BRITISH
BIAS AGAINST THE JEWS IN PALESTINE
An analysis of land purchases from 1880 to 1948 show that 76
percent of Jewish plots were purchased- from large landowners, not poor
fellahin. Those who sold land included the mayors of Gaza , Jerusalem and Jaffa . As’ad
el-Shuqeiri, a Muslim religious scholar and father of PLO chairman Ahmed
Shuqeiri, took Jewish money for his land. Even King Abdullah leased land to the
Jews. In fact, many leaders of the Arab nationalist movement, including members
of the Muslim Supreme Council, sold land to Jews. “The British helped the
Palestinians to live peacefully with the Jews.” In 1921, Haj Amin el- Husseini
first began to organize Fedayeen (“one who sacrifices himself”) to terrorize
Jews. Haj Amin hoped to duplicate the success of Kemal Atatürk in Turkey by
driving the Jews out of Palestine just
as Kemal had driven the invading Greeks from his country. Arab radicals were
able to gain influence because the British Administration was unwilling to take
effective action against them until they finally revolted against British rule.
Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, former head of British military intelligence in Cairo , and
later Chief Political Officer for Palestine and Syria , wrote
in his diary that British officials “incline towards the exclusion of Zionism
in Palestine .” In
fact, the British encouraged the Arab-Palestinians to attack the Jews.
According to Meinertzhagen, Col. Waters-Taylor (financial adviser to the
Military Administration in Palestine 1919–1923) met with Haj Amin a few days
before Easter, in 1920, and told him “he had a great opportunity at Easter to
show the world . . . that Zionism was unpopular not only with the Palestine
Administration but in Whitehall, and if disturbances of sufficient violence
occurred in Jerusalem at Easter, both General Bols [Chief Administrator in
Palestine, 1919–1920] and General Allenby [Commander of Egyptian Force, 1917–1919,
then High Commissioner of Egypt] would advocate the abandonment of the Jewish
Home. Waters- Taylor explained that freedom could only be attained through violence.”
Haj Amin took the Colonel’s advice and instigated a riot. The British withdrew
their troops and the Jewish police from Jerusalem ,
allowing the Arab mob to attack Jews and loot their shops. Because of Haj
Amin’s overt role in instigating the pogrom, the British decided to arrest him.
Haj Amin escaped, however, and was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment in
absentia. A year later, some British Arabists convinced High Commissioner
Herbert Samuel to pardon Haj Amin and to appoint him Mufti. By contrast,
Vladimir Jabotinsky and several of his followers, who had formed a Jewish
defense organization during the unrest, were sentenced to 15 years’
imprisonment. Samuel met with Haj Amin on April 11, 1921 , and was assured “that the
influences of his family and himself would be devoted to tranquility.” Three
weeks later, riots in Jaffa and
elsewhere left Jews dead. Haj Amin consolidated his power and took control of
all Muslim religious funds in Palestine. He used his authority to gain control
over the mosques, the schools and the courts. No Arab could reach an
influential position without being loyal to the Mufti. His power was so
absolute “no Muslim in Palestine could
be born or die without being beholden to Haj Amin.” The Mufti’s henchmen also
insured he would have no opposition by systematically killing Palestinians from
rival clans who were discussing cooperation with the Jews.
As the
spokesman for Palestinian Arabs, Haj Amin did not ask that Britain grant them independence. On the contrary,
in a letter to Churchill in 1921, he demanded that Palestine be reunited with Syria and Transjordan .
The Arabs found rioting to be an effective political tool
because of the lax British attitude and response toward violence against Jews.
In handling each riot, the British did everything in their power to prevent
Jews from protecting themselves, but made little or no effort to prevent the
Arabs from attacking them. After each outbreak, a British commission of inquiry
would try to establish the cause of the violence. The conclusion was always the
same: the Arabs were afraid of being displaced by Jews. To stop the rioting,
the commissions would recommend that restrictions be placed on Jewish
immigration. Thus, the Arabs came to recognize that they could always stop the
influx of Jews by staging a riot. This cycle began after a series of riots in
May 1921. After failing to protect the Jewish community from Arab mobs, the
British appointed the Haycraft Commission to investigate the cause of the
violence. Although the panel concluded the Arabs had been the aggressors, it
rationalized the cause of the attack: “The fundamental cause of the riots was a
feeling among the Arabs of discontent with, and hostility to, the Jews, due to
political and economic causes, and connected with Jewish immigration; and with
their conception of Zionist policy. . . .” One consequence of the violence was
the institution of a temporary ban on Jewish immigration. The Arab fear of
being “displaced” or “dominated” was used as an excuse for their merciless
attacks on peaceful Jewish settlers. Note, too, that these riots were not
inspired by nationalistic fervor—nationalists would have rebelled against their
British overlords—they were motivated by racial strife and misunderstanding. In
1929, Arab provocateurs succeeded in convincing the masses that the Jews had
designs on the Temple Mount (a
tactic that would be repeated on numerous occasions, especially in 2000, after
the visit of Ariel Sharon and others including the recent violence in October
2015). In a Jewish religious observance at the Western Wall, that forms a part
of the Temple Mount ,
served as a catalyst for rioting by Arabs against Jews that spilled out of Jerusalem into
other villages and towns, including Safed and Hebron .
Again, the British Administration made no effort to prevent the violence and,
after it began, the British did nothing to protect the Jewish population. After
six days of mayhem, the British finally brought troops in to quell the
disturbance. By this time, virtually the entire Jewish population of Hebron had fled
or been killed. In all, 133 Jews were killed and 399 wounded in the pogroms.
After the riots were over, the British ordered an investigation, which resulted
in the Passfield White Paper. It said the “immigration, land purchase and
settlement policies of the Zionist Organization were already, or were likely to
become, prejudicial to Arab interests (the British wanted to control the oil in
the Middle East ). It
understood the Mandatory’s obligation to the non-Jewish community to mean that Palestine ’s
resources must be primarily reserved for the growing Arab economy. . . .” This,
of course, meant it was necessary to place restrictions not only on Jewish
immigration but on land purchases. All the while the British turned a blind eye
while hundreds of thousands of Arabs entered Western
Palestine .
“The Mufti was not anti- Semitic.” In 1941, Haj Amin al-
Husseini fled to Germany and
met with Adolph Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Joachim Von Ribbentrop and other Nazi
leaders. He wanted to persuade them to extend the Nazis’ anti- Jewish program
to the Arab world. The Mufti sent Hitler the drafts of declarations he wanted Germany and Italy to
make concerning the Middle East . One
called on the two countries to declare the illegality of the Jewish home in Palestine .
Furthermore, “they accord to Palestine and to other Arab countries the right to
solve the problem of the Jewish elements in Palestine and other Arab countries
(from about 1940 to date the Arab countries terrorized and expelled over a
million Jewish families and confiscated all their assets including over 70,000
square miles of Jewish owned land), in accordance with the interest of the
Arabs and, by the same method; that the question is now being settled in the
Axis countries.” In November 1941, the Mufti met with Hitler, who told him the
Jews were his foremost enemy. The Nazi dictator rebuffed the Mufti’s requests
for a declaration in support of the Arabs; however, telling him the time was
not right. The Mufti offered Hitler his “thanks for the sympathy which he had
always shown for the Arab and especially Palestinian cause, and to which he had
given clear expression in his public speeches. . . . The Arabs were Germany ’s
natural friends because they had the same enemies as had Germany ,
namely. . . . The Jews. . . .” Hitler replied: Germany stood
for uncompromising war against the Jews. That naturally included active
opposition to the Jewish national home in Palestine . . . .
Germany would
furnish positive and practical aid to the Arabs involved in the same struggle.
. . . Germany ’s
objective [is] . . . solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in
the Arab sphere. . . . In that hour the Mufti would be the most authoritative
spokesman for the Arab world. The Mufti thanked Hitler profusely. In 1945, Yugoslavia sought
to indict the Mufti as a war criminal for his role in recruiting over 20,000
Muslim volunteers for the SS, who participated in the killing of Jews in Croatia and Hungary . He
escaped from French detention in 1946, however, and continued his fight against
the Jews from Cairo and
later Beirut . “The
Irgun bombed the King David Hotel as
part of a terror campaign against civilians.” The King David Hotel was
the site of the British military command and the British Criminal Investigation
Division. The Irgun chose it as a target after British troops invaded the
Jewish Agency on June
29, 1946 , and confiscated large quantities of documents.
At about the same time, more than 2,500 Jews from all over Palestine were
placed under arrest. The information about Jewish Agency operations, including
intelligence activities in Arab countries, was taken to the King David Hotel . A
week later, news of a massacre of 40 Jews in a pogrom in Poland
reminded the Jews of Palestine how Britain ’s
restrictive immigration policy had condemned hundreds of thousands of Jews to
death. Irgun leader Menachem Begin stressed his desire to avoid civilian
casualties. In fact, the plan was to warn the British so they would evacuate
the building before it was blown up. Three telephone calls were placed, one to
the hotel, another to the French Consulate, and a third to the Palestine Post,
warning that explosives in the King David Hotel would
soon be detonated. On July
22, 1946 , the calls were made. The call into the hotel
was apparently received and ignored. Begin quotes one British official who
supposedly refused to evacuate the building, saying: “We don’t take orders from
the Jews.” As a result, when the bombs exploded, the casualty toll was high: a
total of 91 killed and 45 injured. Among the casualties were 15 Jews. Few
people in the hotel proper were injured by the blast.
In contrast to Arab attacks against Jews, which were widely
hailed by Arab leaders as heroic actions, the Jewish National Council denounced
the bombing of the King David. For decades the British denied they had been warned.
In 1979, however, a member of the British Parliament introduced evidence that
the Irgun had indeed issued the warning. He offered the testimony of a British
officer who heard other officers in the King David Hotel bar
joking about a Zionist threat to the headquarters. The officer who overheard
the conversation immediately left the hotel and survived.
After WWII; the British actually blew-up Holocaust
refugee ships bound for Palestine-Israel known as “Operation Embarrass”.
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