Monday, March 16, 2015

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE by WILLIAM B. ZIFF - Part 8

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE by WILLIAM B. ZIFF - Part 8

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
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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,
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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
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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
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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 .

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