252 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
Persia, too, becoming practically a British
protectorate, inexplicably put its nose into extra-territorial affairs by
prohibiting the emigration of Jews to Palestine. 20 Jews were forced to wear a
distinguishing badge. No Jew was allowed to walk in the open street in front of
a Muslim, or to talk aloud to him, build a fine house or whitewash its rooms.
He could not leave town, grow a beard or ride on horseback. The law stipulated
that "Jews shall not be permitted to consume good fruit." It is
certainly at least coincidental that when the present ruler, Riza Khan,
denounced the treaty under which Persia was run by British advisers and army
officers under English tariff control and financing, he abolished most of the
more ridiculous anti-Semitic rulings.
Yemen, too, at the south end of the Arabian Peninsula, prohibited the emigration of Jews to Palestine at a time when London could have broken its back by withdrawing
its financial support. Jews attempting to leave for Palestine are brought back and executed. After an
economic rapprochement with Britain, the Turks also made Zionist organizations
illegal, in October 1934, going to the point of raiding Jewish homes all over
the country in their efforts to stamp the movement out.
The attitude may
again be seen in Egypt where an Arab daily paper appears called
the Mokattam, known as the voice of the British Embassy. No other publication
in Egypt attacks Zionism with such unrestrained
violence. Though the country is completely dependent upon Britain for both defense and finance, it has
lately become a center of anti-Zionist conspiracy and agitation, and during
1938 played host to an international Arabic conference, convened at Cairo, to fight Zionism. No one doubts that had
these activities been directed against any friendly nation, or against such
British dependencies as Iraq or Trans-Jordan, they would have been
swiftly outlawed.
A confirming view
is given in Aden, owned by England outright, without bother of pretense. In
June 1932, after mob attacks, the British slapped a blanket censorship on the
news, even withholding cables of news services. Following the disturbances, the
Aden Jews sought to emigrate to Palestine en masse.
253 WELCOME HOME!
Many were
arrested, and many more deported to Hodeida, an Arab pogrom center then raging in a
bath of Jewish blood. When the fanatical Wahabis swept into Yemen in 1934, Jews fled to Aden begging permission to be allowed to
proceed to the Jewish Homeland. The Authorities instead issued an order
prohibiting Jews from entering Aden altogether. Even those lucky Israelites
with visas to Palestine, compelled by the only existing travel routes to pass
through the Colony, are refused transitory entrance and returned to the waiting
Jew-baiters at home.
Lying off the
coast of Palestine, so that its outline is faintly visible on
a clear day, is another English piece of property, the Island of Cyprus. Cyprus had been taken by Disraeli for the Empire
because of its "propinquity to Palestine," a rare evidence of the great
statesman's sentimentality. A number of Jews that were unable to get into Palestine, settled here. The natives were delighted
at the prospect of having someone to whom they could sell their almost
valueless land at a good price. The average amount paid was £8 per acre — about
a thirtieth of the price demanded in Palestine for similar land. Noting this, enterprising
Cypriots filled the Palestine press with advertisements offering every kind of attractive
acreage for sale cheap. Soon Jews held almost seven thousand acres in Cyprus, planting it mostly in citrus. The Island started to boom, and the stream of Jewish
immigration began to swell.
Soon after, the
Colonial Office sent down General Storrs (who had had some experience with
similar problems in Palestine) to rule the Island.
Acting expeditiously, Storrs issued an edict on December 13, 1934 announcing that in future no more
foreigners could buy land in Cyprus; nor could they enter without the express
permission of the Governor himself. It hardly needs mention that the only
'foreigners' attempting to come in or buy land were Jews, and that this
ordinance put a summary end to all such 'attempts.'
CHAPTER V
CLOSE SETTLEMENT
ON THE LAND
SOIL HUNGER
The early Zionist
thinkers instinctively grasped the direct relationship between a sound peasant
class rooted in the soil, and the project of a national renaissance. The British,
too, understood that a National Home without ownership of the soil was
a misnomer. Their
Peace Handbook on Syria and Palestine reads: "The essence of the Zionist
ideal is the desire to found upon the soil of Palestine a revived Hebrew nation based upon an
agricultural life and the use of the Hebrew language. . . There is so much
unoccupied land in Palestine that there is plenty of room for Zionist development
without ousting the existing Muslim population."
The early
colonists found the park-like country their ancestors had left, a treeless
desert. Epidemics made even the raising of cattle impossible. The mountain
slopes, once covered with a never-ending succession of vineyards and orchards,
were now bare rock, washed clean by the torrential rains. The rest of the
country alternated between swamp and desert. Crawling like dull maggots over
these dried bones was a scanty population, scarcely less haggard, wild and
unkempt than the land itself.
Land hunger rode
on the shoulders of the returning Jews, driving them like a man with a lash.
They came from the ghettos of the Russian Pale, men with soft hands,
intellectuals, lawyers, writers, doctors and shopkeepers, inspired by the passionate
dream of turning this pestilential desert into a blossoming countryside. They
themselves, the dreamers of Zion, would erect its first peasantry with their own lives and
bodies.
Their hardships
were almost insupportable. Epidemic pestilences killed off so many that it
became a byword that the graveyards of these settlements were more populous
than the villages themselves. Undeterred, the new settlers pressed on doggedly.
254 Pics
255 CLOSE
SETTLEMENT ON THE LAND
They were living
an epic; and their eyes danced with it long after their bodies grew worn from a
ceaseless struggle with a sick earth. This blazing emotion is beautifully described
by the Hebrew poet, Uri Zvi Greenberg:
"In a
sunburst of love we went up,
Boys and girls to Zion;
Passionate faith
from the roots of our hair
To the tips of the
nails of our feet:
A boundless love
for the mother earth of the Jews
That agonies could
not quench,
Nor the teeth of
the foxes destroy. . .
Unlike the advent
of European capitalism throughout the East, the only privilege these colonists
asked was to be allowed to work the soil with their own hands. They consciously
understood that the body of the Jewish nation had been maimed by a cruel
destiny which had driven the Jews from the soil, had closed manual labor to
them, and had crowded them into one thin stratum of the social pyramid. The
renaissance of Jewry lay in this astonishing attempt to reverse a process
consciously taking place in social adjustment, abjuring personal ambitions, to
erect again by the national will what history had destroyed.
These Jews from the
vitiated air of ghettos, men and women whose psychology and muscles alike were
better adjusted to the counting room and Yeshiva than to heavy labor, made themselves
over by the sheer force of their own idealism into the finest scientific
farmers in the world. Their neat, well-painted houses went up surrounded by
thriving green vineyards, healthy young orchards, flowers and shade-trees. In
the eyes of believing observers it was a miracle, only to be explained in the
light of Biblical Prophecy.
There has been no
braver colonizing group in history, nor any who operated under more
disheartening conditions. With a song on their lips these determined young
people laid the groundwork for an agricultural prosperity which was to be the
backbone of the coming Jewish nation. Their magnificent accomplishments were
unhesitatingly acknowledged by the English after the War. "Every traveler
in Palestine who visits them," relates an official
report, "is impressed by the contrast
256 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
between these
pleasant villages, with the beautiful stretches of prosperous cultivation about
them, and the primitive conditions of life and work with which they are
surrounded." 1 Beverley Nichols remarks: "As I walked around, I
became more and more astonished that any race of men, let alone intellectual
Jews, could possibly tackle such an unfriendly soil. . . Yet over this wilderness
the ex-clerks, ex-doctors, ex-shopkeepers swarmed like ants, staggering under
the weight of the stones they were removing, panting as they wielded their
spades." 2 Father Alfred Sachetti exclaims in admiration: "What had
been up to six years ago a wild unproductive waste land has been transformed
into a fertile and productive country?" 3 And the Rev. Dr. W. M. Christie
reports: "When you see a green spot in Palestine today you may be sure it is a Jewish
colony," 4
When with
premature gratitude the enthusiastic Jews welcomed the British overlords who
were taking the place of the Turks, they had no reason to suppose that in the
near future the further acquisition of land by them was to be considered in the
nature of a crime against humanity. The British were pledged to their cause. London had wholeheartedly acknowledged that
"the immigration of Jews and their close settlement on the land, including
State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes, are integral and
indispensable factors in the execution of the charge laid upon the Mandatory of
establishing in Palestine a National Home for the Jewish People." 5
How far the Jewish
position has actually retrogressed since the English came, may be estimated
from the simple fact that the per capita land possession of Jews in Palestine has shrunk from approximately 8 dunams in
192 1 to only 3 dunams in 1936. Of the total land area of 26,319,000 dunams,
only 1,300,600 dunams are in Jewish hands, of which more than half was acquired
before the War. In 1935, the peak year of investment, only 18,250 acres were
acquired; but the price paid was the enormous sum of £1,700,000. Even at this
uneconomic cost, less than 3% of the huge sums flooding into the country went
into the establishment of new farms.
257 CLOSE
SETTLEMENT ON THE LAND
These figures mean
that Jews numbering 33% of the population are sequestered on 5% of the land,
forcing into existence a queer economy by which the Jewish farm population must
mathematically decrease with the growth of the Jewish national structure. Even
in the short period between 193 1 and 1935, we find the proportion of Jewish
farmers decreasing from 18% to 13.9%, making the Palestine Jews the most highly
urbanized national group on earth.
Here you have the unhealthiest
of all possible conditions: a land-hungry people attempting to build a sound
national economy and owning, after decades of struggle, less than three hundred
thousand acres altogether. 6 On this fact is shipwrecked the basic principles
on which Zionist planning was constructed. For all reasonable purposes, it
forebodes the creation not of a free economy but of a new ghetto, this time in
an Arab instead of an Aryan land.
The causative
factors behind this condition are not hard to find. In the early period of
Jewish settlement, around 1885, prices averaged ten francs, or eight shillings,
per dunam for good agricultural land. By 1900 the price had risen to around
six-teen shillings. By 1935 it was anything that anyone cared to ask. Taking
1932 as an illustration, we find 18,293 £ an (£ transactions concluded by Jews;
whereas in 1926, when more than twice the area of new land had been acquired, there
were only 11,821 such transactions. 7 This meant that land-hungry Jews, caught
in a trap, were reduced to buying land from each other, the price skyrocketing
in accordance with the inevitable law of supply and demand. During the fiscal
year 1933-1934, when practically no new land was acquired by Jews, the
Palestine Government received from them close to £200,000 in registration fees
for land transfers. In many instances a parcel of land passes through eight or
ten hands a year and its price is pyramided to the most unbelievable heights.
"Nowhere in the world," comments the Royal Commission of 1937,
"were such uneconomic land prices paid as by the Jews in Palestine."
The parent of this
distorted condition was none other than the Government itself. A series of bold
expedients flowed from Jerusalem, directly formulated to prevent Jews
258 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
from buying land. Jerusalem
British Authorities directly formulated to prevent Jews from acquiring the soil
of the country. As fast as one artifice proved inadequate, newer and more
offensive ones were invented. The English set themselves up as the protectors
and patrons of the Arabs, much as though Palestine were an endowed institution
for the improvident and the inept for whose benefit all competitive factors
must be excluded.
The keystone to
the British arch was the alleged landless Arab situation. In his report, French
had listed some thirty-seven hundred claimants. The extent of this fabrication
was later conceded when, despite the prodding of the Administration, only five hundred
Arabs could be discovered who even had a provisional claim. Just how there
could be any landless' people in an under populated country suffering for years
from an acute labor shortage, the Administration never attempted to explain.
Major Cecil Quinlan answered the best part of the question with the laconic
remark that "the so-called 'landless' Arab does not exist, except in
disordered imaginations." 8
The Mandate
provided that Jews be given State lands for the purpose of "close
settlement." Nowhere in that document is there anything mentioned about an
opposed obligation to Arabs; but the Government, making its own interpretation,
decided that this must have been a typographical error. It early handed the
Arabs 1 40,000 acres of its most fertile holdings. Later to appease the Jews it
gave them a consolation prize of some 18,000 acres, of which only 962 were
actually cultivable.
The
Administration's Annual Report for 1920-21 gives figures of 942,000 dunams of
State land and two or three million dunams of waste lands. When the Zionists,
grown restive finally, put a fierce demand on the Government to fulfill its
obligations, it was dismally discovered that the two or three million dunams of
waste land referred to had now vanished in thin air.
The technique
under which this piece of legerdemain was accomplished was not involved. It
consisted of simple nostrums and a characteristic method of dealing off the
bottom of the deck. In reply to a pointed question by the Mandates Commission
in
1926, His
Majesty's spokesman, Ormsby-Gore, represented that "the delay of the
259 CLOSE
SETTLEMENT ON THE LAND
grant of
Government land to Jews is connected with the question of survey which has not
yet been effected." 9 A Vaad Leumi Memorandum notes in disgust that
despite this excuse, "hundreds of thousands of Government lands . . . have
been distributed among Arab fellaheen, in lots of such size that they could not
work them properly." All Jewish demands for land were rejected — "even
the claims of the discharged Jewish soldiers who had participated in the
British military conquest of the country being disregarded." At the very
moment Ormsby-Gore was offering his explanation to the League, a special Land
Commission was carrying out a liquidation of the Government estates,
"apparently instructed to hand them over to Bedouins."
Again in 1931, a
Vaad Leumi protest to the League notes that the Government was distributing
State lands to Arabs "in parcels of thousands of dunams per family/' while
Jewish demands were studiously ignored.
Pleased with these
outright gifts, the Bedu had little intention of demeaning themselves by manual
labor. They at once offered their new-found acreage to Jews at prices only
limited by Bedouin ability to count. The indignant Administration put an end to
this practice by attaching a string to further gifts, prohibiting sale of the
land for thirty to fifty years. In other cases the Arabs were beneficiaries of
paternal loans, never intended to be repaid, placing the Jews in the unenviable
position of financing activities aimed directly at themselves. All a Bedouin
had to do, to blackmail this singular Government, was to threaten to sell to
Jews and a subsidy would be forthcoming.
The
Administration's sympathy for 'landless' Arabs went an amazing distance. Four
days before the 1936 riots broke out it gave the Dajani family 10,000 dunams in
the rich Jordan Valley. The 'landless' Dajani family, as it
happens, is fabulously wealthy, owning among other things, the site of 'The
Last Supper,' for which they are said to have recently refused £1,000,000. The
Government even handed out its land to foreigners who made no pretense of Palestine residence. To mention only a few cases,
six Syrian families located in Damascus and Beirut received over 7000 dunams of the Ashrafiye
lands. Of the 3579 dunams distributed in Tel-Es-Shock, 3469
160 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
dunams went to a
family group of four brothers and sisters living in Egypt. 10
Even when Jews
bought areas on which the Government felt it had a lien, it exacted its pound
of flesh. A case in point is the Huleh basin, consisting of 12,000 acres of
miasmatic swamp.
This suppurating
area had polluted the country, for generations back, with malaria and
dysentery. The job of draining it would ordinarily be regarded by any other
government as a task incumbent on itself. Instead, the Palestine Administration
granted concession rights for reclamation of the area to two Syrian merchants,
renewing the concession in 1924 and again in 1927, though the Syrians made no
attempt to proceed with the work and were evidently not in a position to
undertake a development project of this magnitude. It was only after years of
procrastination on the part of the Government that the Jewish Palestine Land Development
Company was able to secure official approval to take over the concession
rights. As the price of its consent the Government stipulated that when the
work was finished, one-third of the new land would have to be handed over for
Bedouin settlement. It was necessary to pay the original foreign concessionaires
£200,000, a sum which could only be considered in the light of a gift. This was
in 1935. In 1938 the Government was still quibbling over the text of the
concession. It also has mysteriously withheld decision on a number of minor
points arising from an engineering report made several years previously. These
dilatory tactics have effectually prevented any progress being made in the work
of reclamation, which is thus shunted into the indefinite future.
The huge task of
draining this quagmire will take at least a decade. It will involve an outlay
of over £1,000,000. To this must be added interest on investment, and
amortization of principal, plus such baksheesh as must be paid to petty
officials who would otherwise find a way to throw a sabot into the machinery,
even after the work has been started. When the 16,000 dunams which must be
given free to the Arabs are deducted, some rough idea is secured of what this
much-touted enterprise will cost the Jews. 11
261 CLOSE
SETTLEMENT ON THE LAND
A FAMINE IN LAND
Having devised the
'landless Arab' thesis, it was only a short step to the principle that the Arab
must be protected against himself and saved from exploitation by the Jew who
would take his land away from him. For this purpose there was introduced a
series of ordinances so plainly meant to prevent Jews from acquiring land in
their National Home that were ten percent of them introduced into England, and directed at Englishmen, an armed
revolution would follow.
But Zionist
spokesmen had been used to the rope's end too long to be able to react with
anything resembling normal indignation. They recognized helplessly that they
were being victimized, but saw nothing else to it but to smirk ingratiatingly
on their tormentors. Once more it is grizzled old Menachem Ussishkin who growls
like a lone wolf to the British Government: "Since you have given your
consent to the establishment of a Jewish National Home, you must have realized
that it is impossible to build on anything but on the land. We have paved every
field and marsh with gold, but you, instead of helping us, have piled stones in
our way and have made the country into a hell." 12
As early as 1920 a
Land Transfer Ordinance already read that "any person wishing to make a
disposition of immovable property must first obtain consent of the
Government," a statute which the Shaw Report frankly admits was introduced
to prevent the easy sale of land. This was followed in 1929 by the Cultivator's
Protective Ordinance, which demanded that buyers make an additional payment to
tenants who might be occupying the land as well as to the owners. 1931 saw a
new edict which provided that irrespective of any provision in the contract,
land could not be transferred if there were "any tenants" cultivating
it. A tenant was described as anyone who has access to the land by "right
or custom, usage or on sufferance" 13 a person hired for agricultural work
who is paid in kind, squatters of any and all types; anyone who cultivated the
land by either express or implied permission, or who had been cultivating the
land on the assumption that he had the right to do so for a period of two years;
or any one who comes and grazes on the land or cuts reeds for
262 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
basket-making, or
one who is a descendant of a would-be tenant under the ordinance.
This startling
piece of legislation derived its full force from the primitive nature of
Bedouin life. While the Bedouin grazed his flocks wherever he pitched camp, he
always made the same general circle of travel, returning year after year to the
identical spots. Thus he automatically became a 'tenant' under the regulation.
Most of the land purchased by Jews came from the tremendous estates of absentee
landlords, a handful of land-barons who owned, for example, eighty percent of
the soil of Galilee and at least half of southern Palestine. 14 These vacant acres were trespassed on
by all comers, and, by the very nature of things, were bound to harbor
itinerant tenants, squatters and migratory Bedouins.
The other claw of
the pincers lay in the fact that all the archaic Turkish land and tax laws were
still operative. 15 This meant that the verification of title went back to the
old Ottoman religious law. The British had made no attempt to determine title,
and the footnote to every Kuban
(title deed) contained the phrase: "The title is not deemed to be
guaranteed." Under the new Cultivator's Ordinance all titles were placed
in jeopardy as having been gained illegally, since they were subject to
tenant's rights.
It now transpired
that tenants' could be evicted only by the High Commissioner himself. This transfer
of discretion to a political appointee, rather than to the courts, prevented
any appeal and gave the frankly anti-Jewish officials of the Administration
arbitrary powers of decision. These powers were further increased by the Land
Disputes Ordinance enacted in March 1932. This remarkable edict empowered the
District Commissioner, should he find that a trespasser was forcibly evicted by
the rightful owner, to regard the dispossessed party as the possessor. Granted
magisterial status, no appeals against the findings of this petty functionary
were possible. The enactment additionally forbade interference with the
'rights' of invaders coming to graze, cut wood or reeds, or for any other
purpose (even if the owner's fences had
263 CLOSE
SETTLEMENT ON THE LAND
been cut down and
his crops destroyed), until in each case "a competent court ruled on the
matter."
On July
25, 1933 the
Administration released the Statutory Tenant Law, effectually freezing the
ownership of large vacant areas in their present hands. Anyone who occupied or
grazed the land for a year, with or without permission, became a "statutory
tenant/' He could not be evicted without being given a new piece of land in a
nearby area approved by the High Commissioner.
These restrictions
made it next to impossible to purchase lands on which claim could not be made
by tenants.' The inevitable result was that Jews buying land had to pay for it
twice: one payment to the owner and the other to his 'tenants/ in order to
obtain their voluntary consent to leave the property. In many cases the sums
given the tenants' were larger than the already inflated prices paid to the
sellers. The whole intent behind this singular legislation is shown in the law
affecting tenants where the land is not sold. Here the tenant is not protected
in any fashion whatsoever, and may be evicted at the landlord's pleasure.
Even on land long
owned by Jews, here is how this 'advanced' legislation operates. 'A' owns a
piece of land; 'B' squats on that land, claiming the right to cultivate it. In
the ensuing conflict, 'B' is not ejected from the parcel and allowed recourse
to the courts, but instead the cultivation of the land is stayed by both
parties until the determination of the courts. Since land cases are known to
sleep through the judicial chambers for five or six years, and appeals are
seldom, if ever, heard less than one year, the result is apparent. Nor does the
final settlement of one trespassing case protect the owner against new ones. As
fast as new trespassers may appear, new court orders must be obtained against
them through the same lengthy litigation.
Here was an
obvious invitation to blackmail which the Arabs were not slow to take advantage
of. False claims were regularly manufactured against Jewish land with the
object of extorting money from the owners. Arab tribes, often as not under the
fatherly advice of the District Commissioners, turned this situation into a
profitable business. They squat in the Jewish colonies, taking over a piece of
land by main force
264 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
if necessary,
claiming it on the basis of prior possession ; and then compromise on some
compensation from the owner, who usually prefers a limited loss of money to
prolonged litigation. The Bedu then drive their herds further on, looking for
another opportunity to repeat this agreeable adventure. There are Arab attorneys
in Jerusalem who specializes in causing squatters to do
this sort of thing and who make a very good business out of it. As may be
expected, Jews are the sole sufferers. "In not a single instance,"
declares the land expert Ussishkin, "has an Arab owner been pestered in
such a way. Bedouins who would so intrude on an Arab parcel of land would be
ejected by the police without further ado."
A few actual cases
will show how these measures operate in practical application. A large parcel
of land, in Jewish hands for forty years, was disputed by Arabs on the basis of
an alleged document signed five hundred years ago granting the land to the Muslim Church. District Commissioner S. H. Perowne immediately
declared the land under dispute and prohibited work there. Jewish farmers who
tried to plough their fields were arrested. 16 At the settlement of Tel Hai in Galilee, Bedouins brought their cattle to pasture
in the colony's fields, destroying the crops. They claimed to be in possession
of a document entitling them "to pasture anywhere." A fight ensued,
the police were called, and the usual order issued to both parties to cease
work in the colony "until the title to the land was established." At
Hedera, where the land had been in Jewish possession for forty-five years,
Bedouins came in, uprooted the crops, injured workers and killed a watchman. The
police ordered all cultivation to cease "until the Court decides the
dispute between the Jews and the Bedouins."
A typical case is
that of the Wadi Hawareth land. After paying liberal baksheesh to the tenants
and after reams of red tape had been unwound to secure title, the Jews were
unable to take possession: the land had already been ploughed by Arab squatters.
Similarly, at Haifa Bay, thirty-five hundred dunams legally bought
and paid for by the Jewish National Fund were given to Arabs, by decision of
the District Commissioner, after they had driven off the Jewish watchman and
taken the land by
265 CLOSE
SETTLEMENT ON THE LAND
armed force. At
Tulkarm, in a regular pestilence of squatter suits, the courts decided that
thirty-six hundred dunams of land had been "purchased illegally" and
directed that they be given, without compensation, to the squatters. While
ignorant Bedouins
were more than
willing participants in this hilarious game of plaguing Jews, what lay behind
their actions can be judged from the Kuskustabun case, where three Jewish
farmers were badly injured by armed Arab invaders. Here it was conclusively
proven that the Arabs "undertook to trespass and plough the land upon the
advice of District Officer Lees." 17
Not satisfied with
its previous measures in which Jewish ingenuity discovered more leaks than the
Government considered supportable, it announced in 1936 a brand new principle
in pro-Arab paternalism, this time swinging back to the Middle Ages for its
inspiration. The present purpose is to anchor the peasant in the land
irrespective of his will to change his status. In future "no land-owner
shall be permitted to sell any of his land unless he retains a minimum
subsistence area. As a safeguard against collusive sales this minimum area
shall be inalienable and shall revert to the Government if it ceases to be
cultivated by the owner-occupier" 18
Many other,
pettier schemes were originated by the British Government of Palestine in its
campaign of harassment. The Jews, urgently needing a source of cheap fertilizer
for their groves, had been buying it from Arabs whose every village was
literally built on an accumulation of century-old dung. Arabs are rarely known
to even remove this filth from the vicinity of their dwellings, much less use
it. In September 1937 the Administration published a Draft Animal Manure
Ordinance vesting the ownership of manure in the proprietor of the land on
which it is dropped. Any attempt to remove or sell it without official permission
henceforth becomes an offense punishable by fine of £2$ or six months'
imprisonment, or both.
Another edict
stipulates that the amount of damages which may be demanded from a seller who
breaks his contract, cannot be included in the contract itself, but must be
fixed by the court.
266 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
This 'Order in
Council' was intended as a staggering blow to Jewish land purchases, since the
only effective way of preventing Arab owners from changing their minds under
pressure was to include in the contract a provision for damages to be paid together with the return of the buyer's
deposit. Another decree released early in 1936 was "designed to protect
water supplies from interference by private individuals." Special
permission had now to be obtained from the District Commissioner before a well
could be constructed or enlarged. Jews might own the land, but the water
underneath it belonged to the Administration in Jerusalem. All water supplies, reads the Ordinance,
"river, spring, or underground," may anywhere be declared public property
at the discretion of the High Commissioner. Beyond serving to frustrate the
irrigation plans of the Jews, this revolutionary measure has no plausible purpose
nor has one ever been offered.
When other
artifices proved inadequate, the Government has followed a system of loans' to
Arab owners, in themselves often greater than the market value of the land.
Sometimes its money is passed over outright on the score of 'relief,' whether
owing to poor crops, damage caused by the elements, or the characteristic
laziness of Arab tillers. It frankly finances and operates Arab agricultural
cooperatives in competition with those of the Jew; and it maintains nurseries and
other agricultural services of which Arabs are the sole beneficiaries.
The unremitting
campaign of Arab leaders, clearly abetted from Government House, thundering
against the 'crime' of selling property to Jews will be discussed again in
Chapter I Book III. It may be remarked, however, that without the Zionist the
market for Palestine land does not exist. Acreage in this corner of creation is
worth next to nothing. In neighboring Syria it can hardly be given away. In Transjordan it is worth only a dollar or two a dunam.
Holding a monopoly on the soil, the Levantines are having a royal holiday.
"No one can doubt," says Broadhurst, "that the Arabs have
exploited the Jews for all they are worth, fattening their pockets in the process."
19 Despite the current campaign against land sales, Arab owners have been
keeping a canny eye fixed on the price barometer. As we shall see, the very
leaders of this
267 CLOSE
SETTLEMENT ON THE LAND
agitation have
proven themselves as anxious, privately, to circumvent the Government's
restrictions as the Jews. There is ample evidence, also, that Government
officials themselves have not been above surreptitious speculation, while at
the same time being a party to driving the prices up out of sight by radical
legislation.
That official
restrictions were designed to force Jews to pay through the nose for such land
as they were able to acquire is conclusively shown by official figures. Buying
in the open market for the purpose of "resettling landless Arabs,"
the Government paid £72,240 for 17,240 dunams, or an average of £4 per dunam.
In the same period the Jews purchased in the same market, 62,114 dunams for
which they paid £1,647,837, an average of £25 per dunam.
DOUBLE STANDARD OF
TAXATION
In vivid contrast
to this flood of radical legislation is Palestine's system of land taxation, beyond question
the most reactionary in existence. Until recently the obsolete Turkish system,
based on the economy of Mohammed's time, was retained intact by the Government
as being perfectly satisfactory in all respects.
There were two
basic taxes. One was the Werko, based on land valuations. The joker lay in the
fact that the last appraisement, by which the tax was set, had been made in the
nineties of the last century. New valuations were only made in cases of change
of ownership. This meant that the old owners were paying a tax based on pre-War
values, while the new owners were assessed on the basis of crazily inflated
post- War prices. Thus the new proprietor paid twenty to thirty times more for
each dunam in tax than the previous owner used to pay for the same land before
it was sold, and continued to pay for the adjoining acres still remaining in
his possession. "This unjust and abnormal position," complains the
Jewish Agency, on March 10, 1935, "expressed itself in the creation of
two classes of taxpayers paying different rates for similar property," of which
"the only sufferers were Jews." The relative difference in this levy
was often literally enormous. An illustration of the whole taxing scheme is
268 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
provided by the village of Shattah, which paid less than £4 in tax, while the
neighboring Jewish colony of Kfar Yehezkiel, owning half the area of land, paid
£55.
The other main
grouping was the Osher or tithe, amounting to 10% on all agricultural income.
This was usually canceled in the case of Arabs, sometimes by personal decision
of the High Commissioner himself, though District Commissioners were also authorized
to grant remission at their discretion. The extent of this practice can be seen
in the announced remission of seventy percent of the tithe due the Government
in 1932, amounting to £173,000. In 1933 the total remission of tithes to Arabs
was £193,500 out of an assessment of £1,245,000; and in 1934, £130,000 out of a
total tax of £245,000. In 1935 the High Commissioner reported that of a tithe
of £171,021, only £19,750 had been collected. The fellah's contribution to
Government revenues (tithe, land tax and all other agricultural taxes)
diminished annually, falling from 25% of the total in 1921-22 to 4.8% in
1934-35.
Though after
eighteen years of effort the Government was seemingly unable to complete the
survey for land registration purposes (which would have put an abrupt end to
the plague of squatter suits), it had not the slightest difficulty in finishing
the survey for taxation purposes within a year after deciding that a remodeled
system was in order. The new Rural Property Tax Ordinance was placed into
effect in 1935, substituting a single basis of levy for the multiple Turkish
tithe, house and land taxes.
Says the Royal
Commission of 1937, pointedly: "This effected 1 a large reduction, in some
cases up to seventy percent, in the taxes payable by the [Arab]
peasantry." 20
Though hailed as a
simplified system it was, on the face of it, an intricate maze. It involved
some sixteen brackets of taxation, varying from the highest to the lowest by
several thousand percent, the brackets themselves divided into innumerable
blocks in the various districts. Providentially, the highest tax brackets coincided
exactly with Jewish enterprises and holdings and the lowest with those of the
Arabs. As the lower grades of ground crop land pay only a nominal tax or no tax
at all, the holdings
269 CLOSE SETTLEMENT
ON THE LAND
of the fellaheen
are practically exempted from impost of any kind. This type of acreage,
coinciding with Arab agricultural undertakings, is divided into eight grades,
the highest of which pays twenty-five mils per dunam, while the sixth grade
drops to eight mils per dunam. The seventh and eighth grades pay no tax.
Irrigated land was
divided into nine grades, seemingly in accordance with the districts where Jews
may or may not be found, and was assessed accordingly. Fallow land, owned entirely
by great Arab landlords, pays no tax whatsoever, putting an actual premium on
land speculation and completely reversing every known process by which land
policy in other nations is guided. In any other country infant industry is
nursed along and protected. It is the pioneers who are relieved of taxes; and
in places like Italy and Spain, the Holy Land's chief competitors in citrus, growers are
directly subsidized. Under this latest arrangement it was the citrus industry,
on which the entire export trade of the country depended, which was placed in
the highest tax division, not even non-bearing groves being excepted. The tax
here vaulted to 825 mils per dunam, the highest rate of taxation on this type
of plantation in the world. 21 excluded specifically from this category, the
all-Arab citrus district of Acre 'pays' 410 mils per dunam. 22
Under the same
law, taxation on urban property is similarly gerrymandered. House property,
including valuation of the site, pays a tax of 12-1/2% of the net annual value.
Premises with an annual value up to 20, invariably Arab, are exempted from
levy. In industrial buildings the Ordinance says that "the tax shall be at
such a rate, not exceeding fifteen percent of the net annual value, as shall be
prescribed by the High Commissioner. The High Commissioner is empowered to
apply the Ordinance by order to specific areas" One may easily presume
that it is the Jewish sections alone which pay the fifteen percent, a circumstance
glaringly evident in the exemptions granted in a list of mixed cities, which on
examination turn out to affect only Arab blocks. Not even schools, clinics or
village councils are exempted from these crushing levies.
270 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
The theory behind
this entire performance is made unmistakably clear in the assessments charged
to the German colony of Sarona, thoroughly Nazi in sentiment since the coming
of Hitler. Almost surrounded by the continuously growing city of Tel Aviv, the fields of Sarona are now located in
one of the most highly priced urban developments in the world, with individual
holdings worth an average of £400,000 in cash. Yet the farmers of this colony
continue to pay a tax as negligible as if their lands were located in the
wilderness on the other side of Jordan.
There are still
other tax schemes directed without too much disguise at the Jewish pocketbook,
such as the Land Transfer Tax, Government Inspection Tax, and Animal Tax, all
of them cut from the same cloth as the land taxes and all brilliantly successful
in mulcting this stricken people who by international consent are returning to
their homeland.
CHAPTER VI
BRICKS WITHOUT
STRAW 1
SABOTAGING
INDUSTRY
Practically all
countries today take an eager if not anxious interest in the development of
their own prosperity. It is invariably the government which points the way to
methods for developing business, which seeks to attract capital and enterprise
and to enlarge its commerce in every way possible. As backward as the Turks
were made out to be in matters of government, they were happy enough to assist
new industry in their domains. Under the Industrial Act of December 1912, newly
established factories in Palestine received five dunams of State land free on
application, were granted exception from import duties until they were well
established, and were relieved of taxation for fifteen years.
The present
mandatory for Palestine, however, appears to do everything possible to halt the
development of business and to omit doing anything designed to help it. In view
of its peculiar obligations under the Mandate, it would appear that the Administration
should have favored the new settlers in every way, that it would nurse their
industries sympathetically during the early and critical period, and in general
lend its support by the usual means, favored taxation, protective tariffs,
loans and subsidies.
That the Palestine
Government is well able to understand this matter of elementary economy is
shown plainly enough in the concessions granted to the Iraq Petroleum Company in
an agreement signed January 14, 1931, to run for a period of seventy
years. This
convention between a private corporation and the Government of Palestine is one of the most remarkable ever penned,
and is worth quoting in extensor. It provides that neither Palestine nor Transjordan shall derive any revenue from the pipeline
passing through their territory. The Government agrees that
271 Pics
272 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
"no import
tax, transit tax, export tax, or other tax or fiscal charge of any sort shall
be levied on petroleum, naphtha, ozokerite or natural gases, whether in crude
state or any form or derivatives thereof, whether intended for consignment in
transit or utilized for the industrial operations of the undertaking." The
Company is given the far-reaching right to bring in, free of duty, all stores,
equipment, materials, etc., required for its undertakings, "including all
equipment for offices, houses or other buildings," directly or indirectly
required for the development of its business in Palestine.
Article VII of
this compact gives the concessionaire the privilege of constructing one or more
private ports in the region and of levying port, harbor or other taxes, as well
as authority to determine who shall have the right to entry at such a port ;
and the
Palestine railroads are placed at the Company's disposal at a special
schedule of rates. Article XVII entitles the Company to lease State lands at a
nominal rental. Lands privately owned are to be expropriated by the High
Commissioner for this purpose
if the Company
cannot come to agreement with the owners. The Company may bring in cheap labor
at its own discretion to compete with the higher-priced local labor. Finally,
this document frees the Company from any kind of land tax, income tax,
or any other toll
or liability. Thus this foreign corporation is presented with all the benefits
of a tax-supported community, and is at the same time released from any
possible levy or demand, in what is altogether the most amazing concession ever
granted by a modern State. On February 11, 1933 the Palestine Government handed this
concessionaire, free of charge, 2250 dunams of valuable land in the industrial Haifa Bay area to build a terminus for its oil line.
In return for all
this, the Company did not even allow casual favors to the local market, so that
a four-gallon tin of gasoline, which might sell for .40£ in Iraq, retails for £1.90 in Palestine. Neither does Palestinian trade derive any
benefit from the large
oil tankers which
sail from Haifa. Everything connected with the petroleum
trade, from the time of its boring, through its transportation down to the
tanker and retail
273 BRICKS WITHOUT
STRAW
marketing, is in
the hands of foreign trusts. 2
When it comes to
the Jews, for whose benefit the Mandate was supposed to have been framed,
another view is taken entirely. Their industries, instead of being welcomed,
are discouraged. Practically nothing is done to assist them. The Government's
attitude can hardly be described as being other than antagonistic. Tariffs and
duties are levied in topsy-turvy fashion, as they would be in a lunatic asylum
; and whatever caters to the needs of industry, such as mail service,
telegraphic system, railways, ports and roads, is maneuvered so as to place it
at a
disadvantage.
The Government has
a tariff on old shoes imported into the country ; but bases its customs policy
on the theory that tariffs lead to a high cost of living. It considers it
immoral to deprive its citizens of the benefits of low-cost merchandise dumped
in
from everywhere by
subsidized foreign trusts ; yet it does not hesitate to levy prohibitive import
duties on all raw materials required by its own industry.
The only authority
the Administration regards as competent to dictate the needs of business is the
Customs Department, headed by a pompous official who starts with the idea that
the local manufacturer must prove that he is producing a superior article at a
lower price than those dumped in the Palestine market by outside competitors, before he
can be regarded as anything but a public enemy. Such foreign trade statistics
as exist are not only badly jumbled but published long after they can do anyone
any good. Dryly, the President of the Tel Aviv-Jaffa Chamber of Commerce advised the Administration
that "the movement of trade is a matter of some importance to those who
are responsible for the conduct of the country's economic affairs, and it
should not be treated as a departmental secret reluctantly disclosed to
the public."
3
By what is at
least the strangest of coincidences, whenever a Palestine factory competes with English goods, even
for the home market, it is sure to find all protective tariffs taken away from it
and impossibly high duties leveled against the
274 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
bulk materials and
machinery necessary to turn its finished products out. These
cramping tactics
may even go the lengths of a carte blanche refusal to allow the contemplated
enterprise to operate on any terms.
An example of this
condition is contained in the several attempts to establish brewery enterprises
in the Holy Land. The first project was started by a man
named Delfiner, who intended to produce, besides beer, certain chemical
products out of the waste materials of alcohol production. A capital investment
of £80,000 was made, a location bought near Mikveh Israel, and machinery ordered. Innocently, the
founder of the factory applied for exemption from duty on the ferments and malt
required in beer-making until these materials could be produced locally. The
Government did not even bother about a response; and after eight months of
patient waiting, Mr. Delfiner, beginning to see the light, gave up his project
and took his loss.
In the meanwhile a
group of French capitalists, headed by a Mr. Dreyfuss, leased a portion of the
wine cellars in Rishon LeZion and started reconstruction for brewery purposes.
Turned wise by Delfiner's experience, before going into production they
applied to the
Government, asking that the existing excise tax on spirits of five mils per
liter and the customs duty of twenty mils per liter be not changed after the
setting up of their business. On receipt of this request the Administration
immediately did
the opposite. It
decided to raise the excise tax on spirits (which had not yet been begun to be
manufactured) to fifteen mils per liter and committed itself to an arrangement
admitting Syrian beer, on which not even an excise tax was levied, free of
duty. Reconstruction work was stopped and negotiations entered into with the
Government, which stated off the record that it considered this enterprise an
unwarranted attempt to compete with the import of English beer. So in March
1934 the Dreyfuss group, having had an object lesson in Near Eastern politics,
gave
up the ghost. 4
In every branch of
trade the same tactics are to be seen. A fair illustration of what takes place
is given in the iron wire in dustry, a business calling for a great outlay
275 BRICKS WITHOUT
STRAW
of capital. Here a
heavy tariff is slapped on raw material, which Palestine does not
produce, and no
duty whatsoever placed on the finished article.
Another example is
that of the aluminum industry. Imported raw aluminum was taxed at the rate of
three cents per pound; while the levy on finished aluminum goods was six cents.
When a factory was set up in Haifa, it was quickly discovered that the tariff
was insufficient to allow for competition even in the home market. The owner
asked for an increase to ten cents per pound. The Government took this request
under the usual advisement and promptly reduced the duty on finished aluminum
ware to
three cents a
pound.
An even more
graphic illustration is provided in the tax on automobiles. A newly
industrialized land is bound to develop a voracious appetite for cars and
trucks of all kinds. But the Jews made the mistake of showing a preference for
American cars, which they considered more suitable to the terrain than the
lighter English makes. 5 The Government then placed a per pound tax on incoming
motor vehicles of forty mils per kilogram. 6 This enormous impost would add to
the normal cost of
a small American
car the fantastic sum of $2700 for duty alone, with the same toll on old cars
as on new. In a desperate effort to circumvent this assessment, the Jews opened
up a car-assembling plant in Tel Aviv. Jerusalem at once retaliated by placing
a duty on bodies
and parts, twenty-five to fifty percent higher than that on complete vehicles.
The attitude of
the official Zionists to all this is incredible. It is reflected in Weizmann's
declaration that "one hears complaints of alleged injustices with regard
to protective tariffs. People do not want to realize that if a Jew from
Schnepeshok [a touch of humor] comes to Palestine and manufactures inferior buttons, the
British Government is not obliged to secure this button by a protective
tariff." 7 The manufacturers of Palestine, caught in a very real web of economic
peonage, were far from impressed with the philosophical ruminations of the
Zionist orators in Europe. There were not wanting individuals who
declared themselves boldly. One of them was the silk manufacturer, Sachs, who
found himself paying a prohibitive duty on ra
276 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
raw silk, with no
protection whatever against the dumping of Japan and other
countries. 8
Shortly before he was compelled to shut down his factory, Weizmann and the High
Commissioner Wauchope strolled through.
"How do you
like it here ? Masked Sir Arthur politely.
Sachs: "Very
much indeed — but I would like it better if we had a decent Government/'
Weizmann,
hurriedly: "Excuse him, Excellency — Mr. Sachs cannot ably express himself
in English."
"Pardon
me," replied Sachs, looking straight at Weizmann, "but I speak
English very well ! "
Part of the situation
this manufacturer referred to showed glaringly on the cost sheets. A meter of
Japanese cloth sells for 12-1/2 mils, while the labor alone costs 15 mils in Palestine and the raw material 20-25 mils. The
factory production cost of a simple
article like cotton
sports shirts came to a total of 150 mils in Palestine, while the corresponding Japanese article
was laid down in Haifa for 80 mils. In 1936 it cost a Palestine manufacturer 430 mils to make a pullover,
while the identical article brought in from Germany or Austria retailed for 320-350 mils.
Agricultural
products found their competition fully as severe. Syrian shipments are able to
consistently undersell locally grown vegetables in all Palestine cities. Practically the whole of Syria's exports in this line are concentrated on
the Holy Land. Syrian eggs retail in the Palestine market for eighteen cents a dozen, while Palestine eggs cannot be sold profitably for less
than thirty-six cents a dozen. In 1935 the local production of table fowl was
1,860,000. Imports for the same year came to 2,000,000, all free of duty. A
heavy impost, levied on practically all feed, made it a physical impossibility
to produce commercial poultry as cheaply as it could be shipped in from abroad.
Adding to the
miseries of business, the Government's immigration policy caused all industrial
plans to become a matter of hazard due to labor uncertainty. In all Jerusalem there are only a handful of qualified
electricians and carpenters. One has to
wait interminable
periods for even the simplest installations — yet
277 BRICKS WITHOUT
STRAW
the Authorities
refuse to grant visas to skilled workmen now refugees from Germany or starving in Rumania and Poland.
The transplanting
of a higher standard of life into the medieval setting of the Near East has invited still other troubles. In Egypt, woman and child labor is obtainable in
large quantities at two or three piasters a day, and in the Syrian factories
children are employed at almost no pay at all. It is obvious that either of two
simple factors can cut the heart out of an unprotected Palestine industry in a realistic world : the mass
production of States with strong industries and vast local markets, and the
extremely
low wage scales in
the surrounding agricultural countries of the Near East.
In such a
thoroughly destructive situation, industry can only hope to secure and hold
isolated and unique markets, and even these, as we shall see, are not safe from
attack. Though Palestine's industry has shown a striking development resulting from
the headlong rush of Jewish investment and enterprise, it has been able to
penetrate only a fraction of its home market and is in extreme jeopardy
everywhere else. What this condition adds up to in figures is seen in the
problem of Japanese dumping. In 1929 the Holy Land imported £7000 of Japanese goods. By 1935 this
figure had skyrocketed to £646,000, while during this same period Japanese
purchases from Palestine held at the ludicrous amount of £5.
Certain favored
groups are saved from a portion of this disabling condition by Governmental
exception. All of the various missionary institutions and enterprises are
exempted from tax or toll of any kind. Under this immunity the churchmen run
hotels, farms, manufacture wine on which no excise duty is levied, and engage
in other flourishing businesses under favorable conditions. Also relieved of
tax and imposts are "all members of His Majesty's forces" and all
officers of the Palestine Government. So is the great Iraqian-owned
trans-desert transport service between
the Holy Land and Iraq, which thus escapes the exorbitant levies
placed on motor vehicles, tires and gasoline. 0
Specific Arab
industries are also shown generous consideration. An eloquent token is the
exemption of the Arab soap industry of Nablus from the high tax on olive oil for
278 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
industrial
purposes; and the grotesquely contrasting customs protection given olives themselves.
Study of the agricultural products protected by Government impost discloses
them to be almost exclusively Arab. Such fellaheen crops as wheat, barley and
seminola are safe-guarded by high duties and a rigid regulation of imports
under a system of licenses.
On scattered
occasions Jewish industry participates unavoidably in these advantages. One
such instance concerns the shoe industry. After dumping practices almost
succeeded in wiping this business out of existence, the Arabs made such a howl
that
the Government was
moved to remedy the situation in 1932 by protective duty. The net result shows
in sharp relief the viciousness of the open door system: there was an immediate
decrease in imports, dropping in two years from £80,000 to £40,000,
and an equalizing
increase in the sale of local manufactures.
The Jews have also
been the beneficiaries of other favors not meant for them. The result of
glutting the Palestine market with foreign goods inadvertently gave Japan and Germany a toe-hold from which they were invading
the entire Near and Middle
East, ousting Britain from her favored position. In printed cotton
goods, one of Britain's pet specialties, Japan took first place as leading exporter to Palestine, more than doubling English sales in the
same market. In 1936 London was shocked to discover that Germany had jumped to first place as seller to the
Palestine market, with English goods losing position
steadily. 10
This dangerous
piece of backfire shocked the Bureaucrats into action. As a result, quickly
imposed tariffs have bettered the situation considerably and a number of closed
Jewish factories have been able to reopen.
It is an error,
however, to assume that Whitehall has suddenly suffered from an attack of
conscience. This was poignantly demonstrated during the recent Tozareth Haaretz
(favoring home products) campaign. In this 'Buy Palestine' movement, the Jews
literally put on a volunteer tariff of their own, deliberately buying home-manufactured
goods though they had to pay a large premium for the privilege. This
279 BRICKS WITHOUT
STRAW
enthusiastically supported
crusade was a considerable factor in enabling Jewish industry to survive, and
bespeaks the almost unique patriotism of Palestine Jewry. Its effectiveness was evidenced
during the three months' campaign early in 1937, when Jewish leaders estimated
it was worth £4,000,000 in increased sales of local products. Out of this
campaign grew a typical frenzy of official harassment. Jewish stores
advertising the sale of 'Palestine Goods Only' were visited by Government
agents seeking an excuse to make arrests. At the same time, street peddlers
selling 'Only
Palestine
Products' were hustled off to police stations to explain why they preferred to
limit their wares to those made in their own land.
BANKING AND
CURRENCY
Due to all the
disabling uncertainties, the credit situation in Palestine is a severe one. It is further complicated
by an archaic credit system which the Authorities refuse to alter. So the financing
of industry lapses into an impossible stalemate; with the banks on one side, so
full of money that they are loath to take on new accounts, and on the other, an
aggregation of puzzled industrialists who are wondering from day to day what
the Government is going to do next. Finance in Palestine has consequently
developed into
something like a roulette game, with all bets called when the wheel stops.
Apart from trivial
quotas, the banks grant no real long-term credits. No security market is in
existence, a particular blow to moderate-sized new undertakings. These are, in
general, precariously financed, the limited capital of the owner being eaten
up early by
bloated land prices and building costs. The Near Eastern expert, Dr. Alfred
Michaelis, states that consequently "numerous moderate and small-sized
factories are in danger of closing down for financial reasons." 11
The legal interest
rate is 9%, but this is vastly exceeded in practice; while the banks pay 1-1/2%
interest on deposits. Despite the favorable circumstances provided in Palestine's swift growth, the hostile attitude of
the Government makes industrial and
280 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
agricultural
mortgages most difficult to obtain, even at the gouging interest rates
prevailing. The establishment of adequate mortgage banks is hampered by the
Administration's land legislation and attitude generally, frightening off
interested financial institutions in London and New York. The Arabs fare a little better. Looking
out for its self -selected wards, the Administration has established an
agricultural bank out of the public funds with a capital of X 400,000. It
grants Arab farmers long-term credits at nominal interest rates. The Jews,
however, must contend with the existing credit situation as best they can.
The Palestine pound is based on the British pound
sterling. The setting of its money values at this artificially high level
automatically exposes Palestine to the paralyzing competition of surrounding nations whose
devaluated and blocked currencies give
them an
immeasurable advantage in all markets.
Due again to the
Administration's own strictures, the banks of Palestine are mainly branches of foreign
institutions, with no particular interest in the welfare of the country.
Barclay's Bank, an offshoot of the institution in London, has offices in Jerusalem and six other towns and is banker to the
Palestine Government.
The Ottoman Bank
(Anglo-French) has five branches, and the Italian Banco di Roma, four. In Tel
Aviv is found the Polska Kasa Oszczednosci (Polish). There are a few local
Jewish institutions but, with little exception, they are of trivial importance.
This circumstance
is all the more remarkable since the great bulk of the money on deposit everywhere
belongs to Jews. The savings of the Arab fellaheen are usually kept in jars and
similar hiding places.
It is apparent
here, too, that the British are determined to hang a millstone around the neck
of Palestine industry, and that if equivocation and
quibbling will not accomplish this purpose they are prepared to strike directly
at the heart of the country's financial structure. This is conveyed in the
draft ordinance of April 1936, deleting from the law the provision requiring
banks to publish annual balance sheets. Thus not only was industry deprived of
any adequate insight into the country's financial situation, but it was placed
hopelessly at the mercy of foreign wire pulling. This was made
281 BRICKS WITHOUT
STRAW
uncomfortably
clear during the unsettled condition which followed after Italy's invasion of Ethiopia, when apprehensive withdrawals threatened
the collapse of Palestine's whole economic structure.
In February 1936
the Government published notice of impending legislation which speaks volumes.
This regulation proposes that "no company or cooperative society shall
carry on a banking business without obtaining from the High Commissioner
a license to do
so, and the High Commissioner may grant, refuse, or revoke such license without
explanation."
CITRUS
Pride of the Yishuv
is the Jaffa orange, reputedly the finest in the world.
An incident occurring in Paris a few years ago spoke more for the quality of this fruit
than a mountain of figures. A fruit vendor had made a charge of two francs for
a single orange, which the writer considered outrageous. After having been so
informed, the vendor shrugged his shoulders and said testily: "Mais,
ATsieu — c'est un Jaffa /"
Before the advent
of the Zionists, oranges were scarcely a factor in the Palestine economy and grapefruit were unknown. By
193 1 the Holy Land was producing five percent of the oranges
for sale on world markets, jumping in 1938 to the unbelievable
proportion of
eighteen percent. Nowhere else in the world is scientific farming brought to
such a high
point
in perfection. In some of the larger groves complete filing systems are used in
which the case history of every tree is charted with all the thoroughness of a
medical clinic.
Citrus is the
heart of Jewish agricultural enterprise and the keystone to the National Home's
prosperity. In 1934 it represented eighty-three percent of all Palestinian
exports. Unlike competitor countries, where a healthy home consumption provides
a secure back-log for this industry, Palestine with its small population has only a
negligible internal market. A falling off in foreign sales would necessarily
place its citrus growers in the most precarious of situations, serious enough
to snap the back-
282 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
bone of the
country's commerce. Here is an imperative which would automatically dictate the
commercial policy of any other government. But in Palestine, declares S. Tolkowsky, General Manager of
the Jaffa Citrus Exchange, this key industry remains
like a fatherless
child, whom everybody is free to kick and exploit and whom nobody will
protect." 12
In the Old World, oranges come within the luxury category.
The arc of production is, moreover, rapidly climbing everywhere, making
competition for existing markets very difficult. The acuteness of this phase is
amply demonstrated in Palestine production alone. In 1936 it was some eight million cases,
whereas in 1940, when the young groves-come into full bearing, it is estimated
that total shipments will reach twenty-two million cases. What this situation
will result in can be discovered from the overwhelming hardships already crucifying
the industry. Impassable trade restrictions are robbing it of existing foreign
markets. Exorbitant taxes make the planters' lives a nightmare. In general, the
obstructive tactics of the Mandatory are shooting them head-first into
catastrophe.
At Jaffa, where the industry is situated, there is
neither a port nor sufficient storage space. At Haifa, the transit sheds, under the control of
the Government, are pathetically inadequate and become more congested each
season as the new orchards begin to bear. The single railroad between the
orange section and Haifa is a Government monopoly. It is short of cars and locomotives, and
during the turbulent rains which fall at the height of the picking season it
often does not run at all. Following nerve-wracking delays, shippers are
compelled to load their fruit in open
wagons ordinarily
used for the transport of manure. Since the orange is highly perishable, many
thousands of boxes are lost annually at the railway stations. Fruit is
inspected outside rather than within the dock warehouses, adding to the
spoilage, in a
scene of
indescribable congestion and confusion. Galling delays frustrate every step in
the attempt to export. The net result is that full shiploads often reach their
markets with as much as fifty percent of waste fruit.
The alternative
possibility of truck hauling did not exist until recently. Over the sixty
283 BRICKS WITHOUT
STRAW
miles of sand dune
between Haifa and Tel Aviv-Jaffa, the most important commercial centers in
the country, the Administration had obstinately refused to construct a road. It
was only when the present war-beclouded horizon made the building of this
artery an inevitable military necessity, that it was undertaken.
In practically all
European countries, quotas, currency restrictions, or prohibitive duties make
the situation more precarious with every passing year. The principal competitor
nations, Spain and Italy, overcome this hazard by favorable
commercial
treaties and
clearing agreements negotiated with the countries in which they market their
fruit. Such intercession as the Palestine Government attempts is almost inevitably
in the nature of cavalier interference. One single rule costing the growers
over a million boxes of fruit was the order excluding oranges from export which
count more than
one hundred to the box. The Administration refuses to introduce any uniform
inspection system and calmly ignores the demands of distracted Jewish growers
for compulsory spraying and smoking of disease-ridden groves — practically all
of them Arab. The desperate Jewish growers have had to establish their own
inspection service on roads leading to the Colonies to keep their trees from
being ravaged by the black scale and other destructive pests.
Over the objection
of the Arabs, also, Jews are making a strenuous effort to create a voluntary,
all-inclusive citrus exchange for the maintenance of high standards of sizing,
packing and shipping. They hope to win the better prices fetched by well-
selected,
well-advertised and well-marketed fruit. The Government, however, seems to
regard this effort as an extravagant irritation of Arabs who wish to keep to
their old ways.
In the matter of
trade agreements the Administration lays exaggerated stress on formal
difficulties, which it pretends cannot be overcome. Yet Great Britain itself levies so heavily on Palestine citrus that the tariff represents as much
as half of the actual cost of production. The only value this high duty could
have is to protect a British island in the West Indies, whose sole export amounts to twenty
thousand cases. The desperate Palestine growers offered to buy this whole crop at
284 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
attractive prices
in exchange for relief — but their offer met with no response.
A reasonable
reading of this mystery is offered in the deliberate British effort to develop Cyprus, where Jews are now practically excluded,
into a direct competitor to Palestine. The Jaffa orange has made such a great European
reputation that the market it has established becomes a most desirable plum for
anyone who can steal it. The bureaucrats have set themselves to take over this
lucrative industry if they can. Cyprus oranges have been exempted from customs
duty in the Empire. Land is cheap, labor is cheap, and the Palestine competitor is being frozen in his tracks
by tariff walls. The Island
is now being systematically advanced as "a place of settlement for retired
Colonial officials of all ranks" and other Britons looking for a good
thing. In the official British press it is provocatively described as
"practically undeveloped." 13
That the tragic
troubles besetting the citrus growers cannot be credited to merely
lackadaisical administration is shown by a host of other circumstances. An
illuminating example concerns the boxes in which the fruit is packed, which the
growers had been buying in Poland and Rumania. When these countries placed severe import
tolls on Palestine fruit, to favor Italian and Spanish
oranges, the Palestinian growers retaliated by setting up machinery to make
their own boxes. This was the signal for the Government of Palestine to act. It promptly plastered a high
tariff on
box-wood, so that they could not be produced locally except at prohibitive
cost.
The result of this
official persecution is not slow in showing itself. Jewish groves, established
at extravagant prices, bearing the entire cost of advertising and marketing Palestine fruit, and harassed from every source, are
losing their hard-won position,
even in Palestine. Isaac Rokeach, President of the Jaffa
Citrus Exchange, estimates that at least one-third of the Jewish citrus growers
have been unable to meet the interest on their debts for the last two years. 14
In his 1935
Report, the High Commissioner candidly calls attention to this end result of
his policies, saying; "A decrease of investment in citrus plantations was
also
285 BRICKS WITHOUT
STRAW
observed owing to
decline in profits and fear of over-production. Arab farmers, how-
ever, with little
or nothing to pay for their land and their larger margin between receipts and
costs, have placed large additional areas under citrus" 15 The simple
figures tell the rest. Citrus, once a Jewish monopoly in Palestine, is gradually passing into Arab hands. The
Arab area increased during 1935 by 20,000 dunams — the Jewish area, by 10,000.
ECONOMIC INSANITY
Practically all
countries today maintain a strict control over their exchange transactions, and
also supervise the search for new markets. Their rulers are prepared to bargain
for each minute advantage at the drop of a hat. This is accomplished by a
direct manipulation of currency, noteworthy in the case of Germany, and special agreements of various kinds,
most common of which is the 'favored nation' type. Under this arrangement a
mutual exchange of purchase value is arrived at, cemented by tariff discriminations
in favor of the preferred party.
Without exception,
industrial nations follow the rule of buying only where they can sell, and view
with serious misgivings even the slightest upset of their trade balance. The United States, after studying the bewildering list of
marks introduced by Dr.
Schacht, each with
a different value and all manipulated to Germany's trade advantage, came to the conclusion
in July of 1936 that they constituted discriminatory trade practice and
promptly placed a retaliatory duty on German goods.
On June
10, 1937, Commons
listened to Lieutenant-Colonel Amery, former First Lord of the Admiralty,
threaten a sharp increase in duty against American products. "It is
impossible," he said, "to get back to the gold standard as long as
that great
creditor nation
still is forcing us to take an excess of imports." Echoed by the whole
British Cabinet, Foreign Minister Eden stated that an agreement with the United States "for the reduction of customs duties
on a most-favored-nation basis," was one of the main objects of His
Majesty's Government. 16 The Colonial Office, too, is not oblivious to these
rudiments of economic good sense. In a recent report it expresses
286 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
glowing
gratification because Cyprus was able to show a small favorable balance
for the three months ending June 30, 1936, with imports of £305,087 against exports
of £305,351.
Alone in the
world, Palestine's trade policy is characterized by an
entirely negative attitude. There the Government considers that the Mandate
rules out the possibility of trade agreements, quotas and compensations, though
these are regarded by other
countries as the
sole means of establishing satisfactory trade relations. Though it seems to
levy tariffs and imposts as it pleases under the less imposing name of 'taxes,'
the Government officially takes refuge in the position that its
"obligations under the Mandate" prevent it from 'discriminating'
against countries belonging to the League, from whom the Administration of
Palestine theoretically derives its authority.
It is obvious that
Germany and Japan, two of the worst offenders in the dumping
process, are hardly entitled, even under this interpretation, to continued
privileges. Officially they have retired from the League and all its
obligations. In Syria, under similar mandate, the French slapped
a prompt surtax on German goods, and forced both Germany and Japan to conclude favorable trade agreements
which included adequate guarantees of payment in Syrian currency.
Palestine is one of the few countries restrained from taking counter
measures when a foreign government leaves the gold standard and spills its
depreciated wares on the market, or even directly subsidizes some of its
exports. Latvian butter shippers, for example, receive such generous
grants-in-aid from their Government that they are able to sell their product
cheaper in Jaffa than it can be produced on neighboring farms. The Holy Land is literally flooded with goods from a
large number of countries, sold at a price with which no industry depending
entirely on its own resources can hope to compete. Much of this dumping is
accomplished through organized cartels which are able to maintain their home
prices at such a high level that they can accept payments on export goods
barely sufficient to cover the cost of
materials and
transport. Recent years have witnessed a vast in crease in the dumping
287 BRICKS WITHOUT
STRAW
of goods by highly
organized countries, effected through export premiums, subsidies to industry,
etc., by which the State endeavors to balance its payments without reference to
the home cost. In the case of Egyptian sugar, prices in Cairo and Alexandria are exactly double those prevailing in Palestine where competition has to be met from Czechoslovakia and other beet-sugar producers.
All nations,
without exception, enjoy preferential treatment in regard to Palestine, turning it out, a little ewe lamb, to
pasture among the wolves. 17 The Holy Land has consequently fallen heir to a dangerous condition where it
buys infinitely more abroad than it sells. The result of this policy showed in
1935 when Palestine had the staggering trade deficit of
£13,800,000, representing the difference between imports of £18,000,000 and
exports of only £4,200,000, a fatal disproportion which has risen yearly. In
1936 the situation became still more serious. Imports for the first quarter
show a reduction of 14.2% over the corresponding period for 1935, while exports
for the same period declined by 18.5%. Not only is the present deficit the
largest in the world, reckoned per head of population, but it was created at
the very time when every country was making the most strenuous efforts to
balance up its trade accounts either by diminishing imports or increasing exports.
Under some
circumstances these huge arrears might not be cause for overwhelming anxiety.
It could be argued that in the development of a young and progressive country
the import of large quantities of production equipment is a vital necessity,
which must be
considered as a capital investment rather than an expenditure. It is
undoubtedly significant that the largest single import in 1935 was industrial
machinery, valued at £992,000 as compared with £967,000 in 1934 and £467,000 in
1933. Other items of producers' materials showed similar pleasant increases.
Despite this optimistic circumstance, the facts as we have seen them are not
conducive to so liberal an interpretation. State policies which allow for a
constriction of foreign markets, and make possible a condition where a locally
manufactured blouse costing 270 mils to make, has to compete with an identical
blouse imported from Austria which retails for 250 mils, hardly make an
assumption of this sort acceptable.
288 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
A picture of what
is occurring can be gained from the increase in egg imports from 11,000,000
eggs in 1929, to 76,000,000 eggs in 1935, a frightening clue into real condition,
when it is considered that Palestine is still in the main an agricultural
country. The import value of food, drink and tobacco alone in 1935 was
£3,646,877, while manufactured articles were £10,789,934. These are certainly
forbidding enough figures, fully justifying Jabotinsky's dour warning that
"the Jews are not settlers in Palestine—they are just tourists!"
Certainly nothing
but ruin can come to the infant industry of this small land by turning it into
a stronghold of free trade while all the countries, including Great Britain itself, operate on the principle of
commercial treaties, mutual preferences and protective tariffs. It seems
obvious that the boasted 'prosperity' of the National Home is a delusion, since
it depends upon the continued import of funds, and not on the sound mechanics
which trial and error have proven to be the only operative media anywhere. To
become economically independent, the National Home must find a way to produce
within its borders, goods and services with which to pay for the supplies it is
compelled to buy from the outside world. Otherwise the difference between
imports and exports must be charged off out of capital; which meant that the
country had to pay out more than twice as much in 1935 alone than was brought
in by all the immigrants of 1936 put together.
The actual fact is
that the four hundred thousand Jews in Palestine find themselves in a grim economic battle
with the world, unprotected and prevented from protecting themselves. Since the
Zionist enterprise in Palestine represents a plunging investment on the part of scattered Israel, desperately attempting to salvage its
remaining resources, Zionist Jewry, despite mutual self-delusions, must be
living largely on its dwindling capital. Such, indeed, must inevitably prove to
be the case. If no other factor than the customs system operated, Jewish industrial
position would still remain dangerous and unhealthy, its catastrophic ferments
sure to expose themselves the instant the river of money
289 BRICKS WITHOUT
STRAW
pouring into this
tiny area abated. That Jewish ingenuity has succeeded in partly circumventing
these determined disabilities is of little real importance, as it can be
assumed that new restrictions will constantly be invented to take the place of
those which have proven ineffective.
In the matter of
currency alone, imports from such countries as Germany, Rumania and Poland have to be paid for in full, whereas when
these States purchase from Palestine, the sums owing are placed in blocked
accounts, or goods which have to
be taken in lieu
of money; and it is a long time, if ever, before the exporter collects on his
debt. Such a condition would be laughable in any other country, which would
insist at once on being paid in local currency under pain of excluding the
offending States from its markets.
All these signs of
economic insanity are the more remarkable since the mere existence of a great
excess of imports over exports should place the National Home in an ideal
bargaining position. The very weakness of her trade position would provide a
club with which to secure important concessions from foreign nations the
instant a quota system was set up. Under an interested Government, Palestine's trade would become a fat prize for which
all commercial nations would angle. It is almost four times that of Egypt, six times that of Syria and five and a half times that of Iraq.
Turkey, one of the prime offenders, sold Palestine in 1935 a total of £338,807 and bought in
return, £6646. Governed under a system of strict State control over foreign
trade, the Turks put a virtual embargo on Palestine products. They ended by banning all Palestine citrus in 1936. 18
Rumania, another typical illustration, sold
Palestine X x ' 208,204 in 1935 and bought from her during that time a total of
£30,000. Despite this enormous advantage, Bucharest insisted that sixty percent of the oranges
it buys from the Holy
Land had to be
shipped in Rumanian boats. To obtain the present import licenses for two
hundred thousand cases of fruit, Palestine exporters had to purchase from Rumania fifteen orange cases for every box of
fruit sold. The same method of box-wood against citrus
290 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
fruit was forced
on Palestine by Russia, whose balance of trade with the Jewish
National Home is twenty-three to one in Russia's favor. In this policy these countries aped
a similar one announced in Poland. Taking full advantage of the defenseless
position of Palestine, Warsaw uses it as dumping grounds for cheap Polish goods, selling the Holy Land £400,000 annually, and buying £40,000 in
return.
Another of this
unending list of examples is Hungary which sells the Holy Land in the neighborhood of £ 1 20,000 every
year, and buys about £ 1000 worth of its goods in return. Like many of her
neighbors, Hungary has a complete embargo on Palestinian
fruit, out of deference to trade agreements with other orange-growing nations.
Even in such countries as France and Belgium, the sale of Palestine fruit is dropping consistently due to the
presence of new trade agreements by these countries with other orange
producers. Palestine is mulcted from every direction. In order to sell Germany, last season, 216,000 cases of fruit worth
less than £100,000, she had to buy German goods of specified classes to an
equal value, notwithstanding an adverse trade balance of £2,000,000.
Whatever specious
legality the Administration might take refuge in to justify its present course,
Article XVIII of the Mandate specifically empowers it to conclude special
agreements "with any State the territory of which in 1914 was wholly included
in Asiatic Turkey or Arabia."
One of these States is Iraq, which in 1935 exported to Palestine £237,000, and managed by discriminatory
duties to hold imports from that country to £10,000. The ratio of Iraq's sales to, and purchases from, Palestine is now about thirty-one to one. Another is
Syria whose cheap labor and abundant irrigation
facilities offers a destructive competition to the fruit and vegetable growers
of the Holy Land. Syria sold Palestine during 1935, £1,310,363 and bought only
£302,988 in exchange. The exports of Palestine to all the countries of the Near East amount to only seventeen percent of its
imports from these same States, showing a deficit of £2,290,000 in 1935. This
may be compared with the
291 BRICKS WITHOUT
STRAW
Iraqian balance of
trade for the same Near Eastern countries including Palestine,
coming to 890,000
dinars in imports against exports of 1,113,000 dinars. In the identical sphere
of Near Eastern trade, Syria shows imports of 5,763,493 Syrian pounds
against exports of 7,121,693 Syrian pounds.
Under the stimulus
of an interested Government, Syria has started an impressive industrial
development of her own. Industrial exports, which a few years ago were far
smaller than those of Palestine, now exceed Palestine's by sixty percent. Even more astounding
is the fact that most of these are being concentrated on the Holy Land. Syrian industrial export to Palestine for 1935 added to ,£520,000, as against an
industrial export by Palestine to Syria of £ 1 10,000. In the trade relations
between
Egypt and Syria we find a wholly different condition.
After a brief tariff war in 1934, a mutual trade agreement was reached between
the two countries leveling off the disproportion under which Syria had suffered, to the point where Syrian
and Egyptian
exports
practically balanced each other.
As if playing a
practical joke, the sole trade arrangement approved by the Administration was
made with Germany in 1933 during the world Jewish boycott of
that country. Here Palestine agreed to take double the amount of German goods for the
value of all oranges shipped to the Reich. Zionist politicians with their hands
out, had set the example in August 1933, by an arrangement for the transfer of
German-Jewish capital in the form of German merchandise, thus flooding the
whole Near East with German goods. This scheme, which seemingly had the full
blessing of the Palestine authorities, resulted in a tremendous fillip to German trade.
German exports leaped from £780,000 in 1932 to £2,035,000 in 1936. How the
trade wind blew as a result of this policy is illustrated in the drop of Palestine's sales to Germany from ,£600,669 in 1934 to ,£131,000 in
1936.
The whole sum and
substance of the Government's attitude can be seen in its failure to provide
for a Palestine trade secretary in any of the British
Consulate-General's offices — even those in neighboring countries. Such
arrangements as are made in the
292 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
name of Palestine are literally fantastic. One is the treaty
granting free zones to Iraq and Iran in Haifa port. Iraq, despite its anti-Jewish attitude, is
given complete facilities for landing, ware-housing and transshipment of goods
and the Zone is placed under the absolute control of Iraq customs officials. Under this curious
'commercial agreement' Iraq also receives concessions "in respect
of local taxation," and is allowed duty reductions in favor of her produce
averaging from fifty percent to eighty percent. In return for all this, Palestine receives privileges which add up to
a collective zero.
19 The result of this 'agreement' has merely been to aggravate Haifa's already serious problem of congestion.
The effect of this
stultifying process was recently described by Dr. F. Rottenstreich, Palestine member of the Zionist Executive. 20 In 1937,
he disclosed, Jewish workers in Palestine industry had decreased by twenty-eight
percent from the previous year.
He flatly accused
the Government of boycotting Palestinian products, asserting that it even went
abroad for goods not manufactured in Great Britain rather than patronize local manufacture.
Something of the same condition was described by the Palestine Arab Congress
back in 1925, which sarcastically mentions a special Stores Department existing
only to buy from Europe such articles as "a thermometer, for
instance, at PT10, when similar thermometers of the same sort, manufacture and
patent, are sold in Jerusalem pharmacies at PT3." 21
While everything
connected with Jewish interests is being booted around like a football, the
usual solicitousness for Arabs continues. This is shown handsomely in the case
of the Arab specialty of wheat growing. When a high tariff proved ineffectual,
the flour trade was placed under a system of rigid licenses, with Jews allowed
an annual import of only ten thousand tons though the Tel Aviv demand alone was
estimated at seventeen thousand tons. Finally the High Commissioner stopped the
imports of wheat altogether during May, June and July of 1935.
This policy was
continued to the actual point of an acute flour shortage, notwithstanding the
fact that it represented a 'discrimination* against members of the League of Nations anxious to dump their excess produce into
the Holy Land. 22
293 BRICKS WITHOUT
STRAW
'HEADS, I WIN —
TAILS, YOU LOSE'
Though Palestine is under the direct control of the British
Colonial Office, London takes the stand that to grant it Imperial preference would be in
some obscure fashion immoral. Palestinian exports to Britain are hence taxed for all the tariff will
bear.
It is significant
that Imperial preference has been accorded all other mandated territories
assigned to Great Britain, without too much fuss being made about
it. In the cases of Togo, Cameroon and Tanganyika, it was decreed by Order in Council, October
13, 1928, that
these areas should be considered part of the British Empire for tariff purposes under Article VIII of
the Finance Act of 1 91 9. International precedent is also offered in the preferential
tariff granted by France to the protectorate of Tunis. The United States did the same for the benefit of Hawaii before its annexation; and in 1903 allowed
Cuba a customs reduction of twenty percent on
the basis of "moral obligations existing."
All authorities on
international law agree that the Covenant and the Mandate were devised for the
protection of the mandated areas, and not for the benefit of foreign powers.
Even the open door, in principle, is primarily intended to prevent the exploitation
of these territories. That economic isolation was certainly not meant by the Powers
is proven in the Mandates Commission's demand that Mandatory rulers and all
other States "which have concluded special treaties or conventions with
the Mandatory Powers . . . extend the benefits of such treaties or conventions
to the Mandated territories." 23
Britain does just the reverse. In no case where
she has commercial treaties embodying the most-favored-nation clause has she
bothered to arrange that the benefits be extended to Palestine. At the same time, the National Home is
bound by all the obligations of existing trade agreements between England and other countries. When a speaker in
Commons demanded that duties be imposed on German and Japanese imports into Palestine, the Colonial Secretary replied that
"this was impossible as long as Palestine remained a party to the Empire commercial
treaties with Germany and Japan." 24 Despite this contention, the
British Government has not applied the
294 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
Anglo-German
payments agreement, in which Palestine is legally included, to the balance of
payments between Germany and Palestine.
The shrewd
hypocrisy of London's position is emphasized by the voluntary action of Stockholm, which removed all import duties on Holy Land grapefruit to "promote trade
relations between Palestine and Sweden." 25 In the same friendly gesture,
the Dominion of Canada allows free entry to Palestine citrus during the principal season of
export from December to May of each year. Yet Britain itself doggedly maintains prohibitive
tolls on everything that comes from the Holy Land.
At the same time London insists on being credited with the amount
of Palestine imports in its trade deals with the
various countries, as in the Commercial Agreement signed with Poland on February 27, 1930. In the Anglo-Lithuanian Treaty, signed
to maintain a
balance of trade between the two countries, the same business was repeated.
Here, too, the British claimed credit for all Lithuanian goods sold in the Holy Land. 26
ON AIR AND SEA
The irresistible
force which drew the city-bound Jew to the hard, challenging soil, also beckons
him to the sea. Zionist thinkers saw in advance what the Asiatic hinterland is
rapidly discovering — that the sea borders of Palestine form the gateway to international traffic.
Strategically located at the sea cross-roads of three continents, the land of Israel must inevitably become a prosperous
maritime country.
The Nationalist
leader Jabotinsky was among the first to grasp the full significance of this
situation. There has long been a Revisionist marine school at Civitavecchia, Italy, where ship-building, fishery and
navigation are taught to eager students from the recesses of European ghettos.
The Palestine Histadruth has its own society called Nachshon, Ltd., and in Haifa there is a non-partisan group, the rapidly
developing Zevulun Society, 27 where enthusiastic youths acquire nautical
training and a love for
the sea.
295 BRICKS WITHOUT
STRAW
In 1934, goods to
the value of £17,000,000 were transported to and from Palestine by water, and nearly three hundred thousand
travelers came or left. Jews alone spend for shipping an estimated £3,500,000
each year. Yet for all the revenue Palestine derives from its own fishing and shipping
industries, it might just as well be tucked away in the middle of Africa.
Several Jewish
companies have made determined efforts to capture a part of this sea traffic
for the Jewish people. When the first Hebrew steamer, the Atid, made its maiden
voyage in 1933, manned by a Hebrew-speaking crew, observers commented wonderingly
that "there was an air of unreality about this venture." Today there
are three Jewish shipping corporations in Palestine, with half a score of vessels plying
between the ports of the Mediterranean. For the most part these craft are of low tonnage but the new Jew
looks at them with pride.
The difficulties
faced by Jewish shipping are far greater than those usually connected with an attempt
to establish a new merchant marine. It must compete unaided against the
subsidized shipping industries of other nations. More, it suffers from the
actual animus of its own home government. It does not even get preference in
port clearance and wharf facilities. It is handicapped by its inability to get
itself included in the pacts between shipping companies, so that a balanced
payload of merchandise could be arranged for its vessels between their various
ports of call. Since the amount of shipping originating in Palestine is considerable, a simple expression of
interest by the Palestine Government to foreign lines which touch at its ports
would easily bring about this desirable result. Far from betraying such an
interest in the country's merchant marine, the Authorities actually prompted Egypt to forbid entry into her waters of Palestine steam vessels (specified so as not to
interfere with Arab sailing skiffs) of less than one thousand tons. This, of
course, hit the Jews alone. Similar difficulties were encountered in British-owned
Cyprus ; and Syria, too, was prevailed on to take discriminatory
action against the struggling Hebrew companies.
The Administration
has declared Sundays and Christian holidays the only days of rest in Palestine ports. On those days customs is closed and
the work carried on at port
296 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
extremely limited.
Employees engaged in it must be paid 'overtime.' The Jewish
Sabbath and
holidays are not recognized. This obviously places Jewish shipping under costly
duress, causing it to lose patronage and cargoes.
In 1936 the
largest of the Jewish steamers, the S.S. Tel Aviv, finally had to throw up the
sponge due to State-subsidized competition of foreign companies, and the ship
was sold to a corporation in Japan.
A growing number
of Jewish vessels are engaged in deep-sea fishing, though local fisheries are
discouraged by special legislation prohibiting trawling, and by the granting of
"exclusive licenses to fish." The High Commissioner dictates the
industry
personally, with
powers to issue licenses as he sees fit. It is note-worthy that foreign
fishermen are subject to none of these disabilities when operating in Palestine waters.
No appropriation
exists for the fisheries service, even though Palestine imports a great amount of seafood every
year. Iraq finds it profitable to transport large
quantities of fish all the way across the scorching desert route. This export
of fish from the Tigris to the markets of Palestine's coastal towns is as ironical as bringing
the proverbial coal to Newcastle. Practically the only experimentation has been that done by
private Jewish enterprise. Dr. Sklover, former official in the Fisheries
Department of the German Government has proven, for instance, that the yearly
cycle of sardines
takes them all the way from South Palestine to the Syrian coast. Were the Government's attitude not a factor,
a great export of sardines, packed in native olive oil, could easily
materialize.
This
uncompromising indifference to the fate of its entire maritime industry on the
part of a Government, is, to say the least, unique. Not even in the section of
the coast around Jaffa Harbor is there an official sea-chart. Apathy
extends in every possible direction. The ports themselves are pathetically inadequate
to care for the enormous growth of shipping. Facilities are so badly jammed
that shippers who can possibly avoid Palestine, do so. For years the Jaffa customs area has been so badly
297 BRICKS WITHOUT
STRAW
overcrowded that
arriving steamers often have to stand by for a week or more before they can
unload. Sometimes in the height of the orange season the situation becomes so
impossible that the whole import and tourist traffic has to be rerouted through
Haifa. Storage facilities are so poor that port
authorities have had repeatedly to proclaim a respite week, during which no
merchandise is accepted from incoming ships and no products loaded on outgoing
steamers. What all this jockeying means to anxious growers whose perishable
product is decaying in the sheds and rail-terminals need hardly be explained.
Haifa Harbor has been modernized to make it suitable as
a military-naval base. From time to time it is substantially rumored that all
civil shipping is to be discontinued, and beautiful Haifa Bay turned into a purely military preserve.
Here oil, which pays no taxes, is the fair-haired boy of the Administration,
and its transportation takes precedence over all else except the cardinal
business of His Britannic Majesty's great gray sea dogs. With superb unconcern,
the Authorities watch everything connected with private shipping pile into a
hopeless jumble at these two ports, a mess which grows crazier with each
passing year.
The ideal spot for
a harbor which would relieve this congestion is Jaffa-Tel Aviv, with a combined
population of well over two hundred thousand and the great bulk of Palestine's citrus groves within easy reach. For
twenty years the irritated Jews have remonstrated with the Administration over
the neglect of Jaffa Harbor. Not even a breakwater exists. Jagged
rocks line the shore, making it necessary for ships to load and unload from lighters
manned by ruffian Arab crews whose mood is always un-
predictable.
Steamers must anchor at least a mile out, and in bad weather have to stand by
and pray for calm.
Unable to enlist
Government support, the city of Tel Aviv had a brilliant idea : it would build a
harbor itself, at its own expense. The juncture of the River Yarkon and the sea
lent itself admirably to such an enterprise. 28 Its success seemed guaranteed
by its location at the very nerve center of the country's commerce. The
Government's answer was a flat 'no.' It is doubtful whether in the history of
responsible government,
298 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
the right of a
city situated on the seashore to build its own harbor at its own expense
has ever been
contested ; but Palestine officialdom was willing to set this amazing precedent. Its
views were that such an improvement on the coast of the all-Jewish city 'would
constitute an encroachment on the vested rights of Jaffa Arabs.
For years the Jews
tried to secure at least unloading rights, and for years their petitions were
ignored. In 1936, after four weeks of violence and isolation had sealed up Jaffa Port, the Authorities finally granted the city
of Tel
Aviv
a limited right to un-
load. What the
Government agreed to, in view of the emergency, was that the Jews be allowed to
build a temporary jetty one hundred yards long with money raised by private
subscription. 29 It not only refused to participate in the financing of the
'port' but also expressly forbade the Municipality of Tel Aviv to do so. With fine meticulousness it
limited the cargo which could be discharged to eleven categories of
merchandise. Vessels with anything else to unload, be it only as big as a dime,
had to steam up the coast to Haifa or to one of the Syrian ports.
With usual
exuberance, the Zionist press over the world hailed the moment as historic and
the 'port' as a great concession. However, what exists at the present day is a
board pier with a couple of wooden shacks serving as customs houses, and a big
sign, "No Admittance to Port Area." 30 Certainly present omens are at
least dubious. One appeared on the jubilant 'Sea Day' which Tel Aviv arranged
to celebrate the triumphant opening of its 'port' in June of 1936. The great
event of the day centered on three Jewish steamers which were to sail proudly
into harbor as living evidence of Jewish might on the sea. Jerusalem, however, ordered these vessels out of the
vicinity, announcing that anchoring in Tel Aviv waters was "permitted only
to ships
unloading cargoes,
not for display purposes."
Actually there is
no deep-water harbor in Tel Aviv, nor has the Government granted any permission
to construct one. The 'port' has none of the rights which are granted even such
minor places as Acre and Gaza. 31 Officially it has no independent existence.
Ships calling at Tel Aviv must receive their quarantine certificate from Jaffa. More ironic still, though the Jews of Tel
Aviv put up all the money to construct
299 BRICKS WITHOUT
STRAW
its wharves and
quays, the Government takes all the income from wharf age and
storage fees in
addition to the revenue derived from customs duties. The Mandatory's attitude
is well covered in the Report of the Royal Commission of 1937. It comments in
regard to the projected harbor that "this would undoubtedly be disastrous
to the prosperity of Jaffa, and, in justice to the Arabs, the Administration has been unable
to consent to such a proposal." 32
In that more
modern type of navigation, over the air lanes, the story is much the same.
Private flying is practically forbidden. When a young Jewish aviator who had
been a former executive in the Fokker Airplane Works attempted to lay out a
field he
was all but
ordered out of the country.
There are three
important air bases, at Haifa, Gaza and Lydda. The Sea of Galilee is also being used as a permanent landing base for Imperial
Airways flying to and from India and Australia. Palestine is on the schedule of the Royal Dutch
Airlines' East
and West service
as well as the Italian Ala Littoria and the Polish 'Lot,' connecting it up with the most important
airports of Europe, Asia and Africa.
A number of years
ago, Tel Aviv with usual enterprise suggested that a piece of ground could be
acquired at the northern end of the city for a commercial airport. It brought
forward the fact that the existing civil airport, located at the extreme
southern tip of the country in the Arab town of Gaza, was far from all business centers and thoroughly
unsuited to serve commercial interests. Leading officers of the Royal Air Force
were induced to survey the site and they agreed that it was the best in the
country for the purpose. As expected, the Government made no response. Tel Aviv
then made another proposition, offering to share the expense of purchasing and
maintaining the port. The Government now replied immediately with an icy
refusal, stating categorically that it would neither participate in the
construction of this air field nor allow the City of Tel Aviv to build it at its own expense.
It must be noted,
however, that recently a company in which Jewish as well as prominent English
figures are interested has been allowed to use the airport at
300 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
Lydda for civil
aviation purposes. 33
ROADS AND
RAILROADS
The question of
roads, touched on briefly before, is well worth additional examination.
The major part of
Jewish investment is made in the coastal plain and in the valleys around Haifa and Tel Aviv. Scores of Jewish settlements
are located here. This district is the backbone of Hebrew colonization.
Despite the
frequent pleading, practically no roadways have been built to relieve these
colonies of their isolation. Colonel Wedgwood called the turn in Commons.
Replying to his "honorable friend Mr. Isaac Foot" who thought
"the roads were
beautiful,"
he observed that "if he goes there and looks again he will see that the
roads which he mentions are all roads leading to Arab villages and that it is
very difficult to get to the Jewish villages." In January 1930, S. Ettingen, lecturer on road and railway engineering
at Jewish Technical College in Haifa, directly accused Jerusalem of mapping the roads deliberately so that
they would not pass through Jewish settlements. This charge is substantiated in
the single experience of the colony of Hedera, largest and wealthiest in the
country and center of the orange-growing section. Not only did the
Administration refuse to construct a road but the colonists themselves were
denied permission to build one at their own expense. Only after interminable,
heart-breaking delays, and determined pressure from the Jewish Agency in London, was this permission reluctantly granted.
Considering even this miserable concession a great stroke of luck, the sturdy
men and women of the settlement turned out under the broiling sun to do the
road construction themselves, stopping all other work.
In striking
contrast are the beautiful highways existing in all parts of Palestine, leading to obscure Arab villages or
isolated military stations. An example of official competence, which speaks for
itself, is the beautiful automobile highway built in
301 BRICKS WITHOUT
STRAW
1936 at breakneck
speed from Gaza to the Red
Sea over a
sparsely settled region where any kind of wheeled vehicle is a rarity. Another
is the really brilliant engineering feat involved in the great broad artery
constructed in 1937 to serve British military needs along the thinly settled
northern border.
At the same time
that Jewish towns were wallowing in surrounding mud, Imperial self-benefaction
announces that two main roads are to be extended from Palestine through Trans-Jordan and on to Baghdad, at an estimated cost to the Palestine tax-payers of £3,000,000. The principal
function of these highways is political, guaranteeing the communications of England with her Indian Empire and protecting that
all-but-sacred instrument, the pipe line to the oil fields of Mosul. Their sole
commercial value
will be to give Iraq a convenient artery for the export and
import of its merchandise through Haifa.
Military
necessities have also given the Jews a left-handed benefit, through the
construction during 1937-38 of the coastal road between Tel Aviv-Jaffa and Haifa. For two decades Jewish colonists pleaded
to deaf ears, issuing volumes of protest
memoranda that would
fill a library. In 1936 Mussolini inadvertently became the Jew's good angel.
The Government realized that the need for facilitating speedy movement of
troops was more pressing than its strictures against Jews. Without
further ado, the
highway was completed with such dispatch as to come under the head of an
engineering miracle. Jewish growers will now be able to transport their fruit
and vegetables overnight to Haifa port. They will be relieved of making their meandering way
in heavy mud to the railroad which hauls their produce by a circuitous route to
the docks. Hardly less important, since it passes mostly through Jewish
territory, the new road will be safe for travelers.
The Palestine railways are reminiscent of nothing so
much as Fontaine Fox's old comic, the Toonerville Trolley. Today they remain in
almost the same disreputable condition as they were when Palestine was nothing but a decrepit Turkish province.
The main line is
largely a war-time product, and exhibits all the short-comings
302 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
of its improvised
military origin. Instead of continuing on a straight course down the coast, the
line loops suddenly inland at the very point where the barren stretches of
the south give way
to the economically important citrus belt with its great urban centers of Tel
Aviv and Jaffa. 84 Just how many miles of line the
Palestine Government operates is an open question. The Royal Commission of 1937
estimates a little over 1000 kilometers, of which 203 kilometers are in Sinai Peninsula, 323 kilometers in Trans-Jordan, and 477
kilometers in Palestine itself. A part of this system is the Hejaz Railway, a Muslim
religious property used largely to transport pilgrims to the desert shrines.
Most of it lies outside of Palestine territory, and the only section which pays
for itself is that which serves the Jewish colonies of the Emek. Its annual
deficit comes to about ,£45,000, which Palestine shoulders as one of the shackles hung
around its neck by the Administration. The Young Turks of Kemal Pasha would
have sold it as scrap iron long ago.
One of the
characteristics of these railways is their varying gauges, requiring a
multiplicity of reloading operations to reach different parts of the same Lilliputian
country. The personnel consists of inept political appointees of the
Government, who
treat this
business with all the sporadic glee that a spoiled child does a mechanical toy.
The management does not bother to coordinate and adapt its services, so that
shipment by rail is liable at any point to turn into a comedy of errors.
An analysis of
revenue demonstrates that Jewish freight and passengers supply at least
two-thirds of the income of these roads.
Since these lines
were constructed they have always been in bad shape. The Mandatory's 1920
report to the League
of Nations
describes them as "entirely un-ballasted, scantily bridged, needing
repairs to earthworks, drains, fences and ditches . . . and liable to be closed
to traffic by washouts." For their length the Palestine Railways are the most
expensive in the world. From year to year the losses of these hungry white
elephants increase, aggravated by the growing preference for highway transportation
where Jews are relieved of Governmental incompetence and
BRICKS WITHOUT
STRAW
obstructive ness.
The railway deficit charged to Government expenditure in the fiscal year
1935-36 was £124,159, as compared with £33,805 in 1934-35.
When the roads
were taken over, more than £500,000 was paid to the Jerusalem-Jaffa Line
concessionaires alone. The Palestine tax-payer was asked to refund an
additional £2,000,000 to the British Treasury for railway expenditures of the
Military Administration. This makes the initial cost £2,500,000, apart from
subsequent capital expenditure of £785,000 and an increasing list of deficits.
The charge on the Palestine
tax-payer per
kilometer of line is conservatively estimated at £ 10,000. 35 The cost of
constructing a modern railway system with full equipment, in other countries
with similar traffic, does not average over £4500.
To reduce
effective competition, the Government puts every possible obstacle in the way
of motor traffic. Some of these have already been mentioned. Others are a
drastic restriction on driving licenses, and such curious devices as an
ordinance which allows only one person to ride in the front seat of a touring
car.
To cap the strange
state of affairs, Tel Aviv, the most important metropolis in the country, does
not have a railway terminal. It has only a little way-station, a small,
ramshackle wooden shack suited to some obscure Arab village. To catch a train
its people must go by motor to the little Arab town of Ludd. Nowhere in the whole British Empire is there a town half of Tel Aviv's size
which has to contend with such a condition. And nowhere in known creation is
there another public utility which could deliberately avoid the chief
commercial city of the country without having its management made the subject
of a lunacy commission.
CHAPTER
VII
DUAL OBLIGATION TO
TWO PEOPLES
THE TAX MONEYS
Before the
Zionists threw themselves into the picture, Palestine was a millstone around the neck of every
nation that governed it. It was always in the red, produced nothing of any
value, and was considered an all-around liability. On a cost accounting basis
the new British acquisition seemed a pretty dismal proposition. A great
economic collapse had settled like a bleak fog over exhausted Europe. The British Exchequer itself was being
bled white by incessant demands from every possible quarter.
Soon Jewish money
began to gravitate toward the National Home. This was one part of the Zionist
adventure the London politicians could approve wholeheartedly. The prospect of having
someone to tax in Palestine was a pleasing one. We find Colonial Secretary Amery
begging the Zionists, in January 1928, not to withdraw their financial support
since "it would be very unfortunate if that support were not forthcoming
just because there is a temporary depression." Great Britain and the East
speaks of the
Zionist Organization as a "hen that lays golden eggs." It was evident
that in the Mandate for Palestine the British had fallen into one of the
best paying businesses they had ever encountered.
Despite generous
squandering, the public moneys flowed in like a golden river. Nothing like it
has ever been seen in the modern world. A deficit of ,£41,000 in 193 1,
converted itself into a surplus of ,£6,267,810 in 1935. By the beginning of
1936
this accumulated
hoard was already equal to more than two years' normal expenditure and was
piling up rapidly.
This was far and
away the most respectable surplus that any Government in existence could show ;
but nothing daunted, the Palestine Administration went about the
304 DUAL
OBLIGATION TO TWO PEOPLES 305
business of both
expenditure and taxation as if it were skating on the thin ice of bankruptcy.
In 1934, though the Treasury was already groaning under the weight of a huge
accumulated reserve, with income gaining over expenditures with every passing
month, the Administration attempted to put through an income tax, and was only
deterred from this measure when it was discovered that the Arabs refused to
keep books. 1
Now began a
performance which Lord Strabolgi sarcastically described as "the policy
and economics of bedlam." The Palestine Government, its pockets already
bursting with unused money, commenced to borrow huge sums in London at high interest rates, using its own
money surplus as security for the loans/ Completely rounding out this strange
condition, the Administration placed all but ,£10,000 of its surplus into low-interest
English stocks and bonds, for funding British Colonial development in such
places as Ceylon, Natal, Uganda and Guiana, an investment whose collectibility is
more than doubtful, if only in view of the defaulted amounts Great Britain owes the
United States.
It is interesting
to examine one of these loans to discover just what purposes the Palestine
Administration had in mind. A typical borrowing was made in 1934 for £2,000,000.
Included among its items were £133,000 for Arab schools (no provision at all
for Jewish schools), £250,000 for the resettlement of 'displaced' Arabs; and £200,000 for agricultural credits (Arab).
£210,000 is asked for a berth and reclamation scheme at Haifa (for the benefit of the Iraq Petroleum
Company). £933,000 is sequestered for water and drainage development schemes.
Of this amount, the provision made for Water Resources Survey (a life and death
matter in view of the claim that Jewish immigration must be restricted for lack
of water) was only £60,000. (Two years later only £7000 had been used, wasted
in bureaucratic functions, the balance spent almost entirely for Arab villages
and British administrative necessities.) The only benefit the Jews received
from the entire water and drainage project came inadvertently from improvements
made in the mixed towns of Jerusalem and Haifa.
306 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
The final item in
this loan was £407,000 for public buildings and post offices. In the
application of this provision the Jews were again ignored. Tel Aviv, bearing by
far the heaviest part of the country's tax burden, was not given a farthing out
of the total loan and went along as best it could with its antiquated telephone,
postal, sewage and drainage facilities.
Analysis of the
Government's expenditures for any period shows a good deal of marauding in the
interests of the Mandatory itself. The League's Council had ruled that
"while a mandated territory may be expected to pay its own way, it may not
be burdened with obligations not directly connected with its own
administration." We have already seen surreptitious violations of this
principle in the amazing deals made with Iraq and the British petroleum companies. But
the English were prepared to go much further: they dipped their fingers
directly into the till without bothering too much about ceremony. They
compelled Palestine to pay over to the British treasury £1,000,000 as a refund for a military
railroad built during the War through Sinai Peninsula. At a time when London itself defaulted on war debts, it
collected in full from Palestine, treating it as conquered Turkish territory. In addition to
these reparations paid direct to the British treasury, the share of the old
Ottoman public debt fastened on Palestine by the Treaty of Lausanne is regularly
paid, though all other countries affected by this provision ignore it,
regarding it as a dead letter. 2
The great bulk of
all expenditures made by the Palestine Government are conditioned directly on
the military needs of the Empire. Says Broadhurst without mincing words,
"Troops have to be kept somewhere, and although it costs more to keep them
in Palestine than in Egypt, India, or other British possessions, the
Palestine Government pays the extra money, and the expense does not fall on the
British taxpayer." 3 According to the Shaw Report thirty percent of all
public expenditures were made on
the military and
armed forces of Great Britain.
In addition to
sums handed directly to London, are other expenditures, designed for the
same purpose but buried in the jumbled double-ledger bookkeeping followed by
the Administration.
307 DUAL
OBLIGATION TO TWO PEOPLES 307
One has only to
compare the disproportionate figure of £842,487 for military and police during
1935, with £313,597 allowed the combined Departments of Health and Agriculture,
the latter amount itself hiding such expenditures as those for military roads.
Just as Jewish money was used to build the best military harbor in the Mediterranean at Haifa to protect Britain's way to India, under the pretext of 'riots' Jews are now
expected to pay Britain's huge military costs in safeguarding that
same highway from the menace of the Italians. It was decided by the Palestine
Government in July 1936 that "in principle" it shall be liable for
the whole cost of army troops stationed in Palestine, plus the capital cost of works services
there. 3 * According to a statement published in March 1936 in the official
Palestine Gazette, the expenditures on the military garrison alone during the
year came to £1,333,000.
An inkling of
where this sweet flood of golden rain comes from was given by the Colonial
Secretary in Commons on March 24, 1936. The fat Palestine surplus, he acknowledged, "in itself
is a magnificent tribute to Jewish enterprise — in the main it is Jewish
money." Official figures of the Palestine Administration show the Jewish
share in Government revenue to exceed seventy percent of all collections of
direct and indirect taxes. On the basis of these estimates the per capita
burden of taxation amounts to about £13 a year for Jews, and £2 a year for
non-Jews. As far back as 1930, the economist, Hoofien, proved by careful
computation that Jews contributed per head directly to the Government, £8.2 per
annum, against a revenue from non-Jews of £1.7 S Per annum.
The figures from Jerusalem give a fair comparative index into the
situation throughout the country. In 1936 the municipality had a budget of
£100,000. Of this, £80,000 was received in rates and fees, of which £70,000
came from Jews. A great share of the balance arose from the wealthy Greek and
Armenian Patriarchates, and such foreign-owned enterprises as the giant King David Hotel.
308 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
PUBLIC
EXPENDITURES
"I
think," said Colonel Wedgwood, his stern blue eyes snapping, "the
feeling is that the Jews ought to look after the Jews and the Government ought
to look after the Arabs. . . Under this bill we are providing for a post office
in Jerusalem. We have
already put up
with national money, not municipal money, a magnificent post office in Jaffa. . . We were told the other day that if
the people of Tel Aviv wished they could raise a loan and build a post office.
Of course they could, but it is not just that
the Government
should provide post offices for Arab towns and leave the Jews to provide the
public buildings in their own towns."
In thus referring
to the postal situation as a symbolic example, Wedgwood did not overstate the
case. Jews contribute seventy-four percent of all postal revenues, most of it
from Tel Aviv. When the palatial new post office was erected in Jaffa, Tel Aviv
was already
posting eight letters to Jaffa's one. With this disproportion vastly enlarged in recent
years, the Tel Aviv Post Office is still housed in a rented, ramshackle
building, staffed with only two officials compared to Jaffa's ten. Broadhurst informs us that "a
visit to the post office at Tel Aviv will show a queue as
long as that at a
Labor Exchange, waiting for stamps." 4
It takes three
days for a letter to travel the thirty-five miles from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. Parcels are not delivered at
all but must be called for. In the villages this applies even to letters. And
should a business man attempt to be smart and send his letter by bus-driver, a
warrant is promptly issued for his arrest for contravening the Postal
Regulations.
All public
services can be measured by the same yardstick. The work of drainage and
reforestation, so vital to the needs of an enlightened European community, has
been dumped into the lap of the Jews themselves. Expenditures on health,
education and agriculture are limited mainly to administration costs with the
exception of small subsidies to the Arabs to keep them quiet. If the Jews
themselves had not drained the malarial swamps, the land would still be subject
to pestilence and disease. One of the
309 DUAL
OBLIGATION TO TWO PEOPLES
learned reproaches
of the Jewish Agency informs the Government that "in most countries the
protection of public health, the promotion of education, the construction of
highways and drainage of large areas, are regarded as governmental
functions." 5
Considering the
fact that in Palestine the Jews had to undertake all these functions on their own,
with funds begged from scattered Israel the world over, this quaint remonstrance
is no less bizarre than the circumstances which gave rise to it.
There is little in
Palestine, as we shall discover, which is not
controlled by the Authorities with an iron hand. They have their fingers in many
of the country's most important business activities and have taken over even
such minor functions as are
generally conceded
to the Municipalities by the most highly socialized States. Despite this, they
maintain no offices in the chief commercial city of the country. Citizens of
Tel Aviv in need of Government services are compelled to go to Jaffa. During the riots, when it meant death for
any Jew to venture into the Arab town, the Government opened up a few temporary
services in Tel Aviv ; but transactions not involving a contribution to the
Exchequer had still to be carried out in Jaffa ! Fretful at being
compelled to go to
Tel Aviv to collect its taxes, the Administration plastered an increased assessment
on the Jews for this 'convenience.' In the temporary Customs Clearing Office,
for example, an additional surcharge of two hundred and fifty mils was levied,
apparently, as one observer remarked, "for the privilege of not having to
penetrate into the closed port area of Jaffa at the cost of a broken head."
CHEATING CHILDREN
WITH COCKLES 6
Since the
educational system is generally considered to be the foundation of the State,
it is important to see just how this public institution operates in Palestine.
Official reports
for 1935 show the number of Jewish school pupils as 52,030; Muslim, 45,894; and
Christian, 18,175. This unexpected proportion is due to the peculiar age
brackets of the Jewish immigration, as well as the aversion of Muslims
310 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
to education,
which they consider destructive to the true faith. If it were left up to the
British alone, the Jewish National Home would be the most illiterate spot on
the globe. Only 6.2 % of the Government's budget goes into education, and of
this small sum, the great bulk is deflected into Arab channels. The attitude
toward Jewish schooling is something like that found in some of our Southern
States toward Negroes. Roughly, the State allots $5.45 for the education of
every Jewish child, and $26.68 for every non-Jewish child. 7 Of the ,£900,000
spent from 1921 to 1929, less than £60,000 went to the Jewish school system.
For the school year 1935-36 the expenditures of the Department of Education ran
to £237,000, of which £37,916 was allocated to Jewish schools. These
comparative figures are even more striking than they appear, since they do not
contain other amounts which must be credited to the Arab side such as
expenditures of the Public Works Department in building of schools, and general
administrative overhead.
With no exception,
the Government School System is purely Arab in character. The language of
instruction is Arabic. Hebrew is not even taught as a foreign tongue. When in
1937 a rumor circulated that the study of Hebrew was to be introduced,
it only evoked
incredulity and rendered the Government's hasty denial superfluous. "Apart
from scientific subjects," the Peel Commission acknowledges, "the curriculum
is almost wholly devoted to the literature, history and tradition of the Arabs;
and
all the school
masters from the humblest village teacher to the head of the Government Arab
college, are Arabs." 8 Arab school masters in Palestine appear to have been recruited from the
ranks of the most exaggerated pan-Arab agitators. The result, as Lord Peel
candidly admits, is to turn the children out as violent "Arab
patriots." "The schools," he tells us, "have become
seminaries of Arab nationalism." 9
During the whole
period of British occupation there has never been a single Jewish school built
in Palestine out of the public funds. The only
consideration shown Jewish children is in the form of the usual face-saving
maintenance grants. As early as 1926 the Vaad Leumi was complaining that though
Jews pay taxes for the maintenance of
311 DUAL
OBLIGATION TO TWO PEOPLES
national institutions,
"the entire burden of the education of the Jewish children is laid on the
shoulders of the Jews themselves." 10 In the year 1933, which may be taken
as an example, the Jewish educational budget was £250,000. The Governments
grant was the ludicrous sum of £23,626. The balance of the money had to be
provided by opulent Americans, and by the many poor European Jews who were
cajoled into donating their meager possessions to the various Zionist funds.
The Administration nevertheless does not hesitate to impose its will on the
Jewish-supported system even in small matters. An instance, more than amusing
under the circumstances, occurred in February 1933, when it informed the Vaad
Leumi that it considered the salaries paid to Jewish teachers excessive and
demanded an immediate reduction.
These marauding
operations show even more cruelly in the handling of the Kadoorie legacy.
Kadoorie was a Baghdad Jew who died in China, leaving a million dollars to the
Government of Palestine for the establishment of an agricultural school. He
died in the serene belief that a Jewish State was in the process of erection.
Says Wedgwood, describing what ensued: "The bequest was, of course, made
for Jewish education; but it was divided, and half was spent on building an
Arab school and the other half has not yet been spent at all. And when the Arab
school was opened they avoided even mentioning the Baghdadi Jew's
bequest." The Jewish school was built some years later, after the
Government had been prompted into action by the glare of publicity this
remarkable arrangement elicited. In accommodation and size it was, as may be
imagined, vastly inferior to the Arab institution.
HEALTH AND
SANITATION
The attitude
toward public health is substantially that man must not presume to interfere
with the inscrutable will of Allah. Only inadequate attention has been given to
the needs of the Arabs, and none at all to those of the Jews. Determined to
build their land so that civilized human beings could live in it, the Zionists
have diverted
312 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
tremendous sums,
desperately needed for other purposes, to sanitation work, meeting as they went
along not the gratitude of officialdom but its undisguised resentment.
Though it bars the
municipal corporations from acting on their own, the Government has not made
the slightest effort to develop adequate sewage systems in the cities. There is
no serious milk and dairy inspection ; and nothing but the sketchiest
provisions for
controlling epidemics or isolating contagious disease. No provision is made for
tubercular patients and little more for the insane. The single small Government
hospital for mental diseases is reserved for Arabs. Broadhurst mentions that
lunatics "wandered loose about the streets, ignored by the passers-by. If
they frightened people, or attacked them, the nearest policeman was
called" 11 and the lunatic was jailed in great cells containing thirty or
more, together with illegal immigrants, and criminals of all descriptions. Even
lepers are not segregated.
Says Duff, "I
can show you a half dozen any day in the Suq" (the general market place).
12
We find the Jewish
Agency remonstrating with the Government in 1930 because it was "steadily
reducing its expenditures for health" despite the great growth in population
and revenue. 13 Again, in 1936 the Hadassah Report bitterly informed the Peel
Commission that appropriations for public health, meager as they were, had
declined materially since 1922.
Taking the
initiative, the Jews have done a magnificent job. "Next to the great
sanitation work carried out in Panama by American genius," wrote Senator
Copeland, "there has been no greater achievement in the field of public
health anywhere in the world than the sanitation program put into effect in Palestine by American Jews." 14 In 1927 the
Zionist medical budget was already double that of the Government for the entire
country. For years expenditures of the Hadassah institutions alone exceeded
those of the Health Department. 15 Hadassah keeps a whole system of hospitals,
clinics and infant-welfare stations open to Arabs as well as Jews. Unpublicized,
still other voluntary bodies play a brave part in this terrible struggle to
redeem the National Home from the morbid infirmities of the Near East.
313 DUAL OBLIGATION
TO TWO PEOPLES
As a result of
their effort, infant mortality in Tel Aviv fell to £74.75 per thousand,
compared with £209 per thousand in neighboring Jaffa and £242 per thousand in Gaza. For all this, officialdom has artfully
usurped credit, though in his 1935 report the High Commissioner is not ashamed
to list the munificent sum of £1038 as the Government's grant for infant
welfare work.
Out of the anemic
amounts which constitute the country's health budget, a scarce ten percent has
been spent on Jews. The Government's preventive medical services are carried on
exclusively for Arabs. All hospitals it has built or supports are in Arab
centers. In Jerusalem itself, where Arabs are far in the minority, less than five
percent of the in-patients treated in Central Government Hospital were Jews. These are generally refused
admittance and told to go to the Jewish hospitals. The grimmest efforts of the
Vaad Leumi finally succeeded during 1935-36 in securing grants for Jewish
medical services totaling the ridiculous sum of £17,703. At the same time the
Government contributes lavishly to hospitalization in Trans-Jordan, as in
February 1938 when it announced a gift of £56,000 to the projected hospital at Amman.
The matter of
national health is one of the innumerable crises with which the Yishuv is
faced. Despite the great achievements of voluntary health work, unsettling
world conditions have diminished the funds once so willingly donated by
Diaspora Jewry.
As these shrink,
the old perils revive in proportion. Such enterprises as the draining of
Esdraelon's great swamps rid Palestine of the major part of its dysentery and
malaria ; but similar work cannot be continued for want of money. Malaria has
consequently assumed epidemic proportions in parts of the country, and
dysentery is considered such an acute danger that housewives use permanganate
of potash on all uncooked fruits and vegetables as a precaution.
Even in sickness
and death the malice of officialdom pursues the belabored Jews. Jerusalem Hadassah Hospital, largest health institution in the city,
is charged for water at the same exorbitant rate as if it were an ordinary industrial
undertaking, the Administration admittedly taking a hundred percent profit ;
while Arab hospitals,
314 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
built and
subsidized by the Government itself, do not pay for water at all. A sorrier
state of affairs was recited in Commons on July u, 1935 by Captain Strickland,
referring to the condition of Municipal Hospital in Tel Aviv. The only institution serving
the two hundred and fifty thousand Jewish inhabitants of this district, it had
barely one-fifth of the accommodations normally demanded in civilized
communities. With a long list of patients on the waiting list, it was so
overcrowded that beds had to be put in the corridors. Facing the Colonial
Secretary, Captain Strickland asked the astonishing question, "Has the
Government yet decided to allow the Municipal Authorities of Tel Aviv to
provide necessary additional hospital accommodations?"
The reply of the
King's Officer was the usual skillful evasion — "It would be very unwise
for me to forward ex parte statements to the High Commissioner, who as the
House knows, gives most careful consideration to these matters." Here we
have something approaching the ultimate in human enormity: though the
Government's Department of Health contributed almost nothing to the support of
Jewish hospitals, the Municipality of Tel Aviv is forbidden to provide improved
hospitalization even at its given expense.
In matters of
health, too, the British relentlessly squeeze this little country for profits.
When the Municipality of Haifa came to an arrangement to buy its sewage pipes from a
reliable Tel Aviv factory in July 1931, the Government stepped in and squashed
the agreement, demanding that it purchase them in England instead. As a result of this kind of
exploitation it was shown in 1935 that over seventy percent of the pipes in Jerusalem's newly laid water system were so
defective that they all had to be torn up again. After a decade of mysterious
engineering, Jerusalem is still so strictly rationed on water that a bath is a
rare luxury and its people are often reduced to cleaning their
teeth with soda
water. 16 It has been reliably estimated that the entire reserve supply would
not last three weeks in emergency and that most of it is totally unfit for
drinking purposes. 17
A perverse
pleasure seems to be taken in keeping all abominations intact. One of
315 DUAL
OBLIGATION TO TWO PEOPLES
these is an open
sewer which runs from North Jerusalem down the whole valley, poisoning the air with a nauseating stink.
This plague-spot has been in existence for
at least fourteen
years. Despite protests, not the faintest attempt has ever been made to cover it.
However, on occasion the Administration can take an aggressive interest in
'sanitary' measures. One of these, announced in July 1930, was a drainage
project for Jerusalem — unaccountably routed so that it cut directly through the
Sephardic cemetery, crossing the last resting place of Shimon Ha'tzadik, whom
orthodox Jews regard as a saint. 18
LAWS, BENEFITS AND
PUBLIC SERVICES
There are more
useless officials quartered on the back of this unfortunate country than can be
found in any other administrated area on earth. Officials crawl over the land
like flies. In 1925, when they were not nearly so numerous, an Arab Congress
did not hesitate to declare that "the Turkish regime administered Palestine with no more than one-eighth of the present
Administration and, from several points, more effectively and
satisfactorily." 19 Some of these men are capable and efficient. Most are
thoroughly unfitted by both experience and psychology for their posts. With few
exceptions all of them avoid work as much as is decently possible. 20 In their
train is
an assisting horde
of native politicos who need no introduction to the somnambulant venality of
the East.
It is a normal
experience to go to one of the Government offices day after day seeking some
small service, such as having the water turned on in a newly leased apartment,
only to be told that the only person who can attend to your matter, is 'out.'
To get anything done at all, it is the common practice to hand one of the
native politicos an inducing sum on the side, which invariably helps. Duff's
admirable book Galilee Galloper, barred in Palestine, gives a relentless description of the
greed and corruption of these men. Their hand is everlastingly out, and nothing
can be moved without the passing of a proper bribe.
Despite its hostility
to Marxism, the Government of Palestine has put into effect
316 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
a practical socialism
of its own. It owns railroads, telephones and other public utilities, and keeps
a close control over every kind of major enterprise. The attitude was explained
in a sentence by Mr. Johnson, the Palestine Treasurer, when he was asked
directly why it was so difficult for Jews to obtain any concessions. Johnson
replied tersely: "What do you s'pose uoe're 'ere for ! " Meaning that
if any of the pro-
posed concessions
were any good, 'they' would operate them for themselves with the public moneys,
creating more jobs for worthy Englishmen out of work. This procedure is,
however, held in check by lack of experience and the enervating climate. Ordinarily
things touched by officialdom wither — or proceed at a snail's pace.
Very little that
is lucrative escapes their attention. Jewish firms rendering a public service
sooner or later find Englishmen in control of their businesses; or their
charters are canceled outright. The Jewish Hasolel Company, first to generate
electricity in Jerusalem, may be given as a case in point. Its rights to operate
were challenged and the concession was finally taken away from this firm by a
simple maneuver. An obscure Greek named Mavromattes with an ancient 'charter'
from the Sultan, was dug up and his claims were shrewdly advanced at the Hague Tribunal. Mavromattes, whose support
hinged on an under-cover agreement to sell to British interests, got the
concession; and in September 1928 the powerful London Power Security Company 21
owned the business so bravely started by the little Hasolel Corporation.
Scarcely half a year later, a boycott was being threatened against the new
owner for its policy in refusing to employ Jews.
All public
utilities seem to operate on the theory that in one way or another life must be
made miserable for the Jews. The phone service is a case in point. Jews are the
great majority of all subscribers. According to Hoofien's estimate, they are
more than seventy percent of the subscribers even in Arab Jaffa. In a rapidly
industrializing country, telephone communications are an urgent necessity.
Nevertheless, applicants for new phones were informed that these could not be
installed under three years’
317 DUAL
OBLIGATION TO TWO PEOPLES 317
notice. The
expressed reason for this delay was that the Government did not like the
existing telephone building and, apparently, had been spending all these years
trying to decide on an acceptable location for a new one. The ownership of a
phone in Palestine is now worth a substantial sum of money,
often changing hands like a seat on the stock exchange.
Though Tel Aviv is
the commercial center of the country, trunk calls to and from that city have to
pass through the Jaffa Exchange. If a subscriber wants to put in a call during
business hours from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem or Haifa, it will take him from two to three hours
to get through. 22 Even this is sometimes an improvement over the local
service. Jerusalem's main post office has two call-boxes, one
for local and one for trunk purposes. "If the local box is occupied,"
says an English political writer, "the wise man calls a friend in Haifa, delivers a message, which he asks to be put
through to the required number in Jerusalem, and steps out of the trunk-box elated
over the comparative perfection of the long distance service, while his
neighbor in the local box is still trying to extricate himself from wrong
numbers." 23
All communications
of any kind are in the hands of the Government. Wires must be brought to the
Central Post Office in person and must be called for in the same way. The Government
fixes the charge, no matter which cable or wireless company is to handle the
message. The press rate for sending a cable from Jerusalem to London is 2 1 mils a word, and it takes an
average of two hours in transit. From Cairo, Egypt, where the distance to London is almost the same, the rate is n mils per
word, and the time in transit is a half-hour.
All but a negligible
proportion of telegrams are forwarded by Jews. The revenue of this Department
in an ordinary year amounts to around £300,000, against an average expenditure
of £198,000.
Until very
recently, messages were accepted only in English and Arabic. A stream of
violent protests from Jewish telegraph users bombarded Geneva in protest. Replying to the League's
question the Government asserted that its lawyers had made a careful
318 Pics
319 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
search of the
Mandate and were unable to find any specific provision for the sending of
telegraphic messages in Hebrew. 2 * After a protracted struggle, this farce was
ended when the Permanent Mandates Commission ordered that the discrimination
cease. The Government then installed Hebrew telegraphy in only a few cities, so
that its use became, in effect, impossible.
The Mandate for Palestine guarantees the rights of the Hebrew
language, though these are constantly infringed in State institutions and in
public life. Throughout the Government Service an accurate knowledge of Arabic
is demanded, but no understanding of Hebrew is expected from either Arab or Englishman.
Commander Oliver Locker-Lampson brought out on December 3, 1937 that only two percent of the Senior
Officers in Palestine had even a passing knowledge of Hebrew. Even in Jerusalem itself, regulations were issued by the
Commandant of Police requiring a working knowledge of English and Arabic of all
officers and constables in order to be eligible for promotion. No mention of Hebrew
was made at all. This discrimination against Jews in a Jewish city received
such worldwide publicity that knowledge of Hebrew was hastily included; but in
practice the original force and purpose of the regulation remained intact.
Identical
strictures operate against the showing of the Jewish flag. Its public use is
treated as a virtual encroachment on public morals. This was demonstrated
convincingly during the celebration of the Maimonides Octo-centenary in April
1935. 25 Spain, the great philosopher's birthplace,
declared the occasion a public holiday. Other powers, including the Vatican, joined in honoring his memory. In Palestine the thousands of Jewish pilgrims to his
tomb were greeted by police with batons, who busied themselves, among other
activities, in tearing down all Jewish flags they could find.
The present flag
of the National Home is the Union Jack with the word 'Palestine' inscribed in a small circle in the lower
right hand corner. Its adoption was precipitated late in 1934, when a Japanese
sea captain gave the Zionists their cue
320 DUAL
OBLIGATION TO TWO PEOPLES
(which with
customary ineptness they ignored) by refusing to fly British colors when in Palestine port, maintaining that the National Home
was an independent country under League Mandate.
Quite in keeping
is the Government Broadcasting Service, launched with much fanfare at the
beginning of 1936. After operating but a few days, officials forced the Hebrew
speakers to eliminate the name Palestine with (Eretz Yisroel) when referring
to Palestine, and to substitute the phrase's initials,
(Aleph Yud), a childish piece of malice which is even carried over to the
country's postage stamps.
Several typical
incidents will show the uses this public service is being put to. During the
last week of September 1936, a famous Arabic legend was being retold. The story
revolves around the classic loyalty of the Jewish poet-hero, Ishmuel (Samuel)
Adaya HaCohen, who had protected a valuable shield entrusted to him by the Arab
hero Alkis, even when his little son was being tortured to death to force him
to yield. To this day HaCohen remains so traditional a symbol of absolute
honesty that an Arab when speaking of outstanding loyalty and trust will say,
"faithful as Ishmuel." As told over the Government broadcasting
station by the announcer, a public official, the explanation was added that
"Samuel behaved as he did from love of wealth, as the shield that Alkis
had left was a pledge for money Samuel had loaned him." Thus the speaker
demonstrated that so great is the avarice of the crafty Jew that he would even
sacrifice his own child to it. On another occasion, in February 1937, a
visiting English M.P. named McGovern had his scheduled talk over the Palestine
Broadcasting Service cavalierly canceled at the last moment. The acknowledged
reason was that McGovern had made the mistake of lauding Jewish accomplishments
in a newspaper interview the day before.
Radios practically
come within the contraband class. The tourist is astounded to discover that he
must make a special journey to Jerusalem and cut his way through a swathing of red
tape to get his radio out of quarantine, where it is impounded on sight. Though
Jews require a special permit even to possess one, hundreds of sets have been
supplied without cost by the Government to Arab villages so that they
320 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
might listen to
the propaganda sent out from London and Jerusalem. (The English have been lately horrified
to find that the Arabs have been tuning in instead on the anti-English
incitement broadcast from Italian Bari.)
Even the priceless
antiquities of the Holy
Land are not
sacred to the ruling caste and may be exported unhindered; though such
'backward' nations as Honduras prohibit similar ravishment as an offense
against the nation. Much connivance goes on to enrich individual pocketbooks.
In one representative instance, certain of these priceless objects were
disposed of to a 'speculator' for £500, who promptly 'resold' them to a Chicago museum for £2000, a price in itself far
below their real value. 26
In other respects
the regulation of life is minute and drastic. The most revolutionary enactments
decorate the statute books, often promulgated without notice or publicity. One
of these empowers a police officer to stop a touring car and order the driver
to do such a thing as transport a live cow to the municipal slaughter house. 27
Another entitles the Authorities to shut off the water supply at any Jerusalem address where a resident has contravened
any municipal law. Still another of these edicts empowers the Government to
revoke the citizenship of anyone whose utterances might be displeasing to it,
without explanation and without recourse. Here one is reminded of the story of
the Berlin Jew, Horowitz, who wrote to a friend in America saying that everything was fine with him
under the Hitler Government, putting at the end of his letter the following
P.S.: "Abe Cohen, who complained in a letter to his brother that things
were not so well here, was shot yesterday." No one needs to explain to the
Government of Palestine what it means for a Jew to be without a country and
without a passport in the present world.
*NO JEWS NEED
APPLY'
Had the Government
seriously wished to pursue the policy of the Mandate, it would have engaged itself
in training Jews for its administrative and executive departments
321 DUAL
OBLIGATION TO TWO PEOPLES
against the day
when the manifest purposes of that document had been fulfilled.
Simple logic would
have recommended the appointment to high position of only those Arabs who could
be relied on to carry out the policy to which the Mandatory was pledged. But
the official cabal had quite other ideas. Hence we discover, among
the other
'benefits' conferred on Jews in Palestine, their derogation to a sub-human species
who at all costs must be kept out of the Government itself.
As in Nazi
Germany, virtually the only Jews who can get Government positions are the old
soldiers — and their lives are made so miserable that they prefer anything else
if they can get it. Though European Zionists proclaimed their happy relationship
with Britain, local Jewry suffered from no such
illusion. The Vaad Leumi Memorandum to the League of June
15, 1931,
referring to the exclusion of Jewish workers on all governmental projects,
declared pointblank that "this exclusion, which is in effect a boycott,
provides additional evidence of a Government policy calculated to ignore the
interests of the Jewish community in all its needs. . ."
When Samuel came
after the 1920 pogrom which almost lost the Mandate for England, a number of high-ranking Jewish officials
had been appointed with him as evidence of London's good faith. The most important of these
was Norman Bentwich, the Attorney-General. As was true of Samuel, Bentwich
leaned over backward so far that he favored the Arabs like the other officials.
But this did not save him and he was retired by 'comrade' Passfield because he
was a Jew, eight years before his pension able age. 28
The resignation in
1932 of A. M. Hyamson, Director of the Department of immigration, eliminated
the last Jew who served as a department head in Palestine. Hyamson had managed to hold on to his job
by outdoing even the English in severity to Jews. This did not save him either.
The Administration simply did not want anyone remotely suspected of being a Jew
in a position of authority. The Jews, who had come to detest this man, were
also glad to see him leave. Said the Hebrew press
322 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
politely at the
time : "Mr. Hyamson's departure from Palestine will not be viewed with regret." 29
British policy has
turned Palestine into a paradise for petty Arab officials,
who have been encouraged into bold disloyalty to the very Mandate which feeds
them. To understand all the implications contained in this shoddy situation,
the character and
training of the
average Arab must be borne in mind. Like the Garrote of Luzon, he is still in
the tribal stage of development.
He still lives in
the atmosphere of the Ghazzu, the night raid. Lawrence, and everyone else who
has had any experience with him, was quick to grasp his hopeless inadequacy for
any kind of modern organization. In all of Palestine but 73,000 Muslims are able to read and
write. To these may be added 43,000 Christians, making 116,000 non-Jews who can
sign their own names.
Against this
miserable showing, almost one hundred percent of the Jews in Palestine are literate. They not only possess a
heavy majority of the trained and educated population but have in their midst
some of the greatest minds in the world. Included in their ranks is a vast
amount of ability that has fled from oppression, a concentration of so many
scholars, engineers, economists, thinkers and distinguished figures generally,
that they probably represent the highest group level of culture and ability
in existence. Here
was apparently the perfect source to draw on, in this land inexperienced in
self-rule, for the purposes of efficient government.
Actually, we find
bias against these people so great that they are allowed to serve only where
their appointment could hardly be prevented — as in the case of translators, or
in the municipal Jewish institutions. The Government's Works and Plans Department
provides an excellent illustration. Some of the ablest engineers in the world
now live permanently in Palestine but are studiously ignored. Whenever
competent engineers or architects are needed, advertisements for the purpose
are inserted solely in the London papers. That 'Aryans only' need apply,
goes without saying.
In the whole
Government service, Jews, who constitute one third of the population
323 DUAL
OBLIGATION TO TWO PEOPLES 323
and contribute the
bulk of the State's revenues, hold less than 5% of the public jobs. Even this
fraction is in the nature of a sop, thrown irritably to keep them quiet as one
does a bone to a yelping dog. A bird's-eye view of these complaints tells a
vivid story. A wild cry from the Jewish Agency reveals that the percentage of
Jewish labor employed on public enterprises was 1%% in 1925, as compared with
6% in 1922. 30 In the five-year period ending March 31, 1927, the average was less than 3%. The Agency
avers that in Haifa where Jews were half the population, and at Jaffa where their numbers were considerable,
extensive public works programs were undertaken without employing a single
Jewish workman or clerk. It declares that less than 4% of those employed on
public works in Jerusalem are Jews.
As early as 1926,
various departments of the Government had already been made Judenrein (free of
Jews) . A list of official appointments published October 11 of that year,
shows the railroads, post office and police departments to be practically without
Jews, though a few were appointed in ensuing years to keep a decent face. No
Jews at all were named to the strategic Land Courts or to the Frontier Force.
In 1930 a Customs Department investigation disclosed that in the head
Government office,
of thirty-five
officials, one was Jewish. In the Haifa office, of thirty-two officials, there
were two Jews. Since these offices were all in strong Jewish areas, it does not
require saying that in the Arab sectors there were no Jews at all.
By 1935 the
condition was hardly improved. In April of that year the Hebrew press was
complaining that Jewish officials in Government offices averaged less than
one-half of one percent. Not a single Jew was employed in the vast Haifa Harbor extension and improvement works. There
were only ten in the Government works in Jerusalem, including the Printing Press, Post Office
and Police School, and only five on Jerusalem municipality enterprises. Thousands of
illegal Arab newcomers were being used on these projects, but no Jews were
wanted.
Evidence presented
to the Peel Commission in 1937, proved that though they contribute directly
sixty-five percent of the railway revenue, out of the 4300
324 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
employees in the
Government railway system only 365 were Jews. The annual budget of £130,000 for
road maintenance and public works was spent almost in its entirety with Arabs.
Though Jews are
responsible for seventy percent of customs receipts, they are virtually
excluded from labor in the ports. At Jaffa the porters are all in direct Government
employ. Lighter men and stevedores must be licensed by the Authorities, who
flatly refused to issue licenses to Jews. At Haifa a considerable proportion of the porters
work for private firms, which hire Jews? Of the three thousand laborers
regularly working in the two ports, at the beginning of 1936 only three hundred
were Jews, all of whom were in the employ of Jewish importers. 31
Where a proportion
of Jews is used the difference in treatment is impressive. Even the Peel
Commission was compelled to remark that Jewish scavengers in Jerusalem were not supplied with winter clothes as
Arab scavengers had been. 32
Partisanship of
the most indefensible kind is always in evidence. Tel Aviv, with one hundred
and fifty thousand people, is allowed only twenty-six postmen, who work twelve
hours a day for a month. Side by side with these Jewish mail-carriers are
imported Englishmen who are paid four or five times this amount. The Executive
Committee of the Palestine Arab Congress comments that "salaries of
Government servants are a matter of wonder and ridicule. . . A customs cashier
in Jerusalem station, for instance, gets £26 per men?*
He is transferred and his successor is given only £12, though he is held
equally responsible. A clerk in a department gets more
sometimes than his
chief who is even responsible for his own work; as for example is the case in
the Werko Department of Jerusalem where the director of that section gets £16
and one of his clerks gets £22, though the former is his senior in age and
service, and though other clerks who carry on the same work get between £10 and
£15." 34
Sometimes official
bias goes to such lengths that it backs up against itself. An amusing instance
concerned a contract for a £60,000 British military camp near the Jewish
settlement of
325 DUAL
OBLIGATION TO TWO PEOPLES
Netania, assigned
to a firm in Egypt. Unable to handle it, they promptly sublet
the job at a profit to Jewish contractors in Palestine.
Still others took
their cue from the Government and refused to employ Jews. One of them was the
already mentioned Jerusalem Electric Company. Another was the important Shell
Oil group, beneficiary of the tax-free Iraq Oil Company agreement.
A particularly
flagrant case concerned the famous King David Hotel, one of the largest enterprises in the
country and a favorite rendezvous of Government officials. On September
23, 1934 it became
entirely Judenrein, the last remnant of a once-large Jewish staff having been dismissed
to be replaced by imported foreign labor. Bellowed the manager: "We want
no Jews in this hotel. We shall keep it clean." 35
AN ANGLO-SAXON
SYSTEM OF JURISPRUDENCE
The average
Englishman believes religiously in the incorruptible quality of "British
justice." He will tell you that the Englishman takes his whole system of
equity with him wherever he goes, and that it is a great, moral, cleansing
influence in the lives of the backward peoples who inhabit the far reaches of
the Empire. But whatever it may be elsewhere, the British system of
jurisprudence in the Holy Land has little to recommend it.
The men sent down
from London to rule this martyred country proceeded at once to put into effect
a number of kinds of justice for a number of kinds of people. Lowest in the
categories of caste by which equity was meted out were the Jews.
The Arabs followed
a few notches ahead in favoritism. Perched on top of the heap were the English,
who were practically a law unto themselves.
Widespread
corruption degrades every department of the Judiciary. Graft, baksheesh and
rake-off are constantly in the background as in the worst days of the Roman
yoke. Every-thing connected with either the police or the courts is for sale.
Even the
black-list of persons to be kept under particular police surveillance at the
time of the 1929 outbreak (a document so
326 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
confidential that
it was even kept secret from the Parliamentary Commissions sent down later to investigate),
appeared in Photostat, with admitted accuracy, in the columns of the New York Forwards and in other papers throughout
the world. Thoroughly disgusted, Detective Chief Broadhurst came to the conclusion
"that to put anything on paper at all was simply 'to blow the whole gaff.'
"36 He candidly concedes that it would be impossible to operate a jury
system in Palestine. Bribery and corruption infest all processes
of law to such a degree that to introduce it would mean a complete end to even
the bare pretense of legal justice. 37
The great bulk of
appointments to the Magistracy have been drawn from clerks and interpreters,
some of them semi-literates. The Government benevolently allows these
incompetents ten years to pass an examination, meanwhile authorizing them to
serve in a judicial capacity. "There was only one man on the High Court
Bench who had any real conception of criminal law," states Broadhurst
laconically, "and he was in a district where his knowledge was only of use
locally." 38
To the outsider it
is incredible that Tel Aviv has no Court. All matters involving more than £150
have to be heard in Jaffa. A court sits in such Arab villages as Jenin, Tulkarm and Acre, but the largest city in the country has
no court. And if you speak anything but Arabic to the notary of clerks in the
Jaffa District Court, you will be stared at as if you were some strange animal.
The record of proceedings in almost all courts is kept in Arabic. Basic law is
still the old reactionary Ottoman code, long ago discarded as obsolete in Turkey itself.
The prosecution of
crime is almost wholly in Arab hands. The Government Advocate is an Arab. His
assistant at head- quarters is an Arab. With the exception of one Jew, who does
only office work, all the Junior Government Advocates are Arabs. 39
The Criminal
Investigation Department is so desultory in its service that it can hardly be
said to exist in practice. Here, too, official perjury is an expected
occurrence and influence and baksheesh are part of the formula of justice. It
is notorious that the
327 DUAL
OBLIGATION TO TWO PEOPLES
police
'investigators' who compose the original 'report' before cases come to the examining
magistrate, will prepare these documents in any way that is wanted if a proper
payment is made. As for the courts, "it was possible," says
Broadhurst, "to obtain a habeas corpus for a few piastres in order to
short-circuit proceedings." 40 The style of British officialdom itself can
be convincingly grasped in the trial of a Georgian Jew named Turshoili, for
arson, in November 1932. Declared States Attorney; Elliot for the Government,
before the highest tribunal in Palestine: "Jews are necessarily arsonists."
The police are
merciless to prisoners who meet their displeasure. Their tone may be judged
from the reappointment to high position in the Police Force of Kheir El Din Effendi
Besesso after he had been found guilty by the High Court, on August
9, 1928,
of kidnapping a
witness for the defense on the eve of a criminal trial. Says Duff who should
know: "Torquemada, or the Court of Star Chamber can have had little fresh
to impart to your Palestine policeman determined to extract a confession." The arrest
of two Jewish children, Simon Mizrachi, aged 9, and Haham Jacob, aged 10, on March
7, 1931, provides
a ghastly example. Without their parents having been informed of the offense,
the 'criminals,' charged with throwing stones at an Arab's house, were flogged
so unmercifully that one was reported near death. 41 The brutal medieval custom
of whipping is actively followed in the jails, a matter which received some
airing in Commons
in June 1928, where the Colonial Secretary learnedly backed this cruel usage
with the opinion that "flogging was a proper punishment."
Not even the
concentration camps of Germany can surpass in pure horror prison life in Palestine. The jail at Acre
is a good example. It is the principal prison of Palestine, a massive, forbidding structure inherited
from the Turks. Its foul dungeons, in which light and air rarely enter, are a
relic of ages past.
The prison food is
supplied by a concessionaire, the lowest bidder receiving the concession. It is
of the poorest kind and consists of a small amount of rice, rough bread and a
handful of green olives. A great many of the prisoners are growing boys
328 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
in their teens
(especially those held as illegal immigrants), and very often remain crippled
for life after a year or two of this diet. "General weakness, stoppage of
growth, ulcerated stomach, anemia and chronic dysentery are prevalent among the
younger Acre prisoners," writes Malkah Ray mist.
42 There is no distinction made between petty offenders, illegal immigrants,
tourists who overstay their leave, murderers, prostitutes or the insane; all of
whom are crowded into the same filthy cells, where at times it is almost
impossible to breathe. The prisoners have no beds and must sleep directly on
the earth floor. Until early in 1938 they were not even entitled to blankets.
There is no
adequate medical service and no dental service at all. All of the prisoners
(including those awaiting trial) are put on hard labor and regularly kicked and
beaten if they are unable to do the heavy work demanded of them. At the
slightest sign of disobedience they are severely thrashed or thrown into a tiny
windowless cell called the 'sensane,' a foul cubicle where a man can neither
lie nor stand, but only crouch. Sanitary conditions are nil and the stench is
described as unimaginable. Clothes are seldom issued and often prisoners have
to go about in rags. Cigarettes are not allowed. Inmates may write or receive
letters only once a month, so that they are virtually cut off from the world.
Under these
terrible conditions unfortunates of all kinds may be kept for years awaiting
trial, and must then serve their sentences in addition.
Suicide and
attempted suicide are a common occurrence, particularly among the illegal
immigrants held here. Often the prisoners collapse in fainting spells or
develop fits of wild hysteria, screaming, tearing their hair and knocking their
heads against the stone walls. Those who have been kept here for any
considerable period invariably emerge physical wrecks.
Palestine is the only country where the old law of imprisonment for
debt still holds. Another novelty of Palestine court procedure permits witnesses to give
testimony behind a screen so that the accused cannot see them. 43 An even more
startling
introduction is
contained in the Laws of Evidence (Amendments) Ordinance,
329 DUAL
OBLIGATION TO TWO PEOPLES
introduced in
1936, which "abolishes the necessity for corroboration in criminal cases
generally." 44
Fully as abhorrent
to any civilized mind is the practice of levying collective fines on whole
villages for the misdeeds of a single culprit; or still more horrible, of
blowing up entire blocks of houses with dynamite on suspicion that a
yet-untried law-breaker made his home in one of them.
What was taking
place under good British Government may be aptly judged from the fact that in
an ordinary year there were three hundred and sixty reported murders in Palestine, with only eight offenders hanged.
Hundreds of additional homicides were not reported at all, "while highway
robberies and cattle thefts were higher even than they had been in the laxest
years of the Ottoman regime." 45
Duff gives a
graphic account of the officially condoned reign of terror against the Jews in
the sector where he was ruling police officer. "It was a most trying
situation for me," he writes. "I dare not do much against the Arabs,
even though I knew they
were guilty, as Jerusalem frowned on anything that would annoy the
'Nationalists,' as these self-seeking, cynical effendis called
themselves." In his district a hurricane of outrages battered the Jewish
settlers, ranging from wanton destruction of trees and animals, to murder and
assault yet, he writes, "in no single instance was I able, through the
restrictions placed upon me, to bring the offenders to trial, though I knew who
the guilty persons were, and they knew I did." 46 It was a contemplation
of this sort of thing which caused Wedgwood to cry out in Commons that
"the Government at the present time is antiSemitic and is a disgrace to England."
It appears to be a
principle of common equity here that thieves and vandals may not be injured
when they are caught red-handed at their work. Hundreds of Jewish watchmen have
been imprisoned for doing bodily harm to Arabs who came to steal or commit
other depredations. A simple example is the case of an 18-year-old watchman
named Solomon Jacobson who was badly injured during a raid by a gang of Arab
thugs organized for purposes of theft. In an effort to discharge his duty and defend
330 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
his life he
mortally wounded one of the invaders. For this 'crime' he was sentenced on May 2,
1935 to seven and
one half years at hard labor. Another typical case occurred February
24, 1933, when a
group of thirty Bedouins attacked a small Jewish colony, killing an
ex-Legionnaire and wounding several others. Police who stood watching a short
distance away did not attempt to interfere; but four of the raiders were
captured by members of the colony. At the Nablus Court, a few months later, the Bedouins were
acquitted for lack of evidence,' an item which appears with tiresome repetition
on Palestine court records.
The amazing legal
principle making these decisions possible is indicated in the case of Naftali
Rubenstein, a watchman of the Bath Galim settlement, who was sentenced to
prison at Haifa for "attempted murder" (the
wounding of an Arab). The judge, in pronouncing his verdict, stated that it was
intentionally light because "there 'were extenuating circumstances"
in that the Jews of Bath Galim were being assaulted by Arabs at the time! 47
An even more
revolutionary precedent is written in the case of Achmed Said, an Arab burglar
who had killed a watchman of the Jewish colony at Petach Tikvah. The Jerusalem Court sentenced the man to six months, justifying
this nominal punishment on the score that "the crime had been
unpremeditated" in that the thief had killed the watchman only to escape
being caught. 48 However, when an Englishman is killed, also "without
premeditation," the death penalty is unhesitatingly invoked. This double
application of the law is nowhere better shown than in the trial of one Sadik
Altamini, indicted for inciting a Hebron crowd with the cry: "Kill Police
Inspector Cafferatta and the Jews!" For inciting to kill Cafferatta, the
man was sentenced to four years at hard labor. At the same time, the second
charge, that of inciting to kill Jews, was dropped "for lack of evidence r
49
Offenses against
womanhood are regarded almost casually. "Young girls no longer may venture
forth safely alone on the streets," writes the correspondent for the
331 DUAL
OBLIGATION TO TWO PEOPLES
National Catholic
Welfare Council. 60 The Government's attitude speaks for itself in
the dismissal of a
Jewish sub-inspector of police named Ben-Yehuda for communicating to the press
and some friends" the fact that an American girl had been violated on the
streets of Jerusalem. 51 Cases of unpunished criminal assault reached
such proportions
that the American Consul General in Jerusalem was forced to make strong representations
on behalf of the United States Government. 52 As if by magic, three assailants
of an American girl were promptly apprehended and sentenced to fifteen years at
hard labor — the heaviest and practically the only punishment imposed for such
crimes up to that time.
In addition to the
deluge of rape cases against women were many degenerate attacks on boys and
men. The Palestine penal law does not prohibit homosexuality
and its practice involves little social stigma among Muslims.
The official
attitude is brought home in revolting detail in the case of a Jewish boy and
girl named Stahl and Zohar who disappeared in the Winter of 1931 while out for
a stroll. A series of earlier outrages had excited the Jewish community to a
fever pitch of feeling; and since the Authorities would do nothing, private
investigators were hired and a big reward posted. This initiative brought
accusing witnesses from Bedouin villages near Herzelia, who led investigators
to a shallow grave where the
bodies of the
unlucky youngsters were found. The boy had been stabbed to death defending his
companion. The girl, according to witnesses, had been violated by five
Bedouins.
Though the
culprits were thus openly named, the police made no effort to arrest them. Here
a new factor entered. The murdered pair were nationals of Germany and Poland and their consulates insisted on at least
a show of justice. Under these representations, the Government took the five
accused into custody, where three were promptly discharged and the other two
held on the familiar charge of "unpremeditated murder" — the fact
that the killing had been incidental to an attempt at rape apparently being
considered a mitigating circumstance. To make the police less eager for private
rewards in future, an officer named Kabra was given three years for having
lodged
332 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
“false information"
against the Arabs who had been released, though they had been identified by a
score of people of their own tribe.
Now followed
galling, interminable delay. Finally, after angry representations from the
Polish and German Consuls, the Bedouins were committed to trial. Though the
case against each of them was identical, only one was found guilty and he was
sentenced to
fifteen years. The same Court which made this decision sentenced an Arab named
Mustafa Jeebawi to death for the murder of Mrs. Thomas Miller, wife of an
English engineer, while bent on rape. 53 Apparently 'un-premeditation' did not
apply when it came down to typical Arab crimes against the families of British
officials.
It has been shown
time and again that culprits arrested for physical attacks on Jews were rescued
by the public prosecutors themselves. Apparently this corrosion reaches into
the highest places, as was clearly demonstrated in the case of an Arab (a suspected
murderer) caught in flagrant delicto with four rifles and some bombs, early in
1937. The prosecuting attorney immediately asked that the case be thrown out of
court. Guilelessly, the presiding magistrate asked why it should not at least
be pressed according to normal regulations on illegal possession of arms.
"I am acting on instructions," snapped back the Government attorney.
54
In addition to the
civil and criminal courts are an unending multiplicity of ecclesiastical
tribunals whose jurisdiction is legally recognized. These perform civil
functions ordinarily considered to be the prerogative of the State alone. The
judges who sit in the Muslim Sharia Courts are considered servants of the
Administration, which pays their salaries — yet the courts themselves are
completely removed from any supervision by the Government's Legal Department.
In the usual contrast, Jewish
courts must pay
all their own expenses by a voluntary tax on the Jewish community. The
privileges of the various non-British Christian communities are intermediate
between those of Jews and Muslims. However, Christians are allowed certain
unique,
333 DUAL
OBLIGATION TO TWO PEOPLES
overall privileges
in compensation. One is the right of monks, European or native, to serve
sentences of imprisonment in the spiritual seclusion of their own monasteries
instead of in the squalid promiscuity of a Palestine lockup. 55
THE WOLF NAMED
SHERIFF TO THE LAMBS
One may well pity
a people who are placed at the mercy of an alien police. The Irish, with
centuries of wretchedness behind them, could tell you something about that.
Jews who remember the Kishineff massacres in Russia, when uniformed gendarmes led the howling
hooligans over the barricades, could tell you more. From their experience in Palestine they could add terrible pages to that
record.
Shocked by the
course events have taken in the National Home, Colonel Patterson grimly
referred to it as a "National Death Trap." Echoing the same disgust
and revulsion, former Colonial Secretary Amery sarcastically informed his
Government that the Home could not be regarded as a Home "unless those
living there were allowed to play a part in its defense." 56
Since the
disbanding of the Jewish Legion it has been known that Jews were not wanted in
the Palestine military or police force. Part of the
strategy in this high game of dissimulation was to make it impossible for the
Jews to protect themselves, and
then, by
encouraging attacks upon them, pose as the faithful, disquieted custodian who
was being badgered from all corners for his good offices. Thus the Jew is
placed in the traditional role of a craven interloper foisted on an innocent
people, who too cowardly to defend himself, calls on the harassed Briton to do
this for him while he slinks out of harm's way. It is this interpretation that London has so painstakingly palmed off on puzzled
world opinion.
The modern Jew has
proven himself to be a good soldier. In the World War he won his full share of
citations in all countries. The present French Foreign Legion, so famous for
its exploits in North
Africa, has so
many Jews in its ranks that whole
334 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
sections of it can
almost be designated as a Hebrew force. The same is true of the plucky
International Brigade of Spain which held up Franco's advance for so long.
In Palestine the Jews were at all times prepared to
defend themselves and were perfectly capable of doing so, had they not been
rendered impotent by the Government. The Hebrew in his National Home is far
from a milksop. The military of Palestine would be literally swamped with Jewish
recruits, were they accepted. Before the British came, the Jewish colonies were
considered the safest places in the Near East. Their gendarmerie, a force of hard-riding, reckless horsemen
known as the
Shomrim, had long
since won a reputation for everything that was fearless and gallant. The Turks
freely acknowledged it to be the most skilled police force in the Near East. In those days Arabs did not attack Jewish
colonies, preferring to pay their night-riding respects to other Arab tribes
and villages where they would get off with a whole skin.
One of the first
British acts was to quietly disband this efficient constabulary, and to
organize one of their own from which Jews were excluded. They were disarmed as
if they had been a conquered enemy, and were not even allowed to possess the
small arms and dirks habitually carried by all Bedouins. A lurid light is
thrown on this circumstance in an anecdote concerning an irreproachable
physician who had been attacked by an Arab assassin. When the police called to
inquire, the doctor informed them in a sad voice: "I was afraid you had
come to arrest me."
"Arrest
you?" said the officer. "Why?"
"Well,
because it is known that I carry a weapon."
"A weapon?
Where do you have it?"
"Here,"
answered the doctor, turning around, "it is a knife, stuck in my
back." 57
The expenditure
for military and police in the Holy Land amounts to more than a third of the total revenues. The immense
constabulary this infers is hardly required for the policing of Jews, who foot
its bills. The trial of Jews for crimes of violence is practically unknown.
Even on such minor charges as drunkenness, only 52 Jews were among the 724
convicted
335 DUAL
OBLIGATION TO TWO PEOPLES
during 1935; and
out of 415 sentenced in 1936 for the same offense, 27 were Jews. Commenting in
Commons, Wedgwood cried: "You say that the money spent on the police force
is spent to protect the Jews. . . If you go to any police station, you will
find that the crimes of violence and the crimes against which the police are
provided ... are committed by Arabs and not by Jews. . . So far as the police
and the defense of Palestine are concerned, if you gave the Jews arms and allowed them
to defend themselves, it would not need so many defenses, even from the
excellent British police." 58
The present
percentage of Jews on the police force is just large enough to be reasonably circumspect.
One is surprised to discover that Tel Aviv itself has few Jewish policemen. The
surface excuse is that Jews do not care for this type of work.
The hidden
stratagem, which makes this condition possible; lies in the amazing scale of
salaries. There are few Jewish men who are able to live on the £15 a month the
Administration is willing to pay a Jewish policeman. At the same time, imported
Englishmen are given £35 a month for precisely the same police work. Even
common labor averages £24 a month.
The Frontier Force
is no better. When it was formed in 1926 the Authorities decided to exclude
Jews from it on principle, as well as from the Border Patrol Force. All
sections of Palestine Jewry rose in furious protest. The Zionist Executive
itself was passive, Weizmann going so far as to declare that "from the
political standpoint it is unimportant whether in Palestine a bigger or smaller number of Jewish
gendarmes would be employed." This pedantic outlook did not deter local
Jewish opinion, which finally forced the Colonial Office to voice the empty
assurance that "Jews would not be excluded by principle." 59 In 1930
the Jewish Agency was again remonstrating that the Frontier Force "was to
all intents and purposes an Arab Force." 60 In 1937, out of a total of
1039 men there were only 35 Jews.
While Jews were
thus practically forbidden to join this national legion which their tax money
keeps, Arabs, who are both poor and unwilling soldiers, have not responded in
336 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
sufficient numbers.
The Arab likes fighting but he detests drilling and routine. So it became
necessary to draw on outlanders from everywhere. The London Daily Telegraph
describes the result, calling the Force "a veritable Foreign Legion of the
Near East," containing among others, Britons, Austrians, Germans,
Armenians, Circassians, Chechans, Druses, Hejazis, Kurds, Russians, Serbians,
Sudanese and Syrians. 61 According to the Peel Commission's Report in 1937, the
Force contained more Sudanese than Jews and almost six times as many
Circassians alone. It is thus apparent that almost anyone is welcome in this
defense force except the Jews whose National Home it ostensibly exists to
protect.
It must be
perfectly plain that this hot-blooded gendarmerie is a poor guarantee of
security. The police themselves are described by Broadhurst as a queer, unruly
lot. "Annual meetings of officers," he writes, "generally
resolved themselves into
discussions on the
best methods of entering police horses for the local races. . " 62
In each of the
previous pogroms it was the police themselves who were found to be the leaders
of the mob. What may be expected of them in the future can easily be guessed
from a few passing incidents. One was the storm raised in Parliament in
June 1934 over the
report that police detailed to cover the Levant Fair in Tel Aviv wore swastikas
on their arms. It is no secret that the recent rebellion itself was started
with arms and ammunition stolen by the Palestine gendarmerie from the Central Government
Arsenal in Jerusalem. Whatever clarity the position lacked was provided in June
1936, when the police stood in ceremonial silence, on public parade, in honor
of the desperadoes whose rifles had touched off the revolt. 63
NUMEROUS CLAUSUES
AND CENSORSHIP
In Jerusalem where there are not more than one thousand
Germans, there is an avowedly Nazi daily newspaper. It seems fair to ask under
whose auspices this pogrom-inciting literature is published. And how can it be issued
in a Jewish city, and
337 DUAL OBLIGATION
TO TWO PEOPLES
in a country ruled
by an all-powerful autocrat with complete powers of censorship which he does
not hesitate to use whenever it pleases him?
In Jerusalem also,
Nazi handbills of the most scurrilous type are openly distributed without
interference by the police. 64 How can this be done in the capital city of the
Jewish National Home ? At a moment when England itself is expressing violent
indignation over
Nazi excesses, a Jewish youth is arrested and sentenced to the degradation of a
public whipping for picketing a Jewish shop which was selling German goods. Why
should this be a commendable expression of spirit in England,
but a crime in the
National Home?
The Jerusalem
Y.M.C.A. is a favorite retreat of the High Commissioner himself and its Board
is certainly dominated by Government officials. Yet its General Secretary, an
American named Waldo Heinrichs, was summarily discharged when he attempted to
exclude Hitler's Jew-baiting Voelkischer Beobachter from the general reading
room. Why is this so?
There is a book
published in England called The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror. It is a
factual history of the first months of the Nazi inquisition in Germany. No one
has ever challenged its accuracy. Yet when it comes to Palestine it is banned,
together with other anti-Hitler literature. But Hitler's Mein Kampf, a venomous
collection of canards against the Jew, is not banned. 65
Everyone who has
ever been in the Near East knows what British censorship in Palestine is
Newspapers may be forbidden to mention the very name of a notorious murderer on
trial for his life. The control is so strict that a story which doesn't sit
well
with the
Administration, just isn't cabled. Nor is the reporter informed about it. His
first hint that anything is wrong is generally in the form of a communication
from his home office, inquiring into his silence. When the Government wants to
clamp down, relates a foreign correspondent, "it just shuts off telephone,
telegraph and cable service completely." 66
Sometimes foreign
Jewish newspapers are proscribed, as they are in Germany and Iraq. In 1934, for
example, the Moment of Kaunas, Lithuania, was barred for a year
338 THE RAPE OF
PALESTINE
and Unzerzeit of
Kishineff (now part of Rumania) was outlawed permanently. Even such
publications as the New York Times are occasionally confiscated when they
contain articles favorable to the Jews.
Local Hebrew
papers are consistently harassed and closed, though they exercise admirable
restraint, foment no civil war and circulate no inflammatory manifestoes urging
civil disobedience. Where they are not ordered stopped entirely, they often
go to press with
huge white spaces in their columns, representing material ordered deleted by
the Government censor. Perfectly representative of the Government's style is
the suspension of the Hebrew papers Door Hayom and Haboker in July 1936 for the
remarkable reason that they urged the Authorities to put a halt to the rioting
and murder. Yet at the same time the censors permitted the radical Arab Journal
A-Diffa to publish a poem by Ali Mansour which read: "We Arabs are all Abu
Jildas [a notorious cutthroat and terrorist]; we shall drive Cohen [a name for
the Jew, Mansour acquired from the Nazis] out of the country." Confident
of its immunity, the Arab Press kept the sledges of hate pounding in a clamor
of extravagant invective only limited by the imaginations of its authors. In
few other countries, concedes the Peel Report, would such a campaign of
vilification and incitement have been tolerated for a moment.
It is no
exaggeration to state that everything pro-Jewish is either directly forbidden
or discreetly frowned upon. Duff's books debunking the Arab terrorists are
permanently banned in the Palestine he loved and served so long. Even Colonel
Patterson, commander of the very legions which conquered this area, is made to
suffer for his pro-Zionist views. During a visit in 1937 he was filmed in Tel Aviv
inspecting some Jewish institutions. This bit of news-film, titled Colonel
Patterson in Palestine, was banned by the Film Censorship Board on the single
score that the film could not be shown with that title!
This singular
custodian of Jewish aspirations, the Palestine Government, has introduced still
other innovations, modeled after the notorious European numerous clauses.
Feeling his way in December 1933, Government Officer Harkness
DUAL OBLIGATION TO
TWO PEOPLES 339
announced that the
Administration was viewing with concern the preponderance of Jews, especially
in the medical and dental callings; and that it was considering the
introduction of numerous clauses in the professions. This was followed by the
Medical Practitioners Ordinance. Thinly disguising its anti-Jewish bias, it
placed a severe limit on the number of physicians who could be licensed in
future. 67 Thus is laid the groundwork for a whole new plague of repressions
against the Jews returning to their Home.
CHAPTER VIII
TRANSJORDAN THE
JUDENREIN
LEGALITIES — 'MADE
IN ENGLAND'
We now return to
another of those strange enigmas of British administration — the territory of
the Jewish National Home east of Jordan. The shrewd manipulation by which it
was filched from the Zionist pocketbook has already been referred to. Just
what its status is
today (1938) remains a dark mystery. The territory is called an independent
Emirate, yet remains part and parcel of the Mandate for Palestine. The same
High Commissioner rules both. The Emir Abdullah, its nominal ruler, is granted
an ample personal subsidy straight out of the Palestine treasury. The deficits
of his stagnating State are taken care of from the same generous source.
When in 1922
London secured the League's consent to set up a separate Administration east of
Jordan, it was granted only with the stipulation that "the general regime
of the Mandate for Palestine" would be maintained there. To this London
agreed, assuring the League "that no measure inconsistent with the provisions
of the Mandate for Palestine would be passed in that territory." All of
this, in words, was carried out in the 'treaty' with the Emir, and incorporated
in the 'Constitution' of Trans-Jordan as well.
In 1924,
officialdom still acknowledged that Trans-Jordan was an integral part of the
Jewish National Home. On May
27 of that year, during a Palestine debate, Lord Arnold, then Under-Secretary
for the Colonies, declared: "During the war we recognized Arab
independence within certain border limits, and supported it. . . There were
discussions as to what territories these borders should take in. But there was
no dispute as to Trans-Jordan. There is no doubt about the fact that
Trans-Jordan is within the boundaries to which the Declaration [Balfour] during
the War refers. This is the Government's point of view relative to the
political status of Trans-Jordan and
340 TRANSJORDAN
THE JUDENREIN
the character of
our relations to the land"
Under the Turks
there were no restrictions against the settlement of Jews in Trans-Jordan. A
number of colonization schemes were attempted. The largest was undertaken by
Baron Edmund de Rothschild in 1894, who bought seventy thousand dunams in Golan
for a large-scale resettlement project. This, however, was sidetracked in favor
of the coastal development where Zionist effort was then concentrated.
Whitehall early
banned Jewish penetration into this territory. Its expressed reason was a deep
solicitation for the returning settlers, who allegedly would not be safe in
this lawless, turbulent sector. The migratory tribes of Trans-Jordan could enter
Western Palestine freely, however, since the question of their safety did not
arise.
Soon these
strictures became iron-clad. The eastern two-thirds of the National Home was
not only hermetically sealed to Jewish settlement but Jews could not possess
property there or practice a profession. Transjordan became the first and remains
the only completely Judenrein area on the earth's surface. Apparently they are
the only immigrants prohibited. Examination of the official British Report to
the League for 1936 shows a large group of foreigners ranging from Syrians and
Egyptians to Germans, Italians and Turks who have taken residence there. Says
the Report succinctly: "The classified and unclassified officials of the
Transjordan Government other than British, including the officers of the Arab
Legion but excluding other ranks, numbered 683" of whom only 422 are Arabs
born in Transjordan. 1
When the Mandates
Commission sharply commented on this condition, London assured it that
"there was no legal prohibition to prevent Jews from entering"
Transjordan. In other words, on paper everything was in order. When the Commission
bluntly demanded that these restrictions be abrogated, the British spokesman
Dr. Drummond Shiels replied with unctuous regret "that that was
impracticable because the existing Legislative Assembly in Trans-Jordan would
frustrate such intentions." 2 Scarcely more than six months later we find
the same
342 THE RAPE OF
PALESTINE
Drummond Shiels
declaring to an impatient Commons that "when Transjordan is freed from the
irritation of raids and counter-raids by warring tribesmen, an opportunity will
be given for its settlement and development." 3 Here we have two diametrically
opposite lines of reasoning. One, that the normal processes of orderly government
forbade an immigration disturbing to the country's economy. The other, that
since no orderly government existed, it was unthinkable to allow civilized
immigrants to
enter.
Faced with a fait
accompli, the League in some meretricious hair-splitting came to a curious decision:
Jews who were natives of Palestine and hence not nationals of a State member of
the League, could not claim the equality stipulated in Article XVIII
of the Mandate.
These could be excluded. However, any Jews in Palestine who were not
Palestinians, must, according to the terms of the Mandate, be allowed the right
of free access to Transjordan. 4
In actual practice
the British went whole hog down the line, barring English Jews as rigidly as
their brethren from Poland. Gentile Englishmen, however, retained indisputable
rights of settlement. Even if one chooses to ignore the maneuvers by
which this section
of the National Home was handed outright to some ambitious nomads from the
Hejaz, how may this circumstance be explained? It was not so long ago that the
world applauded when the United States broke off its commercial treaty
with Czarist
Russia because of a discrimination much the same as this and less inexcusable.
Recounting an identical incident when Turkey attempted the exclusion of Jews in
1888, official British Peace Handbook No. 6o thunders that "the Powers refused
to accept discriminatory legislation against their nationals, Hebrew or
others," and the Turks had to drop the offending statutes like a hot
potato.
Dexterous as their
performance was, the Bureaucrats ran up against the hard fact that legerdemain
has its absolute limits. They could swindle the eyes by appearing to separate
the body of the National Home into living fragments, but no amount of
343 TRANSJORDAN
THE JUDENREIN
black magic could
endow the operation with reality. Trans-Jordan was inalienably a part of
Palestine, and must immediately expire, if cut off from it in fact. M. Rappard
of the Permanent Mandates Commission contemptuously called it "a parasite
State" with a budget fed by grants from the Mandatory Government. Its
total income is forty-five percent less than that of Tel Aviv alone.
Transjordan has
practically no industries of any kind, and only a few of the most primitive
home-crafts. According to the British Report to the League for 1936, the total
assessment for land tax was only £88,000 of which £53,507 had to be subsequently
remitted because the bankrupt villagers could not pay it. 5 The Emir Abdullah's
attenuated income includes "Trans-Jordan's share in the imports duties of
Palestine." 6 Palestine is also Tran-Jordan’s principal market, selling
goods there valued at £208,993 as against £36,088 which she buys in return.
Examining the High
Commissioner's Report for 1935 we discover, weighted beneath a load of words,
that Trans-Jordan's income was £276,258, while its expenditure was £369,395.
Its budget for 1937-38, reduced to skin-and-bones, still showed a thirty
percent deficit. In other words, Transjordan has been perpetually bankrupt —
kept alive only by the munificence of its rich uncle Israel. If it were
divorced from Israel's household it would simply die of malnutrition. Out of
the lush Palestine treasury, the Emir has had an endless flow of 'loans,'
subsidies and outright grants. He has been provided with free Army and Air
Force assistance in quelling the recurrent rebellions of his own tribesmen and
in preserving his boundaries against Wahabis aggression. As early as 1927 it
was pointed out that the National Home would show a deficit of £90,000 for the
yearly period "due to the fact that the Palestine Government is covering
the deficits in Transjordan — otherwise the budget would show a surplus of
£80,000." 7
Transjordan
comprises an area of about 35,000 square miles — more than three times as large
as the country west of Jordan. It is an area of great resources but no effort
has been made to develop them. A census has never been taken, but the
population is
344 THE RAPE OF
PALESTINE
reliably estimated
to be around 275,000. The majority are nomad tribesmen to whom even boundaries
are incomprehensible. Some of these, like the Aneezeh and Sherarat, have their
main camping grounds in Arabia proper. The only towns of any consequence are
Amman, the capital, with 38,000 people, and Es Salt with 18,000.
The limitations of
this country lie in the nature of the human material composing its population.
Turbulent, destructive, inefficient, seemingly incapable of any but the most
elementary creative activities, their stamp is imprinted wherever one turns
in this favored
land. Bizarrely enough, one factor that has contributed to the permanent
poverty of the Bedu is the ruthless suppression of predatory excursions, drying
up their chief source of revenue.
There are only
fifteen doctors in all Trans-Jordan. The rate of infant mortality is the highest
on earth. Its poverty is terrible and crushing. The correspondent of Al Jamia
Al Islamia 8 describes hordes of people "who snatch hungrily at any refuse
which by a stretch of the imagination may be edible. . . At night these
creatures, men, women and children, with no roof to shelter them, huddle for
warmth and sleep in the streets." Reliable English sources describe the
country, after fifteen years of Arab rule, as infinitely worse off than it was
under the Turks. Says the Crown Colonist of June 1934: "The farmers are
plunged in the starkest conditions of poverty, and the nomads are frequently on
the verge of starvation." Cattle die off by thousands, and epidemics,
droughts, grasshopper and mice plagues, which the fellaheen are incapable of
coping with, reduce them to a state of abject deprivation. The result is seen
in the total lack of any natural increase in population since the British occupation;
while directly across the Jordan, their brother Arabs are showing the most
remarkable gain of births over deaths on medical records.
No part of this
discourages Whitehall from broadcasting the usual paean in 1936 to the beauties
of existence in this "peaceful and contented country, blessed with an Arab
Emir and Government, and being without a Jewish problem" 9 Calmly
345 TRANSJORDAN
THE JUDENREIN
shifting gears a
few short months later, it acknowledges that "the Emirate of Abdullah is
poor, miserably poor, but it does not want the wealth of the Zionists." 10
This in itself was flatly-contradicted by the British statesman, Herbert
Morrison, who on returning from a visit to Palestine and Trans-Jordan in 1936,
told the House that Jews were being kept out of Transjordan "by the wish
of the British Government. ,, 11
The fact is that
Trans-Jordan is a colony which Great Britain got on the excuse that it was to
be part of the Jewish Homeland. The Commander of the Arab Legion is a blue-eyed
Englishman named Peake Pasha. The most prominent agent of the
all-important British
Intelligence Service, Major J. B. Glubb, is stationed there permanently in
charge of the desert patrol which keeps the turbulent tribesmen under control.
Here in itself is proof of the importance London attaches to ownership of this
area. British officials
rule as in any other colony, and the word of the British High Commissioner is
final. Says the Encyclopedia Britannica: "A considerable increase in the
number of British officials and the transfer of the Palestine gendarmerie en bloc to
Trans-Jordan resulted
in fact in the carrying on of the Administration on Crown Colony lines; and the
local Government existing as a façade, exercised little or no independent
authority." 12
The 'treaty'
between Great Britain and Abdullah covers all of this nicely.
"His Highness the Emir agrees to be guided by the advice of His Britannic
Majesty in all matters concerning the granting of concessions, the exploitation
of natural resources,
the construction
and operation of railways, and the operation of loans." The Emir may not
"raise or maintain in Trans-Jordan or allow to be raised or maintained,
any military forces without the consent of His Britannic Majesty." The
'independent
Emirate' agrees
"to the employment of British officials." England may keep a foreign army on its soil, and
has its power of attorney in all matters of international relationship. Laws affecting
the State budget, currency, land grants, succession to the
throne and changes
in the 'Constitution' are to be referred to the advice of Great Britain. Signed March 20, 1928, this 'treaty* completed the Strategical
moves by which Transjordan was to be purloined from the Jewish
National Home and stuffed
346 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
in the pocket of Great Britain. Today the Emir Abdullah is a dummy who sits
on the knee of a ventriloquist known as the British Resident. It is Abdullah's
lips which move, but it is the voice of Downing Street which comes forth.
Calling a spade a
spade, the London Times, in its issue of March 29, 1928, declares: "Transjordan therefore has the status equivalent to a
protectorate, the only difference being the status of Great Britain, because whereas a Mandate is provisional,
the
present
relationship is permanent"
The latest plan is
to separate the Aqaba region from Trans-Jordan and declare it a separate
English colony. This move is forestalled only by the vigorous claim of Ibn Saud
to that port as part of the legitimate spoils grabbed from old King Hussein.
Saud now demands
it as the price of his consent to the Palestine partition scheme. To settle this annoying
question, negotiations have been going forward for some time. They will undoubtedly
end in the classic manner, with Aqaba created a Crown Colony, and Ibn Saud
handed part of someone else's territory to compensate him.
ABDULLAH PUTS HIS
HAND OUT
The Emir of
Transjordan owes his success entirely to English patronage. His one military
campaign was staged against Ibn Saud, when that gentleman with tacit British
approval chased Abdullah's father, Hussein, off the throne of Hejaz. Abdullah
himself was
disastrously routed and had to flee for his life into the desert.
The Emir is an
excellent chess player and indifferent poet. He has only one legal wife, but
enough concubines of every color and nationality to suit the most capricious
taste. In April of 1931 he attempted to make the use of automobiles illegal in
Transjordan, but was overruled by the British.
Christian Arab papers in Palestine have attacked him regularly for his
hostility to Christians. His son, Tallal, attempted to assassinate the royal
father in May 1936, and has since been imprisoned in what passes for the
Palace. The Emir is wise enough to know the limitations of his power.
347 TRANS-JORDAN THE JUDENREIN
With the external
affairs of his country he has little to do, even nominally. Its internal
affairs are supervised with autocratic powers by the smart British Resident,
Colonel Cox.
His administration
proved so erratic and extravagant that the English finally deprived him of the
administration of even his own estates and put him on the civil list like a
pensioner. The balance is reserved for the payment of his debts. 13 He is known
to privately favor a great Semitic State made up of Jews and Arabs with himself at
the helm. Publicly he is more circumspect. Once he is said to have declared :
"Why should we not allow the Jews to come into our country ? We shall take
their money and then drive them out again."
He is a realist of
the first water, who would not hesitate at any time to cut His Britannic Majesty's
throat if anything could be gained by it. Lord Raglan, former British political
officer in Transjordan, informed the Lords on February
21, 1922 that he
himself "had heard Abdullah with his £ 5000 in his pocket 14 hold up Sinn
Fein as an example to the Arabs of Palestine. The inhabitants are disgusted
with Abdullah and they are still more disgusted with the British Government
which has forced him
upon them."
During the Winter
of 1935-36 the Emir wrote the French Foreign Minister offering France the annexation of Transjordan to Syria on condition that he become king. "If
for no other reason," says Ernest Main, "than that they suspected
Abdullah of being a tool of Britain, the French had nothing to do with this
scheme." 15
The Emir's country
is so pathetically undeveloped that "even a horse tied to a tree is a
wayside event." 16 Kenneth Williams, accompanying the Peel Commission
during their 1936 visit, describes the greater part as inhabited "only by
wandering tribes.
Only one-fifth of
the total area of the Emirate, in fact, is cultivated." 17
Impelled by their
extreme poverty, the Tribes have long gazed with envious eyes at their lucky
brethren across the river, now prosperous enough to own many wives and
348 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
all the good food
they could eat. Even Abdullah himself, usually so tractable, could not restrain
his cupidity. He began to regard himself in the light of a land-owner whose
vast stretches could be given a fabulous market value, though at the time they
were not worth the taxes paid on them. His cronies among the land-owning
effendis also began to grow restless despite hand-outs and patronage. They
smelled bigger game ; and, mouths watering at this tempting stream of yellow
metal pouring before their eyes across Jordan, they acted at times like a dog teased
with a bone that has a string attached to it. Much to British disgust, the
patriotism ready-made for them by Whitehall began to look phony to all sections of the
Trans-Jordan population.
Back in 1924 Jacob
De Haas had already been offered 100,000 dunams at "about a dollar an
acre, on condition that the sale was not disclosed to the British officials in Jerusalem." 18 Then and since, the Emir has
been anxious to sell to Jews, but the British have persistently interfered. In
1926 they forced the dismissal of Premier Rikabi Pasha for "favoring
Zionist immigration." By the end of 1932 the Emir himself started
negotiations with Jewish political circles and arranged a 99-year lease on
70,000 dunams near the Allenby bridge. 19 The exultant crowing of some members
of the Jewish Agency, who could not resist premature publicity over this
'stupendous victory,' killed the deal. Becoming really annoyed at what they considered
Arab 'rapacity,' the British stepped in and smashed the proceedings.
But the Arabs were
not to be put off. On January 17, 1933, Mithkal Pasha, most powerful Sheikh in
Trans-Jordan, offered to lease one hundred thousand dunams. Heads of other
tribes approached the Jewish Agency with similar propositions. On
January 20 a great
meeting of Sheikhs at Amman resolved to support Abdullah up to the hilt. Three days later, in
an interview carried by the entire Arab press, Abdullah bluntly accused the British
Palestine Government of forcing him to rescind his agreement with the Jewish
company.
Events tumbled
over themselves in swift succession. On February 6, a group of the most
influential tribal leaders drew up a petition demanding the right to lease or
sell
TRANSJORDAN THE JUDENREIN 349
their land. Pointing
out the terrible poverty and under population of the country, they declared
that salvation could come only through the Jews. Under the direction of the British
Government propaganda officer, the Palestine Arab press accused Abdullah of
having engineered the petition himself. Undeterred, Abdullah banned offending
Arab papers from his territory. Trans-Jordanian leaders, determined to have
their way, staged impressive demonstrations demanding land sales. The opening
of the Legislative Assembly on February 9, was all set for fireworks. The group
in favor of legalizing land sales to Jews, having a clear majority, had taken
the bit in their teeth and meant to be stopped by no one. The Assembly had
already met when the Secretariat announced that it had been dissolved and that
future sessions were indefinitely postponed. According to the story carried
openly by all Arab papers, both the British High Commissioner and the British
Commander of the Transjordan Military had held a hurried conference with the
Emir, laying down the law to that refractory gentleman in no uncertain manner.
Meanwhile the British
Palestine Government was with meticulous correctness advising the Jewish press
that "this matter is not within our jurisdiction as Trans-Jordan is under
a different government." At almost the identical moment, it informed the
Emir that his subsidy would be reduced by twenty-five percent during the coming
year. But for once the rubber-stamp Legislature confounded its masters by
running completely amuck.
On April 1, at its
next session, the British High Commissioner's bill prohibiting sale or lease of
land to non-Trans-Jordanians (Jews) was unexpectedly beaten by thirteen votes
to three. The session closed in surly mood with no affirmative measure allowed
to come before it.
Still trying to
force the issue, on May 25, representatives delegated from twenty-three Trans-Jordanian
towns waited in a body on the Jewish Agency urging them not to give up the
fight. It was apparent that operating deviously with his left hand and hungrier
than ever, Abdullah was sitting tight. That forced the British to lay aside
their switch in favor of the cudgel. They reminded the Emir of what had
happened to
350 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
his illustrious father,
King Hussein, when he thought he was a bigger man than
the King of England. Though Abdullah wisely modified his
position, his followers were not nearly so circumspect. Enraged meetings were
held regularly in violent protest. As late as March 27, 1935 the heads of the most important tribes convened
in an uproarious session, demanding the cancellation of anti-Jewish laws
"because Jewish money which is destined to develop Transjordan is being diverted. . " With unerring
awareness they ignored the fiction of a Trans-Jordanian Government and addressed
their resolution direct to the British, who disregarded it.
However, it should
not be believed that English solicitude for their tribal wards is limited to
some skittish desire to fence them off picturesquely on their reservations.
British officials themselves have been buying up large tracts of the most
fertile acreage and placing them under cultivation. 20 Palestine Arabs, too,
are taking over extensive tracts on speculation, considering an eventual Jewish
settlement inevitable. 21
There have been
other settlement schemes which had British approval. In the Spring of 1927 the
English Government put up a demand that land be made available for the
immediate settlement of Armenians. Sensing no monetary advantage, and disliking
Christians with a keener gusto than they did Jews, Arab Sheikhs submitted a
counter-memorandum angrily rejecting the proposition. It was consequently
dropped. Early in 1929 the English backed another plan to colonize refugees
from Tripoli and Benghazi after those territories had been occupied
by the Italians. Three hundred thousand dunams were to be granted under the
most favorable conditions, but the prospective settlers proved unorganized and
capital was lacking. 22 At still another time, under London's request, Abdullah presented one hundred
thousand dunams near Amman to a large contingent of exiles from Morocco. The settlers were guaranteed adequate
deeds, freedom from taxation for three years and military protection against
Bedouin attack.
Whitehall is still fearful that the Jews will find a way some how to
break through the
351 TRANSJORDAN THE JUDENREIN
wall which holds
them west of Jordan. When they do, the 'landless Arab' bogey,
the Statutory Tenant Laws, the whole absurd system of blockade and restriction
in which the land-hungry Jew is caught, must fall apart of its own inert
weight. With the vast unpopulated reaches of Trans-Jordan in prospect, they would
become too foolish to retain even a pretense of plausibility. The Bureaucrats
know that if they succeed in securing themselves on the soil the Jews will
never be driven out of the Holy Land, and that the whole carefully raised scheme against them must then
ultimately fail.
In its issue of February
4, 1937, Great Britain and the East echoes official apprehension,
crying that "a treaty or some conclusive guarantee with Trans-Jordan, that
the Jews will not be allowed to take land there, would greatly pacify the country."
Most Trans-Jordanians
seem to believe, however, that their country would be better 'pacified' by the
removal of the British.
CHAPTER IX
WHOOPING IT UP FOR
DEMOCRACY
THE LEGISLATIVE
COUNCIL
The final stroke,
which was to deal the death blow to Zionist hopes, was simply conceived. It
rested on the establishment of that great democratic institution, a parliament,
in Palestine. Superficially the Bureaucrats thus placed
themselves in the vanguard of progress. Who could challenge the undoubted right
of men to rule themselves through their own elected representatives! By intent,
however, the scheme was a long step forward toward the liquidation of the Mandate.
As envisaged by Whitehall, the Legislative Assembly would be a ready-made dummy
congress which could be implemented at any time as a perfect sounding board for
British policies. At the same time it would place the Zionists within brackets
so that they could not attack
without the risk
of losing world sympathy.
All of this was
urged in the name of the 'sacred promises' made to Hussein of the Hejaz,
despite the fact that in the Hejaz itself there is not and never has been any
parliamentary system whatsoever. Throughout the 'free' countries of Arabia democracy is noteworthy by its absence. Yemen and the immense territory of Saudi are ruled without even a pretense of
constitutional government. The equally vast Hadramaut, as well as Aden, cowers under the despotic authority of
British guns.
Iraq, most developed of all these Arab
countries, is ruled by a shadow Government constituted with the assistance of
British officials. "Notwithstanding the Constitution," says
Lieutenant-Colonel Stafford meaningfully, "British policy in Iraq was directed . . . towards making Feisal a
real King in the Eastern sense." 1 "The country's Parliamentary
system," he tells us, "is a farce." The Government is cordially
hated by the majority of the population. Armed revolt is always in the air and
is kept
down with an iron
hand. 2 Even the barest pretext to constitutionalism vanished in
353 WHOOPING IT UP
FOR DEMOCRACY
1936 when the Army
bombed the capital and seized control.
Toward the great
illiterate bulk of the population the educated Arab classes are no more
democratic in the political sense than the Athenians were to their slaves.
"Even within their own circle," remarks Ernest Main, "they have
little sense of what real democracy means." 3 The orbit of politics in
'free Arabia' revolves around the Sheikhs, Emirs, Imams
and their supporters. "The Arab masses," says Professor Scherger,
"do not fit into any other system of government except the foreordained
traditional rule
of sheikh and religious leaders. . . Conspiracies and assassinations are the
only popular procedure adopted and practiced by the Arabs when electing
representatives and rulers." 4 Throughout every portion of Arabia slavery flourishes with the full support
of public opinion. It is a vested interest of immemorial respectability, writes
Bertram Thomas, "and any extraneous authority interfering becomes odious
in the eyes of the people." 5 How can one talk of democracy in
the same breath
with this !
The readiness of
the Arab Palestinian for self-rule is not less unpromising. He is just as
backward, excitable and fanatic as his brother in the desert. The various
Commissions of Inquiry have themselves declaimed that he was incompetent and
must be protected against the superior capacities of European immigrants.
Eighty-five percent of his men and ninety-three percent of his women are
illiterate. 6
The setting up of
a parliamentary body, under the circumstances, would only serve to provide an
arena for general intrigue and agitation against the whole policy and purpose
of the Mandate. The Colonial Office itself informed an Arab Delegation in March
1922 : "The position is that His Majesty's Government is bound by a pledge
which is antecedent to the Covenant of the League of Nations, and they cannot
allow a constitutional position to develop in a country for which they have
accepted responsibility to the principal Allied Powers, which may make it
impracticable to carry into effect a solemn undertaking given by themselves and
their allies. . . It is quite clear that the creation at this stage of a
National Government would preclude
354 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
the fulfillment of
the pledge ?made by the British Government to the Jewish People"
The greatest
authority in the British
Commonwealth on
constitutional reform is the India Report of 1934. It lays down the following
principle : "Parliamentary government, as it is understood in the United
Kingdom, works by the interaction of four essential factors : the principle of
majority rule; the willingness of the minority for the time being to accept the
decisions of the majority; the existence of great political parties divided by
broad issues of policy rather than by sectional interests ; and finally, the
existence of a mobile body of public opinion, owing no permanent allegiance to
any party and therefore able, by its own instinctive reaction against
extravagant movements on one side or the other, to keep the vessel on an even
keel." In Palestine none of these requisite conditions exist. A few families,
the Nashishibis, Husseinis and Khaldis, monopolize all public power, and would
soon rend all public life to shreds in their mutual struggles. "Of a
genuine rivalry of political parties,
presenting alternative
municipal programs to the electorate," says the Peel Commission,
"there is no trace."
Still another
British authority, the Hilton Young Commission, lays down the precedent that
where a fundamental division exists of race or religious hatreds, or a difference
in level of civilizations between the various elements of the population,
u the abstract
principle of 'majority rule 7 cannot be dogmatically applied" How does
this fit the Palestine situation ?
In July 1924,
Ormsby-Gore informed the Mandates Commission that "if in this
[legislative] council there should be brought forth an anti-Zionist majority,
the Government will come into an impasse, since it must execute certain
provisions of the Mandate, on the one hand, while, on the other hand, a hostile
majority would oppose such measures." Three months later Herbert Samuel is
droning to the same Commission "that the Arabs have declared they would,
if they had the majority [in the proposed Parliament], use it to prevent the
creation of the Jewish National Home."
355 WHOOPING IT UP
FOR DEMOCRACY
Everyone,
including the British, agreed that the setting up of any such parliamentary
apparatus was a direct refutation of the manifest purposes of the Mandate, that
it would automatically crystallize the Jews as a helpless minority in their
National
Home, and that no
right thinking man could countenance such a procedure. Nevertheless, London is soon after found espousing this very
scheme as one of its fundamentals of policy. Every High Commissioner had to make
it his own. Though the Jews fought the proposition desperately, for once
solidly united, the Bureaucrats pushed it with all the power at their command.
Time after time when it appeared on the verge of adoption, unlucky accident
intervened.
On several
occasions, when all else seemed propitious, the Mandates Commission rejected
the proposal as "premature and ill-advised." Notwithstanding, in 1923
London officially declared it in existence. But
the Arabs foolishly refused the proffered bait. Completely misjudging English
motives, they believed that a little additional pressure would bring about the
complete squashing of the Mandate, and the elimination of the British as well.
With consequent bravado they boycotted the
election to the
new Parliament, and announced that they would sabotage all laws accepted by
that body. Left without a leg to stand on, the Government annulled the election
and reinstated the former Advisory Council, taking the occasion to reduce the
former Jewish proportion.
After the 1929
pogrom the Arabs again renewed their demands for the 'true processes of
democracy.' They could not have chosen a more awkward moment. A volcanic
eruption of horror still convulsed world opinion. The temper of Mr. Weizmann's
Zionists was yet an un-probed factor. Uncertainty made the Bureaucrats wary.
With scrupulous probity Whitehall proclaimed that "since the effect of
meeting the wishes of the Arab delegation as regards democratic government
would have been to render it impossible for His Majesty's Government to
continue as Mandatory for Palestine ... it became evident that this matter
could not usefully be pursued further." This was in May 1930. In October
we are told by the same Gov eminent "that the time has now
356 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
come" when
the question of constitutional changes must "be taken in hand without
further delay," and that "the time has arrived" for the setting
up of a Legislative Council for Palestine.
For five more
years the matter seesawed back and forth. Finally, on December
22, 1935 High
Commissioner Wauchope sounded the tocsin for democracy by once more proclaiming
the establishment of a Legislative Council. The announcement carefully avoided
all reference to the Balfour Declaration and the Jewish National Home. It was
made on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, and was addressed to the Arabs, ignoring
the Jews as if they did not exist.
The 'Council' was
a precious piece of humbug. Out of twenty-eight members, four Jews and eleven
Arabs were to be elected. The balance were to be appointed by the High Com-
missioner, to include five Englishmen. The High Commissioner retained wide veto
powers. If a miracle happened and his handpicked legislative body' bucked the
traces, he merely had to deem its measures invalid to rule them out without
ceremony.
The Jews anxiously
asked themselves: What was back of the British mind ? What purpose could there
be to all this artful simulation ? Was it to provide a rostrum for anti-Zionist
agitators who could be represented as expressing the country's will ? Was it a
smokescreen behind which anti-Jewish officials could plot the death of Zionism
? With dogged resolution they notified the Government that they would neither
participate in the elections nor recognize the proposed assembly. The reply was
the icy ultimatum that "with them, without them or against them, a
Legislative Council would be established in Palestine."
This was all very
well, but it did not take into account the British Parliament itself. The
Council scheme was debated in the Lords on February 26, 1936, and on March 24 in Commons, where it was
disastrously routed. In the latter body, recites Lord Peel
dolefully,
"the Secretary of State, whose speech was constantly interrupted, had only
two supporters." 7
357 WHOOPING IT UP
FOR DEMOCRACY
"by their
acts you shall know them!"
After all the
moralizing which accompanied the Legislative Council plan, one is astonished to
discover that the British have neglected to put any of these fine precepts into
operation during the entire period of their administration in Palestine. Such local autonomy as the Jewish
settlements retain is almost entirely a carry-over from the Turkish regime. The
Arab masses have no more voice in even their local community affairs than if
they lived in Timbuktu.
The electoral
system the British introduced (no one else wanted it) is a grotesque travesty
on democratic processes. The country was divided into community rolls based on
religion. A Jew could nominate only a Jew, a Muslim a Muslim and a Christian a
Christian. Suffrage is based on property rights, and there is no educational
test. From here on, the proceedings become heavily involved. Despite the fact
of three community rolls for nomination purposes, there is only one common roll
for election purposes. Now a Christian, Jew or Mohammedan may vote for anyone
he pleases, but Government decree determines the number of each religion which
must be elected!
An analysis of the
polling lists in representative towns shows Nablus to have less than 900 voters, out of a
population of 20,000. Gaza, a city of 19,000, boasts 500 voters. Ramle, with 12,000, has 300
voters. The link between Government officials and the peasantry is the village
Mukhtar, a worthy whom Lord Peel describes as "usually illiterate."
The Capital City itself is a perfect example of what the
British mean when they talk about 'democracy' and 'self-determination.' The
Jews of Jerusalem constitute seventy-two percent of its 110,000 souls. Muslims
are twenty percent, with the balance Christians. Despite this numerical
preponderance, the Government has always insisted on the appointment of an Arab
Mayor, who runs the city with a high hand. 8 Jews, who pay practically all the
taxes, are allowed the barest minimum of public
358 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
benefits. Some of
the older Jewish quarters such as Nahlat Zion, which have been paying taxes since the
British occupation, have yet to be provided with a single yard of road.
An incident which
occurred in 1930 thrusts this whole strange situation close to the realm of
fantasy. We see the Mayor of Jerusalem, Ragheb Bey Nashishibi, at the head of
an anti-Jewish delegation, proceeding to London in his capacity of Mayor, armed with a
bristling political program aimed directly against his own constituents! And
this on the very eve of Municipal Council elections where the Mayor was engaged
in
a mortal struggle
with his ancient enemies the Husseinis! The Jews stormed like madmen. Stentoriously
they promised retaliation by throwing their support to Nashishibis opponents.
Immediately the Government rose to the occasion with a decree postponing the
elections for three years. In the Mayor's absence, it refused pointblank to
allow Chaim Solomon, Jewish Vice-Mayor, to sit as acting-executive, and
appointed an Arab instead. Completely disgusted, the Jewish members of the
Municipal Council
resigned in a body.
In 1933 the
Government introduced an election scheme which gerrymandered the election districts
with such strategic cunning that the Jewish majority was turned into a
minority. Part of the maneuver which arranged this result lay in the granting
of special rights to owners of property in the Old City of Jerusalem. These
regulations so curtailed the right of suffrage that out of its entire
population only 3900 individuals in Jerusalem were entitled to appear at the polling
places.
In January 1935
the Government appointed Hussein Fakri El Khaldi mayor for five years, to take Nashishibis
place. A Jew, Daniel Auster, was given the title of Vice-Mayor. Right after
being inducted into office, Mayor Khaldi refused to countenance the presence of
the Jewish Vice-Mayor and even denied him an office in the Municipal Building. A new roar of indignation arose from the
Jews. As a result, permission was now given the Vice-Mayor to sit in the Municipal Building, where relieved of all duties he twiddled
his thumbs.
The farcical drama
continued to unfold. In 1937, Arab Khaldi himself was picked
359 WHOOPING IT UP FOR
DEMOCRACY
up by a squad of
soldiers for alleged complicity in the murder of a British official, and exiled
to a small island without benefit of trial. Thus unexpectedly Vice-Mayor Auster
found himself acting-Mayor. Officialdom was nonplussed. At that very moment London was seeking to put over its great coup,
the Partition Plan. For the sake of world opinion the Jew must be allowed to
remain. But what to do about the Mayor's salary, which totals £1,446 a year! To
give it to Mr. Auster would be to recognize his position. Naturally, Arab
Khaldi, in exile in the Seychelles Islands, could not receive it. From that point on
the problem is solved by being studiously ignored. So Mr. Auster, who is Mayor
and yet not Mayor, continues to perform the mayoral duties gratis. Just what
his status is, no one, least of all himself, can say.
In Haifa the situation is much the same. Though the
Jewish community is over fifty percent of the population and contributes around
seventy percent of the municipal income, it is represented by only four out of
twelve Councilors on the Municipal Board. A number of other towns have, on
paper at least, some rights of self-government, with power principally to raise
taxes for municipal affairs. But only two Jewish towns come within this
category. "Why," asks Wedgwood, "are Arab towns given
self-government if they have populations of 2,500 or more, while Jewish towns
like Petach Tikvah, with a population of 25,000 or 30,000, do not get self-government?"
Even Tel Aviv did not attain the status of a municipal corporation until 1934.
Tel Aviv's
self-rule is not worth too much. A Council is elected, which selects a Mayor
and Vice-Mayor from among its own members, subject to the approval of the High
Commissioner. How much 'democracy' this entails is demonstrated in the
elections of November 1936, when General Wauchope calmly invalidated the
election of Moshe Chelouche as Mayor without offering any reason for his
action, and appointed Dr. Israel Rokeach, Mayor in his stead.
Tel Aviv is the
only city in Palestine - Israel where women enjoy the franchise. Here they
may even hold important municipal posts. On the extraordinary excuse that this
360 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
was contrary to public
policy, the Administration suddenly placed this right,
which Jewish women
have had for a decade, into question. By regulation issued February
9, 1933 the High
Commissioner was granted the power to decide whether or not a woman has the
right to active or passive participation in municipal elections, entitling him
at will to throw out of office such women as might have been duly elected, as
well as to deny them suffrage.
Though they are
taxed to the hilt, Jewish colonies fail to receive the grants-in-aid allowed to
Arab towns for public services; and the Government at the same time
consistently refuses them permission to make use of outside credit facilities,
even for
self-paying projects. Thus the Council of Rehovoth tried vainly for three years
to get permission to raise a loan for building a market. In the end Rehovoth
built its market without the loan by straining its resources to the bursting
point. When
in 1933 the Tel Aviv Municipality negotiated a loan of £350,000 with the
Prudential Assurance Company, the Government refused permission for any sum over
£60,000. (This loan, incidentally, was to be devoted to the construction of
schools, built in other cities by the Government at its own cost.)
This despotic,
minute control extends to trivia undreamed of in any other State but Soviet Russia. When, after the outbreaks of 1929, Tel
Aviv sought to set up its own slaughter house because Jewish butchers did not
feel safe in Jaffa, the Government
not only ignored
the petition but would not even allow the city to "meet the requirements
by supplies of meat from elsewhere." It was either Jaffa or no meat. 9 Years later a slaughter
house was ultimately built, but the situation continued provocative. In 1938
Tel Aviv was faced with an enormous increase in meat prices, "owing,"
says Palestine and Middle East Economic Magazine,
"to the domination of the market by a group of cattle importers who now
run what is virtually a meat racket on a large scale." 10 By manipulating
supply and transport at both ends, these importers had succeeded in wiping out
all competition, with the result that the price of cattle for slaughter imported
from the identical Balkan countries "is almost three
361 WHOOPING IT UP
FOR DEMOCRACY
times higher in
Tel Aviv than in Egypt." When the Tel Aviv Authorities
decided to take action against further increases in the cost of meat, the
Government withheld its consent for Municipal regulation of meat prices.
Moreover, it refused to sanction the import of cattle through Tel Aviv Harbor, which would have cheapened transport and
insured independent supplies.
Calling things by
their right names, the Jerusalem Palestine Review states the fact that the real
ruler of the city is the District Commissioner, not the "fictitious
Council and bogus Mayor” Fully as courageous, the Jewish Vice-Mayor (now Mayor
?) writes that "although a cursory reading of the Palestine Corporation
Ordinance may give the impression that the Corporations established under that
law have wide powers of civic administration, such an impression is erroneous.
. . Municipalities have practically no authority in connection with the welfare
of their citizens. . . Authority of the Municipal Councils is so limited that
even if it is decided to appoint a minor clerk at a salary of £36 per annum . .
. the approval of the District Commissioner or the High Commissioner is necessary.
A Council of twelve or fifteen elected representatives may spend hours and days
arriving at a decision which, when
submitted to the
Commissioner, is responded to by a curt note canceling it. Against that
rejection no action can be taken. . . . The Palestine Government has, in effect,
turned our Municipal Councils into debating clubs." 11 These Councils are
not even empowered to regulate building and layout or direct roads in traffic.
Their budgets must receive official ratification from the District
Commissioner, which may not be forthcoming for a year or more. "For example,"
writes Lord Peel, "the budget of Jerusalem for the financial year 1935-36 was not approved
until August 1935 ; and ... the majority of the municipal budgets for 1936-37
were still not approved by January
1937." 12
It is interesting
to discover that the Muslim Wakf Administration, though largely supported from
taxes and not subject to the democratic control of the Arab community, has been
al most completely free of Government supervision, presenting
362 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
its budget only
for 'information'; while the Jewish National Council, democratically elected
and supported entirely by internal contributions, must submit its budget for
Government approval.
It is shocking to
learn that Palestine is one of the few places in the world where the slave
traffic is carried on openly. "We talk about slavery in Abyssinia," states a sickened English writer,
"but how many people know, for example, that [in Palestine]
you can buy the
most beautiful girl . . . for a couple of hundred pounds. You can buy her when
she is twelve years old, and you can take her home, there and then, to live
with your other . . . wives . . . and all of this in 1936, in a land administered
by Great Britain under a Mandate from the League of Nations! " 13 He gives the current price of
women as £5 for an 'old' woman of twenty or a girl of fifteen who is
non-virgin.
£l° to £5° gets you
a first class concubine, while £200 will buy you the modern equivalent to the
Queen of Sheba.
According to the
recent Annual Report of the American Colony Aid Association, among three
hundred mothers treated at the Infant Welfare Center, one was thus purchased for the purpose of
sexual abuse at the age of seven, one at eight, 7 at nine
years, nine at ten,
22 at eleven, 41 at twelve, 51 at thirteen, and 54 at fourteen. Of the mothers
treated, 62.5% were defenseless children who had been sold into slavery. How
casually this brutal trade in human flesh is regarded can be understood from
the following item
which appeared in the Palestine press of December 27, 1930: "Three fellaheen of a Gaza tribe, now residing in the Beisan
district, have sold their daughters at a good price, and already handed them
over to masters in Tulkarm, Nablus and Haifa, according to a letter to El Carmeie
One of the most
persistent complaints of this people whom British propaganda regards as
long-suffering patriots, is that the Zionists have inadvertently chased the
price of women out of sight. Arabs who sold land to Jews had enough money to
buy
six, seven —
sometimes a dozen or more women. The price of female slaves rose dramatically
in accordance with the law of supply and demand so that exorbitant
363 WHOOPING IT UP
FOR DEMOCRACY
prices must now be
paid for women, who are dragooned from even far-away Ethiopia. "I assure you," a highly placed
Arab told Farago, "even such episodes
add to the general
hatred of Jews, and one must not judge the Arabs too harshly if they take to
arms in desperation."
It is a striking
commentary on the Mandatory's conception of government that Jews lucky enough
to be nationals of States tolerably free of Jew-baiting will not risk
Palestinian citizenship, even though they have come to the National Home to
stay.
As in the worst
days of the old barbaric Turks, they take special trips back to the old
countries, registering their children there so that they might enjoy protection
against a Government they have learned to distrust thoroughly. It is estimated
that fully one hundred and sixty thousand Jews permanently domiciled in the Holy Land thus keep their old nationality. 14
SOME ODIOUS
COMPARISONS
You may search the
map through and you will not find a single area administered by the English
Colonial Office 'where a constitutional position in favor of the native
population has been allowed to develop. Is it not astonishing, then, that they
should
exhibit such a
compelling sentiment for the 'rights' of natives in precisely the area they are
under pledge to relinquish ultimately to the Jews?
British Central
and East Africa may be taken for convenient comparison.
The native races here are certainly as intelligent as those of Palestine, and infinitely more tractable. They outnumber
the whites four hundred to one. Nevertheless, wherever representative
institutions have been granted to English colonies and dependencies in these
territories, the native peoples have not been allowed to participate either as
voters or as members. The voting power and the right to be elected as members
is vested mostly, if not always, in the British European immigrants. 15
Still more
significant, there are large colonies of East Indians and Arabs settled in these
places. They came long before the British immigrants and they play a vital part
364 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
in the economic
life of these communities. Notwithstanding, the constitutional power is
invariably placed in the hands of British settlers.
It is worth
tearing off the cover of this thing to get a look at some of its detail. We
find Tanganyika, also a mandated territory, with a British
population of 4000 submerged in some 5,022,000 natives. In addition there are 7,100
Arabs and 23,400
East Indians. Yet
under the Constitution of 1926 a Legislative Council is constituted consisting
of twenty British Europeans and three British Indians. Neither the native
populations nor the 1,000 Arabs, who alone outnumber the British two to one,
are represented at all. In Kenya Colony, in which much the same situation
obtains, the best part of the agricultural land is sequestered for white
settlers only. Into this restricted area neither the large native population
nor the considerable proportion of Indians and Arabs may penetrate.
Zanzibar is another fair sample of this weave. In addition to its
native population of 186,470, it has 33,400 Arabs, 14,000 British Indians, and
only 300 Europeans. Yet of the fourteen members of the Legislative Council, ten
are British Europeans.
Arabs apparently
do not count here either.
In South Africa, which as a Dominion (not under the direction
of the Colonial Office) invites no absolute comparison, Europeans are but
1,890,300 out of a total population of 8,370,000. Yet it is mandatory that
members of both the Senate and House of Assembly be British subjects of
European descent. Colored people (including Arabs and East Indians) are
subjected to discriminology regulations of the most severe type. When the Hindu
leader Gandhi visited there several years ago, he was not allowed to enter one
of the great public buildings on this account.
A comparison from
another angle is offered by British experience in the Island of Cyprus. To spike the Greeks, who hoped for enosis
(reunion with Greece) , a Legislative Assembly similar to that
proposed for Palestine, was formed. In it the
Turkish minority
of twenty percent plus Government officials formed an actual
365 WHOOPING IT UP
FOR DEMOCRACY
voting majority.
The result was economic stagnation and political chaos. Greek members refused
to cooperate with the Government or the Turk minority. Bills in
the Legislature
were jettisoned. National hatreds reached an explosive climax. The gulf of culture,
hopes and physical differences between the two races was so fundamental as to
contravene ordinary differences of opinion. As a result of this self-
generated
combustion, the Island almost blew itself off the map
— and the British
were glad enough finally to haul out from under. In November 1931 they withdrew
the Constitution as "premature, excessive and unsuitable." From that
time forward, Cypriots were not so much as allowed to discuss or hear a
political speech. 16 The game had been played out in favor of the baldly stated
conviction that if Britain is to stay there, she must rule there.
The British, with
this experience immediately behind them, do not need to be told that the
differences between Arab and Jew — in ideals, dreams, mentality, culture, and
objectives — are far more exaggerated than anything they ever witnessed between
Turk and Greek in Cyprus. But Whitehall had not confounded itself by turning
evangelist. Its continually publicized efforts to establish a parliament in Palestine had a far more practical purpose. The Zionists had to be pried loose no
matter what was forfeit. Towards this end it was desirable to encourage the
Arabs to consider themselves the rightful rulers of the country, and to foster
the belief that a decisive action on their part would sweep away the last
tottering remnants of the Balfour Declaration and the Jewish National Home
project.
BOOK THREE
CHAPTER I
"A PEOPLE IN
DESPAIR 77
DOES AN ARAB RACE
EXIST?
The British, who
were later to talk imposingly of 'Arab nationalism in Palestine,' were of a quite different view in 1918.
British Peace Handbook No. 60 declares briskly that "the people west of
the Jordan are not Arabs, but only Arab speaking. ...
In the Gaza district they are mostly of Egyptian
origin; elsewhere they are of the most mixed race." As late as 1921 the
Administration was still officially claiming that the word
'Arab' as applied
to Palestinians was a misnomer. 1
Actually there are
no 'Arabs' anywhere. There is not even a fairly homogeneous mixed race.
Throughout the Peninsula the Arab has ceased to exist. Those who
have taken his place are a motley assortment of peoples, low in the scale of human
development, who
speak the Arabic tongue. Even the courtly Saladin was no Arab, but a Kurd.
Hussein of the Hejaz, himself, was mothered by a Circassian and
had his official heirs by a woman of Turkish blood. 2
The countless
cities, tribes and nations incorporated at sword's point into the swollen host
of Allah, soon drowned the Arab out by the very suffocation of their numbers.
An even more dreadful revenge was exacted by that cruel institution, the Harem.
How enormous this practice was can be seen in Sykes' description of the empire
of fabled Haroun-al-Raschid, with its tremendous seraglios stocked with women
from every conceivable corner of the globe. 3 He marvels at the unending supply
of female slaves, of every color and kind. Since purity of blood in the
community of Mohammed always gives way to purity of line, where are the
descendants of Qoraish 3a now ? Even in the very core of desert Arabia, the race has been steadily
adulterated by an
incoming flow of slave girls, most of them, in recent centuries,
366 Pics
367 ”A PEOPLE IN
DESPAIR"
from the Sudan and other places in Africa. The offspring of these stolen creatures
are not slaves but free Muslims, since the moment a woman conceives she attains
the
status of a legal
wife.
Pilgrims from such
faraway places as Java and Morocco, streaming like columns of magnetized ants
toward the holy cities of the Hejaz,
contributed liberally to this mélange. The Muslim habit of giving a slave girl
to an overnight guest for his comfort, the frequent looting of visiting
caravans of the devout, all sweetened the mixture. "If we make exception
of the Sherifian families — the descendants of the Prophet — and some very few
other people of undoubted Arab origin," writes the
great Turkish
scholar, Dr. Riza-Tewfik, "all the population of Mecca is alien to the Semitic race." 4 The
Syrian author, Rihani, describing the population of the Arabian coast, is even
more emphatic. 5
History gives it
as a fact that the Arabs never settled Palestine, merely taking control and providing the
usual military and administrative caste. They imposed their religion on the
native peoples but failed to exterminate them. Here, too, gradual racial
suicide was the price of uncontrolled lust. As far back as the Latin Kingdom in Jerusalem, Edris comments on the vast number of
captive females required to satisfy the wants of these amorous gentlemen. He
reports slaves brought from all parts of Africa and the East, with good-looking Nubian
girls most in demand. The Crusaders found a country peopled by a mixture of all
the races of the Orient, intermarried with Greeks.
On the founding of
the Kingdom they had to recognize the existence of five types of Muslims (each
of different racial antecedents), as well as Jews, Druses, Samaritans, and others.
6 By 1120, when the Council of Nablus was held, the Latins themselves were
already reported half absorbed in this churning stew of races.
Of even greater
significance than the loose social habits of the Muslims was the physical
position of this little land, which turned it into a bloody charnel house for
unending centuries. Spoliation, destruction, rapine, extermination, claimed the
land
368 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
like an
ever-recurring plague. The invasions which regularly smashed against its stricken
borders were countless. It had been devastated by the Scythians from north of
the Caucasus. The Romans populated it with vast
settlements of Greeks and other
races from
everywhere. It was scoured soon after by the wars of the Seleucids and Ptolemies.
In 634 A.D. occurred the Arab conquest. By 868 A.D. an Egyptian invader named
Mehmet Tulum had wrested the country from them in the usual blood
bath. Now for a
period of centuries Turks, Egyptians, Crusaders, alternated in control, periodically
baptizing the shuddering country in a bath of blood.
After the Twelfth
Century, Palestine – Israel was invaded time and again by wild hordes
from Asia who plundered, slew and violated without
halt. In 1256 the Mongol, Hulagu Khan, sacked the stricken area and put the
entire population to the sword. A
scarce hundred
years later, Timur the Lame, a sanguinary destroyer who called himself 'The
Wrath of God’ made this whole sector the scene of one of the crudest massacres
of his blood-drenched career. Now for generations Palestine became an outspread altar on which human
sacrifices were offered continually. In their savage unending struggles for
mastery, Mongols, Mamelukes and the fierce Charismean tribes of Middle Asia butchered its people indiscriminately.
Between 1260 and 1400 A.D. not a single city, town or village remained intact.
When the next conquerors, the Ottoman Turks, came in, raping and slaughter had
left an indelible mark in the character of the survivors. "In few parts of
the world," says Lieutenant- olonel Stafford, "were there more different
types." 7
It was always the
foreign soldier who was the police power in Palestine. The Tulunides brought in Turks and
Negroes. The Fatamids introduced Berbers, Slavs, Greeks, Kurds and mercenaries
of all kinds. The Mamelukes imported legions of
Georgians and
Circassians. Each monarch for his personal safety relied on great levies of
slave warriors. Saladin, hard-pressed by the Crusaders, received one hundred
and fifty thousand Persians who were given lands in Galilee and the Sidon
district for their
services.
369 ”A PEOPLE IN
DESPAIR”
Out of this human
patch-work of Jews, Arabs, Armenians, Kalmucks, Persians, Crusaders, Tartars,
Indians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Sudanese, Turks, Mongols, Romans, Kharmazians,
Greeks, pilgrims, wanderers, ne'er-do-wells and adventurers, invaders, slaves
and backwash of all corners of creation, was formed that hodge-podge of blood
and mentality we call today 'Levantine’ As this wild medley of ungovernable,
lawless men were killed off from time to time by incessant wars, raids and
plagues, more from everywhere were constantly merged into the common melting
pot. In the Fourteenth Century, drought caused the immigration into Palestine of eighteen thousand 'tents' of Yurate
Tartars from the Euphrates. Soon followed twenty- thousand Ashiri
under Gaza, and four thousand Mongols under Moulai,
who occupied the Jordan Valley and settled from Jerusalem south. Kaisaite and Yemenite tribes
followed in their trail. 8 In 1830 the Albanian conqueror Mehemet Ali colonized
Jaffa, Nablus and Beisan with Egyptian soldiers and
their Sudanese allies. Fourteen years later Lynch estimated the thirteen thousand
inhabitants of Jaffa to be composed of eight thousand Turco-Egyptians, four thousand
Greeks and Armenians, and one thousand Jews and Maronites. He did not consider
that there were any Arabs at all in that city. Q
During the middle
of the Nineteenth Century the entire territory of the National Home, east and
west of the Jordan, is computed to have held no more than
sixty thousand people all told. Of this number, non-Muslims, living under the
bitterest
persecution, were
still heavily in the majority. The huge population growth since that time has
been due to large contingents of new arrivals. The Turks introduced Circassians
around Amman. When North Africa passed under European authority,
the fanatic
Moghrabiyeh Muslims moved out and settled in the Holy Land. (It was they who were responsible for the
Safed butchery in 1929, and who supplied the continuous tension at the Wailing
Wall.) So too, were introduced into the permanent
population of this
little land, Bosnians, Turkoman nomads, and a stream of Levantines, mixed
desert wanderers and Africans which continues to the present day.
370 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
As for the
Christian population, we are told by the learned Dr. Christie that it is made
up of fragments of all the Levant
races. The native Christians of Nazareth come from the Hauran and from
Merj-Ayun ; while the Christians of Safed are the children of immigrants from
Hasbeiya who came in the second half of the last century.
In the Arabic
language only the Bedouin is designated by the word 'Arab.' But here, too,
unless the eyes cannot be trusted, there is little evidence of common descent.
The Ghawarineh tribe of the Jordan Valley have strongly marked African features,
fuzzy hair, black skin and guttural voices. A short distance away is the tribe
of Ghazawiyeh, shrill-voiced, gaunt and large-featured. Nearby are the
blue-eyed blondes of Bethlehem. Several tribes of alleged Jewish stock have even been described
in Transjordan. 10
Until English
political maneuvering recast their viewpoint for them, the townspeople were
insulted if they were referred to as Arabs. They wanted to be known for what
they were, Syrian Levantines. Count Sforza designates the inhabitants of this
entire region as a medley of peoples "with not the slightest bond between
them." 11 Mrs. Andrews remarks dryly that "in Jerusalem today there are two or three families that
claim to be of the fine Arab stock which entered the country in the Seventh
Century." 12 Dr. Christie doubts whether there is any Arab blood in the
peasantry or villages at all. 13
As long as these
masses have lived side by side, they have been at each other's throats. Tribe
hated tribe, city man hated fellah, the Bedouin despised both, sect cursed
sect, and even family disdained family as unworthy scions of an inferior race.
That all this ill-assorted, explosive mixture can be organized into one
autonomous nation may also be doubted for the future.
ARAB TYPES AND
TRAITS
From steppe,
mountain, jungle and desert, an agglomeration of primitive, savage man had
swarmed in successive waves over Palestine, arid left their seed there.
371 "A PEOPLE
IN DESPAIR"
