily in the majority . The huge population
growth since that time has been due to large contingents
of new arrivals . The Turks introduced Circassians around Amman
When North Africa passed under European authority,
the fanatic Moghrabiyeh Moslems moved out and settled in the
butchery in 1929, and who supplied the continuous tension at
the Wailing Wall .) So too, were introduced into the permanent
population of this little land, Bosnians, Turkoman nomads, and
a stream of Levantines, mixed desert wanderers and Africans
which continues to the present day.
370
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
As for the Christian population, we are told by the learned
Dr. Christie that it is made up of fragments of all the Levant
races. The native Christians of Nazareth
and from Merj-Ayun ; while the Christians of Safed are the
children of immigrants from Hasbeiya who came in the second
half of the last century .
In the Arabic language only the Bedouin is designated by the
word `Arab.' But here, too, unless the eyes cannot be trusted,
there is little evidence of common descent. The Ghawarineh
tribe of the Jordan Valley
fuzzy hair, black skin and guttural voices . A short distance
away is the tribe of Ghazawiyeh, shrill-voiced, gaunt and
large-featured. Nearby are the blue-eyed blondes of Bethlehem
Several tribes of alleged Jewish stock have even been described
in Transjordan.1o
Until English political maneuvering recast their viewpoint for
them, the townspeople were insulted if they were referred to as
Arabs. They wanted to be known for what they were, Syrian
Levantines. Count Sforza designates the inhabitants of this entire
region as a medley of peoples "with not the slightest bond
between them." 11 Mrs. Andrews remarks drily that "in Jerusalem
today there are two or three families that claim to be of
the fine Arab stock which entered the country in the Seventh
Century." 12 Dr. Christie doubts whether there is any Arab
blood in the peasantry or villages at all . 13
As long as these masses have lived side by side, they have been
at each other's throats. Tribe hated tribe, city man hated fellah,
the Bedouin despised both, sect cursed sect, and even family disdained
family as unworthy scions of an inferior race . That all
this ill-assorted, explosive mixture can be organized into one
autonomous nation may also be doubted for the future.
ARAB TYPES AND TRAITS
Palestine
From steppe, mountain, jungle and desert, an agglomeration
of primitive, savage man had swarmed in successive waves over
"A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR"
371
of slaves and a leavening of nobler blood represent the racial
antecedents of the people we call 'Levantine' today.
Many of these people are shrewd, clever and even charming .
The studied gentility of the upper-bracket Arab leaves little to
be desired . Dressed in his Abaye 14 and red tarbush 15 he is a
colorful figure . His bearing is languorous and courtly, in vivid
contrast to the direct speech and often uncouth manners of the
immigrant Jew. Beneath this thin stratum, the balance of the
Arab population is primitive in the extreme. For the most part
it can hardly be said that they have risen above the stage of barbarism.
They are, on the whole, of poor physical type and of
low mentality . It would be hard to pose a wider disparity of
culture, instinct and mind than lies between these people and
the returning Hebrew. It is on this cold reality that all the finespun
visions of the Zionist theoreticians run afoul .
English as well as American observers, where they are free
from the corrosion of Empire politics, give a none-too-flattering
estimate of this population . Laconically the American, Commander
Lynch, reported that they were "far inferior to the North
American Indian" 16 then being held on reservations by the
United States Government . Drawing a sharp difference between
them and his desert tribesmen, Lawrence refers to the
Palestinians as "an ape-like people, having much of the Japanese
quickness, but shallow." 17 The late Governor of Sinai Peninsula,
C. S. Jarvis, sweepingly disposes of the Arab as "undoubtedly
the most striking example of decadent and decayed gentry
in the world ." He finds that "the Arab works about i o days
out of the 365," and that "all forms of manual labor are abhorrent
to him ." Like Petrie and other English observers, Jarvis
calls the tribesman a bane to the country he inhabits, asserting
that this once prosperous area "will remain wilderness as long as
he encumbers the land." While "the Arab is sometimes called
the Son of the Desert," he continues, quoting from Palmer, "this
is a misnomer as in most cases he is the Father o f the Desert, having
created it himself, and the arid waste in which he lives and
372
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
on which practically nothing will grow is the direct result of
his appalling indolence, combined with his simian trait of destroying
everything he does not understand." 18
Almost a century ago Lieutenant Lynch wrote that "the ruling
passion of an Arab is greediness of gold, which he will clutch
from the unarmed stranger or filch from an unsuspecting
friend ." 19 In 1935 Jarvis remarks that "his love of money is
such that he loses all sense of proportion whenever currency is
discussed, whilst if actual coins and notes are displayed before
him he not only loses his sense of proportion but his self-control
as well." 20 St . John Ervine adds that "when I hear an Englishman
sentimentalizing about the noble Arab and remember the
dirty and greedy baksheesh hunters I saw wherever I went, I
feel rage rising within me ." 21
Any attempt to judge these people by European standards is
anomalous in itself . Their language, for example, contains loo
words for camel and 99 for woman, but none for murder. There
is not a single Arabic word by which one can distinguish between
the slaughter of a sheep and the premeditated killing of a
man. Under his Abaye the Arab wears a long, wicked-looking
stiletto which he will use with lightning quickness on the slightest
provocation . Brutality is common to Arabs of all classes .
Their "utter callousness . . . for the suffering of animals," comments
Reverend H . V. Morton, "is a terrible thing ." 22 "All
their horses, in the tourist season, have bleeding knees," adds the
Reverend Mr. . Jannaway.23
Among all strata of Arabs woman is regarded as a mere animal .
The Moslem does not believe that a woman has a soul . If two
men begin to make complimentary inquiries about their respective
families, the wives are mentioned last, the boys and cattle
being named before them . "A father who has several daughters,"
writes Pierotti, "regards them just as he would sheep or
cows, and sells them in the same way ." 24
Girls are often not even counted in the figures given census
takers . A woman who bears a female child may be beaten and
reviled as if it were her fault . If she bears a large number of
daughters, she is despised . Merrill mentions a typical unfortu"
A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR"
373
nate, thus described by sympathetic neighbors : "Poor thing,
poor thing ! She's got no children-only girls ." A barren
woman is promptly divorced, and her life made a constant series
of humiliations . An amusing side-light on this attitude is contained
in the petition submitted to the Government in 1935, asking
a ban on the showing of motion pictures to women ; asserting
that such entertainment was "contrary to Moslem law" and
"had a demoralizing effect on women ." 26
The Arab's sanitary arrangements do not bear mention . They
are long past the stage where they could be described as vulgar
or offensive. He has an incurable habit of using the middle of
a busy street for a latrine, shocking visiting European ladies beyond
measure .
Contrary to what might be expected, the Arab is of generally
poor physique . The geographer, George Adam Smith, describing
a locality, speaks of the inhabitants as "a sickly and degenerate
race ." Tuberculosis and malaria are rampant . Syphilis
is a chronic affliction which few escape.26 The dread amoebic
dysentery, meningitis and cholera are common . The Arab's
medical arrangements are elementary . He continues to tend
wounds by the application of fresh cow dung ; and in the case
of eye disease, applies bandages soaked in camel's urine . An
Arab will come to a fountain and wash his hair, ears, face, mouth
and feet in it, before drinking . He is much amused over the
European's ideas of hygiene . St. John Ervine speaks the mind
of most visitors when he remarks that "the man who can cure
the Arab of his filthy habits will be his benefactor ." 27
The Arab believes religiously in occult powers, in Shaitan,
the evil one ; in afrits, malicious little devils ; in Djinnieh, wicked
female spirits who suck the life from men's bodies. They cure
illness by prayer at a sacred tree or shrine . Slips of paper with
verses of the Koran on them are soaked in water and the drink
is given to patients ; or they use the froth from the mouth of a
mania dervish who has fallen in a fit . They believe a wolf's jawbone,
worn around the neck, to be a potent charm .
The Arab is stubbornly opposed to modernity of any kind .
He has no conception of civic duty. Broadhurst found that
374 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
he could not even organize a voluntary fire brigade in Jaffa, and
that the city had to be served by the Jewish group in Tel Aviv .
There is no intellectual life . The only Arab writer of any consequence
is Aref-al-Arif, whose book on Bedouin life could not
even find an Arabic publisher and had to appear first in Hebrew
translation.
There is no denying the fact that the Arab is on the whole
likable - as are all primitives . When not aroused by cupidity
or anger, he can be openhanded to a fault . His very ineptness
is engaging. Even his knavery is tolerable and amusing . In a
typical instance given by Meltzer, an elderly woman in a law
court, obviously not less than sixty, claimed to be twenty-seven.
"But your son says he is twenty-three years old, so how can you
be only twenty-seven ?" asks the red-faced English judge, on the
verge of apoplexy. "My Lord," answers the hag, "upon my head
be it if I am lying . That is how it is. Everything is in the hands
of Allah. He alone knows the ages of women ."
Like the heroes of old, Arabs think it a stain on their reputations
if they do not gorge . To say how much a man can eat or
drink is their way of expressing how strong he is . They are
also inordinately fond of perfumes and unguents . Men who can
afford it will walk around smelling as if they had fallen in a vat
of attar of roses .
Few of them have family names . They are simply called after
the tribe to which the family belongs . There is no set style. A
child may be called by name, followed by his father's name, as
`Yakub Ibrahim' ; or the father might be called `Abu Yakub'
(father of Yakub), and the mother, 'Umm Yakub' (mother of
Yakub) . Sometimes they are merely known by the trades they
ply, as Hadad (blacksmith), Hajjar (stoneworker), etc.
Perched atop of the social scale is the Effendieh class, characterized
by Duff as "those masters of low intrigue ." They have
not altered since Turkish times when the engineer Pierotti dcscribed
them in an ironic simile as "a curse to the country - a
greater evil to Palestine than the plagues were to Egypt, because
those were temporary and these are permanent ." 28 They consider
work of any kind to be degrading ; poverty and loss of
"A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR"
3 75
face, unpardonable crimes . They used to extort money from
Christian travelers and convents, but this easy source of revenue
has been stopped since British occupation . Their usual method
of living is by usury . Blackmail is another accepted feature of
their system of existence . It is this class which provides the
politicians who have kept the country in so much turmoil .
The sex habits of this gentry are notorious . Their word is
valueless, even under oath. Most of them have immense families,
with many wives and concubines, purchased with money
derived from Jewish immigration . "A Moslem family of five
wives and thirty or forty children," says Mrs . Erskine, "is no
rarity ." 29
In the cities is a mongrelized horde of ruffians whose presence
makes it impossible for any European woman to walk alone on
the streets after dark . Their insolent eyes undress every woman
they see, with lingering deliberation . The `middle class,' as in
all undeveloped peoples, is neither numerous nor well-defined .
European opinions of this group are not complimentary . Duff
terms them "absolutely incapable of loyalty . . . If money or advantage
is to be gained by betraying partners, there are very few
of them that will not snatch at the opportunity ." 30
At the bottom of the social scale is the Bedouin, whose black
hair tents can be seen today exactly as in the time of the first
Pharaoh.3' He has seen Abraham and Solomon pass . Nebuchadnezzar,
Belshazzar, Alexander, the Ptolemies, a dozen civilizations
rising and falling, have flitted before his eyes . He
remains the same. If his horizon was altered at any point, it speedily
shifted back again as soon as the disturbing element was removed.
The Bedouin is the traditional enemy of the villagers who, not
without justice, regard him as an incorrigible robber and thief .
Bedouin life has always been one of naked struggle between the
stronger and the weaker, the dominant and the subservient tribes.
The former took possession of the best pastures and wells,
plundering the weaker on whom they imposed tribute . Today,
as in the past, the youth of the tribe is nurtured on war songs and
tribal epics of valiant deeds and victories . The principle of im376
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
placable vendetta is a standard part of their existence . The
Bedouin cuts down orchards, burns crops and kills cattle like
any other corsair. The Reverend Henry Field described them in
1884 as "a horrible set of cutthroats, useless in war, as they
were subject to no discipline, and only intent on pillage ." 32 In
our own time, Lowell Thomas reiterates that "the desire to loot
is an all-consuming passion with the Bedouins and is not considered
a form of stealing with them, but is listed among the cardinal
virtues ." 33
The Bedouin has no conception of the word `home' analogous
to ours. He roams a certain well-defined territory with his
herds, paying no attention to international boundaries . He eats
anything : boiled grasshoppers, roast rats, lizards, cats, or any
kind of bird he can snare.34 The life of songbirds in his vicinity
is precarious since he will eat any he can catch .
No fuss is made over the dead . When the body is done with
life, it is simply laid out of sight and promptly forgotten . "The
living do not lay to heart the death of friends ." 35
There is no sentimentality wasted on women, who do all the
slave's work around camp. The Bedouin has a belief in regard
to a certain aromatic shrub that if a man can tie a bow in a twig
with one hand, he will marry two wives . "This superstition,"
says Merrill, "comes the nearest to romance of anything that I
have seen in Arab or Bedouin life." 36
Bedouin women are graceful in youth but begin to walk with
a peculiarly waddling gait after they leave their teens . They
weight themselves down with pounds of barbaric jewelry . Their
faces are disfigured with tattooed patterns of stars, circles and
lines of blue spots. Their knowledge is limited almost entirely
to the trivial tasks of camp life . "They do not know what year
it is," writes Madeleine Miller, "what month, what hour ." 37
Almost alone among the peoples of the earth the Bedouin has
virtually no creative gifts . He destroys and never builds . His
browsing herds of sheep and goats gut the last blade of green
from wherever he camps. His utterly primitive mentality almost
baffles description. In the settled districts he is as likely
"A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR"
377
to ride straight through a cornfield as bother about skirting
around it.
The settled Arabs, known as the fellaheen, are considered by
the Bedouin to be of different (and inferior) race from himself.
The fellah lacks nearly all the undeniable charm of his
Bedouin countryman . He is incredibly backward and fanatic,
and usually of low intelligence . He wears a long plain cotton
dress resembling the old-fashioned nightshirt, which is never
washed and lasts him for years . He is generally undersized and
sickly.
The villages of gray mud huts invariably nestle on the side of
a hill, with an evident eye to safety from surprise attack . The
dwellings themselves are rude structures made of mud or camel
dung thatched with straw, without windows or ventilation . In
one part of the shack lives the owner and his family, sleeping together
on straw mats. In the other part is housed the cattle,
together with the hired hand, if one is employed . The place
is heated by a rough oven which burns the usual fuel, dried cattle
dung.
In the house is not the slightest evidence of artistic or creative
impulse to remind the visitor that these people are lifted above
the stage of simple animal appetite . There are neither beds,
tables, chairs nor candlesticks . On the clay floor are usually a
plentiful supply of homemade rugs . The diners sit at mealtime
in squatting position around a common dish, reaching in with
unwashed fingers for the food . Women may not sit at this
rude table, but get the remains, together with the dogs, when
the men are through .
Around the houses filth accumulates like guano . Not a tree
is to be seen in the whole village, with the exception of an occasional
gnarled olive planted by some generation long forgotten .
The only vegetation is a clump of cactus here and there . The
children run around half naked. Before the Jews came, most
of them suffered from horrible eye disease : many were blind.
The haggard faces and monotonous dark blue rags of the women
make them actually repulsive . They work exactly like animals .
378
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
To this day they give birth to their children in the middle of the
road, returning to their village not only with the new-born child
on their back, but with other heavy loads besides .38
The male peasant himself is no lover of hard work . Dr. Morton,
with long opportunity to observe what the Arab calls `land
cultivation,' comments : "For the most part, the Arab watchword
is `do as little as you can, and let what must be done be
done by your wife !' " 39 And Jarvis remarks sarcastically that
if the poorly sowed crop is a failure, "the Arab is on the whole
pleased, as the awful necessity of garnering the corn is thereby
obviated ." 40 He is invariably in debt to the effendi loan sharks
of neighboring cities . The fellah's farm implements consist
solely of a wooden plough of the most elementary design . He
may own an emaciated donkey or camel . If he has a cow, it
is as lean as the proverbial creature of Pharaoh's dream . Cattle
and chicken diseases are a widespread and permanent feature .
Only a few varieties of vegetables are planted except near the
Jewish villages .
Much of the land is held under the antiquated rusha'a system .
The village lands are owned by the community in common, but
cultivated individually . Every two years or so, each tiller moves
on to a fresh holding . Thus this curious rotation goes on indefinitely.
The result is that no one attempts to make any
permanent improvements . Not even stones are removed from
the fields. The fellah, like his Bedouin brother, quite respectfully
consigns the future to Allah whose business it is to take
care of it .
LEVANTINE WORSHIP OF GOD
There has seldom existed such a tangle of murderous animosities
as those which divide the many creeds in this motherland
of religions .
The majority of the population is Moslem, divided into two
great camps, the Sunnites and Shi'ites . The Sunnites, most numerous,
are in turn split up into four principal sects, all of them
fanatics who hate each other hardly less than they do the de"
A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR" 379
spised infidel.41 Around Acre is a large group of Bahaists, an
heretical offshoot of Shi'a. In Galilee are a considerable number
of war-like Druses, who believe in successive reincarnations
of the one God, including Jesus but not Mohammed .42
Islam in Palestine is a magnificent jungle of faiths and dogma .
In the north the inhabitants hold the Caliph El Hakem Biamrillah
as the Messiah and the incarnation of Ali . The numerous Shi'-
ites place Ali above Mohammed . There are considerable sects
which believe in the twelve Imams, one of whom is destined to
return, like Jesus, to relieve mankind of trouble and unbelief .
Different groups recognize various Imams as the deliverer : the
Caliph All, Mohammed al Bakr, Zeidi, Ismail and Suleiman .
They go so far as to acknowledge different religious holidays,
with varying degrees of importance attached to the days mutually
celebrated . Combined with this tangle of dogma is a
confusing medley of fetish and spirit worship dependent on locality.
Whatever Islam might have been in the past or might be elsewhere,
the Palestine Moslem has grooved it into line with his
own peculiar racial mentality . He considers the word `Jew'
obscene and generally uses it as `Al Yahud, Tikram' -using a
word of excuse for mentioning an object indecent to respectable
Moslems. At the Nebi Moussa festival each year, an hysterical
mob of true believers goes through the streets in procession, in a
delirium of wild, whirling dances, waving huge knives and clubs .
They are led by young townsmen of the low-effendi type who
distribute pamphlets and shout bawdy songs of their own composition.
Rising in low frenzied wail from this serpentine line
as it swings along is the continuous guttural chant : "El Billad
billadna, Wa el Yahud Kellabna" (This is our land and the Jews
are our dogs) . The Christian is despised with even more uncompromising
rigor. On this score Sir Ronald Storrs states
briefly that Moslems are "everywhere more tolerant of Jews
. . . than of Christians ." 48 The expulsion of all Christian missionaries
is one of the standard Moslem demands .
Christian Arabs are not only of markedly different racial mixture,
but their whole role in the country's social-economic struc38o
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
tore is strikingly like that of the Jews in the Diaspora . They are
mainly engaged in service occupations . Approximately 12%
of the population, they are 37.7% of those engaged in manufacturing,
transport and commerce . Only 1 5 % of the Christians
of working age are in agriculture as compared to the Moslems'
66%. And like the Diaspora Jews they are huddled together
in certain towns and villages, forming what is f or all practical
purposes a Christian ghetto .44
Christians number today in the neighborhood of one hundred
thousand. There are no exact denominational figures available .
The official figures for 1920 named thirty-five thousand Greek
Orthodox communicants, twenty-five thousand Catholics (split
into two distinct groups centering around the Italian and French
clerics respectively) and an assortment of others, including Maronite,
Coptic, Anglican, Armenian, Gregorian, Jacobite, Abyssinian,
as well as varieties of Uniate Churches and a sprinkling of
Protestants . All of these share in the principal shrines . All
hate each other with an explosive bigotry hardly understandable
to anyone who has not breathed this morbid atmosphere .
Among their squabbles is the question of the actual site of the
Annunciation. At Nazareth the Catholics have a chapel to mark
their claim, the Greeks another, the Rumanians a third . "For
all one knows," remarks Beverley Nichols, "there may be a
dozen similar chapels." 45 Vicious struggles go on for every
foot of the Holy Places . The contest between the Franciscans
and the Orthodox priests as to who is to be permitted to clean
the north window of the Basilica in Bethlehem, usually ends in
an open row. When on December z8, 1936 the Basilica was
again cleaned, both the District Commissioner and the Police
Chief had to be present . In the Holy Sepulchre, the presence
of military guards is always required on high holidays to keep
the Armenians, Latins and Orthodox priests from bashing in
each other's heads . In the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem,
the priests of the different sects have been known to brain
each other with the brass candlesticks at Christmas.
Their brawls never cease . If not over `Holy Places' and
liturgical rights, they are accused of stealing each other's con"
A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR"
381
verts. Their statements are always bald and uncompromising .
An example is the accusation hurled by the Latin Patriarch in
Jerusalem against the Protestants, claiming that they had "despoiled
many important Catholic sites in Jerusalem ." 46
The classic quarrel is between the Greek and Roman Catholics,
with the British invariably taking a covert stand in favor
of the Greeks. An outstanding instance occurred during 1921
when the collapse of Russia left the Greek Patriarchate practically
bankrupt. This was the hour the Latin Church had
waited centuries for. Promptly it entered into an agreement to
purchase the rights and properties of its Orthodox rival, including
the envied Church of the Sepulchre . The Authorities, getting
wind of what was occurring, stepped into the breach and
forbade the sale . They did not care to allow the Catholic
Church to gain the paramount importance which possession of
these sites would give . The collapsing Orthodox clericals were
bolstered up by a subvention from the public funds and a British
puppet, His Beatitude the Greek Patriarch Damianos, was installed
on the bankrupt patriarchal throne over the violent opposition
of the majority of his own synod .47
Beneath the surface, the Latin Church has been in almost a
continuous state of war with the Authorities since the Administration
began. The English suspect that the Vatican is working
hand-in-glove with the Italian Foreign Office . The Vatican in
turn is aroused because the Holy Places Commission has not yet
been constituted, though the League had instructed Britain to
do so from the beginning.
There is not the slightest concord in the religious life of this
land. The Latin Patriarch, for example, considers the local
Y.M.C.A. not only a Protestant missionary institution but an
English propaganda center to boot, and has threatened with excommunication
every Catholic who dares enter its portals .48
On the other side of the fence is the symbolic case of a Moslem
sentenced to one month in jail (on June 23, 1931) for having
been converted to Protestantism.
No matter how virulently these factions may detest each
other, they all join in the opinion that to injure a Jew is a work
382
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
well pleasing in the sight of God . The Greeks, particularly, are
fond of raising the old blood-libel charge, exactly as they used
to in Russia . This type of Jew-baiting the Administration seems
to regard with surreptitious enjoyment . A speaking instance
occurred in March 1921, when the Greek Orthodox daily Falastin
headlined an atrocious story accusing the Jews of kidnaping
Arab children in order to drink their blood during the Passover
rites. Jewish agencies angrily remonstrated to the Government .
The result was a typical piece of horseplay, with an official
named Mark Young ordering the Jaffa authorities "to investigate
the report immediately to ascertain what truth there is
in it."
With the cooperation of Government House, native Christians
have placed themselves in the forefront of Arab nationalist agitation.
49 The intellectual activity and propaganda work is almost
exclusively in their hands . It flatters their vanity, says
Duff, "to believe that they are on equal terms with the young
Moslem gentlemen of Jerusalem and Jaffa to whom through all
the centuries, their people have had to look up with awe and respect."
50 There is no doubt in the minds of unbiased observers,
however, that any idea of a lasting alliance between Cross and
Crescent in Palestine is a chimera . Christians have undergone
an oppression here not one whit less horrible than that meted
out by their co-religionists to the Jews in Europe . Periodic
massacres have occurred consistently since the time when the
Moslem Chief, Ashraf Khalil, celebrated his conquest of Acre
with a great display of Christian skulls on the spears of his bodyguards
.
As long as the Crescent ruled, the Christians were to be pointedly
reminded by blackmail, bloody repression, rape and murder
that they were inferior sons of dogs whom the Prophet for
some reason of dark mercy allowed to carry on . After subjecting
Jews and Christians to every barbarity a distorted imagination
could invent, the notorious el Djezzar actually issued orders
in I8oI to massacre every Christian in Palestine . Only the
threat of the great British Admiral, Sir Sidney Smith, to blow
"A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR"
383
Acre out of the ocean if a single Christian head fell, saved them
from extermination. Living men still remember the terrible
events of i 86o when in a widespread murderous attack reminiscent
of the riots of 1936, sixteen thousand Christians were slaughtered
and countless others left destitute . Throughout Palestine
and southern Syria whole villages embraced Islam as the only
alternative to certain death . Again only the hurried intervention
of the Great Powers prevented a general massacre .
In each of the pogroms which have occurred under British
Administration the old enmities have come to the surface . Soon
Christians, too, heard an angry familiar scream which made them
shiver in their skins . They and their forefathers knew its meaning.
It was the call to war against the detested infidel, the old
battle-cry of Islam : "Mohammed and his sword!" The Christians
knew it meant them and no one else . Christians were
freely attacked, and kept to their houses for safety .
The publicity officer of the Palestine Administration has
always been at eternal pains to broadcast the slightest squabbles
between Arab and Jew "apparently to indicate the terrific difficulties
in judicial handling the Mandatory labors under ." 51 But
news of the constant brawls and killings between followers of
Cross and Crescent is always carefully suppressed . Actually the
hatred which separates Moslem and Christian is far more fundamental
than that held by either party for the Jew . This enmity
does not need to be fostered, since it is traditional .
Despite rigid censorship, news events break through, such as
the mob attack on the Protestant Missionary Council Conference
held in April 1928, when a pitched battle was fought between
rioters and police . Moslem attacks flared up viciously in September
1930 . Christian notables were assassinated. In mixed
quarters, Moslem well-owners refused to sell water to Christians.
The paper El Yarmonk, bespeaking the general feeling, advised
Arab Catholics coldly : "Christians are not entitled to speak for
the Arab nation ." 52 Feeling was at a dangerous tension . With
an iron hand, in significant contrast to its handling of Jewish-
Arab disturbances, the Government swiftly intervened . Troops
384
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
patrolled the danger zones, prepared to make short work of the
slightest disturbance . Special regulations were issued and rigidly
enforced against assemblies of any kind .
During the recent rebellion, too, Arab bravos swollen with
their own truculence could but with difficulty be restrained
from including their ancient enemies, the Christians, in one
grand all-embracing terror. Pious Moslems, with an eye for
business, called for a boycott of Christian shops . A violently
worded ukase was issued forbidding `loyal Arabs' from even
using busses run by Christians. The Christian chairman of the
Arab Labor Association was butchered in cold blood . Followers
of the Cross and Crescent fought it out in bloody scrimmage
on the streets. Once more the Administration stamped its foot
down with surgical efficiency, and put a summary end to this
phase of the disorders. Even the slightest hint of what had
taken place was deleted from news dispatches sent abroad .
THE SON OF THE DESERT SUFFERS FROM JEWISH
COMPETITION
Hope-Simpson's thesis that Zionist development has impoverished
the Arab, remains the text from which the ruling coterie
of Whitehall continues to draw its inspiration . Utter despondency,
we are told, has made the Arabs desperate . The semiofficial
British press characterizes them as "a people in despair ."
The root of all the troubles, past and present, Great Britain and
the East assures us solemnly, "is inherent in the Mandatory policy
of making Palestine a National Home for the Jews, with the inevitable
consequence o f reprisals on the part o f the Arabs when
their security and livelihood are threatened ." 53
Has the Arab really been reduced to penury by Zionist immigration
? Has he been actually driven to "despair," as the
Colonials so zealously insist ? The best answer to these interesting
questions lay in the English records themselves .
The returning Zionists found a country sunk in the most
wretched poverty. Malaria, trachoma, dysentery and tuberculosis
stalked everywhere like great shadowy werewolves . Trans"
A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR"
385
Jordan was almost deserted by human life . "In Western Palestine,"
writes De Haas, quoting from a U . S. consular report,
"they [the Bedouins] had driven the population to the hills and
its plains were wholly neglected ." 54 The majority of Jerusalem's
nineteen thousand inhabitants were "mendicants and beggars.'"-'
In 1881, states another official American report, there
was "not even a good wagon road" in the entire country .56
Some years earlier Churton had written : "In the whole of Palestine
there is not a single cart or vehicle on wheels ." 67
The population lived in a state of squalid degradation not surpassed
by the most miserable savages in creation . There was
no professional class . Only 1 % % lived from the rude handicrafts
and small industries that existed. The demoralized inhabitants
would not even trouble to cut wood for fuel "but
found it easier to set fire to the trees on a mountainside to obtain
the charcoal they needed ." S8 The peasant scratched a miserable
living from land which he leased from gouging landlords .
Other human vultures burned his fields and robbed him of even
the pittance he managed to eke from the unfriendly soil . Laborers
employed in the few orange groves belonging to the
effendis received one bishlik (5¢) per day, working from sunup
to sundown under supervisors armed with whips .
At the turn of the century there were 40,000 Jews in Palestine
and about 140,000 others of all complexions ." The inhabitants
had no other feeling for this pauperized, disease-ridden
country than a fervent desire to get away from it . Emigration
proceeded steadily. Immigration was virtually non-existent .
Not until the Zionists had arrived in numbers did the Arab population
begin to augment itself . The introduction of European
standards of wage and life acted like a magnet on the entire Near
East. Abruptly Palestine became an Arab center of attraction.
By 1922, after a quarter century of Jewish colonization,
their numbers mushroomed to 488,000. Today they are over
a million .
If the English contention were accurate, we should expect to
find an exodus of Arabs from areas where Jews are settled, into
purely Arab regions . But exactly the opposite is true : it is
386
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
precisely in the vicinity of these Jewish villages that Arab development
is most marked . Arab Haifa, profiting by the Zionist
boom, grew from 1922 to 1936 by 130%, Jaffa by 8o% and
Jerusalem by 55% . The Arab rural settlement in the Tel Aviv
district increased by over 135%. The all-Arab city of Nablus,
which held 33,000 before the War, has fallen to less than 12,000.
Safed which had zo,ooo, dropped to less than 9000.
In the vicinity of Jewish villages Arab workers earn twice the
wage paid in other parts of Palestine . Unskilled labor receives
three to five shillings a day, and skilled workers eight to twelve
shillings . In neighboring Egypt, Iraq and Syria a worker considers
himself well off if he gets one shilling a day .
Palestine is the only country in the entire Middle and Near
Eastern section where there has been any substantial increase
either in nominal or real wages since the War . The official
index of wages shows a rise from zoo in 1913, to 390 in 1932 .
No Government figures have been published since that date, but
the report of the Department of Overseas Trade in 1935 states
that wages have progressively increased since 1933. The simultaneous
fall in the official index number of retail prices, from loo
in 1922, to 55.1 in 1934, indicates the enormous increase in real
wages in post-war Palestine.
According to the Royal Commission's Report of 1937, forty
percent of all labor employed on Jewish-owned plantations is
Arab. Against this, Arab establishments employ practically no
Jews whatever .
Jews spend annually about £ 1,500,000 for agricultural produce
of the Arab fellaheen, and about £750,000 on the products
of Arab quarries and industries ." It is estimated that they pay
Arabs in direct wages, £ 86o,ooo ; in rentals, £ 5oo,ooo, and in
trade and transport, £200,000 . 61 Payments for land are about
£ 1,650,000 . To these annual figures must be added the tax
moneys derived from Jews and expended for Arab benefit (computed
at (1,250,000) . Balanced against these sums, the Arab
payments to Jews for all causes during a single year, come to
around 10,200,000 . It does not require expert bookkeeping to
determine who is getting the better of this bargain.
"A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR" 387
Modernization, copied directly from the Jew, has benefited the
Arab greatly. Machine production is being introduced into the
manufacture of oils and soaps, silk and cotton textiles, and tobacco
working. In 1928 the industrial census registered ten
thousand persons employed in Arab industries and handicrafts,
representing an investment of £ 1,100,000 . Four years later the
census showed twenty thousand persons engaged in the same
industries, with capital expanding to C2,500,000.
In the short period from 1931 to 1935 Arab land under vegetables
rose from 20,000 dunams to 65,000 and Arab citrus groves
increased from zo,ooo dunams to 135,000. In a span of hardly
eight years, Arab orchards devoted to bananas, figs, apricots,
olives and grapes rocketed from 18o,o6o dunams to 1,651,466
dunams.
In 1927 Arab urban building represented an average annual
investment of £2oo,ooo. By 1935 it had inflated itself to
£ 1,500,000 ; and Arab bank deposits had grown from £ 1,ooo ;
000 to £4,000,000 .
Once the poorest, sorriest population in this whole section of
poverty-stricken masses, the Arabs of Palestine are now on their
way to be the richest per capita of their race . As an index to
their prosperity, they import £4.5s . per head, as compared with
£3 .7s . for wealthy Egypt and £3 .5s- for oil-rich Iraq . Motor
cars, unknown here before the War, now number one to every
352 inhabitants, as compared with one to every 730 in Iraq.62
The network of Jewish medical centers, hospitals and dispensaries
has served the Arab equally with the Jew . It is these
Jewish services alone which carry on the bitter fight against trachoma,
malaria and other devastating diseases . These benefits
are amply reflected in the great natural increase in a population
disease had once brought to a standstill . "One of the most important
consequences of the rise of the cultural and economic
level of the country due to Jewish immigration," a British representative
told the Mandates Commission, "is the high increase
in the Arab birth rate ." 63 The death rate at the same time goes
down steadily year by year.
Some mention must also be made of the assertion that Jews
388
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
are dispossessing Arabs from the land. As far as one is able to
make out, the area of the entire mandated territory is 26,ooo,ooo
dunams west of Jordan, and something over ioo,ooo,ooo east
of Jordan. Of this total, Jews own 1,300,000 dunams - a grand
over-all acquisition of approximately one percent of their National
Home - by which, according to the tenaciously held British
thesis, they have managed to frighten and abuse the natives,
and present the Mandatory with a major crisis in the shape of a
landless Arab problem.
Fully seventy-five percent of the area in Jewish hands, moreover,
had not known the plough for centuries . The northern
colonies in Galilee were built on land rendered impossible for
life since Roman times because of marsh and endemic disease.
Tel Aviv was erected on sand dunes which were considered to
be without monetary value . That great granary, the Valley of
Jezreel, now nestling so trim and green in the shining Palestine
sun, was so deserted and pestilential when Jews bought it that it
was said that any bird attempting to cross it would fall dead in
its flight . That adjacent scene of Jewish colonization, the Plain
of Esdraelon, was in i 9 i 9 desolate and abandoned except for a
few sickly villages built on camel dung .
In the case of those peasants who sold to Jews, with the exception
of a bare five percent who bettered themselves in urban pursuits,
all remained on the land . Most of them sold only a part
of their acres and with the money obtained got out o f debt for
the first time in their lives. Within the past six years the indebtedness
of the Arab cultivator has been reduced by sixty percent,
and the tax burden by as much as seventy percent, while
at the same time his income has sharply increased. The years
have proven the landless Arab hypothesis to be nothing more
than simple humbug . The most solicitous prodding by the
Government over a period of the last ten years has not been able
to bring forth more than 664 Arab families who could come even
vaguely under the definition of displaced cultivators . Of these,
317 families refused the Government's offers, presumably because
they had more satisfactory employment elsewhere .
A very real and harsh condition, which the British carefully
"A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR"
389
slur over, is the fact that a handful of large land-owners hold
as much acreage as all the Arab peasantry put together . The
Husseini family holds fifty thousand dunams ; the Abdul Hadi
family, sixty thousand ; the Tajji family, fifty thousand, etc .
The bulk of this ground lies permanently fallow, happily untaxed.
The rest is rented out to tenants under conditions which
would make the lot of the average American sharecropper look
heavenly. The Hope-Simpson Report estimates a year's income
of a tenant farmer at only eighteen dollars - this for an
entire family !
The prevailing system is one of actual peonage . The fellah
is continually in debt to the effendi-usurer . According to the
Johnson-Crosbie Report "a rate of thirty percent per annum is
perhaps the commonest, but fifty percent for three months is not
unusual." Arab improvidence and extortionate interest charges
have had their result in the taking over of many small tracts for
debt. The French Report states that as a consequence, in one
Sub-District in the hills "no less than thirty percent of the land
has passed from Arab peasants to Arab capitalists" in a single
decade . This is the type of creature existence to which British
policy would freeze the Arab forever !
Though British `investigators' have proven `conclusively' that
Zionism is an unrelieved menace to the `helpless' natives, it appears
that surrounding countries would like very much to be
exposed to a similar risk . In his book, Europe and Europeans,
Count Carlo Sforza states that Syrians of all classes, who have
been watching Palestine's development with envious eyes, are
anxious to have something of the same phenomena duplicated in
their country. This desire is written in the clamorous petition
sent the French in 1935 by the inhabitants of Lebanon, begging
them to encourage Jewish immigration as that would bring prosperity.
Said the important Damascus paper Lissan Alakhar in
a fiery editorial on this subject : "We ought to demand Jewish
immigration, for through it our situation will be saved ." 64
In Palestine itself, if official encouragement to hoodlums and
agitators were removed, the whole condition would alter overnight.
The Levantine mind is sensible enough to know which
390
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
side its bread is buttered on, and to pay that side a proper regard.
In 1926 Major E. W. Poison stated unequivocably that
despite mischievous propaganda, "if the Jews were to leave Palestine
tomorrow, the Arabs would be the first to cry out ." 85
"We are led by a group of men who bargain us away, buying
and selling us like cattle," asserts the newspaper Al Igdam in
May 1930. "The Arab people have not yet said their last word
on the Arab-Jewish question . When this word has been said,
it will not be one of hatred and war, but one of peace and
brotherhood, as is suitable for two people who live in one country."
Says a round robin issued during March 1934 by the
leading Moslems and Christians of Nazareth : "On behalf of the
majority of the property-owners and consumers, we declare that
we would welcome Jewish immigration and trust that the enlightened
Jews with their financial and commercial associations
will hasten, to respond to our appeal . We have had enough of
losses ; we want a system of reciprocity and understanding.
We are tired of the obstinacy of the money-lenders and shopkeepers
who pursue a policy of boycott and preach hatred ." In
the very hotbed of unrest, on May 2.1, 1936, the merchants and
shopkeepers issued a manifesto urging fellow-Arabs to repudiate
the self-seeking agitators who were leading the `Arab cause' -
a courageous enough act, since some of the signers were soon
after murdered .
The claim that Jewish colonization has ruined the Arab and
driven him to the desperate acts of despair, is obviously a fabrication.
Hidden beneath this pretext lie the deeper issues of
classic anti-Semitism, British self-interest and Arab family feud .
NASHISHIBIS AND HUSSEINIS
Little in the way of political reasoning can be expected from
the inert Levantine mass which has been elected to rake Whitehall's
chestnuts from the fire . These people have never been
able to reason along other than religious and economic lines .
Colonel Wedgwood tells us that they think more "of the next
meal than of greater Arabia ." Duff found that they had not the
"A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR" 391
slightest conception of sacrifice for the common good. They
invariably bow with respect to the authority of the powerful
and rich. They are forever intriguing against each other . "The
Arab who has a Government position," writes Senator Austin,
"is always exposed to the attempts of other Arabs to put him
out and get his place ." 66
Combined with these traits is an inordinate love for the excitement
of feudal contention . Given an opportunity for guntoting,
almost any banner would suit the average tribesman .
Their whole economy centers around the patronage, power
and influence of half a dozen wealthy families . These invariably
lay claim to hereditary rights of overlordship based on aristocratic
lineage. There are, in the main, two great camps . One is
headed by the Husseinis, who allege themselves to be sprung from
Mohammed himself. The other is led by their traditional enemies,
the Nashishibis, whose boasts of noble descent are no less
lofty . Beyond a natural quest for power, no one actually knows
on what tangible grounds this rancorous rivalry is based, least
of all, probably, the Husseinis and Nashishibis themselves .
Of the six Arab parties in Palestine, five are family or patronage
organizations. Only one, Istakial, could be considered a
political party in the European sense . Istaklal is a minor but
loud-voiced group which represents the young-bloods of the
country. It is the party of the pan-Arabs and dopes itself on
dreams of a revived Arabic empire stretching over all of North
Africa as well as the Arabian Peninsula . It regards the Jew as
an hereditary enemy who is to be rigorously annihilated . The
violent tone of this group, and its fantastic utterances, conforms
to the best traditions of Nazism, overlayed with a thick buttering
of oriental mysticism . Its members no longer wear the
Tarbush, sacred to Mohammedans, but a smart brown military
hat. Istaklal believes in direct action and is known for its thugs
and assassins . Other Arab leaders are so desperately afraid of
this organization that they rarely oppose it publicly for fear of
death.
The British have tolerated Istaklal as a hedge against futures ;
but its usefulness to them now seems about at an end . It is
392
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
headed by an ambitious radical named Awny Bey Abdul Hadi,
a man with broken teeth, a cynical laugh and, strange in Levantines,
a sense of humor . He comes from a large and quarrelsome
family who are always in litigation with each other which
sometimes ends in murder . One member of the family is a
judge of the Supreme Court. Another graces the Secretariat.
The titular head of the Husseini clan is Haj Amin, whom Samuel
had appointed Mufti . For years he was the `fair-haired boy'
of the Administration . He was a frequent and favored visitor
at the High Commissioner's table. He had his own brand of
shock troops, openly tolerated by the Government . Apparently
his position was impregnable .
If the Mufti had been created by some fiction writer instead
of having been authored by the Mandatory for Palestine, he
would have been considered too exaggerated a character to be
included in a serious work . He occupied the unique and unparalleled
position of being at war with the same government
which was subsidizing him . In every one of the riots which
shook Palestine the Mufti was an acknowledged leader . He
openly directed the rebellion of 1936 and at the same time continued
to act as a high official of the Government . He is violently
and incurably anti-Jewish . He has a fixed delusion that
the Jews are conspiring to tear down the Mosque of Omar and
build a Jewish Temple on its site . In June 1936 he sent a cablegram
to the Syrians in Brazil beginning with the theatrical words
"Jews and Arabs at war !"
It cannot be emphasized too clearly that the Mohammedan
Church in Palestine is not a private organization as are churches
elsewhere, but an official body with prescribed secular functions.
As its head the black-robed Mufti was a Government
employee . Under his control was the rich Moslem Wak f, which
possesses an income of some C 1 oo,ooo a year, and literally untold
wealth in ancient treasure . The Wakf is the largest landowner
in the country, holding over a million dunams, including
office buildings, apartment houses, shops, factories and warehouses.
It is paid by the Government a fixed sum in lieu of
tithe, and thus receives seventy percent of the total Government
"A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR"
393
revenue from rural property in Palestine . The Mufti in addition
had autocratic authority over the Moslem Courts, also
Government-subsidized, and could appoint or dismiss judges
and employees at will .
Haj Amin was thoroughly resented by his fellow-Moslems
who accused him of every crime on the calendar . He never
kept accounts and the disposal of all funds was his personal secret.
His power came completely from Government patronage.
An insight into this relationship of Mufti to Government was
provided by the Tiberias Arab leader, Mohammed Tawil, who
declared from exile in 1930 that "the Palestine Government is
protecting the Grand Mufti, supporting his anti-Jewish policy
and going so far as to suppress those who favor peace ." He asserted
that those opposed to this agitation lived under a veritable
reign of terror and were afraid to open their mouths .67
The crowning insult in the Government's favoritism to the
Husseinis was reached in 1934 when Ragheb Bey Nashishibi,
Mayor of Jerusalem for 14 years, was ousted and Dr . Husseini
Khaldi appointed in his stead . The Nashishibis, cut to the quick,
went wild. They even urged that a Jew be appointed mayor .
It looked like their star had set, when the Mufti made the
crowning mistake of his career : he refused to denounce Mussolini
during the Ethiopian invasion, making it plain that he took
British utterances seriously and considered himself no puppet .
The British believed, and with reason, that Haj Amin was convinced
that ultimate victory in the Near East would be with the
Italians, and that he had quietly switched allegiance . It was
evident that he considered himself so powerful a figure that the
Government would not dare remove him . From that day onward,
Jerusalem maneuvered to create a situation which would
bring about the Mufti's fall .
Now began a game of high politics and involved intrigue
almost impossible to describe . The Administration had planned
Haj Amin's ruin by the Legislative Council project with Ragheb
Bey slated as its president. Thoroughly alarmed, the Mufti
fought this proposal tooth and nail, joined enthusiastically by the
Jews. This land makes strange bedfellows . The Nashishibis,
394
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
taking their cue, began to send spellbinders to the villages who
soon had the countryside in an uproar. The strategy was to
undermine the Mufti by depicting him as an enemy of Arab national
aspirations. This seemed easy since the secular form of
state was anathema to Haj Amin, who was dreaming of a new
edition of the old Moslem Caliphate with himself as the boss .
The agitation became more and more violent . Government
House watched it with circumspect eye. Here was a chance to
kill two birds with one stone : to unload the Mufti, now grown
dangerous, and to smash the unwanted Jewish National Home
once and for all.
But Haj Amin was no fool . A Husseini suddenly bobbed up
as one of the most violent of the extremists . He declared for
his party in a press interview that "between the Arabs and Jews
a life-and-death struggle is raging, which will not cease before
one of the parties has been completely crushed ." Against his
will the Mufti found himself forced, temporarily at least, into
the nationalist camp .
Quite different from the squat, ape-like figure of his archopponent,
Ragheb Bey Nashishibi is a tall personable Arab with
white hair and almost fair skin. His manner is smooth and he
has a certain easy Levantine charm . Though he now heads an
Arab independence party which bases its demands on alleged
promises made by Britain for Arab help during the War, Nashishibi
himself had fought on the opposite side as an officer in the
Turkish Army. He is said to have three legal wives, one Moslem,
one Jewish and one Christian, choosing them deliberately
from each faith so as to enhance his chances to get into Heaven
when he dies, by whichever gate is open . He plays the game
of practical politics in much the same pragmatic manner and
can shift his ground on any issue with the most bewildering ease.
The program of the Nashishibi party now coincides exactly
with British aspirations in the Near East . Today they are plumping
for a reunited Arab Transjordan and Palestine, under the
current British favorite, Abdullah of Transjordan . The Mufti
clique rejects Abdullah and hopes for a renaissance of fanatic
Mohammedan times in a great loose Moslem Federation, with
"A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR"
395
the Church as the ruling power . In every country where influence
counts, these rival groups lobby, not only against the
Jews, but with still greater violence, against each other .
The part Whitehall has had in all this can be easily guessed from
the constant open advice given by British officials, urging these
warring parties to "get together" in their fight against the Jews.
Colonial Office organ Great Britain and the East was full of these
admonitions ; nor could even the High Commissioner refrain in
his Annual Report from expressing his "regrets" over this inability
of Arabs to create a truly `united front .' 08
Under the patronage of the Government, Arab leaders representing
all the various groups have long been joined in a superbody
called the Arab Executive,* most members of which are
directly on the Government payroll . A sample of this body's
policies is contained in a proclamation issued February 21, 1 93 1,
which calls on the entire Moslem world to massacre Jews wherever
they may be found .
CLAIMS, OBJECTIVES AND METHODS
The Arab politicians and the anti-Semitic officials of London
and Jerusalem who spur them on, always paint the Arab as an
under-privileged creature who is unable to get a hearing in Britain
because the Jews control the press there and by inference
hold the mass of M . P.'s efficiently under their thumbs. This,
of course, is nothing but an extension of that lively humbug, the
Elders of Zion story . Says Wedgwood, drily disposing of this
contention : "These officials claim that the Arab case is not put
before Parliament . The Arab case cannot be put in a British
House simply because their case is anti-British ." 69
The pro-Arab case in its entirety is a post-war product . During
the War "there were no pro-Arab sympathies [in Palestine]
as [there] were in parts of Arabia . . . and the question of a
Palestinian nationality had never entered their heads ." 70 The
great Near East negotiator Sir Mark Sykes dismissed them with
the deprecatory remark that they had "long had the knack of
0 The Arab High Committee, has, since 1936, superseded the Arab Executive.
396
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
falling in with the plans of a successful conqueror ." The British
Peace Handbook No. 6o observes crisply : "With the Arab
movement centered at Damascus, Zionism in Palestine would be a
help rather than a hindrance to it ; for that movement would
only suffer from the attempt to absorb a district ethnologically
and otherwise so different from countries in which the Arab element
stands alone or is distinctly predominant ."
Despite these facts and the solemn agreements signed by the
House of Hussein with the Zionists, the pan-Arabs, backed by
their powerful sympathizers, continue to harp on the `promises'
made to Hussein by McMahon .* Time after time, Mc-
Mahon himself denied this claim with considerable show of irritation,
71 but it makes no difference. The British-Arab clique
held on to this bone with all their teeth . Discredited or not, we
find even Lord Peel repeating it as a fact in his official report
in 1 937 .
Looked at over a period of years the Arab story strikes an
amusingly self-contradictory note . In 1925 it rests its case entirely
on the alleged failure of Zionist colonization. The Arab
Executive speaks in sepulchral tones of "the economic retrogression"
of the country . It groans dolorously that "the figures are
growing darker every day" and that "Palestine's general wealth
has been reduced by 4 16,604,594 during the last four years
alone ." 72 In March 1927, after a year's slump had slowed up
Jewish immigration till it was only a dribble, the Arab Executive
asserts triumphantly that "the decrease in Jewish immigration confirms
our contention that the Government's policy in Palestine
was wrong."
When this line of argument became silly on the face of it, the
Arabs suddenly swung over to the discovery that Palestine, virtually
ignored in Moslem religious tradition, was "a Holy Land
for Moslems also ." 73 It was on this concept that the horrible
events of 1929 pivoted .
It is at least a curious accident that all these inconsistencies of
Arab viewpoint correspond exactly with whatever happens to
be agitating Whitehall most at the moment. When the British
* See Appendix B, p. 580.
"A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR" 397
switched to a policy aiming at the consolidation of Arabia into
a confederacy under their control, the character of Arab demands
shifted accommodatingly . At a conference in Jerusalem,
the Arab leaders took a pledge under oath "to uphold the
integrity of Arabia as a nation and to recognize no divisions
therein." 74 Yet when it became apparent to the British Foreign
Office that it would have to go slow on such a program, the Arab
agenda shifted obligingly once more . Now the demand was
for sectional independence, a concept regarded as nothing less
than traitorous a few months earlier .
Present-day demands are for a complete stoppage of Jewish
immigration and a cessation of land sales . The claim is that
Palestine is an Arab land and that the Jews, entering on Arab
sufferance, can only hope to attain the status of paying guests .
Some leaders go so far as to propose the confiscation of Jewish
property ; others are satisfied with political domination only.
The Mufti's gang would force them all to become Moslems ;
while the followers of Awny Bey would drive them into the
sea altogether.
Much of this, of course, is the sheerest political hokum, since
very few Levantines have ever been known to lose an opportunity
to make money. Duff writes that "nearly every man of
Nazareth had land ready to sell to the Jews, despite the fact that
they were continually signing high-sounding declarations about
never surrendering one inch of the `Fatherland' to the detested
intruders." 75 At the very peak of the 1936 revolt the three
visiting United States Senators found that "while the Arab High
Committee in charge of the Strike is officially demanding prohibition
of, the sale of land to Jews, some of the prominent Arab
leaders active in that Committee are quietly trying to sell land
to Jewish buyers ." 76
If this proposed tabu were placed into effect a number of
knotty problems would at once arise which none of the Arab-
English solons have yet attempted to answer. Could Arab land,
for instance, be sold to a Jew who has become a convert to Mohammedanism
? May the Druses, who are not Arabs but Persians,
and heretical Moslems to boot, own land? A large part of
398
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
the Afghan population calls itself B'nai Yisroel77 and claims
Jewish descent though they are fanatic Moslems . If they
came to Palestine could they own land ? Half a century ago a
great number of Samaritans accepted Moslemism for the practical
advantages involved . May these people buy land ? Finally,
what is the attitude toward Arabs who are converted to
Judaism ?
It is also claimed that the Nations, in authorizing the establishment
of a Jewish National Home, disposed of a country
which did not belong to them but to the Arab people . But
here again they appear to be flying in the face of facts . Mr.
Van Rees of the Permanent Mandates Commission remarks that
it is "enough to point out that Palestine had belonged before the
War to the Ottoman Empire . That country had been conquered
not by Arabs of Palestine, but by the Allies, and had
finally been ceded to the Allies and not to the Arabs ." 78 If the
League's right to act on behalf of the Jews is contested, it would
be equally valid to challenge the status of every other area disposed
of through the Mandatory system. Turkey then would
have an a priori case for the return of all her lost territory in
Arabia. Certainly if this business of self-determination is to be
carried through honestly, the rich oil area of Mosul must be
taken from Iraq and given back to the Turks . Of the 342,000
people who inhabit the Mosul Vilayet, only 6o,ooo are Arabs,
and these are newcomers living in the town of Mosul itself . Yet,
since Mosul oil is one of the major reasons for British presence
in the Near East, would they dream of urging its return to Turkey
under the same rules they are attempting to apply in Palestine
?
During the middle of the last century, before Zionist immigration
began, there were not one hundred thousand people all told
in the entire country on both sides of the Jordan . There are
plenty of official statistics and hundreds of books and consular
reports on every detail . The vast majority of Arabs are therefore
newcomers, the same as the Jews . Wherefore are they so
land-hungry that they must debouch onto this little territory ?
The question arises : Are they without adequate territories of
"A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR" 399
their own ? Here we come to a new application of Aesop's old
story of the dog in the manger. We discover that in Asia the
Arabs inhabit an area of 2,o i 6,000 square miles, three-quarters
the size of the United States . It is so wild and unpopulated that
Lowell Thomas was led to exclaim that "we have better maps
of the North Pole ; in fact, we have better maps of Mars than we
have of some parts of the interior of Arabia ." 79 The total population
roaming this tremendous expanse is less than twelve million,
including a healthy proportion of minority peoples . If
Syria and Iraq are excluded, this vast domain holds less than six
million human beings . In North Africa, which pan-Arab visionaries
also dream of incorporating in the Arab Empire of the future,
is another territory almost as large and nearly as underpopulated
.
Here we find the Arabs in possession of what is by all odds
the world's last frontier. No colony held by any European
Power is as sparsely peopled . No nation on earth can even remotely
compare with the Arab in per capita land possession .
He has so much of it that he is actually land-poor, its value having
fallen to zero, since there are no human beings to work it .
The great territory of Saudi, whose unsurveyed area can only
be guessed to be approximately a million square miles, contains
not three million human beings, and is undoubtedly the most
underpopulated space on the globe today . The rich Hejaz has
only eight hundred and fifty thousand people within its 150,000
square miles : yet it was from here that Abdullah and his desert
tribesmen came to squat on the Jewish National Home territory
in Transjordan. Arabs have also the vast spaces of Oman, Yemen,
the Hadramaut and Syria on the Peninsula, as well as
Algeria, Tunisia, Lybia and Morocco in Africa. Even Iraq,
thickly settled by comparison to the immense empty expanses
to the south, has less than three million people in a territory of
143,250 square miles. In ancient times this magically fertile
earth, watered by two of the great rivers of Asia, was the granary
of civilization . It alone could support the entire Arab nation
and still present all the aspects of an underpopulated country .
If the matter be considered from the purely Moslem view400
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
point, which admits of neither racialism nor nationality beyond
the community of Mohammed, the axis of possible settlement
stretches itself immeasurably . Even Asiatic Turkey is impoverished
for want of men . In 1926 Kemal Pasha offered large
holdings to Palestine Arabs on the homestead plan if they would
immigrate to Turkey. (After a considerable group of families
left to take advantage of this attractive tender, the Palestine Government
suppressed the whole business, even forbidding any public
mention of the Turkish Government's offer .)
Since the emphasis of Arab demands centers on a united Arab
Empire, it seems fantastic to believe that they also require for
their national development the nine thousand square miles of
Western Palestine. "When the Arab talks of his right of selfdetermination
in Palestine," comments Herbert Sidebotham, "he
really means his right to suppress Palestine and to merge it with
some other country. Palestine as a political unit is a ghost of
the Jewish past alone . It has never had a separate existence as
a political unit except through the Jew nor will it ever have in
the future." Actually, Arab politicians do not recognize Palestine
at all. In all their public statements they deliberately refer
to it as `Southern Syria .' They protest continually because
Palestine has been severed from the main body . In their minds
it can be no more than a geographical concept . It is only
through the introduction of the Jewish factor that it becomes
meaningful as a national-territorial organism .
One is forced to concede that wherever two divergent races
inhabit the same territory, prejudices, hatreds and envies must
arise, if only due to differences of habits and culture and temperament.
Despite this, the prosperity brought in by the Jews
would be an almost certain guarantee of permanent peace if
pernicious propaganda were eliminated. "The Jew would welcome
fellowship with the Arab," says Broadhurst . 80 And Colonel
Wedgwood states fearlessly that the Arabs would give little
or no trouble "were they not encouraged and stimulated to do
so by the effendis of the Higher Arab Committee and by a Government
which does not like the Jews and lets the Arabs know
"A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR" 401
it." 81 Arab papers reflect all the contempt the permanent officials
hold for English party politicians . Insolently the Arab
press asks : "What is the British Parliament but a Council of
Elders of Zion ?" 82 Falastin (usually accounted the semi-official
voice of the Government) berates Ormsby-Gore as a stupid
heretic who "cannot free himself from the influence of the Bible."
"The British Government," it warns, "must forget the
Bible" and must order "the Church of England in no uncertain
terms to refrain from interfering in political matters ." 83
It must not be doubted that the Arab has some forbidding
grievances, real enough to him, no matter how puzzling they
may appear to alien minds . One of these is the fear of the
emancipation of women . Another is the alarm of the effendis
lest the end of the feudal period terminate their privileged position
in society. To these Colonel Blimps of the Near East it
is useless to argue the benefits which Jewish science, industry
and medicine have brought to the people of Palestine . "They
will reply," relates the London Times, "that these are luxuries
which the people of Palestine can do without." 84 Like all
other forms of existence the medieval mind dies hard . This
deep-rooted resistance is shown by the petition of professional
camel drivers in June 1936, complaining against the competition
of such devilish inventions as the automobile and railroad . The
camel drivers are hence losing "their independence and dignity,"
and must be protected by turning the clock back. Another reason,
which appears too ridiculous on the surface to be credible,
though Duff assures us it is so, is that "the Arabs still hate the
Jews, and despise them because they hold that Ishmael, and not
Jacob, was the legal son, and that Hagar was the wife of Abraham,
and that Sarah was his concubine ." 85
The final and clinching argument is that no matter what benefits
might come of it, the Arabs do not want Jewish settlement,
and that they have a `right' under the principle of majority rule
to forbid Jews from immigrating . Would not the same argument
oblige the British to retire from South Africa and other
places where they are in the minority ? Since the successful
402
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
issue of a wrong does not make it right, must not America then
be returned to the Indians ; and perhaps England itself to the
Celts ?
Certainly of all peoples, the English must know that the history
of the world is the history of colonization . Every civilized
country is the result of some such process in the past . Today
all the major peoples continue to colonize . In Arab Algeria and
Tunisia, for instance, both France and Italy are steadily pouring
in European immigrants without anyone in particular objecting.
In the case of the Jews there is infinitely more reason to
seek mass resettlement. Not poverty or impulse alone drives
them forth, but a grim and terrible battle against extinction .
They cannot retreat from Palestine because there is nowhere else
for them to retreat to .
If the question be one of title and legality, the Jews have in
their possession a charter signed by the Nations and countersigned
by Feisal of the House of Hussein for the Arabs . If a
moral right is to be posed, can it be offered by the voracious appetite
of a new Arab imperialism, already swollen and choking
on vast territories it cannot possibly digest ? You may scratch
Palestine anywhere and you find Israel. There is not a spot
which is not indelibly stamped with the footprint of the Jew -
"not a road, spring, mountain or village, which does not awaken
the name of some great king or greater prophet . Surely," cries
Dr. Holmes, "this is his homeland, if ever again he is to have
a home." 86
`SEMITIC BROTHERS'
If British plans ever materialize, Palestine will eventually come
under Arab domination, presumably as part of the great Arab
Confederacy . The fate of the Jews in this eventuality becomes
an interesting conjecture.
There is a pleasant fiction, implicitly believed by many Jews,
that Israel has been well-treated by the followers of Mohammed
; that some sort of modus vivendi was established in the dim
days of antiquity, so that the two groups got along famously to"
A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR" 403
gether. This fantasy grew out of the liaison between the Jews
of Spain and their racial kinsmen, the invading Berbers, zvho were
largely of direct Jewish and Phoenician descent .87 It was the
Jewish Berber, General Tarik-es-Ziad, who began the Moorish
conquest of Spain . During the Arab invasion of Spain in 71 z,
Jewish troops often as not garrisoned important fortresses .
Lloyd George states that "in science and art the superiority of
the early Moslem is attributable to the Jews." Lecky tells us
that "Jewish learning and Jewish genius contributed very largely
to that bright . . . civilization which radiated from Toledo and
Cordova." 88 And H. G. Wells declares that it is "difficult to
say . . . when the Jew ends and the Arab begins, so important
and essential were its Jewish factors." 89
As the invading tribes began to be suffocated by mass conversions
and the holding of innumerable concubines, whatever
bond of attraction might have existed between the two peoples
completely disappeared . Soon thereafter, to continue to this
day, Moslem rulers placed a penalty of death on apostasy to
Judaism. Jews were forbidden to ride on horses and were
marked with special clothes . Politically they were consigned
to the same second-rate citizenship which Nazi Germany is now
introducing ." In this cruel condition they remain, considered
in the same light as dogs, creatures the true Believer utterly despises.
The Arabic culture known to history was a modification of
the several ancient civilizations absorbed bodily by the barbaric
Arab tribes in their swift march of conquest . It never touched
the Arabs of Arabia, the peninsular Arab . These, writes Bertram
Thomas, "remained inviolate by their poverty, their remoteness,
their unwillingness to change. . . An intolerance survives
which is almost without parallel in the world today and
explains why so few European explorers have penetrated deep
into the peninsula - scarcely twenty throughout the ages ." 91
As early as Roman times, when the Hebrews with their backs
to the wall were struggling for their very existence, Tacitus informs
us that "a considerable body of Arabs . . . took the field
as avowed enemies of the Jewish nation ." 92 Wherever the
404 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
Arab has seized control since, a critical situation has risen for
the Jews . A modern instance is the revolt of Palestine Arabs
in 1834 against the exactions of the Caliphate . Mobs converged
on Jerusalem from all over the country, and for several weeks
held the city. Venting their ugly passions on the horror-stricken
Jews, they gave themselves over to a mad orgy of rapine, murder
and pillage, until the Egyptian general Ibrahim, with equal
barbarism and ferocity, annihilated them .
If one may judge from the tone of the Arab press, the lot of
the Jew under the coming `National Government' will be anything
but pleasant. El Jamiya Arabiyah snarls that "the English
can stand the pride and impudence of the Jews, but the Arabs
know what kind of vermin the Jews are and will know how to
silence them ." Another ready example is the editorial in Islamia
on October 4, 1936, appealing to foreign Arabs not to confine
themselves to mere boycott of Jews but to drink their blood .
It may be seen again in the inflammatory circulars systematically
scattered in Jerusalem, reading : "Kill the Jews until not one of
them remains. Gird yourselves and satiate your souls that thirst
for blood, souls that cannot be sated but with the blood of the
. . . alien and loathsome Jew ."
Farago found that "Arab agitators visit the peasants and promise
them that at the end of the struggle the land and wives of the
Jews will be distributed amongst them . With this expectation
the peasant digs up his money and buys rifles and ammunition
from wandering gunrunners ." 93 Like many other informed
men, Duff gave blunt warning that "as soon as the Palestinian
leaders understood that Great Britain had really left them to their
own devices . . . a general massacre of the Jews and the destruction
of their colonies would occur ." 94 It need occasion
no surprise that the words 'Heil Hitler' proved a magic password
during the recent rebellion, protecting Europeans against
attack.
In every Moslem country the situation of Israel is tragic and
frightful. When the French came into Arab North Africa on
a frank war of imperial conquest, the Jews were overjoyed .
Their position had been so terrible that the invading French
"A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR"
405
were looked on as if they had been the troops of Messiah . Even
after European intervention, characteristic pogroms have flared
up like a windswept flame . The fiendish attack on the Jewish
quarter in Constantine, Algiers, in 1934, was a particularly atrocious
event. When French troops finally arrived, they found a
bloodcurdling scene of ruin and horror . Over a hundred Jews
had been slaughtered . Whole families had been locked in their
homes and burned to death . Houses were sacked, women violated
and children hacked to pieces . Among the countless injured
were young girls with their breasts cut off, creatures mutilated
beyond recognition but somehow alive .
In as dire misery are the one hundred and twenty thousand
Jews in French Morocco . In Tunis, Tripoli and Spanish Morocco
the picture is as wretched. Only the protection of European
soldiers saved the North African Jews from an orgy of
torture and merciful annihilation ; and some day, the Socialists
promise, these troops will be withdrawn .
In Iraq the one hundred and ten thousand Jews live under a
sanguinary reign of terror, not much different from that taking
place in Germany . They are mercilessly boycotted . Savage
beatings, murders and robberies are a daily occurrence . Jewish
girls are forcibly seized and dragged into harems . Yusuf Malek
assures us that "in Iraq a Moslem finds it more easy to kill a Jew
than to kill a chicken ." 95
In Syria Jews face famine and gradual extinction . Since they
are completely Arabicized, their fate gives an abrupt answer to
Arab claims that the tension in Palestine springs solely from a
conflict of national aims . The Jewish population of Damascus
has collapsed from twenty thousand after the War to less than
four thousand in 1935. In the last five years, ten thousand Jews
have emigrated from Damascus and Aleppo alone . In every
city and village they are systematically terrorized and boycotted .
In the streets and mosques they are openly threatened with the
same fate as befell the unfortunate Assyrians in Iraq, just as soon
as Syria obtains its independence . The French Mandatory Authorities
show little concern for Jews and are either vague or
frankly indifferent . Nevertheless, the Jew views the day when
4o6
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
a native government will be installed, with horror . The sudden
move of Leon Blum's Socialist ministry to make good on its
theories by granting independence to Syria, threw all Syrian
Jewry into a panic. To a man, they are trying to leave the
country before the French-Syrian Treaty goes into effect .
The only redeeming spot on the Syrian map is the autonomous
Christian district of Lebanon . These people are the only friends
the Jews have in Western Asia . Centuries of bloody persecution
have taught the Syrian Christian a lesson he has not forgotten.
The Lebanon is completely and whole-souledly pro-
Zionist. It wants the Jews for neighbors by the south, to lessen
its isolation in this forever-menacing Moslem sea. When pan-
Arab congresses held their anti-Jewish sessions, the Lebanese
papers roundly denounced them .116 The Government of the
Lebanon Republic has even proclaimed the Jewish Day of
Atonement, Yom Kippur, as an official holiday .
Arabia Felix, that immense curtained mystery, is a graveyard
in which lie buried the many strong Jewish tribes who once
graced this area with their intelligence and learning . In this vast
stronghold of the fanatic Ishmaelites no Jew may enter and live .
In Yemen, at the south end of the Peninsula, Jews are locked
into ghettos as in the Middle Ages, reduced to conditions of economic
desperation even worse, if that be possible, than the Jews
of the pogrom areas of Europe . Their women are at the constant
mercy of every wandering desperado who takes it into his
mind to invade the ghetto. Jews must wear a distinctive dress .
They must keep in the shadows . They are prohibited from
riding on horseback . Their children, by edict of December
1928, must embrace Moslemism on the death of their parents .
Those who believe the assurances of the English have only to
read the gory history of the Christian Assyrians in Iraq, after
Britain terminated its Mandate there in 1932, to gain a picture
of what is impending in Palestine . Just as the English made
an arrangement with the Zionists, so they had made a similar one
with the Assyrians, inviting them to rise against the Turks and
promising them independence and protection if they would do
so. Moved by these pledges, the Assyrians were the only peo"
A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR"
407
ple in what is now Iraq who took up the Allied cause and fought
loyally for the British Empire .97 Their territory was later placed
under Arab rule because London was anxious to include the
Mosul Oil District within Iraqian frontiers .
When the Assyrians expressed alarm over the British proposal
to grant statehood to Iraq, the Mandates Commission was solemnly
assured that the anxiety of these minorities was due to
"mischievous propaganda." Iraq, said the British representative,
was "a country where the Moslem, Christian and Jew have
lived happily side by side for centuries . . . His Majesty's Government
fully realizes its responsibilities in recommending that
Iraq should be admitted to the League . Should Iraq prove unworthy
o f the confidence which has been reposed in it, the moral
responsibility must rest with His Majesty's Government ." 98
In vain the Assyrians pleaded . The engineer A . M. Hamilton
and other thoughtful Englishmen immediately called the
turn without reservation, stating that "the lives of the minorities
have been placed in the hands of people without any morals or
conscience." e°
Scarcely a year after Iraq was granted its `independence,' and
despite the readiness of His Majesty's Government to assume
"moral responsibility," the Kurdish settlements were bombarded
by airplanes. A month later (in August 1933), a holy war was
proclaimed against the Assyrians . The Government offered
Arab tribesmen one pound bounty for every Assyrian head
brought in, as well as license to plunder any Assyrian property
they could find . The Arab press made it known that all acts
of violence were lawful and that anyone not participating in
this war would be betraying his religion and country.'°° At the
head of the Criminal Investigation Department was an Englishman,
who watched this terrific barrage of wild propaganda and
incitement without making a move .
Lieutenant-Colonel A. S. Stafford, British Administrative Inspector
in Iraq, gives a blood-curdling eye-witness account of
what followed. The Assyrians were first systematically disarmed.
On August 5, an Army detachment swept through
their territory and the Assyrians were hunted down as one stalks
408
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
rabbits. "No pretence was made that these operations had any
purely military objective, for the Army Intelligence Officers
did not even take the trouble to cross-question the captured Assyrians,
who were simply shot as they were rounded up ." 101
At Dohuk they were taken from their villages in vans, in batches
of eight or ten, and shot down with machine guns . "The heavy
armoured cars were driven over dead and dying alike ." 102
On August 7, the inhabitants of the whole surrounding district
were ordered to come down to Simel, the largest Assyrian
settlement. After days of sacking, the troops began a coldblooded
and methodical massacre . "Machine gunners set up
their guns outside the windows of the houses in which the Assyrians
had taken refuge, and having trained them on the terrorstricken
wretches in the crowded rooms, fired among them until
not a man was left standing in the shambles ." 103 Women
were ripped open with knives and then made sport of while they
were in a state of agony . Little girls of nine were raped and
burned alive. After being barbarously tortured, priests were
slaughtered, holy books piled over their bodies and burned with
them. When there was no one left to kill, the troops took their
departure, carrying with them for their amusement a large number
of luckless Assyrian girls . The Tribes, who had been interested
spectators of these unspeakable events, then came in and
completed the looting. "I saw and heard many horrible things
in the Great War," related an English eye-witness, "but what
I saw at Simel is beyond human imagination." 104
The troops engaged against the defenseless Assyrians were
given a royal reception on their return . In Mosul the Crown
Prince, now King of Iraq, decorated their colors with his own
hands. The various officers concerned were promoted . Enthusiastic
applause greeted their triumphant procession through
the capital.
After this cowardly slaughter, occurred other massacres, this
time of the Yezidis, "planned by the Central Authorities at Baghdad
and conducted by the army with no less barbarity than the
previous ones." 105
To the present day Christians are effectively boycotted in the
"A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR"
409
Government service, debarred from primary schools, and militated
against in all ways . Girls are never safe ; and "acts of
sodomy by force," states Malek, are committed on boys by education
and administrative officials .100
In these circumstances the Zionists may well read a ghastly
projection of the future. In ringing accents the Assyrian
leader Prince Gambar told them : "Despite the empty assurances
of Great Britain, those who have eyes with which to see,
and know what Arabs of the type of the Iraqis can do when
let loose, must share your fears as to what is positively to happen
to non-Arabs when placed under Arab rule ." 107
CHAPTER II
JEHOVAH ABDICATES IN FAVOR OF DOWNING STREET
LET NOT THY RIGHT HAND KNOW WHAT THY LEFT HAND
DOETH'
CHAPTER II
JEHOVAH ABDICATES IN FAVOR OF DOWNING
STREET
LET NOT THY RIGHT HAND KNOW WHAT THY LEFT HAND
DOETH'
In 1936 again, uncontrolled violence rolled like a sheet of
seething flame over Palestine . For the sixth time since British
occupation, armed revolt broke out, turning the country into a
roaring furnace. And as before, the lawlessness timed itself to
coincide exactly with events of major importance in Empire
politics .
If circumstances are to be believed at their face value, the
recent revolt in Palestine was a marvel of valor and military
genius. For more than two years a handful of petty ruffians,
sniping from ambush in the hills, have held the greatest empire
in the world at bay . "It may be doubted," states Sidebotham,
"whether there were ever more than one thousand men in the
field against us." 1 What London is asking us to believe at
the moment is that in a country half the size of Ohio, thirtytwo
thousand troops equipped with airplanes, tanks and all the
trappings of war are unable to subdue a small gang of desperadoes
who have succeeded in keeping it in a state of insecurity
and uproar for years. The utter helplessness and awful inefficiency
of the Mandatory in the face of this minor insurrection
is laid on too thick to be credible .
In scarcely more than a century London has managed to seize
for itself over a quarter of the land surface of the globe. Is
not the very existence of this vast Empire a gilt-edged guarantee
that England has never shown herself inept at the business of
handling rebellion ? It is not generally realized that the British
are constantly engaged in putting down insurrection in farseparated
places . In the Hadramaut they have been going
through a merciless mopping-up process . Along India's north-
410
JEHOVAH ABDICATES
411
west frontier they are cleaning out the revolting tribesmen of
Waziristan with a ruthless hand . The colonies without exception
are ruled by the axiom, `Spare the rod and spoil the child .'
In Kenya, another mandated territory, when a government
clerk named Thuku founded the "East Africa Native Association"
to protest the peonage system introduced by the Colonials,
he was grabbed on the charge of `sedition' and deported without
trial, after the police had slaughtered a score of his followers
for demonstrating in front of the jail where he was held . In
Iraq an emergency similar to the one in Palestine was handled
by Sir Percy Cox with scant ceremony . All the Arab leaders
concerned were immediately placed in custody, offending newspapers
suppressed and their editors arrested . Sir Percy's comments
were brief and to the point : ". . . the High Commissioner
will not hesitate to take drastic steps against any persons,
tribesmen or townsmen who do not take the present warning,
but continue to emulate the seditious vagaries of those now
placed under restraint ." This was language that Arabs could
understand, and the whole affair died aborning. Subsequent rebellions
were handled in short order by the Iraqi shadow government,
by simply detailing a few British airplanes to bomb
the tribesmen into submission .
In Palestine the close integration of officialdom itself with
the `patriotic' movement is hardly open to doubt . It is sufficient
to cite the Nationalist demonstration of October io, 1 934,
attended by prominent Government functionaries in their official
capacity, where "Arab civilization" was lauded and "the
coming independence and unification of the Arab countries"
(including Palestine) enthusiastically hailed . This hidden complot
reveals itself even more obviously in an incident of twelve
months earlier . An anti-Jewish demonstration had been announced.
The usual preparations had preceded it, the ferocious
bluster and screaming agitation, led by the familiar leaders of the
Arab Executive . Unfortunately for these plans, Nazi violence
in Germany, then unique and shocking, suddenly shook the soul
of civilization like an earthquake . All articulate reaction to
these startling events was overwhelmingly with the stricken
412
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
Jews. Sympathy for human suffering and despair was the prevailing
mood, and it was apparent at that moment that anti-
Jewish riots would be more than embarrassing to the British
Government. In an amazing about-face the scheduled disorders
were converted into a peaceful demonstration against the Government,
in which the word Jew was not even mentioned . A
strike had been called, but it was quietly recalled, without a
word of explanation . Part of the mob which had been so carefully
prepared could not, however, be headed off. Several
thousand hoodlums charged the police in Jaffa after having been
told by their own leaders to disperse . Taking his duties seriously,
Assistant Superintendent of Police Faraday ordered his
men to fire. In the melee he himself was badly wounded ; and
as a result an irate British judge sentenced some of the rioters to
imprisonment. Immediately the District Court quashed the
sentence and released the prisoners on "promise of good behavior
." The bewildered Faraday soon after had his post taken
away from him and was exiled to Beersheba .2
The British are reputed to possess the shrewdest Intelligence
and Secret Service in existence . Concentrated in one small
branch of the War Office, known as M.I.5, this superbly organized
spy and counter-spy system is respected wherever espionage
exists . Yet in strategic Palestine the Authorities never
seemed to know that seditious unrest of the most explosive type
was being openly organized right under their noses . Like the
previous uprisings, the rebellion of 1936 was scarcely a bolt
from the blue. It only became possible after prolonged elaboration
and shaping. Much of it was openly bought and paid for .
"Fifty well-armed, resolute Franks with a large sum o f money,"
observes an official United States Report, "could revolutionize
the whole country ." 3 "It is always easy in Arab countries,"
confirms Ernest Main, "to buy agitators and even murderers
for a pittance. It is easy, too, to work up political demonstrations,
even culminating in riots, if the fee paid is sufficient . All
you have to do is to summon a local labor contractor and tell
him you want a thousand men to demonstrate . His fee will be,
say, C50 or C 7o, and if you hand over this money you will
JEHOVAH ABDICATES
41 3
get a perfectly good demonstration in the streets, perhaps with
a few persons injured and some windows broken . . . It is important,
therefore, to realize that so-called `spontaneous' outbreaks
among the Arabs are less common than those that are
engineered ." 4
Before this kind of backdrop the riots were openly rehearsed
and agitated. For eighteen months the Government allowed
the Arab press to keep up a daily barrage, systematically branding
the Jews as "the human sexual disease," as "a gang of swindlers,"
and "a menace to all mankind ." Arab leaders publicly
threatened violence and bloodshed . Terrorist organizations
paraded themselves without the slightest attempt at secrecy .
Among others, there was the Red Shadow, the Black Hand, and
a formidable murder gang calling itself simply `G,' over whom,
says Farago, "the British made merry," referring to its members
as 'G-Men.' 5 All over Palestine groups of brown-clad storm
troops were marching, shouting 'Heil Hitler .' At Nablus,
boldly operating in the open, was a military training school for
the Arab Scouts, prime leaders in the disturbances .
Late in March a meeting of influential Arabs, practically all
of them Government employees, was held at Safed to plan the
uprising. A delegation consisting of members of the Iraqian
Parliament arrived to attend . It behaved itself in a flagrant
manner which would have led to strong diplomatic representations
in any other country, but here its stay was made pleasant
by every official courtesy. Fifteen days before the lid finally
blew off of this seething caldron, the Revisionist leader Jabotinsky
cabled the High Commissioner warning him that "specific
Arab manifestations on an unprecedented scale are being
exploited to revive the ominous battle cry, `Eddowleh Maana'
[the Government is with us]" and received a contemptuous
reply.
There was hardly one of the Arab ring-leaders who was not
on the Government's payroll . In any other country these men,
self-announced plotters of riot and rebellion, would have immediately
been tried for high treason . On the statute books
was the Seditious Offenses Ordinance, providing severe penalties
414
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
for any act which conspired "to raise discontent or disaffection
amongst the inhabitants of Palestine ; or to promote feelings of
ill-will and hostility between the different sections of the population
of Palestine." Yet on one of those rare occasions when
this ordinance was applied, the dangerous firebrand, Hassan
Sidki Dejani, was let off with the derisive fine of C 25 after he
had been found guilty of inciting Arab officials to revolt . "If
one thing stands out clear from the record of the Mandatory administration,"
concedes the Peel Report, "it is the leniency with
which Arab political agitation, even when carried to the point
of violence and murder, has been treated ."
Responsible Arabs who wanted peace were treated with all
the contumely of renegades who had joined the enemy camp .
In Britain itself, Colonial Office publications were blatantly advising
the Arabs to "unite on a common front ." An Arab delegation
was invited to present its grievances officially in London
- though no Jewish delegation was asked ." The tomtoms beat
in frenzied repetition as Whitehall circles called on the Arabs
not to let this opportunity to smash Zionism go by . The Bureaucracy
was now stalking its game brazenly in the clear .
While Arabs who made no secret of their revolutionary aims
were being pampered on the Government payroll, the steamroller
of official authority was ironing out the Jews. Among
other incidents, every Revisionist leader in Palestine was arrested
on suspicion of being connected with a "secret revolutionary organization,"
and held for considerable periods, without trial .
Even the innocuous little Jewish State Party was refused registration
as a legally existing organization. With withering
mockery the Government announced that unless it "eliminated
from its platform the demand for a Jewish majority . . . the
Jewish State Party could not be registered by the Palestine Administration."
Under this kind of patronage Arab megalomania developed
like a well-watered weed . A droll example is provided by the
indignant protest sent to a Jewish newspaper by a bandit named
Nabulsi during the height of the riots . Complaining that the
paper was not even concerned "with common politeness," he
JEHOVAH ABDICATES
415
says, making his point : "Never have the Official Communiques
designated us as inciters, terrorists and murderers !" 7 Of course
Mr. Nabulsi was quite right -the Official communiques had
never done so .
Unless the British are the victims of the worst accumulation
of circumstantial evidence that ever made white appear to be
black, the current disturbances, as well as the preceding situations
they have been required so busily to police, were created
with adroit cunning by themselves . The hope was plainly to
institute a struggle which would paralyze the Jews, after which
the Administration could come to terms with the Arabs . And
so we see the fantastic picture of a State surreptitiously engaged
in undermining its own authority and ruining its own commerce
and security by an act of civil rebellion to which it has lent its
own tacit permission . The three American Senators, Austin,
Copeland and Hastings, who visited Palestine in 1936, made
no bones about their impressions. Copeland, product of the
unbending morality of an upper-state New York village, bluntly
wrote that "there are really two strikes going on in Palestine .
One is conducted by Arab terrorists, who throw bombs and
snipe at passersby in the streets and highways . The other is
conducted silently by the Mandatory Government of Palestine
against the proper administration of justice . The prolongation
o f the terror in the Holy Land is due . . . to a manifest sympathy
for the vandals and assassins displayed by many officers
who are sworn to uphold the law . . . creating a condition
which could not but shock any American observer ." 8
REVOLT BY PERMISSION
For months, fifteen thousand soldiers had apparently been unable
to render safe a few miles of road between Jerusalem and
Tel Aviv . There had been innumerable hold-ups by armed
gangs, in which Jewish passengers had been hauled out of their
cars and wantonly butchered. Not a soul had been punished
for any of these brutal crimes . With unrestrained arrogance
the intransigeant Arab press hailed these killers as heroes and
416 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
boasted of further horrors to come . The nerves of the Jewish
community were worn to a frazzle. On April 17, 1936 the
funeral of a murdered Jew was made the occasion of a protest
demonstration . In an ugly mood, the police fired into the
crowd, wounding thirty persons . Immediately after, steelhelmeted
officers invaded Tel Aviv, dragging out householders
on suspicion of having been connected with the protest . Bearers
of black-bordered Zionist flags of mourning were beaten into
unconsciousness . Sullen, angry apprehension once more made
the air of the Holy Land a tinder box . It was in the midst of
this charged condition that the explosion was touched off .
The actual lighting of the fuse took place on the nineteenth of
April when a blood-curdling tale was circulated in Jaffa that
four Arab men and women had been beheaded by Jews in Tel
Aviv. Instead of counteracting these wild rumors, the Government
added fuel to the fire by dispatching enlarged police
units to Tel Aviv, obviously to protect Arabs from Jewish attack.
The outbreaks were swiftly and shrewdly plotted . On the
scheduled day not a single Arab was to be seen in Tel Aviv
though they generally offer their vegetables for sale as early as
five in the morning. Jews visiting Jaffa were irritably told by
the Chief Officer there that he "really did not understand why
they had come . . . since everybody had already known yesterday
that anti-Jewish attacks were to take place ." e Not a
finger was lifted by the Authorities . On the entire road from
Tel Aviv to Jerusalem only one policeman was posted though
the roads were almost bursting with armed and threatening men .
Jaffa burst into flames with the familiar cry "the Government is
with us" urging the demented horde on . By midday the streets
were running with Jewish blood . Many were slaughtered and
mutilated past identification, right under the eyes of the police
who made no effort to interfere .
The contagion spread to all parts of the country like wildfire .
Little boys of six carried automatics, shooting them off on the
streets of Jerusalem as if they were toy pistols . Unhindered,
the Arab press beat a loud tattoo for murder and revolt . GramJEHOVAH
ABDICATES
4 1 7
ophone records made their appearance in the shops, calling on
the Arabs to annihilate the Jews . Nazi flags and pictures of
Hitler were prominently displayed in store windows . Booklets
explaining Nazi methods of forcing Jews from the Reich were
distributed freely . Only the Haifa district remained immune,
miraculously free of violence to the end, leading Jabotinsky to
ask coldly if it were true that this was "a revolt by leave" in one
part of Palestine, with no revolt where it was requested by the
Authorities that there should be no revolt .
On May 21, the Arab High Committee called a general strike,
stopping all work. Contrary to its own organic law, the Government
did not declare the strike illegal . Despite the fact that
it was an openly seditious body, the Arab High Committee was
not interfered with. The queer business by no means ended
here. At the end of June a mutinous memorandum was submitted
to the High Commissioner, signed by 137 senior Arab
officials, telling him bluntly to yield to the Arab High Committee.
This singular paper was duly forwarded through proper
channels to the Colonial Office, "who politely acknowledged it
and so far from rebuking the signatories, thanked them for their
loyalty!" 10 It was followed by even more impudent memoranda
from Arab officials in the second division, and the
Government-paid judges of the Moslem Courts .
With the exception of Government employees, virtually the
whole terror was led by Syrians, and Arabs from Mesopotamia
and Egypt. Violent men from all quarters slipped in and out
of the border as if it were non-existent, attracted by the lust
for action. The most important of these was Fawzy Bey el
Kaougji, self-styled commander of the Arab bands . A somewhat
handsome adventurer of neurotic impulses, Fawzy was a
Syrian who had been sentenced to death by the French for his
activities during the Druse revolt . Escaping to the Hejaz, he
had to fly for his life again, this time for being mixed up in a
tribal rebellion .
More lately he had been Commandant of the Military Training
College of Iraq . The Arab outbreak had already lasted three
months when Fawzy made his sensational appearance in a battle
418
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
in the Nablus area. Soon after, reports came through describing
how he had actually made his way in broad daylight across
the desert from Iraq, accompanied by many motor lorries laden
with full military equipment, and a considerable body of professional
desperadoes said to have come from the Iraqian Army .
To reach the Jordan River he had to pass through a veritable
network of military posts and patrols by which every waterhole
and lane is watched with a hawk's eye. The Jordan crossings
themselves are well known and well guarded . Fawzy
was no ectoplasm which could waft its way across these threedimensional
obstacles like Shaitan's spirit. The passage was that
of a regular expedition replete with weapons and military baggage
; but there he was on the wrong side of Jordan.
His appearance in Palestine was greeted with a well-organized
blast of publicity not less than that given the British expeditionary
force of General Dill." Within a few days his photographs,
describing him grandly as "Commander-in-Chief of the Arab
Armies in Southern Syria," were being sold and displayed in
bookstalls throughout the Holy Land . The entire Arab press
featured them with such provocative statements as "long live
the leader of battles, Fawzy, the messenger from Iraq," and "unsheath
your swords and daggers and press the enemy till he is
strangled." None of this met with the slightest interference
from the all-powerful censorship bureau . Aping the Government
itself, Fawzy even published his own war communiques,
making extravagant claims of `victories .' These were posted
prominently, sometimes on Government buildings themselves,
where they were allowed to remain for Arabs to see and believe .
An apparently frantic search by the combined forces of the
Army and Police found him as elusive as the proverbial greased
pig. While the Authorities were supposedly turning the country
upside down to find him, fifteen thousand Arabs assembled
on the banks of the Jordan to give the `hero' a royal reception .
From the very start, the rebels showed that they possessed an
inexhaustible supply of weapons and ammunition and were being
guided by a skilled military hand . Most of the Arab arms
were "brand new British weapons and ammunition manufacJEHOVAH
ABDICATES
419
tured in the celebrated Woolwich Arsenal ." 12 It is reliably declared
that practically all their bombing operations were conducted
with hand grenades of official army issue . 13 Searches
for arms in Arab towns were preceded by a great stir in advance
so as to apprise the villagers that the raid was imminent, giving
them plenty of time to put their houses in order. In many cases,
groups of rebels used police cars and possessed special police
passes .
With bandits and mutineers swarming over every road, soldiers
were under instruction to fire only in the air. British
Tommies informed Farago : "We are not allowed to use weapons
without the written permission o f the District Commissioner
!" 14 And Duff was told in disgust by a loyal Arab policeman
: "Life is almost impossible for us men of the police
nowadays. We dare not do our duty for fear of being reported
and punished ." 15 "Both men and officers," states the London
Morning Post sharply, "have been quite bewildered by the fact
that operations have frequently been canceled at the moment
when they were on the point of being successful ." 16 A cloak
of bleak mystery shrouded these strange instructions . Where
they came from, no one seemed to know .
The streets of all cities were made the daily stamping grounds
of gangs who threatened Arab shopkeepers and beat up peasants
who came into town with their vegetables . "For an Arab to be
suspected of a lukewarm adherence to the nationalist cause,"
says Lord Peel, "is to invite a visit from a body of gunmen ." 14
Gangs visited villages and threatened to burn them down unless
they supplied quotas of men, firearms and provisions . When
the Mayor of Beisan displayed a foolish unwillingness to swell
the terrorists' funds, his young son's throat was slit in reprisal .
In deadly fear of their own nationals, 1 zoo wealthy Arabs fled
the country.
Shootings, bombings and every conceivable form of violent
outrage now became the daily routine . Bombs were thrown at
homes, railway stations, hospitals and public buildings . Kindergartens
and playgrounds were dynamited, tearing little children
to shreds. Nurses were slain by snipers as they went on duty .
420
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
Trains were fired on and wrecked ; cinema houses blown up ;
crops burned ; trees whose planting represented a lifetime of
heartbreak and industry, maliciously uprooted . Nothing that
would yield to knife or flame was safe from the destructive hand
of the vandal .
The chivalrous stuff these pampered `patriots' were made of is
typified in the case of a gang who invaded the home of a Safed
rabbi at midnight . They found his three little children on the
veranda and butchered them in their sleep. Their mother,
startled by the commotion, ran out and flung herself down to
protect her brood . The Arabs shot her without mercy. Her
husband coming on this terrible scene had barely time to see his
family dying before his eyes when a bomb hurled by the retreating
intruders decapitated him .
The Yishub was caught in a trap, but it knew from what
source its agony came . Courageously the head of the Palestine
Jewish Community, Mr. Ben Zvi, asked : "Who can say that his
hands are clean in these outrages ? Can the High Commissioner
?" In refreshing contrast to the fawning rhetoric of
Zionist `statesmen' in London, forthright old Mayor Dizengoff
of Tel Aviv saddled the High Commissioner with direct responsibility,
bluntly accusing him of having introduced "demoralization,
anarchy and lawlessness into the country ." He declared
that "the Government railways have become the strongholds of
terrorists from which they set fire to Jewish cornfields and bombard
peaceful towns," and that "Palestine is now directed by the
Arab High Committee and hooligans." "You assure us solemnly,"
he exclaimed (addressing himself to the Government),
"that you are fulfilling your obligations to us, but in practice
you have outlawed the Jews and handed them over to a mob of
criminals." 18
As in previous riots, the Jews were rendered impotent by being
forcibly disarmed. Drivers of vehicles compelled to run the
gauntlet of frequent attacks could not carry so much as a club
to protect themselves with. The police regularly searched Jewish
busses and passenger-cars on the roads, while Arab vehicles
derisively passed them, neither examined nor stopped .19 DeJEHOVAH
ABDICATES
421
spite the fact that vandals were systematically uprooting valuable
groves and applying the torch freely, Senator Copeland found
that owners were flatly refused permission to have armed guards
on their properties.20 Jewish watchmen found in possession of
pistols were sentenced to long prison terms, though it was shown
that their posts were dangerous and that other watchmen had
been killed in the very neighborhood. Even colonies which
were subjected to recurrent assaults were religiously ransacked
by police, and colonists found in possession of weapons were
punished by imprisonment. Jews were warned that under no
circumstances might they own a rifle or fire a gun . Colonists
exposed to Arab violence were advised to lode out until troops
came. Even the Jewish Ghaffirs and supernumerary constables
were usually armed with truncheons only, or at best, with decrepit
shotguns that had little military value . Moreover, they
were not permitted to pursue marauders beyond the confines of
their settlements. "Jaffa Jews may be done to death in the very
sight of Tel Aviv's Jewish policemen, but these police may not
go to the rescue !" cries the Palestine Post indignantly.21
In vain the Jews pleaded to be allowed to defend themselves.
Students and veterans of the battalions who had fought under
Allenby begged to be mobilized, urging that they "did not de
sire to see any British blood spilled . We are quite capable of
defending our own homeland ." The Revisionists offered fifty
thousand Jewish soldiers, some of them seasoned World War
veterans, for police duty . The mobilization of five thousand
Jewish youths at any time, would have made short work of the
killers, but the Authorities had other ideas .
Arabs arrested for carrying arms were either freed outright or
fined as ridiculous a sum as three shillings (about 75¢) . Those
convicted of murderous assaults or of arson were indulgently
released "on probation ." For months, though there had been
numerous murders of Jews, the Government did not take the
matter seriously enough to offer any reward at all . It was only
after a British constable named Bird had been assassinated that
they suddenly came out with a substantial reward . Despite the
wholesale murders which took place in 1936, there was not a
422 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
single execution, a more than startling circumstance, since the
normal crime calendar of Palestine accounts for twelve hangings
annually .
Officers who took their duties too seriously were rebuked in
open court or transferred to less desirable posts as a warning to
others . The following cases, selected at random, show the general
tone of the courts . In one case, three Arabs, arrested for
sending an infernal machine in a suitcase to a Jew in Tel Aviv
and found with a whole arsenal of bombs in their possession, were
released on bond of L25. In another, two Arabs positively
identified by seven eye-witnesses as having dynamited a cinema
in Tel Aviv, murdering three people and mangling many others,
were given seven days in jail for carrying guns . The murder
charges were not even brought up. In another, some two hundred
ruffians armed with knives and iron bars, fell on the Jewish
quarter of Tiberias . When the military and police finally arrived
they `escorted' the assailants out of the vicinity . The
journey was made a source of great merriment . Shop windows
were broken and passersby stoned . "The next day the police
returned and arrested fifteen Jews ." 22
When the Administration dealt with outrages it really regarded
as scandalous, it made short work of the miscreants .
Rebels who damaged the Iraq Petroleum Company's pipelines
were not only apprehended, but their houses and those of their
relatives demolished in reprisal . When the military railway
was scathed by unidentified vandals, the nearby city of Lydda
was fined J 5000. An Arab who set a relative's grain field on
fire was sentenced to four years' imprisonment .23 Insurgents
caught firing on British troops were speedily handed the death
penalty, these crimes apparently being classified as `premeditated,'
as opposed to the `unpremeditated,' hence forgivable,
murder and arson committed on the person and property of
Jews.
While Arab papers were allowed to carry on the most unbridled
anti-Jewish incitement, it was a different matter when
El Jamia al Islamia engaged in what was alleged to be pro-Italian
propaganda . Its editor, Khalil Yousuff, was picked up with no
JEHOVAH ABDICATES
423
more ceremony than if he had been a sack of potatoes, and deported.
24 Similarly, when some swashbucklers with little imagination
took their immunity too literally and dropped some bombs
outside the residence of the High Commissioner, "the Palestine
Government ordered the suspension of all Arabic newspapers indefinitely,
beginning at once ." 25
What the attitude was is shown in the order to Jews to bury
their dead at five o'clock in the morning so that there would be
nothing ostentatious about it . At the same time the Arabs were
turning the funeral of an ordinary outlaw into the most spectacular
celebration ever seen around Haifa .
Though in every case Jews were the victims, the Authorities
felt justified in alluding to the marauding operations of the insurgents
as 'Arab-Jewish clashes' requiring the meting out of
equal punishment to both sides `impartially .' To justify this
piece of hypocrisy, Jews suspected of nationalist leanings were
arbitrarily picked up and jailed, without cause or trial . When
an old Arab woman was assassinated by thieves from Arab Tireh,
known as a den of cutthroats since time immemorial, 26 the peaceful
little Jewish hamlet, Achuzat Herbert Samuel, was stigmatized
with the onus of murder by the imposition of a huge collective
fine, without the slightest offer of evidence.
Perhaps the most revolting part of this ugly pantomime was
the treatment accorded the Jewish refugees who had escaped the
storm area with their lives . By June more than twelve thousand
homeless creatures had streamed into Tel Aviv for protection,
their possessions destroyed and occupations ruined . The Government
finally agreed, under pressure, to contribute the sum of
2o mils (1o¢) a day per head to their upkeep . After a few
weeks it abruptly notified the Municipality that it would terminate
even this meager contribution (June 17, 1936) ; and in an
astounding decree taking effect thirteen days later, it denied the
city of Tel Aviv permission to provide for or deal with these
unfortunates. In this amazing order the dictum was laid down
that though the refugees were not to be permitted to return to
their ruined homes, it was up to the voluntary contributions of
Jews abroad to maintain and house them . The Government
424
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
washed its hands of the proposition and refused to accept, or to
allow the Municipality to accept, the responsibility .
Since it is apparent that this whole mad fury of lawlessness has
been prompted from an outside source, the question naturally
arises -where did all the money come from to keep it alive?
There were men to feed, committees to keep going, agents to
support in foreign countries, and arms and ammunition which
had to be purchased. It is estimated that these activities were
costing in the neighborhood of f 3000 a day.27 This is a large
sum when it is applied to a struggle lasting many months on end .
Those acquainted with the country know that the rich Arab is
not prepared to donate "even a pound of his own free will for
communal purposes." 28 Nor did his nature show any change
in this case . The Arab landlords, effendis and merchants gave
very little support to the strike . Many, in fact, left the country
to protect themselves .
According to the continental press, the Jerusalem Police found
documents proving that the rioters had received C70,000 from
European sources actuated by anti-British as well as anti-Jewish
motives. In addition to this and other sums which came from
Fascist countries, the London Daily Mail reported that a police
raid in Jerusalem discovered receipts and documents indicating
that the Soviet Department for Near East Propaganda had sent
large sums to Palestine to support the insurrection .29 Another
considerable amount was reported to have been remitted to Arab
emissaries at Cairo, Egypt, via the American Express Company .3o
A great part of the revolt funds came from England itself . Allied
anti-Semites in America supplied another portion .31 Some
came directly from the Palestine Government in various disguises,
as the £ 30,000 loan "to needy farmers," actually used
to buy arms and ammunition . 32 The Government-controlled
Moslem Wak f contributed another sizable sum . Mohammedan
.countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq which fall in the British
sphere of influence, made a number of public collections for this
;purpose. The London Daily Mail of July 15, 1936 reports that
£ 11,000 was sent from India, apparently without the slightest
;interference by either the Indian or Palestine Authorities .
JEHOVAH ABDICATES
425
"One of the surest sources of strike funds," states the London
Times, "remains the contributions from Arab officials in the
Government service, most of whom regularly surrender a fraction
o f their salary." 33 For the right to continue working,
Government employees were assessed by gangster methods, up
to twenty percent of their monthly salary . By August 15, 1936,
according to a detailed statement published by an Arab paper,
around £ 5000 was collected in Jerusalem from this source .
According to an incomplete list appearing daily in Ad Difaa,
twice that amount was collected in Jaffa by the same date .
This tax, writes Horace Samuel, fell impartially on every Arab
official from the most junior teacher "to the most senior of Sir
Michael MacDonnell's Arab judges in the Court of Appeal, taking
in, presumably, in its stride, Ishak Effendi El Hashim, the
Arab private secretary of Sir Arthur Wauchope ." 34
By Fall the Levantine began to grow heartily tired of the revolt.
All this turmoil was the incomprehensible business of
Allah and the strange Angliz who for some reason wanted it that
way. The fellah and Bedouin, for their part, had had enough .35
The citrus season was coming on . The fruit hanging on the
tree was like ready money. There were not enough hands to
go around . Tradesmen and merchants found themselves almost
bankrupt and wishing the `patriots' all in hell in consequence.
The British had moreover accomplished all their objectives for
the moment. They had succeeded in concentrating a huge
military force in the delicately balanced Near East without protest
from any source . A Royal Commission was already on its
way to complete the work of demolishing the Mandate . After
dilly-dallying around for months with his huge imported military
machine, General Dill bluntly made it known that the curtain
was about to be rung down on the play .
The Arab ring-leaders were now in an all-but-impossible situation
. With nice consideration Whitehall conceded that their
prestige must be saved at all costs . "The Arab Higher Committee,"
states Great Britain and the East, "cannot of itself say that
the strike shall end without renouncing the whole position it has
426
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
taken up . A 'face-saving' development is however possible." 38
With extravagant mummery, as if they were dealing with a
powerful opponent, the Colonials made the proper motions .
Low-flying airplanes scattered tons of Arabic leaflets promising
that if the strike were dropped, a Royal Commission would immediately
come and "give the Arabs justice ." With ill-concealed
clarity they were told by manifesto and proclamation that all
their demands would be granted .
With brilliant forethought the Bureaucrats cushioned the collapse
for their friends in the Arab High Committee . They invited
the Arab kings into the situation . But here came a snag
the Arab kings smelled a rat and would not budge . Abdullah,
who believed he was to be the Emir of a reunited Palestine and
Transjordan, was mortally afraid of baiting Ibn Saud by a public
declaration, since the latter understood that it was his second
son who was to get the Holy Land throne . Each waited dead
in his tracks, desperately afraid of being double-crossed .37
Finally, the Iraqi Foreign Minister, Nuri Pasha Said, was
dragooned to act as mediator . He assured the rebels that "the
Palestine Government would not only announce stoppage of
Jewish entry into Palestine but would also declare an amnesty
for individual Arabs participating in the outbreaks, as quid pro
quo concessions for Arab cessation of the strike ." 38 Almost
immediately afterwards, Nuri Pasha was overthrown in his own
country and chased out to exile in Egypt. The new Government
of Iraq turned its back on the pan-Arab world . Ibn Saud
and Abdullah continued to eye each other suspiciously . Only
after these gentlemen had been stiffly reminded that they owed
their eminence to British bayonets, did they cautiously allow
themselves to be drawn into the 'face-saving' process .
With this theatrical piece of staging the `strike' ended . It was
not a surrender, but in the nature of an honorable armistice.
The plain inference in this gentleman's arrangement was "that
pending the findings of the Commission, the terrorist organization
is not to be unduly harassed, so that it shall be in a position
to resume hostilities should it not be satisfied with the findings
of the Commission ." 311 With superb courtesy, Fawzy Bey and
JEHOVAH ABDICATES
427
his followers were allowed passage into Transjordan . "Though
the Army had successfully surrounded him and his foreign supporters,"
writes the Jerusalem correspondent of the London
Times, ". . . his capture would have been embarrassing," so he
was "allowed to escape across the Jordan as a more tactful solution,"
enabling him to "conclude his spectacular career here
with honor and without surrender." 40 Why, one wonders, was
it necessary to allow this invading desperado to depart "with
honor" ? By what providential device was he "surrounded"
immediately after the conclusion of the strike, though seemingly
so elusive before ? And why would his capture have been
"embarrassing" to the Government of Palestine ? Returning to
Baghdad with a large party of followers by motor convoy, Fawzy
was given a rousing official reception which included "a message
of welcome from the Prime Minister, who congratulated him on
his safe return." 41 Since Iraq is frankly a British dependency,
must not this circumstance also be included in the puzzle ?
One hundred and seventy-five days had elapsed . During this
time, Palestine had wallowed in a horrible blood bath which had
cost seven hundred lives and thousands of wounded . Trees by
the hundred thousand had been uprooted ; innumerable stock
animals slain ; forty-eight bridges were destroyed ; telephone
and telegraph wires damaged ; trains derailed, buildings burned
and looted. There had been, all told, 1996 attacks on Jewish
settlements and communities, and numerous other forays directed
at busses, police stations and public buildings . Business
was at a standstill . Property loss was estimated at L 3,000,000.
The extra expenditure for military and police ran to another
J.2,200,000
The Holy Land was tense and anxious as still another of the
obliquitous Commissions entrained from London to `investigate :
BLAMING ITALIANS AND COMMUNISTS
While London was thus engaged in victimizing the Jews, official
publicity agencies were losing no opportunity to squeeze
428
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
every ounce of advantage from the situation . A venomous and
apparently incurable quarrel had developed between England
and the ambitious Italian dictator Mussolini . Frankly worried,
London was straining every nerve to quarantine the Italian by
depicting him as an international criminal who must be ostracized
by all decent opinion . The efficient English propaganda
machine was now operating on the old war-time basis . From
London and Jerusalem came a roll of sensational stories fastening
responsibility for the riots on the scowling figure of Mussolini.
Veiled allusions were made to the Pope and to his liaison
with the Italian Dictator . Catholic nuns, nurses and teachers
were accused of carrying on secret propaganda against Zionists
and British alike .42 In beautifully chosen words which inferred
an anti-Jewish as well as anti-English plot the British Foreign
Secretary pinned the whole blame on the Italians .
The entire liberal press rose to the bait so dexterously flicked
upon the water . Like a pack of dogs hot after game, the Marxist
press aggressively took up the cry. The London Daily Herald
asserted that Italy had sent enormous sums to Arab leaders
through secret agents . It even went to the point of claiming
that Mussolini had offered the Bedouins of Transjordan three
dollars a day per man if they would cross over into Palestine and
loot Jewish stores and houses .43 Responsible publications went
so far as to feature as news a weird story, concocted by the press
officer of Palestine, alleging that posters printed in Italian had
been stuck up all over Jerusalem urging Arabs to slit the gullets
of the Jews .44 Even the Zionist spokesmen, anxious now for
some unreal explanation of distasteful reality, seized on this fragile
straw which the Mandatory for Palestine had thoughtfully
provided.
A scant two years later, Italy, under pressure from its Nazi ally,
was to join the anti-Semitic Internationale so sedulously promoted
from Berlin.45 Jews, who had occupied the most illustrious
positions in Italian life, were to find themselves, in a single
merciless stroke, ostracized, vilified and threatened with exile.
In 1936, however, before this chameleon-like development in Italian
policy had taken place, Fascist Italy could truly have been said
JEHOVAH ABDICATES
429
to be freer from anti-Semitic agitation than London itself .46 On
June 20, 1937 the Italian Dictator had told Generoso Pope, New
York publisher : "I authorize you to declare and to make known
immediately upon your return to New York, to the Jews of
America, that their preoccupation for their brothers living in
Italy is nothing but the fruit of evil informers . I authorize you
to specify that the Jews in Italy have received, now receive, and
will continue to receive, the same treatment accorded to every
other Italian citizen and that no form of racial or religious discrimination
is in my thought, which is devoted and faithful to
the policy of equality in law and freedom of worship ." Ten
years previously he had advised the Rumanians : "Anti-Semitism
is a product of barbarism to which our movement is diametrically
opposed. Fascism seeks unity ; anti-Semitism seeks destruction
and separation . If we are to exclude Jews, we will only
strengthen our enemies." 47 In 1935 he had again warned the
pogromists that "if Rumania goes along the road of anti-Semitism
it will have very severe consequences not only inside the country
but in its foreign relations ." 48
Before events forced him into the unhappy position of being
the tail to the German kite, Mussolini had been a persistent advocate
of State Zionism . On February zo, 1934 he urged in
Popolo D'Italia the creation of a "true Jewish State in Palestine,"
pointing out that a "National Home" could logically mean only
this and nothing else . As late as January 18, 1937, he had written
an editorial warmly lauding the Zionist cause, though soon
after he was found attempting to match cards with Britain by
posing as the friend and patron of the Arab .
There can be no doubt that Mussolini, a hard-fisted realist,
would have considered it good business if he could have disengaged
the Jews from the English orbit . A powerful independent
Zion with which he was on a friendly footing would have
suited him perfectly . The Jews themselves eliminated this prospect
by their persistent Anglophilism, and Mussolini has come to
regard Zionism as merely a mask for the creation of another zone
of English political and economic expansion in the Mediterranean.
It hence looms in the Italian mind as an anti-Italian force.
430
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
Nevertheless, not a shred of real evidence has ever been offered
to substantiate the charge that Italian intervention was a factor in
the recent Arab revolt in Palestine.
Far more potent than any interference by Italian or Papist has
been the German intervention, which the English studiously
ignore. It has been shown that agitators now active in the Near
East have been trained in a special school in the Brown House
in Munich ; that pamphlets in Arabic are printed in Berlin and
Hamburg for distribution in Palestine 4 9 On October 22, 1 933,
it was announced that Eissael Bendek, member of the Arab Executive's
Administrative Bureau, would direct a propaganda
campaign in the interests of the Nazi Party . On June 8, 1934
the Jerusalem Arab daily, Mukkattar, reported the formation of
an Arab Nazi Youth Organization . The French Weekly, Marianne,
reported in 1937 that a great part of the arms employed in
the rebellion were supplied by the Suhl and Erfurter Gewehrfabrik
of Germany, which sent, in particular, many rifles and
machine-guns. The Arab journals Falastin and Al Dijah published
regularly articles of a racial nature, together with large
portraits of the various leaders of the Third Reich . They did
not even attempt to conceal the fact that they had become tools
of the Ministry of Propaganda in Berlin . The shout of `Heil
Hitler' became a catchword which rang insolently over all Palestine.
Nevertheless, the British Foreign Secretary has persistently
informed Commons that Nazi propaganda in Palestine is not of
such a nature as to require representations to the German Government.
This is a subject which Sir Robert Vansittart's publicity
bureau has also continuously soft-pedaled .
The Mandatory's press releases, however, made much of Communist
agitation in the Holy Land, inferring by unmistakable
innuendo that this was a Jewish introduction and one of the unspoken
horrors against which patriotic Arabs were rebelling .
This was a deft trick which the Soviets returned even more
deftly. Identifying Zionism with British Imperialism, they
placed themselves in the vanguard of the pan-Arab movement .
Communist hatred of Zionism is fundamentally rooted . AcJEHOVAH
ABDICATES
431
cording to Marx, the Jews are not a nation but merely a product
and relic of an outmoded economic system . Hence a Jewish
regeneration based on its own (i.e., capitalist) values is contradictory
to the first and initial postulates of Communist theory .
Despite this ideological overgrowth, however, one may suspect
that this rancorous hostility is actuated by a more realistic reason
: Palestine as a stronghold of British Imperial interests could
by virtue of its strategic position be turned into one of the keystones
in the arch of anti-Soviet attack . The Kremlin, therefore,
not daring to attack England openly, does so by sneaking
through the back door and lambasting the Jews.
As long ago as November 15, 1926, a letter to the Palestine
Arab Executive from the Executive Committee of the Communist
Party of Great Britain offers "the wholehearted help of the
British Communist Party in the great historic mission of establishing
a united workers and peasants republic in the Near East
from Morocco to Syria . . . Great Britain," it asserts, "has
treacherously betrayed the Arabs by establishing Palestine as a
National Home for the Jewish People under an imposed British
Mandate." In Russia the Moscow Pravda roars on August 13,
1935 that "the Communist Party is building a people's front of
the entire Arab Nationalist Movement against Imperialism and
against Zionism." In 1936 the Kremlin decreed "a united front
between the local Communist Party and the Arab nationalists ."
By order of the Comintern the Palestine Communist Party was
completely Arabized.so
Sacrificing outright their social propaganda, which the Arabs
could not be expected to understand, the Palestine section of the
Communist Internationale issued the following manifesto just after
the riots erupted in 1936 : "Arabs, you have seen the open and
clear villainies of the Zionist despoilers . . . Through their despicable
methods they have managed to deprive your tribes of most of
their land and to cut you off absolutely from all means of livelihood.
But they [the Zionists] are not satisfied with establishing
their National Home on the bayonets of British Imperialism . . .
They are bringing in large quantities of arms with but one aim -
to shoot at the hearts of the Arabs, whom they seek to wipe off
432
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
the face of the earth. The Arab people have two ways open to
them. One is the road to annihilation . The other is the road
to life and honor. He who is ready to take the second road
must choose war, just as his fathers and grandfathers spilled their
blood for their fatherland . The present Strike is our opportunity.
The Communist Party joins this Strike, but demands that
it must assume revolutionary proportions, and not by sleeping at
home or sitting around coffee shops . The Strike must not end
until Jewish immigration and the sale of land to Jews will be
stopped, and until the Jews are disarmed and the Arab masses
armed!" 51
As a result of this agitation, organized Jewish labor in Palestine
almost alone in the labor world refuses to admit Communists
to its ranks, stating simply "that such people have cut themselves
off from the Jewish people." The Communist is nicknamed
Mups, a contemptuous label which even the most radical
worker resents. "In my candid opinion," wrote Senator Copeland,
"there is no more solid anti-Communist body in the world
than the four hundred thousand Jewish people in the Holy
Land." 52 Farago, on the other hand, noted that Arabs were being
strongly influenced by Communist propaganda .53 An official
of the Criminal Investigation Department asserted to Duff that
Communism is "becoming a terrible menace now . The Arab
peasants are being inoculated with the poison . . . The fellaheen
believe that a Bolshie revolution in Palestine will mean three
cows for each man, J4 a month in cash, and 2o dunams of land
apiece . On top of that the Communists will expel the Jews and
all the rich colonies will become the property of the Arab peasants."
54
However, these activities were more sinister vocally than important
in reality . The British are not kindly disposed toward
Communists, and only let them on the loose for short periods
when their inflammatory material is required to keep the pot
boiling. When the dangerous woman agitator, Regina Brodskis,
was arrested in September 1935, a storehouse of inflammatory
literature and a counterfeit seal of the High Commissioner
were found in her possession . Despite these damning facts, this
JEHOVAH ABDICATES
433
woman and her gang were released in the Spring of 1936 "for
lack of evidence ." The very unusual nature of this act in itself,
plus its exact timing with the outbreaks, hardly leaves this
trouble-breeding policy open to doubt .
ANOTHER ROYAL COMMISSION
In October 1936, six distinguished British gentlemen, all well
over on the elderly side, packed their duffle to entrain for the
Holy Land. Their names were Peel, Rumbold, Hammond,
Carter, Morris and Coupland . With one possible exception,
they had spent their lives immersed in the intrigues of Imperial
business. Only Lord Peel, their leader, a handsome man with
a thin pleasant smile and soldierly bearing, lent the slightest sense
of reassuring warmth to this new peregrination of elderly
knights.
These were the gentlemen whom officialdom had handpicked
from its own midst for the learned work of passing judgment
on the late lamented remnants of what had once been a
mandate to the Jewish people for the reconstitution of their National
Home in Palestine . What they were up to was amply
demonstrated by Ormsby-Gore's preemptory rejection of a
demand in Commons that a woman member be included, to investigate
the condition of women in Palestine . His reason was
that "such a move would be incompatible with Arab ideals" ;
so that now it could be assumed that the six elderly gentlemen
were to investigate only such matters as were "compatible with
Arab ideals."
Here we have a plot so far-fetched that it would be rejected
by most fiction editors as incredible. In the docket is a mandatory
which, under the most generous construction, must be impeached
as co-defendant with the Arabs in the case . At its
service it possessed an enormous military and espionage machine .
Yet it knew nothing of the impending outbreaks, did nothing to
forestall them, failed to apprehend the principal culprits, and has
since failed to bring the numerous murderers to justice . For
six long months, with this huge military establishment, by which
434
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
a country like Palestine could have been conquered in a week, it
was unable to put down less than two thousand lawless men .
Now we find this custodian, having turned the patrimony of its
ward into bankruptcy, and suspected of scheming to expropriate
the remnants for itself, setting itself up as an impartial court of
inquiry in order to determine who the culprit is .
In order to secure Parliament's consent to the appointment of
this new body, the Colonial Secretary assured Commons on May
z8, 1936 that the Commission would "investigate the causes of
unrest and alleged grievances, either of Arabs or of Jews, without
bringing into question the terms of the Mandate ." Later in
the House of Lords, he repeated this pledge that whatever the
Commission's operations "it will not be open to them to challenge
the Mandate itself ."
At its opening session the new Commission at once began the
usual quibble on words. "We are `to ascertain the underlying
causes of the disturbances which broke out in Palestine in the
middle of April,"' Lord Peel told his associates . "You will note
the words `underlying causes .' It does not appear to be necessary,
therefore, to inquire into the detailed course of events in
the last six or seven months. If there are claims and counterclaims
arising out of these events, they are matters for the courts
or for the Administration, but we have to deal, I believe, with
wider issues." Thus immediately the Commission tore up its
terms of reference and prepared to tear up the Balfour Declaration
and the Mandate .
One has only to read the transcript of evidence to judge this
body's temper, and its badgering and unfriendly attitude towards
Jews. Setting the whole tone of the `investigation,' Sir Horace
Rumbold unburdened himself of the irritable observation that
"the Jews were an alien race in Palestine ." ss When Leonard
Stein, legal adviser to the Jewish Agency, finished a carefully
prepared statement on the legal character of Jewish rights under
the Mandate, Lord Peel remarked sarcastically : "Thank you for
your very able exposition, which now makes the document [the
Mandate] more obscure to me than ever before!" 66 With
magisterial sharpness Peel demanded to know whether the Jews
JEHOVAH ABDICATES 435
were ready to work on the Sabbath as a condition to securing
public works positions - (which was much the same as if one
had asked a professing Catholic to bring a basket of ham sandwiches
to his church on Good Friday) . At another time the
Jewish Agency was given an unmerciful tongue-lashing for not
constituting itself as an unofficial police body to smoke out `illegal'
Jewish immigrants from the corners and crevices where they
lay shivering . But when the Agency brought up the question of
illegal Arab immigration, the Commission changed its attitude
completely. The fact that no measures were being taken against
this illegal procedure, and the moral encouragement given by the
Government, which employed hordes of these Arab illegals on
its own payroll, did not appear to cause them the least concern .57
In all, there were eleven witnesses called by the Commission to
expound the Arab political position . Seven of these were members
or agents of the insurgent Arab High Committee . The
other four, admits the Commission blandly, "appeared with the
full assent of the Arab High Committee" and "supported in toto
the Arab High Committee's case ." It was from this kind of
collusive ballot-box stuffing that the `Arab position' was determined.
When after long delays the much heralded `Report' finally
made its appearance in July 1937, it was apparent that whatever
else this Commission had `investigated,' responsibility for the
riots (the only matter which came within its terms of reference)
was not among them . The `Report' consisted of a monumental
4.04-page compendium of closely packed, sanctimonious verbiage.
It breathed brotherly love in every phrase . As a compendium
of plausible nostrums it was nothing less than a literary
masterpiece ; but cleansed of all concealing rhetoric it boiled
down to several quite sordid propositions . One was an adroit
effort to absolve the Mandatory from any inference of misconduct
or dereliction in its stewardship of the Jewish National
Home. The other was an attempt to justify by principle a
planned embezzlement of its Jewish ward's inheritance .
For this purpose the Report boldly reverses every contention
by which the British Government had justified its strictures
436
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
against Zionists in the past. Directly confounding the findings
of previous `Commissions,' it acknowledges that Arabs are much
better off than they were in 1920, and that this increased prosperity
has been due to the influx of Jewish capital and the other
factors connected with the growth of the National Home .
It tenaciously remembers, however, that "the Government's
first duty was what Sir Herbert Samuel rightly called `the invidious
task' of preventing this tide [of Jewish immigration] from
swamping Palestine." It discovers that "the establishment of
the National Home involved at the outset a blank negation of
the rights implied in the principles of national self-government,"
and that "as the Home has grown, the fear has grown with it
that, if and when self-government is conceded, it may not be
national in the Arab sense, but government by a Jewish majority .
That is why it is difficult to be an Arab patriot and not to hate
the Jews. . . In their eyes," continues the Report, "the Jewish
National Home is already too big . Four hundred thousand is a
formidable fraction in a total population of i,3oo,000 ." Thus
the whole attempt to oust the Jews from Palestine is switched
from the basis of alleged economic injury to the Arabs, to that
of conflicting national loyalties .
With absurd disregard for all known facts, the document discloses
that "there was little or no friction . . . between Arab
and Jew in the rest of the Arab world until the strife in Palestine
engendered it ." By every implication, it attempts to give
the false impression that the young intelligentsia of Syria and
Palestine joined in the revolt of Hussein against the Turks, and
hence had an earned right to `their' country . Not a single mention
is made of the part played by the Jewish Legion .
Despite its admission that the Arab has benefited greatly from
Jewish immigration, it returns to the old thesis that the native
cannot possibly compete with the Jew. It finds that the Arab
has to be protected against his own cupidity ; and to bolster its
contention that the land must be allowed to stay undeveloped,
offers the ludicrous argument that any effort at intensive farming
would entail "a complete change in the [Arab] cultivator's habits,
chief among which stands the fact that he would have to
JEHOVAH ABDICATES
437
work all the year around ." It asks particularly for stringent
legislation barring the Jews from settlement "in certain areas,"
and that the Mandatory "reserve certain areas for Jewish settle .
ment." In less circumspect words, what it proposes is the establishment
of a new ghetto . For its authority it refers to the completely
discredited Hope-Simpson Report which it describes as
"an excellent and comprehensive appreciation of the agrarian
position" and "a thorough investigation of the land problem in
Palestine."
The Report counts it "highly undesirable" that there should
be a harbor in Tel Aviv since this would compete with Arab
Jaffa . In a transparent effort to organize the entire Arab world
against the Zionists, it suggests that an Arab Agency be formed
in London and Palestine, "including in addition to the Arabs of
Palestine, representatives of Transjordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia,
Syria and perhaps Egypt ."
The Commission completely disposes of the principle that
`economic absorptive capacity' shall be the yardstick by which
Jewish immigration is to be figured. It discovers that "political,
social and psychological factors should be taken into account ."
So it now asks His Majesty's Government to "lay down a political
high level of Jewish immigration ." On no account, it
states, must more than twelve thousand Jews be admitted to
Palestine annually, and that even this maximum shall be subject
to the discretion of the High Commissioner, who may admit
none at all if he feels so disposed . Following this bombshell, the
Commission arrives at the bizarre conclusion that "insofar as
immigration has been the major factor in bringing the Jewish
National Home to its present stage of development, the Mandatory
has fully implemented his obligation to facilitate the establishment
of a National Home for the Jewish people in Palestine" !
With queer reverse logic, it condemns the Jewish National
Home as having "grown into something like a state within a
state ." "It would be difficult to find in history," it remarks, "a
precedent for the establishment of so distinct an imperium in
imperio." With similar waggish complaint it concludes that
"the social conscience of the National Home tends to concen438
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
trate on Jewish needs and to leave the Arabs to the care of the
Government." It asserts that the Jew is no patriot even of his
own homeland, saying that "allegiance to Palestine and its Government
are minor considerations to many of them," and goes
out of its way to call into question the loyalty of the Jewish police.
By analogy one gains the idea from its pages that the Jews
actually plan to demolish all the Christian churches and the
Moslem mosques, and re-erect the temple of Solomon. It makes
sly reference to the findings of the Haycraft Commission, which
found the `Bolshevik' Jews guilty of arousing patriotic Arabs by
their May Day celebrations after the pogrom of 1920. It disposes
of the charge that Jews receive virtually no share of the
tax moneys, with the observation that "it should be a matter of
pride to the Jews that their Home is one of their own building
and we believe it to be in accordance with the intention of the
Mandate that it should be so ." The claim that Jews should at
least receive their proportionate share of educational grants is invalidated
in the single remark that the Arab is not as well educated
as the Jew, and that hence "it is unjustifiable to increase the
grants to the latter ." (The Jew is apparently to be brought
forcibly down to the Arab's level .)
Though the Arab insurrectionists are obviously recognized as
`patriots,' the Jewish nationalists are referred to as "a determined
and troublesome group," who one gathers, are basically responsible
for all the trouble . The Commission does not hesitate to
saddle the murder of Dr. Arlosoroff on the Revisionists as "an
act of political terrorism," though time has proven conclusively
that this was a trumped-up charge in which the Government itself
was not guiltless . Jews, who were formerly militated against
by all administrations as being advance agents for Communism,
are now lambasted hip and thigh for being such thoroughgoing
nationalists . "So far, in fact, from facilitating a better understanding
between the races," laments the Report, "the Jewish educational
system is making it more and more difficult as, year by
year, its production of eager Jewish nationalists mounts up ."
JEHOVAH ABDICATES
439
Then comes a filibuster patently aimed at disengaging those
Christian Zionists who have given their sympathy and strength
to the Jewish cause . Says the Report piously : "The religious
stake of the Christians in the Holy Places is just as great as that
of the Jews or Moslems . . . The 500,000,000 Christians in the
world cannot be indifferent to the position and well-being of
their co-religionists in the Holy Land ." The Commission refers
sententiously to the "very strict observance of the Jewish
Sabbath and the fact that the Jewish Government official does
not work on Saturday" ; with the result that "the Christian official
has to work on Sunday," a state of affairs which the Commission
believes "impairs the spiritual influence of the Christian
Church."
All this is followed by even more brilliant grotesqueries.
Their recommendation, the Commission regretfully announces,
is only "a palliative ." It would not remove the "grievance" of
the Arabs in the matter or prevent its recurrence . We gather
that the whole Mandate and Balfour Declaration can only be
considered a practical and moral mistake, made by a humanitarian-
minded Empire, which through this act of sheer benevolence
has placed itself in an ethical if not physical dilemma .
Finally we come to the point all this literary effort was leading
up to. It seems, quotes the Commission, that all the previous
Governments' Commissions had been dead wrong. The Mandate
does not involve an obligation to two peoples who are to
live side by side with each other, nor does it preclude the establishment
of a Jewish State. That, God bless you, could have
been its only purpose, since anything else save a homogeneous,
self-governing territory is unreasonable. But again, God bless
you, "under stress of the World War the British Government
made promises to Arabs and Jews in order to obtain their support"
which seem to cancel each other out . (Not a particle of
evidence exists to show that any promises were ever made to
Arabs in regard to Palestine, except in the imagination of the
Commission. Sir Henry McMahon, acknowledged by all comers
to have been the only negotiator privy to these conversations,
4.40
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
has denied time and again that any such promises existed . The
denial is also implicit in the Conventions signed by Feisal with
the Zionists.)
In the interest of common decency, it now turns out that
something must be done to clear this imbroglio permanently and
justly. Skillfully presented in the role of a fatigued mediator
with a headstrong quarrel on its hands, the Mandatory has attempted
to conciliate both parties, but without success . Here
comes the master touch . It pleads with both Jews and Arabs
to accept a disinterested proposal for a settlement of these irreconcilable
differences through a division of territory. In suave
words it pleads its friendship for both parties and offers to cut
the Gordian knot in one heroic stroke . The Jews are startled
to find that they have been offered a Jewish State as their share
of the bargain . A Jewish `State' after two thousand years of
tragedy and homelessness ! Messiah's kingdom at last !
We put the proposed Jewish `State' under a spy glass and discover
that it is an area approximately seven times the size of New
York City, running along the coastal plain ; that though Haifa
and the towns of Galilee are ostensibly included, the British plan
to hold them `temporarily' under their own administration ; 58
that it consists of the only densely populated portion of Palestine,
holding 140 people to the square mile, a density twice as
great as that of France ; that it will contain 225,ooo Arabs (approximately
equal to the number of Jews) ; that its fiscal services
will be under British control ; that as an independent economic
unit it is undone from the beginning ; and that it undoubtedly
will be administered by the British under a new and separate
Mandate of the same character, temper and quality as the existing
one.59
The British retain for themselves, under `permanent Mandate,'
the city of Jerusalem and an area around it taking in Bethlehem
and a corridor to the port of Jaffa. In the Report the Negeb,
the vast underpopulated portion of Palestine south of Jaffa, is
described by allusion as desert . It fronts on the road to Aqaba,
and is the area through which the new canal which is to parallel
Suez is to be constructed . It seems to have no claimant . ApJEHOVAH
ABDICATES 441
parently it is not to be divided or partitioned, but it is to be
left as a residue which the Mandatory Government will in due
time take possession of, just as it has the Hadramaut . The remainder
of what had been Palestine is to be given to the Arabs,
to be rejoined with Transjordan under the Emir Abdullah, and
to become Judenrein, an area from which Jews are to be permanently
barred. Thus in this third partition, the Jewish National
Home, originally a territory of some 45,000 or 50,000 square
miles, is shrunk to less than 2000 square miles .
Since "the Jews contribute more per capita to the revenue of
Palestine than the Arabs, and the Government has thereby been
enabled to maintain public services of the Arabs at a higher level
than would otherwise have been possible," continues the Report,
"partition would mean . . . that the Arab area would no
longer profit from the taxable capacity of the Jewish area ."
This unfortunate complication presents a self-evident problem,
but the Commission has a solution ! The Jewish State should
pay a permanent subvention to the Arab State out of its own
tax moneys ! 80 To justify this denouement, the Commission
establishes the fact that the Arabs are inept and incapable of supplying
sufficient revenue from their own resources to run their
State . Transjordan, it cites, has never been able to meet even
the costs of its skeleton administration . Since the Jews had
always met the deficit before, runs the reasoning, why should
they not continue to do so indefinitely ! 81 The Jewish `State' is
further to "provide for the free transit of goods in bond between
the Arab State and Haifa ." The Central Government, i .e., the
British, would control railways, roads and post office . The collection
of customs at all ports would also be taken over by the
British, including Haifa, Jaffa, Tel Aviv and such other ports
as may be found necessary .
The existing public debt of Palestine amounting to about
£4,500,000, is to be divided between the Arab and Jewish States
by a Financial Commission to be appointed later . Is it a mere
slip of the pen which causes the Report to omit any reference in
this connection to the permanently mandated British area ? Is
this area to be exempt from taking over any share of the debt ?
442
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
Nothing is said in the Report as to the apportionment of the
Government's surplus . Who, one wonders, is to take over that ?
The Report makes it clear that the permanently mandated territory
will be administered on a footing to which the Balfour
Declaration will not apply. There will be no recognition of
any official languages - except that of the Mandatory Administration,
i.e., English. It is clear that the public schools of Jerusalem,
for instance, will be managed on such lines as would be
prescribed by British Authorities. Within the Jewish area the
British would hold Haifa, Tiberias, Acre and Safed . Will not
the same condition also be true there ? If Arab and Jewish
nationalists are really as fanatic and refractory as the Mandatory
claims, is it not setting itself up for a new and more terrible
vendetta ? If this inflexible, blazing national feeling exists, how
could it become reconciled to the theft of its principal cities and
the subordination of its culture there ?
Further analysis reveals that the British would have a stranglehold
on the major portion of foreign trade and resulting customs
revenue. Customs duties and various types of urban taxation
constitute eighty percent of the total income of the Palestine
Government from taxation . For the year 1935-36 the Government's
income from these sources was £4,097,126 out of a
total revenue of C5,770,475 . The lion's share of tax revenue
would therefore be controlled, if not wholly appropriated, by
the British, leaving the proposed Jewish and Arab States without
resources at the outset . The Mandatory would also gain
practically all of the tourist business, by virtue of its ownership
of the Holy Places . Controlling the larger urban centers which
constitute the major markets of the rural areas, it would have
the power of life and death over the Jewish and Arab States .
The British would be entitled to, and doubtless would, impose
burdensome restrictions on the movement of men and goods
to these areas. They would be able to determine the utilization
of the Jordan waters through control of the Sea of Galilee, thus
putting them in a further coercive position in relation to the
two `States.'
In its proposed boundaries the Jewish `State' would be cut off
JEHOVAH ABDICATES 443
not only from its traditional Capital, but also from its sources of
hydro-electric power on the Jordan, its main mineral asset of the
Dead Sea, and from prospective mineral resources such as petroleum,
phosphates and copper, in the south . Since it would have
no access to the great desolate regions surrounding it, it will have
no outlet for future growth.
Moreover, there will be almost as many Arabs in the Jewish
`State' as Jews . Hence it is likely that the division will not solve
the problem of Arab-Jewish rancor, but intensify it, encouraging
two mutually clashing irredentas within a small territory . The
Government clearly encourages the proposed Arab State to join
a future Arab Federation, so that this little Naboth's vineyard is
to be surrounded by a more or less united mass of covetous appetites
about ten million strong. In what respect will the position
be better than it is now ? Would it not simply provide
pan-Arabic ambition with a definite objective ? Whereas formerly
the Jews in the country were, at any rate, bringing new
wealth to the Arabs, would not the new contrast between Jewish
progress and Arab poverty "invite attack by tempting
greed" ? 112
Strategically the Jewish `State' cannot be protected . It consists
of lowlands surrounded by Arab hills. At one point it is
seven and a half to nine miles wide . What would the life of
anyone on this plain be worth if the hills bordering it were fortified
by the Arabs ? A country like that could be overrun
within a few hours, whatever the valor of its defenders . Of
this the Royal Commission itself gives unintentional warning,
saying, "the Jews must realize that another world war is unhappily
not impossible [and] that in the changes and chances of
war it is easy to imagine circumstances under which the Jews
might have to rely mainly on their own resources for the defense
of the National Home." How could such a wealthy, crowded
and progressive State on the plains and coast, surrounded by hills
and uplands, protect itself from the hungry, warlike inhabitants
of these adjacent areas ?
To give the proposition some aspect of reason, the Commission
suggests a mass exchange of population between the two
444 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
`States,' citing in defense of this idea the Graeco-Turkish exchanges
of population in 1922 .63 The transfer of Arabs in Galilee
is to be voluntary, but the transfer of those from the Sharon
is to be compulsory. A Transfer Commission is to be set up
under British control with headquarters at Jerusalem . Is not
all this contrary to the whole argument raised against the Jewish
National Home in the first place ? What in the name of common
sense is the moral difference between transferring 300,000
Arabs and, say, 900,000 Arabs, the total of those now in Palestine
? If it was moral when the League undertook the repatriation
of Turks and Greeks, and if it is moral in order to justify a
British plan of partition, why is it not moral in the name of those
8,ooo,ooo Jews who are being slowly done to death in Poland,
Rumania and Germany? There are at least 100,000 Jews in
the Arab peninsula who could be exchanged for Moslems . Two
hundred and fifty thousand more live in Arab North Africa. All
told, in Arabic speaking countries, there are at least 700,000 . Iraq,
among others, has stated her willingness to take all the Arab immigrants
she can get and to offer them every possible attraction,
including free land .64 Would not this solution be not only humane
but an act of the highest statesmanship, far superior to the
dog-in-the-manger tactics at present adopted ?
Much to the amazement of the Mandates Commission, which
had more than a little difficulty swallowing this explanation,
Ormsby-Gore stated that this whole scheme of partition was an
afterthought which occurred to the Commission after its return
from Palestine.65 He hastened to report that it was all a happy
accident and that the British Government had had absolutely
nothing to do with suggesting it . Yet Britain's Colonial Secretary
must know that no part of this is new in British Colonial
policy. It is identical with the system of `native reserve' followed
in many parts of Africa . Was the appointment of Sir
Morris Carter to the Commission a mere coincidence ? Sir Morris
is an expert on just this kind of work . Not long ago he
served as chairman of a commission in Kenya which fixed the
boundaries of a native reserve from which European colonists
are barred. This same partition scheme, in fact, was published
JEHOVAH ABDICATES 445
in almost exact outline more than eighteen months before, by
Mrs. Steuart Erskine, speaking the mind of the London anti-
Zionist cabal .6°
The partition scheme parallels exactly British strategic requirements,
allowing Mount Carmel and Haifa to be converted into
an eastern Gibraltar, and developing the corridor between Jaffa
and Jerusalem into a strong military and air base under permanent
British control, unhampered by promises, covenants and
trusteeships . Is this also coincidence ? The Commission recommended
in the interests of the Jewish and Arab `States' that they
sign treaties "of military cooperation" with England "dealing
with the maintenance of naval, military and air forces, the upkeep
of ports, roads and railways," for British military purposes.
The Jews, in other words, would foot the bill for a permanent
British garrison in their own territory . Are we asked to believe
that this, too, came as a touching and unexpected surprise to Britain's
military and naval advisers ?
At least it can occasion no surprise to find the British Cabinet
tripping over its own feet to accept "the unanimous Report of
the Royal Commission on Palestine" on the day it was published,
before there was any opportunity for examination or discussion.
But even here they were careful not to bind themselves
too closely, so as to leave the way open for still a further
foray against the distracted and retreating Zionists. In the exact
language used, the gentlemen of the Cabinet found that they
were "in general agreement with the arguments and conclusions
of the Commission," thus committing themselves to exactly
nothing, while at the same time appearing to have taken a stand.67
DOWNING STREET RUNS THE GAUNTLET
There were still formidable obstacles to be overcome, whether
by guile or force, before this carefully laid intrigue could be
consummated. One was certainly the conscience of Britishers
outside the official cabal . Another was the League of Nations,
for whom Britain was acting as temporary trustee . Since the
mere fact of railing against the Mandate did not alter its exist
446
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
ence, the third was obviously the Zionists themselves, who alone
could turn the trick without unpleasant repercussions if they
could be cajoled or frightened into voluntarily relinquishing
their rights in favor of the new British promises .
In England itself matters did not go too well . The country
was still a democracy, and for all the bureaucratic contempt for
elected politicians, five hundred cabals of vested officialdom
could not bring this plot off without the consent of Commons .
And Commons was grimly asking questions .
The moment Earl Peel's report was published, Englishmen,
boring through its polished phrases to the deceptions which lay
below, began to make themselves heard. Lloyd George, whose
government had issued the original Declaration, blasted it as a
"crazy scheme" which would brand Britain as faithless in the
eyes of honest men .68 Winston Churchill denounced it and the
men who issued it, stating that the Balfour Declaration could not
be brushed aside "as though they were under no obligations ."
Lord Strabolgi bluntly placed the entire blame for Palestine
troubles squarely on the shoulders of British officials, and accused
the Royal Commission of neglecting Imperial interests .
"The British scheme," he asserted, "was playing straight into the
hands of Premier Benito Mussolini of Italy, who . . . had been
in touch with the representatives of the Zionist Organization
. . . promising them all sorts of things ." 89 Expressing the generally
voiced opposition, the London Morning Post commented
sarcastically : "They have put a Saar, a Polish Corridor and half
a dozen Danzigs and Memels into a country the size of Wales ." 70
Opposition leaders once more scented an opportunity to tumble
the Government from power .
In foreign countries it appeared that the official clique had
overestimated the extent and force of anti-Semitic influence .
Ominous rumblings began to boil to the surface like little bubbles,
presaging a more vigorous convulsion gathering underneath.
Christian leaders, Fundamentalists who took their Bible
Prophecy literally, gazed askance. Bishop Alma White advised
the British nation that "the world will not know peace
until a Jewish Zion is established ." 71 "If the Jews do not preJEHOVAH
ABDICATES
447
sent united opposition," asserted the Reverend John Haynes
Holmes, "then the Christians must take up the fight . For the
partition of Palestine is as gross an outrage upon Christian tradition
as upon Jewish hope." 72 The Irish, who saw a situation
developing analogous to their own, came out in their newspapers
with such headlines as "Palestine Riots Due to British Guile ." 73
The Hindu leader, Basanta Koomar Roy, termed the whole affair
a characteristic piece of British diplomatic treachery, declaring
that "the British conspiracy is to exterminate the Jews and to
paralyze the Arabs in Palestine through a bitterly fought and
mechanically prolonged civil war ." 74 Irredentist groups of all
kinds, in chains to Britain the world over, were looking on now
with keen interest to see what the Jews were going to do about it .
The cabal was playing with fire . Hitler and Mussolini were
on the move, and an alarmed Britain saw herself as the ultimate
target for their fast-developing ambitions . With pecksniffian
horror she was declaiming on the subject of treaty breaking and
violation of sacred international covenants. Righteous indignation
was her stock in trade . "With all her customary secret
diplomacy," writes Wythe Williams, she was preparing "the
greatest campaign in history to insure the aid of the United
States in the conflict she now fears is inevitable ." 75 The belief
on the Continent that in case of war Britain could count on
American support, and at the least would have access to huge
American supplies of raw materials, was an important asset which
London did not dare forego . The ablest British diplomats were
detailed to Washington, where they concentrated all their wiles .
Downing Street grew increasingly nervous as the reports from
America became more and more disconcerting . Though officially
inspired news agencies were pounding out ecstatic descriptions
of the proposed new Jewish `State,' the reaction was
impressively antagonistic . The Jews themselves were quiet, under
the strictures of the ever-reliable Weitzman and his collaborators
; but there were signs that this too might only be the proverbial
lull before the storm . Consternation ruled Whitehall
when the American Christian Conference sent a cable to Geneva
signed by the most prominent and influential names in American
448
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
public life, calling attention to the "persecution of Jews that
now disgraces and degrades Germany, Poland and Rumania,"
and making the British Government a party to this villainy by
calling on it to "fulfill its covenanted pledges to the Jewish people
and to the world . . . and to cease obstructing Jewish settlement."
78 The Pro-Palestine Committee, headed by Senator
William H . King, issued a vigorous statement denouncing the
proposed plan as "a cruel act of persecution and a grave infringement
of international law ." Said the influential Hamilton Fish
"It is an amazing suggestion and a deliberate breach of trust ." 77
From the American Congress, forty-one members petitioned
Secretary of State Hull to advise London that partition was "totally
opposed to the spirit and acceptance of the Mandate by the
British Government ."
In the Senate the question of the treaties under which America
held rights in Palestine co-equal to those of Britain and other
League members, popped up as big as day. Senator Royal S .
Copeland, standing on the American-British Mandate Convention
on Palestine signed in 1924, drew attention to the fact that
under this treaty no modification can be made in the terms o f
the Mandate without the prior consent o f the United States .
Despite this Agreement, he pointed out, the United States had
not been consulted. Speaking in turn, Senator Warren R.
Austin, an eye-witness to the outrageous events which had taken
place in the Holy Land, solemnly urged that "under this treaty,
Americans are clearly entitled if not obligated to investigate the
lawlessness . . . and criminal conduct prevalent in Palestine ."
From Berlin, Adolph Hitler contemptuously dismissed the
whole plan as "English bluff ." Mexico announced that it would
oppose it in Geneva. The French, still wryly remembering the
intrigue which had handed Feisal to them in Syria, let it be
known with some heat that "no final decision could be taken
without their consent ." 78 In an impressive memorandum the
liberal groups of France and Belgium presented a major report
whose general premise was that far from being interested in the
establishment of a Jewish commonwealth, Britain would infinitely
prefer to see the work of construction collapse in order to have
JEHOVAH ABDICATES
449
a free hand to play the political game in the East. Accusing
London of direct complicity in the riots, the report proposed an
international committee to investigate .79
From yet another quarter came Poland, which as a powerful
buffer state between Germany and Russia, each a potential English
enemy, was being desperately wooed by Downing Street .
Poland wanted the largest Jewish State possible, in order to provide
a competent outlet for her unwanted Jews . Surveying the
British plan coldly, Poland announced herself solidly opposed . In
this tart disagreement she was joined by Rumania, and for much
the same reason.
It was apparent that all of this was just the beginning ; and
that if the Zionists started raising a commotion, the first nation
to have a serious tiff with Britain would make the Jewish quarrel
their own, with the legal advantage all on their side . None of
these things argued well for the Government's case when Parliament,
filled with grim and suspicious men, met late in July to
consider the measure .
Leading the Government's fight in person was the Colonial
Secretary, William George Arthur Ormsby-Gore . He was the
same Ormsby-Gore who had told a Zionist gathering in London
"I belong to the Anglican Church, and I see God's finger in the
return of the Jews to Palestine ." 80 He was the same man who
had thundered in 1921 : "Never in the history of the world has
a great empire taken up obligations of this kind and gone back
on them without being doomed. . . The little Englanders and
the narrow-minded politicians . . . what do they care about
Jerusalem or the British Empire ? They only care about . . .
getting an anti-Semitic cry."
It was he who had again told Commons in 1922 that the campaign
waged against a Jewish Palestine was the product of anti-
Semitic conspiracy ; that it was anti-British as well ; that it was
"only likely to result in the replacement of Britain in Palestine
by some other power" ; and that England "ought to pause before
it allows such a policy to be effected by its own nationals ." 81
Yet now we find this same gentleman hand-in-glove with the
cabal he had denounced, doing his best to convince Parliament
450
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
that the undertaking to which his nation was solemnly pledged
"involved an irreconcilable conflict between the aspirations of
Arabs and Jews" and therefore must be abandoned . To show
what kind of company he was keeping, one merely needs to
mention that in the House of Lords the Government's case was
being summed up by Lord Winterton, the identical worthy who
had once shouted down an unlucky Jewish M . P. from Whitechapel
with the words : "Silence in the ghetto!" 82 Now Winterton
was orating with crocodile tears in his eyes about the
miseries of Jews in this world, and stating his conviction that the
official clique were offering them "a fair deal" for the first time in
two thousand years .
In Commons it was apparent at once that none of this pharisaical
nonsense was going to be worth its salt . Despite the Government's
plea that the matter was so imperative that it had to
be adopted at once, Parliament was in no mood to accept this
proposition blindfolded . It was plain that while the Government
might win on the straight question of a vote of confidence,
it was a risky business, with a considerable section of its own
Party ready to vote with the opposition . Rather than chance
it, the official clique hastily backtracked, and introduced a resolution
referring the whole matter to the League, giving Commons
a chance to mull over it in its own good time . The result was
that Ormsby-Gore had to take his proposals before the Mandates
Commission without authority to say that Parliament approved
the scheme in principle or in detail . Here again the
British Colonial Secretary found himself with his hands full .
The Mandates Commission, considerably bucked up by international
reaction and Parliament's refusal to immediately approve,
was not impressed. It expressed astonishment that the
Mandatory had been unable to control the Arabs, and in effect
held the Commission's learned labors to be so much vague rubbish.
83
It was plain all around that for all its careful build-up the plan
wasn't worth the powder to blow it to hell with, unless the Jews
agreed. Once more Whitehall, with a cat-like smile, turned to
Weitzman.
JEHOVAH ABDICATES
MR. WEIZMANN OBLIGES AGAIN
To discourage any attempts at bold action which might have
been latent in the Zionists' minds, London promptly arranged
to have its creature, the Arab High Committee, reject the proposed
partition scheme . In a statement breathing fire and brimstone,
this body, composed for the most part of senior officials
of the Palestine Government, vociferated that Palestine "did
not belong to the Palestine Arabs alone, but to the whole Moslem
world ." Therefore it was turning to the Arab kings for
advice. Producing their optical illusions in swift sequence, the
magicians in Downing Street straightway trotted out these desert
potentates, who obligingly played their roles . Ibn Saud's
son was made to roar like a lion that "Palestine is Arabian and
must remain so!" Seyvid Hikmat Suleiman, Prime Minister of
Iraq, issued a spate of violent pronouncements damning partition
as an outrage against Arabs ; and Abdullah of Transjordan,
heir presumptive to a good part of the swag, added a comical
note by stentoriously threatening Great Britain with the consequences.
Thus the Zionists were to be kept properly scared and made
to understand that crumbs were better than no loaf at all . This
was inadvertently shown when Yemen's rapprochement with
Mussolini caused the permanent officials to believe that they had
carried this game of make-believe too far, putting ideas into the
heads of Arab princes that shouldn't be there . A few weeks
later the Colonial Secretary is found assuring an anxious Commons
that far from getting out of hand, "the Governments of
Transjordan and Iraq are now backing Great Britain in its decision
to tri-partition Palestine ." 84 In Palestine, itself, violent
protest demonstrations continued to be held, led by the most
virulent of the Arab extremists and protected by the police. But
the outside Arabs, including Saud and even the Government of
Egypt, suddenly seeing the light, had changed their tune. They
saw now with proper benevolence that the fact of a Jewish State
was only right and proper.
While all this was developing, the Zionists were preparing to
45 1
452 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
hold a congress to consider the situation, the most ominous they
had faced since their movement began . Only a few months before,
the Zionist Executive had voted not to cooperate with the
Royal Commission since that Commission, a political body, constituted
in itself "a distinctly anti-Zionist action" ; and also not
to convey this fact to the public "for obvious reasons ." S 5
Now, suddenly, the Zionist press gushes that "the great dream
of hundreds of generations of Jews throughout the two thousand
years of our history soon will materialize ." 86 Screeching headlines
announced : "England gives the Jews a Jewish Kingdom!"
In fulsome editorials, which under the circumstances can only be
described as crack-brained, the general theme runs throughout
"God bless England - England our friend - England our benefactor
- England our saviour !"
Like a fierce old wolf driven to bay, the veteran Ussishkin
growled : "It is necessary to indict England openly. The outbreaks
would not have occurred if the English Administration
had not wanted them to happen ." But the clear-sighted old
man was hushed up by timid confreres who were more afraid
to let go of the lion's tail than they were to hold on . Lord Peel's
threat to introduce a "political high level of immigration" and to
further restrict Jews on the land, had frightened them almost
out of their wits. If Jews did not accept the partition proposal,
warned Dr. Bernard Joseph, legal adviser of the Jewish
Agency, there was danger of a "much worse alternative." 87
Impending at last was a dramatic end to the inflated ballyhoo,
the stories of "unbelievable progress," the carefully nurtured
fiction of English friendship, the fund-raising prospectuses, the
long retreat into solacing unreality, by which the Zionist politicians
had sustained themselves . To Jews throughout the
world, totally unprepared for this collapse of their last hope, it
would come as a stunning blow . Could their confidence in the
Zionist hierarchy survive this final crushing disappointment ?
Would not Jewry, enraged and disillusioned, withdraw its support
? This fear, says Dr. Maurice Karpf, American member
of the Jewish Agency, entered heavily into the calculations of
the Executive.$$
JEHOVAH ABDICATES
453
At this very moment, a half dozen good, solid protest meetings
in the liberal countries and the threat of a determined Sinn Fein
might have moved the English. The Zionists might have concentrated
on the determined demand that the actual disturbances
themselves be investigated, that the action of the Royal Commission,
as well as the conduct of the members of the Palestine Administration,
be subject to an international court of inquiry . But
timidity ruled . Christian friends of the movement looked on
aghast, completely taken aback by the want of reaction on the
part of the official Jewish body . That great gentile pro-Zionist,
Charles Edward Russell, wrote to a friend : "I may say to you
quite frankly that if the Jews submit tamely to this colossal
affront and deep injury, I am out of the game . It will be of no
use to try to do anything for a people resolutely in love with
kicks in the face ."
Early in August the Congress met in Zurich, Switzerland .
Leading the struggle against acceptance of the partition principle
was Menachem Mendel Ussishkin . Solemnly turning to
Weitzman, he charged that for the past twenty years that gentleman
and his colleagues "had suppressed criticism of the British
Government and had concealed its unbending animosity to
the Jewish work in Palestine ." Acceptance of the British proposal,
he warned, would be only the beginning "of a new disaster."
Heading the American section was Dr . Stephen S . Wise
of New York, who was moving heaven and earth to make his
unqualified opposition clear . Even the non-Zionist, Felix Warburg,
pleaded : "I beg you, do not let down your ideals for something
that only seems like a State ." Violent language, hardbitten
accusations, split the air of the meeting-hall into a shower
of fragments from day to day . In a barrage of charges, Weitzman
himself was stigmatized as a traitor who had committed
himself to the partition principle in advance of the session's deliberations
.$» It was obvious that the temper of the Congress
454
was unalterably opposed to the British plan, even many of the
Laborites displaying a willingness to vote with the opposition .
Leading the fight for his program, Weitzman addressed the
delegates again and again, turning on all his old mesmeric charm,
454
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
with the officeholders holding up the van . Reversing himself
completely once more, he spoke in the typical language he had
always denounced as Fascist and jingo . Now he was violently
attacking those Jews who disagreed with what he called "the nationalist
Zionist ideal ." "The Arabs refuse to share Palestine with
anyone," he orated with nice casuistry . "If the Americans also
share the Arab viewpoint, our roads must part." "The Jews must
not forget," he continued, "that England is the only country
trying to solve the Jewish question ."
Weitzman was followed by Mr. David Ben-Gurion, regarded
as the second most influential person in the Zionist high command.
Mr. Ben-Gurion had changed considerably since that
day scarcely three months back when he had valiantly blazed
"We declare to the representatives of the English people that we
shall take no part in any experiment with the object of reexamining
that which has been decided by the nations of the
world and that which has been entrusted to England to carry
out." 90 Now he, too, was for partition .
It was useless to argue with such men, or to remind them that
`he who is cheated twice by the same man becomes an accomplice
with the cheater .' England had struck her blow just before
the era of stabilization had set in, and just in time to prevent
a Jewish majority in the Holy Land . The Jewish people
were writhing in the coils of the bitterest persecution they have
endured since the Dark Ages . Was not this the time of all
tunes for a final showdown ? If omens spoke correctly, a frank
revelation of this whole situation to the English electorate itself,
might have given them justice . If the facts had courageously
been made known, the nations of the world would certainly
have looked unsympathetically at this sordid attempt at
pirating the last resource of a defenseless people . Whitehall and
Downing Street, always sensitive to outside opinion, could hardly
have ignored this prospect .
It seems reasonable that the Zionists could have stood safely
on several counts : that Palestine was mandated and not British
territory ; that Jews have a right to an impartial investigation of
any squandering of their resources by a malfeasant mandatory ;
JEHOVAH ABDICATES
455
that neither a Colonial Office nor a Royal Commission of any
kind has any authority in Palestine ; and that Jews have the
same right to human happiness and existence as any other people .
Since the Mandate was not created to serve the interests of English
Imperialism, but to solve the Jewish problem, it could hardly
have been claimed that the whittling down of the Jewish National
Home to a few hundred square miles under questionable
`self-rule,' was a just and reasonable interpretation of Great Britain's
obligations .
But warning and counsel were useless . A large group of stalwarts
fought to the end against anything but a flat rejection of
this proposition, which they regarded as infamous . The Congress
as a whole could be regarded as implacably set against
Weizmann's proposals . But it consisted for the most part of inexperienced,
unworldly men who often acted for all the world
as if they had stared at the moon too long . They were caught
in the spell of glamorous orators who urged them in the name of
`reason' not to slam the door tight, who prodded their fancies
into the belief that this was only the opening bid - that since
Britain was thinking in terms of `a Jewish State,' it was indecent
not to investigate at least and discuss .
Finally they were brought to the point of agreeing to authorize
negotiations with Great Britain to ascertain "the precise purpose
of the Government in the proposed establishment of the
Jewish State ." That seemed perfectly safe, since at the same
time the Congress hedged this permission by instructing the
Executive not to commit either itself or the Zionist Organization,
but to bring a definite scheme for creation of the State, if
such a scheme emerged from the negotiations, before a newly
elected congress for "consideration and decision ." To make
clear that this act in no sense altered their opposition to the existing
proposals, the same resolution declared the partition scheme
unacceptable, protested all restrictions placed on Jewish development,
rejected the contention that the Mandate was unworkable,
and emphasized that the Homeland was understood at the time
of the Balfour Declaration to be "the whole of historic Palestine,
including Trans-Jordan ." As a parting shot, it directed the
456
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
Executive to "resist any infringement of Jewish rights as guaranteed
by either Balfour Declaration or Mandate ."
Events immediately proved the irreconcilables right . The
Zionists thought they had committed themselves to nothing ; but,
though they did not realize it, they had crossed the Rubicon .
They had not rejected the proposition absolutely and unconditionally
as had Jabotinsky's right-wingers, or even Agudath Israel
in convention at Marienbad, Czechoslovakia. Moreover,
they had re-elected Mr. . Weitzman as president, and with him
all the old gang and all the old policies . The world press at once
flashed the story in their columns : "Zionists Accept Partition ."
The functionaries in the Bureaus, too, understood it that way,
Great Britain and the East commenting smugly that "the Zionists
at Zurich have made the best of what they regard as a
thoroughly bad position." 91 Lending force and color to this interpretation,
Weitzman appeared at Geneva . Dining with Professor
William Rappard, Vice-Chairman of the Mandates Commission,
he "was understood" to be pressing for acceptance by
that body of the Royal Commission's proposal .92
Serenely now, with the appraising smirk of one who knows
that the die is cast in his favor, the British waited on Geneva.
With no other recourse, in view of the apparent circumstances,
the Mandates Commission committed itself to approval of the
Palestine partition scheme "in principle," going no farther than
they conceived their wards, the Zionists, had gone . "The word
'scathing,"' reports the New York Evening Journal, "can properly
be used to describe the Commission's biting criticism of British
action in Palestine" accompanying this approval . It charged
London with responsibility for the extent and duration of the
riots, and declared that "the present Mandate, which Britain now
says is unworkable, did not become unworkable until Britain
said it was ." 93
The next move was now up to Commons, where the friends
of the Jews looked on in some mystification at what appeared to
be a voluntary relinquishment of the Jewish franchise without a
fight of any kind . Weitzman had succeeded in taking the wind
completely out of the sails of those staunch spirits who had been
JEHOVAH ABDICATES
457
ready to crusade for justice to the Jew in Palestine . One prominent
American who had been most vigorous in denouncing this
attempted larceny of Jewish rights, remarked to the writer after
reading the newspaper reports on the Zurich deliberations : "I
feel like a fool."
Whether they liked it or not, the Zionists had put their head
in the lion's mouth . The question that remained was - will the
beast bite? The Government answered provisionally by putting
into effect at once all the stringent "Partition-Interim"
recommendations of the Commission, though the Report had not
yet been approved, and before any discussion of its policy in
Parliament.
SAINT GEORGE SPITS IN THE DRAGON'S EYE
With the dexterity of long practice the cabal once more made
effective use of the Arab kings. Egypt, which a scarce two
months previously had declared a complete `hands off' policy in
regard to the Palestine troubles, 94 mysteriously awoke to its
obligations to Arabs in the Holy Land . She was joined the next
day by Iraq which after leaping nimbly on and off this hot plate,
decided that the Arabs could not possibly permit "the cancer of
Zionism" to ruin the body of the Arab world 9 5 Moslem India,
too, was hauled into the play when Sir Zafrullah Khan, a minion
closely connected with Whitehall, was made to solemnly warn
Great Britain that unless she solved the Palestine problem to
Moslem satisfaction she would be "setting up a sore which will
never heal ." 96 The trump card played for the benefit of jittery
Parliamentarians came with the insolent declaration by an Iraqian
statesman that Arabs "will look elsewhere" if Britain takes the
wrong turn at the crossroads between pro-Zionism and a profitable
amity with the Arab world .97 These were ferocious warnings,
but it is notable that without exception they came from territories
held under British control . No word was heard from
the great body of Arabs in North Africa living under French,
Spanish and Italian rule, who went about their business completely
indifferent to events in the Holy Land . Equally as
458 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
apathetic were the non-Arab Moslem territories whose orbits rotated
outside of British spheres of influence.
Despite these imposing demonstrations, it was inevitable that
when the British moved to consolidate their new position the
Arab High Committee would have to go. It had been an effective
instrument, but it was composed of insubordinate, refractory
men who had long taken literally the tradition of power and invulnerability
British policy had woven around them . The Mufti,
in particular, was regarded as too dangerous now to be useful .
He had made the fatal mistake of defying his masters at a critical
moment when they had asked him to issue a call to Holy War
against the Italians. Like a cat sitting immobile at a rat hole,
the British had waited patiently for a propitious moment to destroy
him . Had Haj Amin been wise, he could have read the
premonitory menace in the Peel Commission's statement, cautiously
taxing him with "his due share of responsibility" for the
riots, and ominously referring to him "as the head of yet a third
parallel Government ."
As it came about, der Tag was Sunday, September 27, 1 937,
when for the first time a high-ranking British official was assassinated.
His name was Lewis Yelland Andrews and he had been
District Commissioner for Galilee. The murder had been committed
by unidentified thugs who, as usual, made a quick disappearance
.
Until this time it was alleged by officialdom that no matter
how truculent they became, the Mufti and Arab High Committee
had to be handled with kid gloves. "Britain," they asserted,
"had to think of the Moslems in India, her delicate relationships
with the Arab world, etc ." Now giving the game
dead away, the Arab High Committee, always so bold and brassy
before, precipitously swung over, becoming apologetic and cringing.
It immediately met in urgent session and issued a frightened
manifesto "condemning the assassins and expressing condolences
for the victims' families ." Its bravado had disappeared as
completely as if it had yielded to black magic .
Ignoring these protestations, Jerusalem acted swiftly and ruthlessly
. A reward of 41 o,ooo, unprecedented in the history of
JEHOVAH ABDICATES
459
Palestine, was posted for the murderers, dead or alive . Within
twenty-four hours Haj Amin had been deposed from his Government-
paid position as president of the Supreme Moslem Council
; and two hundred previously immune gentlemen, in or around
the Arab High Committee, were rounded up . They included,
among others, the Mayor of Jerusalem and the forbidding personality
whom everyone was allegedly afraid to touch, the pan-
Arab firebrand Awny Bey Abdul Hadi. Now it appeared that
the Government had forgotten about the susceptibilities "of the
Moslems in India" and the delicate feelings of "our friends the
Arabs outside of Palestine," for it outlawed the Arab High Committee
in toto, explaining this action, as if it had just awakened to
the fact, by the existence of an organized terrorist and assassination
campaign, directed by the arrested gentlemen .
It was soon apparent that careful preparations had long been
made in advance by the Government for this coup . All police
and military leaves had been canceled and the order given to
stand by. Friday morning, at dawn, the homes of the Arab
High Committee members were surrounded . Telephone service
throughout the country was completely suspended . Lulled
to a sense of false security by past experience with English rule,
the Arab leadership was taken completely by surprise . Without
formality of trial, the erstwhile `patriots' now found themselves
roped like so many sheep on the British cruiser Sussex, and
headed for permanent exile on a barren island in the Indian
Ocean.98 Moving with the speed of lightning, this Government,
which had been so unbelievably supine before, went to
ferocious extremes. In a relentless purge, strikingly reminiscent
of what was taking place in Germany and Russia, suspected
persons were punished and their houses blown up with dynamite
without the slightest pretense at judicial inquiry.99
Despite twenty years of dire prophecy, the sensitive Moslems
of India and the fire-eating politicians of the Arab world remained
as docile as lambs . For weeks, until the cabal in Whitehall
thought to bestir itself again, Palestine, too, was as quiet as
a churchyard . In vain the Mufti sent out his official bulls demanding
intervention by the Arab kings . Not an Arab prince46o
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
ling let out a peep - not even when the Palestine Official Gazette
announced that henceforth the Moslem religious funds were going
to be administered by a triumvirate consisting of two Christian
officials and one Mohammedan sheikh for makeweight .
It was evident that Whitehall did not contemplate sharing Palestine
with anyone and that consequently the Jews were next on
the agenda for official attention. The cabal was playing its cards
with the shrewd, practiced hand of a gamester who knows how
every card is marked. Their moves came in rapid-fire order .
Within a week it was known that Jerusalem was starting preparations
for the establishment of an Arab Agency to offset the
Jewish body, an overt move which would in itself shatter every
obligation of the Mandate to bits.
Into operation were placed all the `palliatives' proposed by the
Peel Commission, as if they had already received the approval of
Parliament. On October 21 an ordinance was promulgated empowering
the High Commissioner to set political limits on immigration,
which in no case was to exceed one thousand a month
irrespective of absorptive capacity, -and to establish a Jewish proportion
o f this maximum. "In cases where a dispute arises," the
Government Director of Immigration was to decide whether or
not a person was a Jew . The new schedule announced several
weeks later to cover the ensuing eight-month period, consisted
of 9600 certificates . Of these, i 6oo were reserved for non-Jews,
thereby setting up a principle which could be extended in any
direction at officialdom's whim . For the first time capitalists
were lumped with all other immigrants, and a limit placed on
their entry within this same number of certificates .* It was also
announced that another ordinance was being drawn up which
would rigidly restrict Jews on the land in accordance with the
Royal Commission's recommendation .
Though all this went off with little or no trouble, Whitehall's
plan was still highly vulnerable . Neither Parliament nor the
League had yet agreed to it . The Zionists could conceivably
* On March 15, 1938, when the schedule for the ensuing six months came up,
the British Government announced a further reduction, limiting the Jewish
immigration quota to one thousand labor certificates and two thousand certificates
for capitalists for the six months beginning April 1 .
JEHOVAH ABDICATES
461
about-face, overturn Weitzman, and unhorse the whole program.
There were signs that such a contingency was by no
means remote.10° Already harried by these problems, officialdom
now found another, equally serious, obtruding on its view
the Arabs themselves had begun a definite movement for rapprochement
with the Jews. To London's consternation it
gained ground with surprising momentum . "For the first time
in the twenty years since the Balfour Declaration," writes the
New York Times' correspondent on August 5, 1937, "the Arabs
openly censure the Palestine Government for never having attempted
to bring the two peoples together ." Falastin, once the
pet of the Administration, commented caustically a day later
that despite British allegations of an unbreachable enmity between
Jews and Arabs, "we cannot recall a single instance since
the British occupation here when they have made the slightest
effort to bring the Arabs and Jews together . Pre-war Jewish
residents lived here peacefully with Arabs for hundreds of years.
To this day these Jews, in addition to the Arabs, maintain that
if it were not for British policy of divide and rule, the Arabs and
Jews would again live in Palestine in peace and harmony ."
On November 15, 1937 the Arab daily Ad-Difaa asserted
that the British Government had categorically rejected all proposals
for a round-table discussion between Jews, Arabs and
British, though the Jews and Arabs alike were anxious for such
a meeting. After talking to all sections of the Arab population,
the Near East Correspondent for the New York Times again
reported on November z 1, that their unanimous cry was "we've
suffered enough and we don't wish to have any more trouble .
May Allah curse them and cut off the lives of these intruders
from the outside who are disturbing our existence ." Pamphlets
were distributed in Arab villages, violently attacking Great Britain
as being the cause of their ruin . Publications which for years
had heralded the most extreme Arab nationalism, published conspicuously
on their front pages manifestoes of Arab and Jewish
leaders appealing to the public for peace . A similar appeal was
issued by the councilors of the Jerusalem Municipality, Jews and
Arabs, in the form of a joint resolution, followed by another
462
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
from a conference of Jewish and Arab merchants . Even the
extremist Jaffa daily Al Jamia Al Islamia gnashed its teeth,
threatening terrorists "with the wrath of judgment day and the
anger of posterity, for fanning the embers of hatred and animosity."
101 The planned Arab Congress which was to have aroused
world-wide sympathy for the nationalist cause, proved a fizzle,
with responsible Arabs both in and out of Palestine refusing to
have anything to do with it .
There was good reason for this change of face. The plot
had overreached itself so far that everyone faced bankruptcy .
Preceding events had "gradually but effectively ruined Arab
merchants and tradesmen ." 102 A financial crisis was rapidly
developing . As cash was withdrawn in increasingly heavier
amounts, the banks shut down on credits . Real estate values
tobogganed downward. In Tel Aviv alone, the Property Owners
Protective Association registered five thousand owners who
were faced with foreclosure due to inability to meet mortgage
interest . Arab towns, such as Jaffa, Acre, Tulkarm and Ramleh,
were gripped with a virtual paralysis ; their business centers practically
deserted . `To Let' signs hung over thousands of stores
and apartments . In the villages "tens of thousands of fellaheen
began to experience starvation . . . In very many cases the disturbances
ruined fellaheen for life, and perhaps their families
after them ." 102a The debts of the Arab peasantry had "at least
trebled." 102b An economic collapse threatened the entire country.
Budgets of all concerns, large and small, were cut to the
bone, with the inevitable result that unemployment was rampant.
Wages fell . Jewish enterprises which had always employed
Arabs set themselves resolutely against the practice . During
1936, Jewish investments had dropped by more than half
from the previous period. In 1937, reversing the accustomed
process, foreign capital was liquidating its investments and fleeing
from the country .
For the first time in years the Government announced a
deficit, £25,000 for the sixth-month period ending October 1,
1936. The High Commissioner warned that there would have
to be a drastic increase in the land tax, to cover . Arabs, who
JEHOVAH ABDICATES
463
suddenly remembered that they owned 97% of all the land, were
in a panic . Even Transjordan, feeling the repercussions, was
having serious trouble, bordering on open revolt. Awakening
as from a bad dream, responsible Arab opinion shied away from
the Royal Commission's solution, considering it a measure which
would only add further to their already crushing miseries . What
they wanted was a return to the golden age of prosperity which
had come in with the Jews .
Once more officialdom started pulling the strings necessary to
make its puppets move . Bloody insurrection broke out over the
Holy Land with renewed savagery . Arab notables who indicated
that they wanted amity were shot down or intimidated.
103 Moderates among the Arab Government employees
received warnings to resign or be killed . When the Mukhtar
of Siris, a town near Jenin, notified the District Commissioner
that he was resigning following receipt of such a threat, he was
arrested and sent to the Acre Concentration Camp . 104 Terror
settled over this stricken land as hand-picked Arab hoodlums
went on record with torches and bullets to the effect that the
Mandate must be abolished, to be superseded by a treaty between
Arab Palestine and England "along the lines of the Anglo-Iraq
Treaty." Their attitude was now, "We yield nothing ."
This time the insurgents consisted almost altogether of some fifteen
hundred ruffians imported from Syria and other nearby countries.
The disgusted villagers not only gave them no help, but in
many cases actually drove them out of their vicinity .105 George
Meyer, Cairo correspondent for the influential Paris daily Le
Temps, states that the leaders of the new disturbances are the identical
Syrian Arabs and Kurds who had participated in the Druse
uprising in 1925 against French rule in Syria . There are twenty
of them who "constitute an executive and contact committee,"
writes Meyer tersely. "These twenty usually meet in Damascus
in a house located in the Salhiye quarter, and from this headquarters
they control the terrorist bands in Palestine, organize
the recruiting and the transport of reenforcements, as well as of
arms and funds ." Most of the recruits he specifies to be villagers
from the Syrian Hauran, attracted by the opportunity for ad464
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
venture and loot. In addition there is a considerable group of
Moroccans and some Druses, Circassians and Armenians . "Crossing
the frontier," continues Meyer, "is a very easy matter for
the terrorists. . . Daily they enter and leave the country without
hindrance. So far [July 1938] there is no instance on record
of terrorists being arrested at the boundary ." * 106
The insurgents operated with bold effrontery, levying on villages
for both funds and supplies . In several cases mentioned
by the Palestine Review where bandits raided Arab villages whose
residents were suffering from temporary financial embarrassment,
they agreed to accept promissory notes from their victims
on condition that they bore the signatures, as guarantors,
of two of the leading men of the village. It may be presumed
that they proceeded to discount these bills in the usual way .107
The new outbreak shook the country with unmitigated savagery.
Daily, orchards and homes were wrecked, railroads bombed,
men, women and children assassinated and pitched battles fought .
Christians, too, were made the object of violence . Many were
slain, including the Reverend Pietro Rossini, an Italian principal
of a mission school near Jaffa . He was beaten almost to a pulp,
his school looted and practically demolished .
Perfectly timed for its publicity value, a great engagement
took place between Government forces and Arabs in Galilee
on Christmas Eve, in which fifty men were killed . It was the
bloodiest battle the Holy Land had witnessed since the World
War. The farcical maneuvers of the previous years were now
reenacted all over again . Prominent Arab residents `suspected'
of having a hand in the disorders had to remain helpless "while
their homes and goods were blown to smithereens" by charges
of dynamite set by British troops.108 When the airport at Lydda
was damaged, a succession of Moslem houses were officially
dynamited in reprisal . Collective fines running into huge amounts
were levied on entire villages without the slightest judicial inquiry
or proof of guilt .
With engaging hypocrisy, the British went about the business
* This is the same border which Jewish illegals find it almost impossible to
cross due to drastic supervision .
JEHOVAH ABDICATES
465
116 In the American Congress, Representative Hamilton
of changing generals as if they were facing a major crisis . Major-
General Archibald P . Wavell iosa who had replaced General Dill,
was in turn replaced by Major-General Robert H . Haining,
much as players are substituted in sporting contests. As if reluctantly
put into operation by liberal humanitarians who had
been pushed as far as they could go and who now meant to end
the terrorism at any cost, courts martial were decided on and
loudly announced on November 1 7, 1937. To advise the General
Staff on the correct points of law before such courts, it was
advertised that "the noted British jurist," Major William Henry
Stoker, had been appointed Deputy Judge Advocate General .
Stoker, as it happens, had been in Palestine news before as the
chief counsel for the Arab Executive when it appeared before
the "Commission of Inquiry" after the 1929 upheaval .
Determined to make this whole procedure look like the end
result of a serious imbroglio between warring Arabs and Jews,
the Administration seized a number of Jews and threw them into
concentration camps . Jewish leaders, in particular Jabotinsky's
Revisionists, were picked up en masse under `preventive arrest'
and sentenced to long terms, or simply thrown into concentration
camps without trial or charge . Jewish passersby were
seized indiscriminately in the streets and laborers in the colonies
were grabbed and sentenced without even being questioned .
For the first time in the history of the National Home, the Authorities
established punitive police posts in Jewish quarters .
With mock solemnity, Arab busses passing through Jewish areas
(where Arabs had lived in peace even during the worst of the
riots) carried elaborate police protection .
The brunt of the disorders as well as this farcical arrest of
Jews, came just before the League of Nations Council meeting
in Geneva, where the partition proposals were to be considered .
It is at least noteworthy, too, that during that week the Authorities
allowed posters to be put up in the Jerusalem mosques signed
by Fawzy Bey el Kaougji, the old public enemy number one of
the previous year, appealing for a renewal of terrorism .
This synthetic state of affairs had been impressively staged but
there were men high in the councils of Europe to whom similar
466
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
phenomena were not new . The Report of the Mandates Commission
to the League Council unexpectedly threw the lie in the
face of British reports by absolving the Jews completely from
any responsibility for the 1936 disorders. It viewed London's
explanations with unconcealed disbelief, and held the newest
restrictions on Jewish immigration to be a flagrant violation of
the Mandate. "It was inconceivable," said Commissioner M .
Orts, "that during the transition period between the present
regime and the institution of a new regime, Palestine should be
administered entirely at the pleasure of the former Mandatory."
109
At the League of Nations Assembly held a few weeks later,
the British plan was unmercifully criticized . In a searing analysis,
President De Valera of Ireland declared that "partition is
not the solution - it is the cruelest wrong that could be done any
people." 110 Dr. Christian Lange, the beloved and influential
delegate from Norway, demanded the inclusion in the Jewish
State of the strategic areas which Britain had reserved for itself .
Poland's delegate, Mr. . Komarnicki, made it plain that his Government
would agree only if the proposed Jewish State were to
get an area large enough to make it economically sound, and
capable of absorbing a compact Jewish immigration . On this
position he was solidly backed up by the representatives of the
Little Entente . Uruguay, Lithuania, Latvia and even Haiti
joined in demanding that if the Jews were to be given a State, it
should be a State in fact, and not the spurious makeshift proposed
by Great Britain . Guided by what seemed to be the abdication
of Weizmann's official Zionists, the League finally authorized
Britain to "study" a solution of the Palestine problem on partition
lines, but emphasized that it was in "the meantime entirely
reserving its opinion and decision ." 111 This meant that the
Mandate continued to remain in full force as heretofore .
For the time being at least, Whitehall's play had fallen far
short. This result was more than disappointing. The permanent
officials had counted on bringing their program to a quick
head, after which it could rest as a fait accompli. In this lengthening
interim it became a dangerous plaything . Had these men
JEHOVAH ABDICATES
467
been dealing with anyone but inexperienced Jewish theorists, the
results might have been extremely unhappy . In Britain's current
situation, the label of "perfidious Albion" reburnished and
flung in her face would have effected a disastrous loss of moral
position ; and there were Parliamentary leaders who suspected
that Whitehall was exposing the nation to this hazard .
During an angry debate on supplementary estimates for Palestine
defense, David Lloyd George asserted that the continued
disturbances in the Holy Land were "entirely due to matters of
policy." 112 Winston Churchill warned that partition "will not
lead away from violence but into its very heart ." 113 On the
floor of the House, Colonel Wedgwood charged the Government
with failing to give the military in Palestine authority or
power to pacify the country, impeaching it scornfully for not
using the forty thousand Jews capable of bearing arms . Sarcastically
he pointed out in a letter to the London Times (July
21, 1938) : "For two years murder and destruction of Jewish
property have gone unpunished under British rule. The Administration
continues to be strictly impartial between the murderers
and the murdered . I have not known of such a black
page of incompetence and hypocrisy in British history."
Even more disconcerting was a bill introduced without warning
by Commander Oliver Locker-Lampson for the purpose of
"giving the potentially persecuted Jew in Europe the chance, if
he wishes, of becoming a Palestine subject." 114 The measure
contemplated extending to all Jews who required it, an extraterritorial
Palestine nationality, placing them automatically under
the protection of Palestine law . The bill unexpectedly passed
Commons by a vote of 145 to 144. This was a matter the
startled Bureaucrats would sabotage effectively before it came
to the Lords ; but it offered proof positive that beneath the comparatively
smooth surface there were hidden snags, well capable
of capsizing the craft when the matter again arose for final disposition.
The news from America was still more disquieting . The influential
Foreign Policy Association dubbed the British plan "a
political absurdity . . . fraught with the greatest danger." 115
468
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
Such eminent statesmen as President Roosevelt and Secretary of
the Interior, Harold Ickes, expressed "their deep and continuing
sympathy for Jewish efforts to build a National Home ." "With
cruel pressures against Jews in Europe unrelaxed and access to
Palestine no easier," Secretary Ickes told a Zionist gathering robustly,
"the need for a viable Jewish homeland in Palestine is
greater than ever. . . The enemies against whom you are forced
to contend are not so much your enemies as the enemies of all
human progress . . . As the darkening shadows lift from a
troubled world, the sun will also rise over Palestine, and law shall
again go forth from Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem."
Fish introduced a concurrent resolution demanding that
Great Britain lift its unjust and inhumane restrictions on Jewish
immigration into Palestine . 117
It was evident enough that this whole ferment of intrigue was
teetering on the verge of self-defeat, and that nobody but Whitehall
was assuming even vaguely that this was a matter exclusively
for Britain to deal with. It was clear that Palestine was not yet
British property and was still playing its independent part in international
politics . Moreover, the Powers needed little encouragement
to resist any encroachment on their special position
in the Near East. London was profoundly shocked when it
was reported late in October 1937 that Germany had suggested
to Italy that a four-power commission, to include Britain, France,
Germany and Italy, be sought to rule Palestine in place of the
present Mandatory Government . Modeled along the lines of
the Saar Commission, it would be empowered to send an international
militia to Palestine to preserve order ."" Another piece
of annoying news reported that Ibn Saud, bitterly resentful of
this attempt to strengthen the hated house of Hussein, had mobilized
his horsemen on the Transjordanian border under orders
to be ready for action if Abdullah were given Palestine.119
The situation focused itself logically on the Jews themselves .
Would they accept partition? Was Weizmann's mesmeric influence
still strong enough to hold, with nerve-cracking tension
JEHOVAH ABDICATES
469
turning Israel over half the world, bitter and dangerously restive
? What to do ! Should the Jews be frightened further into
submissiveness by continued riots ? Should the pill be sugarcoated
with a heavy dose of the old promises ? Would the
leopard change its spots or would the Zionists take their licking
like decent fellows ? These were the questions running through
the mind of the London cabal .
Not quite knowing their proper course, they attempted to
make things look right by a violent shake-up of the gendarmerie
in Palestine in which the resignation of virtually every police
head was found acceptable . Included in this collection of scalps
was that of the High Commissioner himself . It was 1920 all
over again.
The new High Commissioner was a man with a high-domed
head and a shrewd face creased with tired lines, named Sir Harold
MacMichael . MacMichael had been former Governor of
Tanganyika Territory, and later a high official in the Sudan Government.
He was reputed to be a renowned Arabic scholar.
"If anything could reassure the Arab world particularly, and the
Islamic world in general," says Great Britain and the East succinctly,
"that the problems of Palestine will be handled sympathetically,
they need but refer to the Bedouin and the fellaheen
of the Sudan for their opinion of Sir Harold MacMichael."
Before leaving for Palestine, MacMichael pledged himself in
a leonine oration to eradicate the terror, root and branch . His
arrival on March 3, 1938 was marked by violent samples of the,
very lawlessness he had promised to eliminate . One of his first
acts was arbitrarily to return control of the city government of
Jerusalem to the Arabs, giving the acting-Mayor, Mr. Auster,
his walking papers and appointing an Arab majority in the Municipal
Council . In the official announcement it was made perfectly
clear that had Mr. . Auster been a Moslem he could have
continued as Mayor . 120 Along the full length of the northern
frontier, allegedly to keep out terrorists, was built an elaborate
barbed-wire entanglement of the most substantial and
permanent wartime type, six feet high and six feet deep, strung
470
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
on stakes set in concrete .121 Despite this `precaution,' terrorists
seemed to have little difficulty in continuing to go and come as
they pleased .
Meanwhile tension was considerably eased by the new accord
signed with Italy, in which Mussolini agreed not to oppose British
policy in Palestine. Long grueling months of riot and uncertainty
had all but destroyed Palestine's economic life. With
their principal enemy out of the way for the moment, the Bureaucrats
decided that now was the time to strike in a decisive
effort to force a conclusion . A new partition Commission was
announced. Swiftly organized, it sailed from London on April
21, 1938 to begin its task. Coincident with its arrival, terrorism
of the most frightful kind again stalked the country, with the
police and military seeemingly powerless to halt it . Peaceful
Arabs as well as Jews were slaughtered daily, colonies attacked,
and houses, schools and other buildings blown to bits . Arson,
stoning and sniping became part of the regular routine .
In a determined attempt to justify its interpretation of these
events as "Arab-Jewish clashes," the Administration concentrated
its efforts on the unfortunate Revisionists . Once more
there were mass arrests of Jewish workmen and students, who
were promptly referred to in dispatches sent abroad in the same
terms as were the Arab desperadoes . Among them was a young
boy named Shlomo Ben Josef who was sentenced to hang for
being allegedly in possession of arms.122 The Government did
not assert that he had killed or injured anyone .
A general strike shut all Jewish shops in Jerusalem as the case
became a cause celebre for all Jewish Palestine . Over the entire
country widespread demonstrations took place and a spontaneous
walkout emptied all schools in Tel Aviv . Sickened and outraged,
the struggling Yishub endeavored desperately to make itself
heard .
These manifestations were contemptuously ignored, and Ben
Josef was officially put to death, the first Jew to be hanged in the
history of modern Palestine . The Jewish Yishub, to a man, considered
him an innocent victim of the Government's determination
to prove that Jews, too, were terrorists . In the British ParliaJEHOVAH
ABDICATES
47 1
ment itself, John McGovern M. P. did not hesitate to refer to the
execution of this boy as "perfectly outrageous ." 123 Making the
event as offensive as possible, the day selected for the hanging
was a Jewish holiday so that no rabbi could be present to administer
last rites . An appeal by Chief Rabbi Herzog to postpone
the execution till the next day was refused, as had been
the unanimous demand of Palestine Jewry for a retrial .
For once the Jews sunk their ideological differences . Defiantly
the Jewish Council and the Chief Rabbinate issued a
manifesto saying : "The entire Yishub mourns the loss of a son
of Israel. Let us bear the pain quietly and with restraint suitable
to the dignity of a people struggling for life ." Jewish Palestine
seethed with dangerous tension. General strikes were called in
the principal cities. Jews carrying black flags of mourning were
beaten down by the police in the Jerusalem streets . But Jewish
leaders, who had been urging self-restraint in the face of all provocations,
managed to make their influence felt again.123a The
Yishub settled back to its old dogged policy of patient waiting .
Haifa, which had been so miraculously free of disturbance
during the earlier period of the revolt, now became the very
center of terrorist activity . By the usual coincidence, this synchronized
itself exactly with Whitehall's latest agitation to detach
Haifa from the Jewish State, and to include it in the Arab
area. It is also worthy of remark that the worst outrages took
place at the very time President Roosevelt was calling his Evian
Conference to arrange for an orderly resettlement of Jewish
refugees from Germany and Austria . The deadliest bomb explosion
in Palestine's current history shattered the crowded Haifa
market place, killing thirty-five Arabs, including women and
children, and touching off a day of terror which left forty-five
dead and seventy-five wounded. Aghast at this atrocity (which
was promptly attributed to them) the Jews made no bones of
the fact that they considered the explosion to be the work of
agents provocateur, 1231 and that its purpose was to impress upon
the Evian Congress the supposed perils of settling large numbers
of Jews in the Holy Land .124
These provocations had their effect. Deep unreasoning hatred
472
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
paralyzed the Holy Land. It was the Arab turn now to be outraged.
The terror expanded into unprecedented proportions,
with stricken Haifa the chief battleground. A whole series of
disastrous bomb explosions followed, blowing Arabs and Jews
to pieces indiscriminately . The list of dead mounted into the
hundreds. Property of untold value was destroyed . The normal
economic life of the country continued to deteriorate rapidly.
Despite the presence of innumerable British soldiers, Haifa,
particularly, became a death trap for the Jews, who could not
go to work or return home without running the risk of ambuscade.
"One entire section of the city," writes Roman Slobodin,
correspondent for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, "is overrun
by the Shabab - the organized Arab mob - whose leaders boast
that they rule supreme in the Arab quarters, and who, by this
correspondent's personal observation, make good that boast ." 125
Four large bands operated apparently with impunity in the
vicinity of this great seaport city . One consisted of two hundred
Palestine Arabs headed by Yussef Abu Dura ; another of
a hundred and twenty Palestine Arabs led by a relative of the
exiled Awny Bey, one Fakhri Abdul Hadi ; a third group comprised
four hundred Syrian Arabs and was led by Abdullah el
Asmat of Damascus ; and a fourth band consisted of several hundred
Iraqians headed by a lieutenant of Fawzy Bey, Sheikh
Salach Issa Laoh .
Meanwhile the country was rife with reports that these and
other bands were not only controlling entire sectors without interference,
but were imposing collective fines and preparing
mobilization lists . From Beirut came reliable information that
a general uprising was in preparation, to be coincident with the
presentation of the Commission's plan to Parliament . Armed men
were reported pouring unchecked across all Palestine frontiers .
Agents were said to be openly recruiting villagers throughout
Palestine, fixing an orderly levy of men and cash in proportion
to village populations .126 In Iraq and the desert, the old reliable
threat of a jihad in the name of all Islam, suddenly became a
threatened reality. The fanatical Shi'as (who had been petiJEHOVAH
ABDICATES 473
tioning the League, voicing passionate indignation at the outrages
committed against them by the hated Sunnis) now incomprehensibly
issued a solemn fatwa demanding that Iraqis engage
in a holy war to aid their Arab (Sunni) brothers in Palestine .127
In this turbulent setting the latest `Commission' sent down from
London to `investigate,' completed its labors . What it had in
mind was more than hinted at by the columns of Great Britain
and the East, which referred to the "false premise which caused
the Commission [Peel body] to propose including Arab Galilee
in the suggested State ." The Zionists were thus put on warning
that the tiny area suggested by Lord Peel was itself about to be
drastically slashed . The Jews, in short, were to be pushed out
of Palestine by being compressed into an uneconomic mud-hole
on the coast, which could not possibly continue its existence as
an independent unit. Great Britain and the East did not mince
the matter. It `predicted' that the Arab State would, eventually,
either join an Arab Federation or become part of that larger entity
provided by Transjordan and Palestine. The future of the Jewish
`State' it found no difficulty in forecasting, remarking : "It
may find a way of accommodation, and even help to fructify those
States [Arab] . It may ultimately end as a dream." 128
The plan was thus to reduce the Jewish `State' to a mere "token
home," and to confine it to some 40o square miles in the Sharon
Valley. Galilee, Acre and Haifa were to be added to the permanently
mandated British area . Under this scheme the British
would also take over southern Palestine to protect Suez .129 The
remainder of the country was to be united with Transjordan as
an Arab `State' under Abdullah.130
Convinced that the Jewish stag had finally been run to earth,
the exultant Bureaucrats now dallied with the idea of abrogating
even the Jewish "token home," repudiating the Balfour Declaration
and setting up an Arab government "permanently allied with
Great Britain." For this purpose, under the sponsorship of the
British Foreign Office, Tewfik es-Suwaidi, foreign minister of
Iraq, was introduced to official London ; and it was he who went
through the motions of demanding this solution in the name of an
aroused Arab world . At this psychological moment an imposing
474
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
Arab Congress, consisting of delegates from various countries of
the Peninsula, had been gathered in Cairo, where, under the approving
eye of both Egyptian and British authorities it stentoriously
threatened the British nation with the eternal enmity of all
Arabia unless these minimum demands were promptly met .
Timed to absolute precision the revolt in the Holy Land, itself,
assumed major proportions . Calling themselves the "provisional
Arab Government" the rebels announced that they had taken
over responsibility for "law and order, life and limb" in their
territory .
With unparalleled audacity they swiftly assumed authority
over practically the whole of Palestine with the exception of a
few isolated military outposts held by the British . Persons in
the vicinity of Jerusalem's American colony stated that they were
halted in broad daylight on the charge of violating this `provisional
Arab Government's' laws, and taken into custody by the insurgents
after being marched right past the Mandatory's policemen
who looked on passively. The insurgents not only set up
their own courts but issued laws and decrees like a bona fide
government and began to collect taxes. According to the Chicago
Daily News of October i9, 1938, an old Englishwoman,
resident of Jericho for forty years, was given twenty-four hours'
notice by the `Provisional Government' to pay taxes on her orange
grove. When she repaired to Jerusalem for advice she was
told by British officials there "to pay and look pleasant ." Returning
to Jericho, she not only paid the tax but was "fined additionally
for not paying on time ."
Over the whole length and breadth of the Holy Land sanguinary
violence flared wickedly . The most shocking acts were
committed, as when twenty-one Jews were butchered in cold
blood on October z 2 in Tiberias, including ten little children who
were roasted alive.
For all its perfect timing, it now became apparent that the
Bureaucrats had once more over-reached themselves . News from
Europe of a new succession of barbarities against the Jews was
profoundly stirring international Christian opinion . As a result
of the Munich settlement, 30,000 Siideten Jews suddenly found
JEHOVAH ABDICATES 475
themselves penniless refugees, fleeing in mortal terror from the
invading Nazi legions . Czechoslovakia, which the Munich pact
had reduced to complete vassalage, now, under Nazi pressure,
turned to anti-Semitism, threatening its 340,000 Jews with expulsion
or pauperization . The news from Poland and other European
countries grew worse daily .
As it became apparent that London was about to repudiate its
obligations under the Balfour Declaration, voices of protest, of
indignation and anger began to make themselves heard, particularly
in the United States . American Jewry, too, aroused itself
from its apathy and became articulate . Hundreds of mass meetings
were planned to denounce this final outrage . This swelling
tide of opinion quickly enlisted the sympathetic support of noted
political leaders, of organized labor, church dignitaries, and the
majority of influential newspapers . The National Council of
Catholic Men appealed to President Roosevelt to take immediate
action in regard to Palestine "to the end that misfortune and
misery be not further heaped upon the afflicted peoples of the
world." More than one hundred thousand telegrams and memorial
resolutions poured in from all sources, urging the American
Government to intercede . It was once more pointed out that the
American-British Mandate Convention on Palestine prohibited
any change in the Mandate without the prior consent of the
United States Government . Both the Senate and House of the
Pennsylvania legislature adopted a unanimous resolution asking
President Roosevelt to inform London "that this country looks
to Great Britain to adhere to her commitments and to hold fast
to the terms of the Palestine Mandate and to the spirit of the Balfour
Declaration ." Another petition signed by 5i Senators, 31
Governors of States, and 194 members of the Lower House,
voiced an almost identical sentiment . Additional protests emanated
from still other legislative bodies as well as religious and
social groups throughout the nation .
In view of the dangerous situation both in the Far East and on
the Continent, London had been feverishly courting American
public opinion . If America refused cooperation in the event of
a new world war, the great vulnerable British Empire was sure
476
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
to find itself in a desperate position . The very thought of such
a possibility was sufficient to throw Whitehall's masters into a
panic.
In England itself there were signs that the Munich pact was not
popular and that a growing section of British opinion viewed it
as a direct betrayal of Britain's future . The Government's own
party was split wide open with dissension . Opposition leaders
were searching frantically for some issue which would throw the
hated Tories out of power.
In its very dying moments the League, speaking for the nations
which still believed in the fundamental principles of international
law, taxed Great Britain with a flagrant breach of the
Mandate, calling attention to her "virtual suspension" of Jewish
immigration .
To the Bureaucrats the situation had, unexpectedly, again
become tense and fraught with ominous possibilities . It was apparent
that the attempt to wreck the Jewish Homeland now,
might bring on a reaction of enormously unpleasant proportions .
This was the situation when the British Cabinet hurriedly met
on October ig and announced that no drastic action was about
to be taken against the Jews . All the carefully built plans for a
reorganized Arab Palestine were immediately shunted out of
sight ; and it was authoritatively stated that military action would
be taken at once to put down the few thousand Arab `rebels' who
had so unaccountably checkmated a major British army in Palestine.
The Woodhead Commission's report, which was to have
been issued late in October, was with-held apparently to undergo
a drastic revision .
The Bureaucrats themselves are now eager to allay the grave
suspicions visibly growing in the world conscience . The much
heralded partition plan has, from all appearances, been quietly
jettisoned . Judging from the inspired propaganda arising from
London sources, the latest strategy is to perform the operation by
degrees. It seems fairly certain that the Jews are to be placated
for the time being by a gift of several thousand additional immigration
visas. At the same time a cantonization scheme is to be
presented, to be elaborated in a round-table conference at which
JEHOVAH ABDICATES
477
will be seated hand-picked Arabs and Jews . Coincident with
this maneuver a great campaign to the Christian world is to be
pressed, placing the Mandatory in the role of a champion of
Christianity. The Jews and Arabs, both, will be reminded forcibly
that Palestine is not of interest to them alone, but that there
is also a third party - the Christian churches. Under this pretext,
Haifa and the whole of Galilee is to be taken over by Britain
under permanent Mandatory rule, and closed to Jewish settlement.
The new cantonized Palestine would thus consist of a
large permanently mandated area which would include all the
Holy Places as well as the strategic points ; a small and circumscribed
Jewish sector (where Jews would be given certain illusory
rights) ; and a remaining Arab section, to be set up under
some other form of British control .
When all of this has been settled, the Arabs can be expected to
mysteriously quiet down like decent fellows, and the rebellion
in Palestine will suddenly evaporate into thin air . The intransigeant
politicians of the rest of the Arab world, too, will undoubtedly
then find their attention distracted elsewhere .
Thus, with the exception of a few hundred square miles of virtual
ghetto on the maritime plain, Western Palestine eventually
would become, like Transjordan, Judenrein .
Reprint of 1938 edition. The Rape of Palestine is a scathing indictment of the British administration in Palestine. It is well documented and makes full use of quotations from the writings of non-Jewish persons who served under that administration and themselves complained of the anti-Semitism shown by government officials. Among them was Douglas V. Duff, who complained that "it did not pay for one's seniors to think that one had any undue sympathy for the returning Jews". Even if only one-half of the evidence amassed by the author were true, he would have proved that nearly all the persons sent out to administer Palestine were anti-Semitic and determined to evade the Mandate and destroy the Jewish national home.
ReplyDelete"The Rape of Palestine" by William Ziff (1938). Partial comments by Sheree Roth in the Fall 2016 "Middle East Quarterly":
ReplyDelete"Ziff (1898-1953) was born in Chicago..... Active in Zionist politics, his "Rape of Palestine" was considered by the British Foreign Office "a violent and offensive book," and for years afterward, the British monitored the Zionist writings and speeches of this "unscrupulous gangster," fearful that his audiences were "lapping this poison up." The thrust of Ziff's book is on British policy in Palestine during the mandate period, but what is especially interesting today are his comments on the migration of Arabs and the squelching of Jewish immigration by the British. ...
"Ziff elaborates on Jewish efforts, both from within and from abroad, to create more jobs for those Jews emigrating to Palestine as well as those already living there. These efforts spurred significant economic growth and consequently accomplished the goal of providing employment. However, British policy resulted in a stream into Palestine of illegal Arab immigrants who filled these jobs in lieu of the barred Jews. (All of the above-mentioned modern authors also address the influx of Arabs lured by the booming economy.)....
"Ziff adds details about immigration certificates, labor visas, taxation, and Hadassah aliyahs.... Many of the administration's reasons for refusing entry permits would do credit to Herr Hitler as witness the refusal to grant a visa to a refugee Russian rabbi on the excuse that "there were enough rabbis already in Palestine." Some of the regulations designed to restrict Jewish immigration are classic. One of these edicts, promulgated November 14, 1933, allowed only 250 immigrants "to enter Palestine from any one vessel." Its effectiveness rested on the fact that few of the ships touching Palestine ports could make a payload out of such a small number of travelers, forcing the cancellation of sailings. "Ziff mentions the British practice of hunting down "illegal" Jews:
[Ziff wrote:} "Coincident with the advent of Hitler, the business assumed the proportions of an out and out Jew-hunt. In a nice piece of collusion between the colonial secretary, Sir Phillip Cunliffe-Lister, and an M.P. named MacDonald, the Government "admitted" that "illegal" Jewish immigration existed but stated in assurance that "practical steps would be taken to deal with the matter." The very next day Cunliffe-Lister announced stringent measures to prevent "illegal" Jewish immigration into Palestine."
...."The system of tourist deposits was instituted. Holders of Nansen [League of Nations] passports, that pitiful army of staatenlos [stateless] men, were not in future to be granted even tourist visas. An air-tight frontier control in collaboration with the agreeable French authorities in Syria was to be put in effect. On the subject of illegal Arab immigration, the announcement was expressively silent.....
"While Ziff's book has lain dormant, his insights regarding the waves of Arab immigration into Palestine substantiates the assertions of later scholars. During the mandate period, Arabs from many lands flowed freely into Palestine while Jewish immigration was severely limited. The truth remains that the native Arab population in Palestine was relatively small before the first Jewish settlers made it an attractive and prosperous place."
The Rape of Palestine
ReplyDeleteA controversial book because of its thesis and the contemporaneous research done by the author. The research, which has never been effectively refuted, establishes the facts regarding British rule of the Mandate up until 1948. This research establishes that two thirds of the Arab population in what became Israel (i.e., modern "Palestinians") descend from folks moved into Palestine during the 20-30 yrs preceding Israeli independence. These Arabs were brought in to counterbalance (i.e., outweigh) the growing population of Jews in Palestine.
While the facts may be inconvenient for those with a certain agenda, it's always best to establish the truth. The fact Arabs expelled or who fled Israel in 1948 may have been in Palestine for twenty five years instead of one thousand years doesn't change the fact people were expelled and fled, or that one-third of these folks did have families who had been in what became Israel for many centuries. That two-thirds were in a somewhat different situation is a fact, but is certainly not dispositive of how those expelled, who fled, or who left in 1948/49 felt at the time.
The Rape of Palestine by William B. Ziff (1938) is a very important book and highly recommended to all who are interested in the Israel-Arab conflict. These reviews are from the digest by Harry Louis Selden of the "Rape of Palestine" Copyright 1940:
ReplyDelete"The Rape of Palestine" as one of his Three Books of the Year for the New York Herald Tribune. From his review in the Baltimore Sun: "I defy anyone to read him without granting the soundness of his main thesis.... It is a tale full of racy ironies, and it makes excellent reading, for Mr. Ziff writes almost as competently as he argufies..."
H. L. Mencken Selects
Of "Information Please" in the New Yorker: "An important discussion of the fate of the Jews as bound up with the fate of Christianity itself."
Clifton Fadiman
In the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science: "Every statement of fact is documented by government publications, impartial authorities, and irrefutable sources."
Professor Francis J. Brown
Community Church of New York: "This is a historical document of first class importance, and the most important book to date in its field."
Rev. John Haynes Holmes
"You may like `The Rape of Palestine' or you may come near to bursting with anger at it, but one thing is certain, you will have to reckon with it... this is an important book. It demands a reading by all and a reply by some."
American Hebrew
Cathedral College, New York City: "This vigorous book edited in scholarly fashion challenges the justice and humanity of the entire Family of Nations as no other book known to this reviewer."
Father Joseph N. Moody
"Dealing with the vital problem of Palestine and coming at a time when that problem has been so adroitly and commonly distorted and falsified, it is beyond all ordinary praise."
Charles Edward Russell
".... a lengthy, powerfully-documented and utterly unafraid pronouncement by and informed and unimpeachable investigator... it is an amazing and heart-rending narrative presented by this extraordinary volume."
Jewish Outlook
"This book is decidedly worthwhile; it is really an arsenal of information upon a burning question of the day."
America
"Mr. Ziff's book is extraordinarily valuable."
Palestine Review
"Mr. Ziff's brilliant book tells the impassioned story of the betrayal of the Jews in Palestine.... Not only are the current day activities discussed but the author has wrought a magnificent account of Jewish life and struggle from Biblical times to the present."
Chicago Daily News
"The frightful persecution of Jews is spreading like a fire driven by strong winds. Is there no solution to this problem which strikes at the heart of the belief in a rational world? Does the Jews' salvation lie in the creation of a Jewish State within boundaries large enough to permit it to survive as an economic unity?
"To those interested in answering these questions a `must' book is `The Rape of Palestine,' by William B. Ziff...."
Washington (D.C.) News
https://archive.org/stream/TheRapeOfPalestineByWilliamB.Ziff1938withPageLinksForTheTableOfContents/The%20Rape%20of%20Palestine%20by%20William%20B.%20Ziff%20(1938)%20(with%20page%20links%20for%20the%20table%20of%20contents)_djvu.txt
ReplyDeleteFull text of "The Rape Of Palestine By William B. Ziff ( 1938) (with Page ...
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he Rape of Palestin THE RAPE OF PALESTINE by William B. Ziff Opinions "Having read 'The Rape of Palestine,' I stand amazed at the scholar- ship, the courage arid the competence of William B. Ziff, its author. The book is full of political dynamite — in its documented indictment of the British camarilla which in betraying the ...