THE RAPE OF PALESTINE - "A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR" - pages 371-437 - Draiman
ARAB TYPES AND TRAITS
From steppe, mountain, jungle and desert, an agglomeration
of primitive, savage man had swarmed in successive waves over
"A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR" 37I
Palestine, arid left their seed there. These with a vast admix-
ture of slaves and a leavening of nobler blood represent the racial
antecedents of the people we call 'Levantine' today.
Many of these people are shrewd, clever and even charming.
The studied gentility of the upper-bracket Arab leaves little to
be desired. Dressed in his Abaye 14 and red tarbush 15 he is a
colorful figure. His bearing is languorous and courtly, in vivid
contrast to the direct speech and often uncouth manners of the
immigrant Jew. Beneath this thin stratum, the balance of the
Arab population is primitive in the extreme. For the most part
it can hardly be said that they have risen above the stage of bar-
barism. They are, on the whole, of poor physical type and of
low mentality. It would be hard to pose a wider disparity of
culture, instinct and mind than lies between these people and
the returning Hebrew. It is on this cold reality that all the fine-
spun visions of the Zionist theoreticians run afoul.
English as well as American observers, where they are free
from the corrosion of Empire politics, give a none-too-flattering
estimate of this population. Laconically the American, Com-
mander Lynch, reported that they were "far inferior to the North
American Indian" 16 then being held on reservations by the
United States Government. Drawing a sharp difference be-
tween them and his desert tribesmen, Lawrence refers to the
Palestinians as "an ape-like people, having much of the Japanese
quickness, but shallow." 17 The late Governor of Sinai Penin-
sula, C. S. Jarvis, sweepingly disposes of the Arab as "undoubt-
edly the most striking example of decadent and decayed gentry
in the world." He finds that "the Arab works about io days
out of the 365," and that "all forms of manual labor are abhor-
rent to him." Like Petrie and other English observers, Jarvis
calls the tribesman a bane to the country he inhabits, asserting
that this once prosperous area "will remain wilderness as long as
he encumbers the land." While "the Arab is sometimes called
the Son of the Desert" he continues, quoting from Palmer, "this
is a misnomer as in most cases he is the Father of the Desert, hav-
ing created it himself, and the arid waste in which he lives and
372 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
on which practically nothing will grow is the direct result of
his appalling indolence, combined with his simian trait of de-
stroying everything he does not understand." 18
Almost a century ago Lieutenant Lynch wrote that "the rul-
ing passion of an Axab is greediness of gold, which he will clutch
from the unarmed stranger or filch from an unsuspecting
friend." 19 In 1935 Jarvis remarks that "his love of money is
such that he loses all sense of proportion whenever currency is
discussed, whilst if actual coins and notes are displayed before
him he not only loses his sense of proportion but his self-control
as well." 20 St. John Ervine adds that "when I hear an English-
man sentimentalizing about the noble Arab and remember the
dirty and greedy baksheesh hunters I saw wherever I went, I
feel rage rising within me." 21
Any attempt to judge these people by European standards is
anomalous in itself. Their language, for example, contains 100
words for camel and 99 for woman, but none for murder. There
is not a single Arabic word by which one can distinguish be-
tween the slaughter of a sheep and the premeditated killing of a
man. Under his Ah aye the Arab wears a long, wicked-looking
stiletto which he will use with lightning quickness on the slight-
est provocation. Brutality is common to Arabs of all classes.
Their "utter callousness ... for the suffering of animals," com-
ments Reverend H. V. Morton, "is a terrible thing." 22 "All
their horses, in the tourist season, have bleeding knees," adds the
Reverend Mr. Jannaway. 23
Among all strata of Arabs woman is regarded as a mere animal.
The Moslem does not believe that a woman has a soul. If two
men begin to make complimentary inquiries about their respec-
tive families, the wives are mentioned last, the boys and cattle
being named before them. "A father who has several daugh-
ters," writes Pierotti, "regards them just as he would sheep or
cows, and sells them in the same way." 24
Girls are often not even counted in the figures given census
takers. A woman who bears a female child may be beaten and
reviled as if it were her fault. If she bears a large number of
daughters, she is despised. Merrill mentions a typical unf ortu-
"A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR" 373
nate, thus described by sympathetic neighbors : "Poor thing,
poor thing ! She's got no children — only girls." A barren
woman is promptly divorced, and her life made a constant series
of humiliations. An amusing side-light on this attitude is con-
tained in the petition submitted to the Government in 1935, ask-
ing a ban on the showing of motion pictures to women ; assert-
ing that such entertainment was "contrary to Moslem law" and
"had a demoralizing effect on women." 25
The Arab's sanitary arrangements do not bear mention. They
are long past the stage where they could be described as vulgar
or offensive. He has an incurable habit of using the middle of
a busy street for a latrine, shocking visiting European ladies be-
yond measure.
Contrary to what might be expected, the Arab is of generally
poor physique. The geographer, George Adam Smith, describ-
ing a locality, speaks of the inhabitants as "a sickly and degen-
erate race." Tuberculosis and malaria are rampant. Syphilis
is a chronic affliction which few escape. 26 The dread amoebic
dysentery, meningitis and cholera are common. The Arab's
medical arrangements are elementary. He continues to tend
wounds by the application of fresh cow dung ; and in the case
of eye disease, applies bandages soaked in camel's urine. An
Arab will come to a fountain and wash his hair, ears, face, mouth
and feet in it, before drinking. He is much amused over the
European's ideas of hygiene. St. John Ervine speaks the mind
of most visitors when he remarks that "the man who can cure
the Arab of his filthy habits will be his benefactor." 27
The Arab believes religiously in occult powers, in Shaitan,
the evil one ; in afrits, malicious little devils ; in Djinnieh, wicked
female spirits who suck the life from men's bodies. They cure
illness by prayer at a sacred tree or shrine. Slips of paper with
verses of the Koran on them are soaked in water and the drink
is given to patients ; or they use the froth from the mouth of a
mania dervish who has fallen in a fit. They believe a wolf's jaw-
bone, worn around the neck, to be a potent charm.
The Arab is stubbornly opposed to modernity of any kind.
He has no conception of civic duty. Broadhurst found that
374
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
he could not even organize a voluntary fire brigade in Jaffa, and
that the city had to be served by the Jewish group in Tel Aviv.
There is no intellectual life. The only Arab writer of any con-
sequence is Aref-al-Arif, whose book on Bedouin life could not
even find an Arabic publisher and had to appear first in Hebrew
translation.
There is no denying the fact that the Arab is on the whole
likable — as are all primitives. When not aroused by cupidity
or anger, he can be openhanded to a fault. His very ineptness
is engaging. Even his knavery is tolerable and amusing. In a
typical instance given by Meltzer, an elderly woman in a law
court, obviously not less than sixty, claimed to be twenty-seven.
"But your son says he is twenty-three years old, so how can you
be only twenty-seven ?" asks the red-faced English judge, on the
verge of apoplexy. "My Lord," answers the hag, "upon my head
be it if I am lying. That is how it is. Everything is in the hands
of Allah. He alone knows the ages of women."
Like the heroes of old, Arabs think it a stain on their reputa-
tions if they do not gorge. To say how much a man can eat or
drink is their way of expressing how strong he is. They are
also inordinately fond of perfumes and unguents. Men who can
afford it will walk around smelling as if they had fallen in a vat
of attar of roses.
Few of them have family names. They are simply called after
the tribe to which the family belongs. There is no set style. A
child may be called by name, followed by his father's name, as
'Yakub Ibrahim' ; or the father might be called 'Abu Yakub'
(father of Yakub), and the mother, 'Umm Yakub' (mother of
Yakub). Sometimes they are merely known by the trades they
ply, as Hadad (blacksmith), Hajjar (stoneworker), etc.
Perched atop of the social scale is the Effendieh class, char-
acterized by Duff as "those masters of low intrigue." They have
not altered since Turkish times when the engineer Pierotti de-
scribed them in an ironic simile as "a curse to the country — a
greater evil to Palestine than the plagues were to Egypt, because
those were temporary and these are permanent." 28 They con-
sider work of any kind to be degrading ; poverty and loss of
"A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR" 375
face, unpardonable crimes. They used to extort money from
Christian travelers and convents, but this easy source of revenue
has been stopped since British occupation. Their usual method
of living is by usury. Blackmail is another accepted feature of
their system of existence. It is this class which provides the
politicians who have kept the country in so much turmoil.
The sex habits of this gentry are notorious. Their word is
valueless, even under oath. Most of them have immense fam-
ilies, with many wives and concubines, purchased with money
derived from Jewish immigration. "A Moslem family of five
wives and thirty or forty children," says Mrs. Erskine, "is no
rarity." 29
In the cities is a mongrelized horde of ruffians whose presence
makes it impossible for any European woman to walk alone on
the streets after dark. Their insolent eyes undress every woman
they see, with lingering deliberation. The 'middle class,' as in
all undeveloped peoples, is neither numerous nor well-defined.
European opinions of this group are not complimentary. Duff
terms them "absolutely incapable of loyalty. . . If money or ad-
vantage is to be gained by betraying partners, there are very few
of them that will not snatch at the opportunity." 30
At the bottom of the social scale is the Bedouin, whose black
hair tents can be seen today exactly as in the time of the first
Pharaoh. 31 He has seen Abraham and Solomon pass. Nebu-
chadnezzar, Belshazzar, Alexander, the Ptolemies, a dozen civi-
lizations rising and falling, have flitted before his eyes. He
remains the same. If his horizon was altered at any point, it speed-
ily shifted back again as soon as the disturbing element was re-
moved.
The Bedouin is the traditional enemy of the villagers who, not
without justice, regard him as an incorrigible robber and thief.
Bedouin life has always been one of naked struggle between the
stronger and the weaker, the dominant and the subservient tribes.
The former took possession of the best pastures and wells,
plundering the weaker on whom they imposed tribute. Today,
as in the past, the youth of the tribe is nurtured on war songs and
tribal epics of valiant deeds and victories. The principle of im-
376
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
placable vendetta is a standard part of their existence. The
Bedouin cuts down orchards, burns crops and kills cattle like
any other corsair. The Reverend Henry Field described them in
1884 as "a horrible set of cutthroats, useless in war, as they
were subject to no discipline, and only intent on pillage." 32 In
our own time, Lowell Thomas reiterates that "the desire to loot
is an all-consuming passion with the Bedouins and is not con-
sidered a form of stealing with them, but is listed among the car-
dinal virtues." 33
The Bedouin has no conception of the word 'home' analogous
to ours. He roams a certain well-defined territory with his
herds, paying no attention to international boundaries. He eats
anything : boiled grasshoppers, roast rats, lizards, cats, or any
kind of bird he can snare. 34 The life of songbirds in his vicinity
is precarious since he will eat any he can catch.
No fuss is made over the dead. When the body is done with
life, it is simply laid out of sight and promptly forgotten. "The
living do not lay to heart the death of friends." 35
There is no sentimentality wasted on women, who do all the
slave's work around camp. The Bedouin has a belief in regard
to a certain aromatic shrub that if a man can tie a bow in a twig
with one hand, he will marry two wives. "This superstition,"
says Merrill, "comes the nearest to romance of anything that I
have seen in Arab or Bedouin life." 36
Bedouin women are graceful in youth but begin to walk with
a peculiarly waddling gait after they leave their teens. They
weight themselves down with pounds of barbaric jewelry. Their
faces are disfigured with tattooed patterns of stars, circles and
lines of blue spots. Their knowledge is limited almost entirely
to the trivial tasks of camp life. "They do not know what year
it is," writes Madeleine Miller, "what month, what hour." 37
Almost alone among the peoples of the earth the Bedouin has
virtually no creative gifts. He destroys and never builds. His
browsing herds of sheep and goats gut the last blade of green
from wherever he camps. His utterly primitive mentality al-
most baffles description. In the settled districts he is as likely
'A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR"
377
to ride straight through a cornfield as bother about skirting
around it.
The settled Arabs, known as the fellaheen, are considered by
the Bedouin to be of different (and inferior) race from him-
self. The fellah lacks nearly all the undeniable charm of his
Bedouin countryman. He is incredibly backward and fanatic,
and usually of low intelligence. He wears a long plain cotton
dress resembling the old-fashioned nightshirt, which is never
washed and lasts him for years. He is generally undersized and
sickly.
The villages of gray mud huts invariably nestle on the side of
a hill, with an evident eye to safety from surprise attack. The
dwellings themselves are rude structures made of mud or camel
dung thatched with straw, without windows or ventilation. In
one part of the shack lives the owner and his family, sleeping to-
gether on straw mats. In the other part is housed the cattle,
together with the hired hand, if one is employed. The place
is heated by a rough oven which burns the usual fuel, dried cat-
tle dung.
In the house is not the slightest evidence of artistic or creative
impulse to remind the visitor that these people are lifted above
the stage of simple animal appetite. There are neither beds,
tables, chairs nor candlesticks. On the clay floor are usually a
plentiful supply of homemade rugs. The diners sit at mealtime
in squatting position around a common dish, reaching in with
unwashed fingers for the food. Women may not sit at this
rude table, but get the remains, together with the dogs, when
the men are through.
Around the houses filth accumulates like guano. Not a tree
is to be seen in the whole village, with the exception of an occa-
sional gnarled olive planted by some generation long forgotten.
The only vegetation is a clump of cactus here and there. The
children run around half naked. Before the Jews came, most
of them suffered from horrible eye disease : many were blind.
The haggard faces and monotonous dark blue rags of the women
make them actually repulsive. They work exactly like animals.
378 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
To this day they give birth to their children in the middle of the
road, returning to their village not only with the new-born child
on their back, but with other heavy loads besides. 38
The male peasant himself is no lover of hard work. Dr. Mor-
ton, with long opportunity to observe what the Arab calls 'land
cultivation,' comments : 'Tor the most part, the Arab watch-
word is 'do as little as you can, and let what must be done be
done by your wife !' " 39 And Jarvis remarks sarcastically that
if the poorly sowed crop is a failure, "the Arab is on the whole
pleased, as the awful necessity of garnering the corn is thereby
obviated." 40 He is invariably in debt to the effendi loan sharks
of neighboring cities. The fellah's farm implements consist
solely of a wooden plough of the most elementary design. He
may own an emaciated donkey or camel. If he has a cow, it
is as lean as the proverbial creature of Pharaoh's dream. Cattle
and chicken diseases are a widespread and permanent feature.
Only a few varieties of vegetables are planted except near the
Jewish villages.
Much of the land is held under the antiquated imtshcHa system.
The village lands are owned by the community in common, but
cultivated individually. Every two years or so, each tiller moves
on to a fresh holding. Thus this curious rotation goes on in-
definitely. The result is that no one attempts to make any
permanent improvements. Not even stones are removed from
the fields. The fellah, like his Bedouin brother, quite respect-
fully consigns the future to Allah whose business it is to take
care of it.
LEVANTINE WORSHIP OF GOD
There has seldom existed such a tangle of murderous animosi-
ties as those which divide the many creeds in this motherland
of religions.
The majority of the population is Moslem, divided into two
great camps, the Sunnites and Shi'ites. The Sunnites, most nu-
merous, are in turn split up into four principal sects, all of them
fanatics who hate each other hardly less than they do the de-
'A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR'
379
spised infidel. 41 Around Acre is a large group of Bahaists, an
heretical offshoot of Shi'a. In Galilee are a considerable num-
ber of war-like Druses, who believe in successive reincarnations
of the one God, including Jesus but not Mohammed. 42
Islam in Palestine is a magnificent jungle of faiths and dogma.
In the north the inhabitants hold the Caliph El Hakem Biamrillah
as the Messiah and the incarnation of Ali. The numerous Shi'-
ites place Ali above Mohammed. There are considerable sects
which believe in the twelve Imams, one of whom is destined to
return, like Jesus, to relieve mankind of trouble and unbelief.
Different groups recognize various Imams as the deliverer : the
Caliph Ali, Mohammed al Bakr, Zeidi, Ismail and Suleiman.
They go so far as to acknowledge different religious holidays,
with varying degrees of importance attached to the days mu-
tually celebrated. Combined with this tangle of dogma is a
confusing medley of fetish and spirit worship dependent on lo-
cality.
Whatever Islam might have been in the past or might be else-
where, the Palestine Moslem has grooved it into line with his
own peculiar racial mentality. He considers the word 'J ew '
obscene and generally uses it as 'Al Yahud, TikrarrC — using a
word of excuse for mentioning an object indecent to respectable
Moslems. At the Nebi Moussa festival each year, an hysterical
mob of true believers goes through the streets in procession, in a
delirium of wild, whirling dances, waving huge knives and clubs.
They are led by young townsmen of the low-effendi type who
distribute pamphlets and shout bawdy songs of their own com-
position. Rising in low frenzied wail from this serpentine line
as it swings along is the continuous guttural chant : "El Billad
billadna, Wa el Yahud Kellabna" (This is our land and the Jews
are our dogs). The Christian is despised with even more un-
compromising rigor. On this score Sir Ronald Storrs states
briefly that Moslems are "everywhere more tolerant of Jews
. . . than of Christians." 43 The expulsion of all Christian mis-
sionaries is one of the standard Moslem demands.
Christian Arabs are not only of markedly different racial mix-
ture, but their whole role in the country's social-economic struc-
380
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
ture is strikingly like that of the Jews in the Diaspora, They are
mainly engaged in service occupations. Approximately 12%
of the population, they are 37.7% of those engaged in manufac-
turing, transport and commerce. Only 15% of the Christians
of working age are in agriculture as compared to the Moslems'
66%. And like the Diaspora Jews they are huddled together
in certain towns and villages, forming what is for all practical
purposes a Christian ghetto. 44
Christians number today in the neighborhood of one hundred
thousand. There are no exact denominational figures available.
The official figures for 1920 named thirty-five thousand Greek
Orthodox communicants, twenty-five thousand Catholics (split
into two distinct groups centering around the Italian and French
clerics respectively) and an assortment of others, including Mar-
onite, Coptic, Anglican, Armenian, Gregorian, Jacobite, Abys-
sinian, as well as varieties of Uniate Churches and a sprinkling of
Protestants. All of these share in the principal shrines. All
hate each other with an explosive bigotry hardly understandable
to anyone who has not breathed this morbid atmosphere.
Among their squabbles is the question of the actual site of the
Annunciation. At Nazareth the Catholics have a chapel to mark
their claim, the Greeks another, the Rumanians a third. "For
all one knows," remarks Beverley Nichols, "there may be a
dozen similar chapels." 45 Vicious struggles go on for every
foot of the Holy Places. The contest between the Franciscans
and the Orthodox priests as to who is to be permitted to clean
the north window of the Basilica in Bethlehem, usually ends in
an open row. When on December 28, 1936 the Basilica was
again cleaned, both the District Commissioner and the Police
Chief had to be present. In the Holy Sepulchre, the presence
of military guards is always required on high holidays to keep
the Armenians, Latins and Orthodox priests from bashing in
each other's heads. In the Church of the Nativity in Bethle-
hem, the priests of the different sects have been known to brain
each other with the brass candlesticks at Christmas.
Their brawls never cease. If not over 'Holy Places' and
liturgical rights, they are accused of stealing each other's con-
"A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR"
381
verts. Their statements are always bald and uncompromising.
An example is the accusation hurled by the Latin Patriarch in
Jerusalem against the Protestants, claiming that they had "de-
spoiled many important Catholic sites in Jerusalem." 46
The classic quarrel is between the Greek and Roman Catho-
lics, with the British invariably taking a covert stand in favor
of the Greeks. An outstanding instance occurred during 1921
when the collapse of Russia left the Greek Patriarchate prac-
tically bankrupt. This was the hour the Latin Church had
waited centuries for. Promptly it entered into an agreement to
purchase the rights and properties of its Orthodox rival, includ-
ing the envied Church of the Sepulchre. The Authorities, get-
ting wind of what was occurring, stepped into the breach and
forbade the sale. They did not care to allow the Catholic
Church to gain the paramount importance which possession of
these sites would give. The collapsing Orthodox clericals were
bolstered up by a subvention from the public funds and a Brit-
ish puppet, His Beatitude the Greek Patriarch Damianos, was in-
stalled on the bankrupt patriarchal throne over the violent op-
position of the majority of his own synod. 47
Beneath the surface, the Latin Church has been in almost a
continuous state of war with the Authorities since the Adminis-
tration began. The English suspect that the Vatican is working
hand-in-glove with the Italian Foreign Office. The Vatican in
turn is aroused because the Holy Places Commission has not yet
been constituted, though the League had instructed Britain to
do so from the beginning.
There is not the slightest concord in the religious life of this
land. The Latin Patriarch, for example, considers the local
Y.M.C.A. not only a Protestant missionary institution but an
English propaganda center to boot, and has threatened with ex-
communication every Catholic who dares enter its portals. 48
On the other side of the fence is the symbolic case of a Moslem
sentenced to one month in jail (on June 23, 193 1) for having
been converted to Protestantism.
No matter how virulently these factions may detest each
other, they all join in the opinion that to injure a Jew is a work
3 82
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
well pleasing in the sight of God. The Greeks, particularly, are
fond of raising the old blood-libel charge, exactly as they used
to in Russia. This type of Jew-baiting the Administration seems
to regard with surreptitious enjoyment. A speaking instance
occurred in March 1921, when the Greek Orthodox daily Falas-
tin headlined an atrocious story accusing the Jews of kidnaping
Arab children in order to drink their blood during the Passover
rites. Jewish agencies angrily remonstrated to the Government.
The result was a typical piece of horseplay, with an official
named Mark Young ordering the Jaffa authorities "to investi-
gate the report immediately to ascertain what truth there is
in it."
With the cooperation of Government House, native Christians
have placed themselves in the forefront of Arab nationalist agi-
tation. 49 The intellectual activity and propaganda work is al-
most exclusively in their hands. It flatters their vanity, says
Duff, "to believe that they are on equal terms with the young
Moslem gentlemen of Jerusalem and Jaffa to whom through all
the centuries, their people have had to look up with awe and re-
spect." 50 There is no doubt in the minds of unbiased observers,
however, that any idea of a lasting alliance between Cross and
Crescent in Palestine is a chimera. Christians have undergone
an oppression here not one whit less horrible than that meted
out by their co-religionists to the Jews in Europe. Periodic
massacres have occurred consistently since the time when the
Moslem Chief, Ashraf Khalil, celebrated his conquest of Acre
with a great display of Christian skulls on the spears of his body-
guards.
As long as the Crescent ruled, the Christians were to be point-
edly reminded by blackmail, bloody repression, rape and mur-
der that they were inferior sons of dogs whom the Prophet for
some reason of dark mercy allowed to carry on. After sub-
jecting Jews and Christians to every barbarity a distorted imag-
ination could invent, the notorious el Djezzar actually issued or-
ders in 1 80 1 to massacre every Christian in Palestine. Only the
threat of the great British Admiral, Sir Sidney Smith, to blow
'A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR"
383
Acre out of the ocean if a single Christian head fell, saved them
from extermination. Living men still remember the terrible
events of i860 when in a widespread murderous attack reminis-
cent of the riots of 1936, sixteen thousand Christians were slaugh-
tered and countless others left destitute. Throughout Palestine
and southern Syria whole villages embraced Islam as the only
alternative to certain death. Again only the hurried interven-
tion of the Great Powers prevented a general massacre.
In each of the pogroms which have occurred under British
Administration the old enmities have come to the surface. Soon
Christians, too, heard an angry familiar scream which made them
shiver in their skins. They and their forefathers knew its mean-
ing. It was the call to war against the detested infidel, the old
battle-cry of Islam : "Mohammed and his sword !" The Chris-
tians knew it meant them and no one else. Christians were
freely attacked, and kept to their houses for safety.
The publicity officer of the Palestine Administration has
always been at eternal pains to broadcast the slightest squabbles
between Arab and Jew "apparently to indicate the terrific diffi-
culties in judicial handling the Mandatory labors under." 51 But
news of the constant brawls and killings between followers of
Cross and Crescent is always carefully suppressed. Actually the
hatred which separates Moslem and Christian is far more funda-
mental than that held by either party for the Jew. This enmity
does not need to be fostered, since it is traditional.
Despite rigid censorship, news events break through, such as
the mob attack on the Protestant Missionary Council Conference
held in April 1928, when a pitched battle was fought between
rioters and police. Moslem attacks flared up viciously in Sep-
tember 1930. Christian notables were assassinated. In mixed
quarters, Moslem well-owners refused to sell water to Christians.
The paper El Yarmonk, bespeaking the general feeling, advised
Arab Catholics coldly : "Christians are not entitled to speak for
the Arab nation." 52 Feeling was at a dangerous tension. With
an iron hand, in significant contrast to its handling of Jewish-
Arab disturbances, the Government swiftly intervened. Troops
3 8 4
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
patrolled the danger zones, prepared to make sh6rt work of the
slightest disturbance. Special regulations were issued and rig-
idly enforced against assemblies of any kind.
During the recent rebellion, too, Arab bravos swollen with
their own truculence could but with difficulty be restrained
from including their ancient enemies, the Christians, in one
grand all-embracing terror. Pious Moslems, with an eye for
business, called for a boycott of Christian shops. A violently
worded ukase was issued forbidding loyal Arabs' from even
using busses run by Christians. The Christian chairman of the
Arab Labor Association was butchered in cold blood. Follow-
ers of the Cross and Crescent fought it out in bloody scrimmage
on the streets. Once more the Administration stamped its foot
down with surgical efficiency, and put a summary end to this
phase of the disorders. Even the slightest hint of what had
taken place was deleted from news dispatches sent abroad.
THE SON OF THE DESERT SUFFERS FROM JEWISH
COMPETITION
Hope-Simpson's thesis that Zionist development has impover-
ished the Arab, remains the text from which the ruling coterie
of Whitehall continues to draw its inspiration. Utter despond-
ency, we are told, has made the Arabs desperate. The semi-
official British press characterizes them as "a people in despair.''
The root of all the troubles, past and present, Great Britain and
the East assures us solemnly, "is inherent in the Mandatory policy
of making Palestine a National Home for the Jews, with the in-
evitable consequence of reprisals on the part of the Arabs when
their security and livelihood are threatened." 53
Has the Arab really been reduced to penury by Zionist im-
migration ? Has he been actually driven to "despair," as the
Colonials so zealously insist ? The best answer to these inter-
esting questions lay in the English records themselves.
The returning Zionists found a country sunk in the most
wretched poverty. Malaria, trachoma, dysentery and tubercu-
losis stalked everywhere like great shadowy werewolves. Trans-
"A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR" 385
Jordan was almost deserted by human life. "In Western Pales-
tine," writes De Haas, quoting from a U. S. consular report,
"they [the Bedouins] had driven the population to the hills and
its plains were wholly neglected." 54 The majority of Jeru-
salem's nineteen thousand inhabitants were "mendicants and beg-
gars." 55 In 1 88 1, states another official American report, there
was "not even a good wagon road" in the entire country. 56
Some years earlier Churton had written : "In the whole of Pal-
estine there is not a single cart or vehicle on wheels." 57
The population lived in a state of squalid degradation not sur-
passed by the most miserable savages in creation. There was
no professional class. Only 1 1 / 2 % lived from the rude handi-
crafts and small industries that existed. The demoralized in-
habitants would not even trouble to cut wood for fuel "but
found it easier to set fire to the trees on a mountainside to obtain
the charcoal they needed." 58 The peasant scratched a misera-
ble living from land which he leased from gouging landlords.
Other human vultures burned his fields and robbed him of even
the pittance he managed to eke from the unfriendly soil. La-
borers employed in the few orange groves belonging to the
effendis received one bishlik (5^) per day, working from sunup
to sundown under supervisors armed with whips.
At the turn of the century there were 40,000 Jews in Pales-
tine and about 140,000 others of all complexions. 59 The in-
habitants had no other feeling for this pauperized, disease-ridden
country than a fervent desire to get away from it. Emigration
proceeded steadily. Immigration was virtually non-existent.
Not until the Zionists had arrived in numbers did the Arab pop-
ulation begin to augment itself. The introduction of European
standards of wage and life acted like a magnet on the entire Near
East. Abruptly Palestine became an Arab center of attraction. By 1922, after a quarter century of Jewish colonization,
their numbers mushroomed to 488,000. Today they are over
a million.
If the English contention were accurate, we should expect to
find an exodus of Arabs from areas where Jews are settled, into
purely Arab regions. But exactly the opposite is true : it is
386 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
precisely in the vicinity of these Jewish villages that Arab de-
velopment is most marked. Arab Haifa, profiting by the Zion-
ist boom, grew from 1922 to 1936 by 130%, Jaffa by 80% and
Jerusalem by 55%. The Arab rural settlement in the Tel Aviv
district increased by over 135%. The all- Arab city of Nablus,
which held 33,000 before the War, has fallen to less than 12,000.
Safed which had 20,000, dropped to less than 9000.
In the vicinity of Jewish villages Arab workers earn twice the
wage paid in other parts of Palestine. Unskilled labor receives
three to five shillings a day, and skilled workers eight to twelve
shillings. In neighboring Egypt, Iraq and Syria a worker con-
siders himself well off if he gets one shilling a day.
Palestine is the only country in the entire Middle and Near
Eastern section where there has been any substantial increase
either in nominal or real wages since the War. The official
index of wages shows a rise pom 100 in 1913, to 390 in 1932.
No Government figures have been published since that date, but
the report of the Department of Overseas Trade in 1935 states
that wages have progressively increased since 1933. The simul-
taneous fall in the official index number of retail prices, from 100
in 1922, to 55.1 in 1934, indicates the enormous increase in real
wages in post-war Palestine.
According to the Royal Commission's Report of 1937, forty
percent of all labor employed on Jewish-owned plantations is
Arab. Against this, Arab establishments employ practically no
Jews whatever.
Jews spend annually about £1,500,000 for agricultural pro-
duce of the Arab fellaheen, and about ,£750,000 on the products
of Arab quarries and industries. 60 It is estimated that they pay
Arabs in direct wages, £860,000 ; in rentals, £500,000, and in
trade and transport, £2oo,ooo. 61 Payments for land are about
£1,650,000. To these annual figures must be added the tax
moneys derived from Jews and expended for Arab benefit (com-
puted at £1,250,000). Balanced against these sums, the Arab
payments to Jews for all causes during a single year, come to
around £ 1,200,000. It does not require expert bookkeeping to
determine who is getting the better of this bargain.
"A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR" 387
Modernization, copied directly from the Jew, has benefited the
Arab greatly. Machine production is being introduced into the
manufacture of oils and soaps, silk and cotton textiles, and to-
bacco working. In 1928 the industrial census registered ten
thousand persons employed in Arab industries and handicrafts,
representing an investment of ;£ 1,100,000. Four years later the
census showed twenty thousand persons engaged in the same
industries, with capital expanding to ^2,500,000.
In the short period from 193 1 to 1935, Arab land under vege-
tables rose from 20,000 dunams to 65,000 and Arab citrus groves
increased from 20,000 dunams to 135,000. In a span of hardly
eight years, Arab orchards devoted to bananas, figs, apricots,
olives and grapes rocketed from 180,060 dunams to 1,651,466
dunams.
In 1927 Arab urban building represented an average annual
investment of ^200,000. By 1935 it had inflated itself to
;£ 1,500,000 ; and Arab bank deposits had grown from ;£ 1,000,-
000 to ^4,000,000.
Once the poorest, sorriest population in this whole section of
poverty-stricken masses, the Arabs of Palestine are now on their
way to be the richest per capita of their race. As an index to
their prosperity, they import £4-$s. per head, as compared with
£3 -7 s* for wealthy Egypt and ^3.5^. for oil -rich Iraq. Motor
cars, unknown here before the War, now number one to every
352 inhabitants, as compared with one to every 730 in Iraq. 62
The network of Jewish medical centers, hospitals and dis-
pensaries has served the Arab equally with the Jew. It is these
Jewish services alone which carry on the bitter fight against tra-
choma, malaria and other devastating diseases. These benefits
are amply reflected in the great natural increase in a population
disease had once brought to a standstill. "One of the most im-
portant consequences of the rise of the cultural and economic
level of the country due to Jewish immigration," a British rep-
resentative told the Mandates Commission, "is the high increase
in the Arab birth rate." 63 The death rate at the same time goes
down steadily year by year.
Some mention must also be made of the assertion that Jews
388
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
are dispossessing Arabs from the land. As far as one is able to
make out, the area of the entire mandated territory is 26,000,000
dunams west of Jordan, and something over 100,000,000 east
of Jordan. Of this total, Jews own 1,300,000 dunams — a grand
over-all acquisition of approximately one percent of their Na-
tional Home — by which, according to the tenaciously held Brit-
ish thesis, they have managed to frighten and abuse the natives,
and present the Mandatory with a major crisis in the shape of a
landless Arab problem.
Fully seventy-five percent of the area in Jewish hands, more-
over, had not known the plough for centuries. The northern
colonies in Galilee were built on land rendered impossible for
life since Roman times because of marsh and endemic disease.
Tel Aviv was erected on sand dunes which were considered to
be without monetary value. That great granary, the Valley of
Jezreel, now nestling so trim and green in the shining Palestine
sun, was so deserted and pestilential when Jews bought it that it
was said that any bird attempting to cross it would fall dead in
its flight. That adjacent scene of Jewish colonization, the Plain
of Esdraelon, was in 191 9 desolate and abandoned except for a
few sickly villages built on camel dung.
In the case of those peasants who sold to Jews, with the excep-
tion of a bare five percent who bettered themselves in urban pur-
suits, all remained on the land. Most of them sold only a part
of their acres and with the money obtained got out of debt for
the first time in their lives. Within the past six years the in-
debtedness of the Arab cultivator has been reduced by sixty per-
cent, and the tax burden by as much as seventy percent, while
at the same time his income has sharply increased. The years
have proven the landless Arab hypothesis to be nothing more
than simple humbug. The most solicitous prodding by the
Government over a period of the last ten years has not been able
to bring forth more than 664 Arab families who could come even
vaguely under the definition of displaced cultivators. Of these,
317 families refused the Government's offers, presumably be-
cause they had more satisfactory employment elsewhere.
A very real and harsh condition, which the British carefully
"A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR" 389
slur over, is the fact that a handful of large land-owners hold
as much acreage as all the Arab peasantry put together. The
Husseini family holds fifty thousand dunams ; the Abdul Hadi
family, sixty thousand ; the Tajji family, fifty thousand, etc.
The bulk of this ground lies permanently fallow, happily un-
taxed. The rest is rented out to tenants under conditions which
would make the lot of the average American sharecropper look
heavenly. The Hope-Simpson Report estimates a year's in-
come of a tenant farmer at only eighteen dollars — this for an
entire family !
The prevailing system is one of actual peonage. The fellah
is continually in debt to the effendi-usurer. According to the
Johnson-Crosbie Report "a rate of thirty percent per annum is
perhaps the commonest, but fifty percent for three months is not
unusual." Arab improvidence and extortionate interest charges
have had their result in the taking over of many small tracts for
debt. The French Report states that as a consequence, in one
Sub-District in the hills "no less than thirty percent of the land
has passed from Arab peasants to Arab capitalists" in a single
decade. This is the type of creature existence to which British
policy would freeze the Arab forever !
Though British 'investigators' have proven 'conclusively' that
Zionism is an unrelieved menace to the 'helpless' natives, it ap-
pears that surrounding countries would like very much to be
exposed to a similar risk. In his book, Europe and Europeans,
Count Carlo Sforza states that Syrians of all classes, who have
been watching Palestine's development with envious eyes, are
anxious to have something of the same phenomena duplicated in
their country. This desire is written in the clamorous petition
sent the French in 1935 by the inhabitants of Lebanon, begging
them to encourage Jewish immigration as that would bring pros-
perity. Said the important Damascus paper Lissan Alakhar in
a fiery editorial on this subject : "We ought to demand Jewish
immigration, for through it our situation will be saved." 64
In Palestine itself, if official encouragement to hoodlums and
agitators were removed, the whole condition would alter over-
night. The Levantine mind is sensible enough to know which
39o
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
side its bread is buttered on, and to pay that side a proper re-
gard. In 1926 Major E. W. Poison stated unequivocably that
despite mischievous propaganda, "if the Jews were to leave Pal-
estine tomorrow, the Arabs would be the first to cry out." 65
"We are led by a group of men who bargain us away, buying
and selling us like cattle," asserts the newspaper Al Iqdam in
May 1930. "The Arab people have not yet said their last word
on the Arab-Jewish question. When this word has been said,
it will not be one of hatred and war, but one of peace and
brotherhood, as is suitable for two people who live in one coun-
try." Says a round robin issued during March 1934 by the
leading Moslems and Christians of Nazareth : "On behalf of the
majority of the property-owners and consumers, we declare that
we would welcome Jewish immigration and trust that the en-
lightened Jews with their financial and commercial associations
will hasten to respond to our appeal. We have had enough of
losses ; we want a system of reciprocity and understanding.
We are tired of the obstinacy of the money-lenders and shop-
keepers who pursue a policy of boycott and preach hatred." In
the very hotbed of unrest, on May 21, 1936, the merchants and
shopkeepers issued a manifesto urging fellow-Arabs to repudiate
the self-seeking agitators who were leading the 'Arab cause' —
a courageous enough act, since some of the signers were soon
after murdered.
The claim that Jewish colonization has ruined the Arab and
driven him to the desperate acts of despair, is obviously a fabri-
cation. Hidden beneath this pretext lie the deeper issues of
classic anti-Semitism, British self-interest and Arab family feud.
NASHISHIBIS AND HUSSEINIS
Little in the way of political reasoning can be expected from
the inert Levantine mass which has been elected to rake White-
hall's chestnuts from the fire. These people have never been
able to reason along other than religious and economic lines.
Colonel Wedgwood tells us that they think more "of the next
meal than of greater Arabia." Duff found that they had not the
"A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR" 391
slightest conception of sacrifice for the common good. They
invariably bow with respect to the authority of the powerful
and rich. They are forever intriguing against each other. "The
Arab who has a Government position," writes Senator Austin,
"is always exposed to the attempts of other Arabs to put him
out and get his place." 66
Combined with these traits is an inordinate love for the excite-
ment of feudal contention. Given an opportunity for gun-
toting, almost any banner would suit the average tribesman.
Their whole economy centers around the patronage, power
and influence of half a dozen wealthy families. These invariably
lay claim to hereditary rights of overlordship based on aristo-
cratic lineage. There are, in the main, two great camps. One is
headed by the Husseinis, who allege themselves to be sprung from
Mohammed himself. The other is led by their traditional ene-
mies, the Nashishibis, whose boasts of noble descent are no less
lofty. Beyond a natural quest for power, no one actually knows
on what tangible grounds this rancorous rivalry is based, least
of all, probably, the Husseinis and Nashishibis themselves.
Of the six Arab parties in Palestine, five are family or patron-
age organizations. Only one, Istaklal, could be considered a
political party in the European sense. Istaklal is a minor but
loud-voiced group which represents the young-bloods of the
country. It is the party of the pan-Arabs and dopes itself on
dreams of a revived Arabic empire stretching over all of North
Africa as well as the Arabian Peninsula. It regards the Jew as
an hereditary enemy who is to be rigorously annihilated. The
violent tone of this group, and its fantastic utterances, conforms
to the best traditions of Nazism, overlayed with a thick butter-
ing of oriental mysticism. Its members no longer wear the
Tar bush, sacred to Mohammedans, but a smart brown military
hat. Istaklal believes in direct action and is known for its thugs
and assassins. Other Arab leaders are so desperately afraid of
this organization that they rarely oppose it publicly for fear of
death.
The British have tolerated Istaklal as a hedge against futures ;
but its usefulness to them now seems about at an end. It is
392 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
headed by an ambitious radical named Awny Bey Abdul Hadi,
a man with broken teeth, a cynical laugh and, strange in Levan-
tines, a sense of humor. He comes from a large and quarrel-
some family who are always in litigation with each other which
sometimes ends in murder. One member of the family is a
judge of the Supreme Court. Another graces the Secretariat.
The titular head of the Husseini clan is Haj Amin, whom Sam-
uel had appointed Mufti. For years he was the 'fair-haired boy'
of the Administration. He was a frequent and favored visitor
at the High Commissioner's table. He had his own brand of
shock troops, openly tolerated by the Government. Appar-
ently his position was impregnable.
If the Mufti had been created by some fiction writer instead
of having been authored by the Mandatory for Palestine, he
would have been considered too exaggerated a character to be
included in a serious work. He occupied the unique and un-
paralleled position of being at war with the same government
which was subsidizing him. In every one of the riots which
shook Palestine the Mufti was an acknowledged leader. He
openly directed the rebellion of 1936 and at the same time con-
tinued to act as a high official of the Government. He is vio-
lently and incurably anti-Jewish. He has a fixed delusion that
the Jews are conspiring to tear down the Mosque of Omar and
build a Jewish Temple on its site. In June 1936 he sent a cable-
gram to the Syrians in Brazil beginning with the theatrical words :
"Jews and Arabs at war ! "
It cannot be emphasized too clearly that the Mohammedan
Church in Palestine is not a private organization as are churches
elsewhere, but an official body with prescribed secular func-
tions. As its head the black-robed Mufti was a Government
employee. Under his control was the rich Moslem Wakf, which
possesses an income of some £100,000 a year, and literally un-
told wealth in ancient treasure. The W akf is the largest land-
owner in the country, holding over a million dunams, including
office buildings, apartment houses, shops, factories and ware-
houses. It is paid by the Government a fixed sum in lieu of
tithe, and thus receives seventy percent of the total Government
'A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR'
393
revenue from rural property in Palestine. The Mufti in addi-
tion had autocratic authority over the Moslem Courts, also
Government-subsidized, and could appoint or dismiss judges
and employees at will.
Haj Amin was thoroughly resented by his fellow-Moslems
who accused him of every crime on the calendar. He never
kept accounts and the disposal of all funds was his personal se-
cret. His power came completely from Government patronage.
An insight into this relationship of Mufti to Government was
provided by the Tiberias Arab leader, Mohammed Tawil, who
declared from exile in 1930 that "the Palestine Government is
protecting the Grand Mufti, supporting his anti-Jewish policy
and going so far as to suppress those who favor peace." He as-
serted that those opposed to this agitation lived under a veritable
reign of terror and were afraid to open their mouths. 67
The crowning insult in the Government's favoritism to the
Husseinis was reached in 1934 when Ragheb Bey Nashishibi,
Mayor of Jerusalem for 14 years, was ousted and Dr. Husseini
Khaldi appointed in his stead. The Nashishibis, cut to the quick,
went wild. They even urged that a Jew be appointed mayor.
It looked like their star had set, when the Mufti made the
crowning mistake of his career : he refused to denounce Musso-
lini during the Ethiopian invasion, making it plain that he took
British utterances seriously and considered himself no puppet.
The British believed, and with reason, that Haj Amin was con-
vinced that ultimate victory in the Near East would be with the
Italians, and that he had quietly switched allegiance. It was
evident that he considered himself so powerful a figure that the
Government would not dare remove him. From that day on-
ward, Jerusalem maneuvered to create a situation which would
bring about the Mufti's fall-
Now began a game of high politics and involved intrigue
almost impossible to describe. The Administration had planned
Haj Amin's ruin by the Legislative Council project with Rag-
heb Bey slated as its president. Thoroughly alarmed, the Mufti
fought this proposal tooth and nail, joined enthusiastically by the
Jews. This land makes strange bedfellows. The Nashishibis,
394
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
taking their cue, began to send spellbinders to the villages who
soon had the countryside in an uproar. The strategy was to
undermine the Mufti by depicting him as an enemy of Arab na-
tional aspirations. This seemed easy since the secular form of
state was anathema to Haj Amin, who was dreaming of a new
edition of the old Moslem Caliphate with himself as the boss.
The agitation became more and more violent. Government
House watched it with circumspect eye. Here was a chance to
kill two birds with one stone : to unload the Mufti, now grown
dangerous, and to smash the unwanted Jewish National Home
once and for all.
But Haj Amin was no fool. A Husseini suddenly bobbed up
as one of the most violent of the extremists. He declared for
his party in a press interview that "between the Arabs and Jews
a life-and-death struggle is raging, which will not cease before
one of the parties has been completely crushed." Against his
will the Mufti found himself forced, temporarily at least, into
the nationalist camp.
Quite different from the squat, ape-like figure of his arch-
opponent, Ragheb Bey Nashishibi is a tall personable Arab with
white hair and almost fair skin. His manner is smooth and he
has a certain easy Levantine charm. Though he now heads an
Arab independence party which bases its demands on alleged
promises made by Britain for Arab help during the War, Nashi-
shibi himself had fought on the opposite side as an officer in the
Turkish Army. He is said to have three legal wives, one Mos-
lem, one Jewish and one Christian, choosing them deliberately
from each faith so as to enhance his chances to get into Heaven
when he dies, by whichever gate is open. He plays the game
of practical politics in much the same pragmatic manner and
can shift his ground on any issue with the most bewildering ease.
The program of the Nashishibi party now coincides exactly
with British aspirations in the Near East. Today they are plump-
ing for a reunited Arab Transjordan and Palestine, under the
current British favorite, Abdullah of Transjordan. The Mufti
clique rejects Abdullah and hopes for a renaissance of fanatic
Mohammedan times in a great loose Moslem Federation, with
'A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR'
395
the Church as the ruling power. In every country where in-
fluence counts, these rival groups lobby, not only against the
Jews, but with still greater violence, against each other.
The part Whitehall has had in all this can be easily guessed from
the constant open advice given by British officials, urging these
warring parties to "get together" in their fight against the Jews.
Colonial Office organ Great Britain and the East was full of these
admonitions ; nor could even the High Commissioner refrain in
his Annual Report from expressing his "regrets" over this inability
of Arabs to create a truly 'united front.' 68
Under the patronage of the Government, Arab leaders rep-
resenting all the various groups have long been joined in a super-
body called the Arab Executive,* most members of which are
directly on the Government payroll. A sample of this body's
policies is contained in a proclamation issued February 21, 1931,
which calls on the entire Moslem world to massacre Jews wher-
ever they may be found.
CLAIMS, OBJECTIVES AND METHODS
The Arab politicians and the anti-Semitic officials of London
and Jerusalem who spur them on, always paint the A^rab as an
under-privileged creature who is unable to get a hearing in Brit-
ain because the Jews control the press there and by inference
hold the mass of M. P.'s efficiently under their thumbs. This,
of course, is nothing but an extension of that lively humbug, the
Elders of Zion story. Says Wedgwood, drily disposing of this
contention : "These officials claim that the Arab case is not put
before Parliament. The Arab case cannot be put in a British
House simply because their case is anti-British." 69
The pro-Arab case in its entirety is a post-war product. Dur-
ing the War "there were no pro-Arab sympathies [in Palestine]
as [there] were in parts of Arabia . . . and the question of a
Palestinian nationality had never entered their heads." 70 The
great Near East negotiator Sir Mark Sykes dismissed them with
the deprecatory remark that they had "long had the knack of
* The Arab High Committee, has, since 1936, superseded the Arab Executive,
396 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
falling in with the plans of a successful conqueror." The Brit-
ish Peace Handbook No. 60 observes crisply : "With the Arab
movement centered at Damascus, Zionism in Palestine would be a
help rather than a hindrance to it ; for that movement would
only suffer from the attempt to absorb a district ethnologically
and otherwise so different from countries in which the Arab ele-
ment stands alone or is distinctly predominant''
Despite these facts and the solemn agreements signed by the
House of Hussein with the Zionists, the pan-Arabs, backed by
their powerful sympathizers, continue to harp on the 'prom-
ises' made to Hussein by McMahon.* Time after time, Mc-
Mahon himself denied this claim with considerable show of irri-
tation, 71 but it makes no difference. The British- Arab clique
held on to this bone with all their teeth. Discredited or not, we
find even Lord Peel repeating it as a fact in his official report
in 1937.
Looked at over a period of years the Arab story strikes an
amusingly self -contradictory note. In 1925 it rests its case en-
tirely on the alleged failure of Zionist colonization. The Arab
Executive speaks in sepulchral tones of "the economic retrogres-
sion" of the country. It groans dolorously that "the figures are
growing darker every day" and that "Palestine's general wealth
has been reduced by ^16,604,594 during the last four years
alone." 72 In March 1927, after a year's slump had slowed up
Jewish immigration till it was only a dribble, the Arab Executive
asserts triumphantly that "the decrease in Jewish immigration con-
firms our contention that the Government's policy in Palestine
was wrong."
When this line of argument became silly on the face of it, the
Arabs suddenly swung over to the discovery that Palestine, vir-
tually ignored in Moslem religious tradition, was "a Holy Land
for Moslems also." 73 It was on this concept that the horrible
events of 1929 pivoted.
It is at least a curious accident that all these inconsistencies of
Arab viewpoint correspond exactly with whatever happens to
be agitating Whitehall most at the moment. When the British
* See Appendix B, p. 580.
'A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR 1
397
switched to a policy aiming at the consolidation of Arabia into
a confederacy under their control, the character of Arab de-
mands shifted accommodatingly. At a conference in Jeru-
salem, the Arab leaders took a pledge under oath "to uphold the
integrity of Arabia as a nation and to recognize no divisions
therein." 74 Yet when it became apparent to the British Foreign
Office that it would have to go slow on such a program, the Arab
agenda shifted obligingly once more. Now the demand was
for sectional independence, a concept regarded as nothing less
than traitorous a few months earlier.
Present-day demands are for a complete stoppage of Jewish
immigration and a cessation of land sales. The claim is that
Palestine is an Arab land and that the Jews, entering on Arab
sufferance, can only hope to attain the status of paying guests.
Some leaders go so far as to propose the confiscation of Jewish
property ; others are satisfied with political domination only.
The Mufti's gang would force them all to become Moslems ;
while the followers of Awny Bey would drive them into the
sea altogether.
Much of this, of course, is the sheerest political hokum, since
very few Levantines have ever been known to lose an oppor-
tunity to make money. Duff writes that "nearly every man of
Nazareth had land ready to sell to the Jews, despite the fact that
they were continually signing high-sounding declarations about
never surrendering one inch of the 'Fatherland' to the detested
intruders." 75 At the very peak of the 1936 revolt the three
visiting United States Senators found that "while the Arab High
Committee in charge of the Strike is officially demanding pro-
hibition of the sale of land to Jews, some of the prominent Arab
leaders active in that Committee are quietly trying to sell land
to Jewish buyers." 76
If this proposed tabu were placed into effect a number of
knotty problems would at once arise which none of the Arab-
English solons have yet attempted to answer. Could Arab land,
for instance, be sold to a Jew who has become a convert to Mo-
hammedanism ? May the Druses, who are not Arabs but Per-
sians, and heretical Moslems to boot, own land? A large part of
398 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
the Afghan population calls itself Wnai Yisroel 11 and claims
Jewish descent though they are fanatic Moslems. If they
came to Palestine could they own land ? Half a century ago a
great number of Samaritans accepted Moslemism for the prac-
tical advantages involved. May these people buy land ? Fi-
nally, what is the attitude toward Arabs who are converted to
Judaism ?
It is also claimed that the Nations, in authorizing the estab-
lishment of a Jewish National Home, disposed of a country
which did not belong to them but to the Arab people. But
here again they appear to be flying in the face of facts. Mr.
Van Rees of the Permanent Mandates Commission remarks that
it is "enough to point out that Palestine had belonged before the
War to the Ottoman Empire. That country had been con-
quered not by Arabs of Palestine, but by the Allies, and had
finally been ceded to the Allies and not to the Arabs." 78 If the
League's right to act on behalf of the Jews is contested, it would
be equally valid to challenge the status of every other area dis-
posed of through the Mandatory system. Turkey then would
have an a priori case for the return of all her lost territory in
Arabia. Certainly if this business of self-determination is to be
carried through honestly, the rich oil area of Mosul must be
taken from Iraq and given back to the Turks. Of the 342,000
people who inhabit the Mosul Vilayet, only 60,000 are Arabs,
and these are newcomers living in the town of Mosul itself. Yet,
since Mosul oil is one of the major reasons for British presence
in the Near East, would they dream of urging its return to Tur-
key under the same rules they are attempting to apply in Pales-
tine ?
During the middle of the last century, before Zionist immigra-
tion began, there were not one hundred thousand people all told
in the entire country on both sides of the Jordan. There are
plenty of official statistics and hundreds of books and consular
reports on every detail. The vast majority of Arabs are there-
fore newcomers, the same as the Jews. Wherefore are they so
land-hungry that they must debouch onto this little territory ?
The question arises : Are they without adequate territories of
"A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR"
399
their own ? Here we come to a new application of Aesop's old
story of the dog in the manger. We discover that in Asia the
Arabs inhabit an area of 2,016,000 square miles, three-quarters
the size of the United States. It is so wild and unpopulated that
Lowell Thomas was led to exclaim that "we have better maps
of the North Pole ; in fact, we have better maps of Mars than we
have of some parts of the interior of Arabia." 79 The total pop-
ulation roaming this tremendous expanse is less than twelve mil-
lion, including a healthy proportion of minority peoples. If
Syria and Iraq are excluded, this vast domain holds less than six
million human beings. In North Africa, which pan-Arab vision-
aries also dream of incorporating in the Arab Empire of the fu-
ture, is another territory almost as large and nearly as under-
populated.
Here we find the Arabs in possession of what is by all odds
the world's last frontier. No colony held by any European
Power is as sparsely peopled. No nation on earth can even re-
motely compare with the Arab in per capita land possession.
He has so much of it that he is actually land-poor, its value hav-
ing fallen to zero, since there are no human beings to work it.
The great territory of Saudi, whose unsurveyed area can only
be guessed to be approximately a million square miles, contains
not three million human beings, and is undoubtedly the most
underpopulated space on the globe today. The rich Hejaz has
only eight hundred and fifty thousand people within its 1 50,000
square miles : yet it was from here that Abdullah and his desert
tribesmen came to squat on the Jewish National Home territory
in Trans jordan. Arabs have also the vast spaces of Oman, Ye-
men, the Hadramaut and Syria on the Peninsula, as well as
Algeria, Tunisia, Lybia and Morocco in Africa. Even Iraq,
thickly settled by comparison to the immense empty expanses
to the south, has less than three million people in a territory of
143,250 square miles. In ancient times this magically fertile
earth, watered by two of the great rivers of Asia, was the granary
of civilization. It alone could support the entire Arab nation
and still present all the aspects of an underpopulated country.
If the matter be considered from the purely Moslem view-
4 oo THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
point, which admits of neither racialism nor nationality beyond
the community of Mohammed, the axis of possible settlement
stretches itself immeasurably. Even Asiatic Turkey is impov-
erished for want of men. In 1926 Kemal Pasha offered large
holdings to Palestine Arabs on the homestead plan if they would
immigrate to Turkey. (After a considerable group of families
left to take advantage of this attractive tender, the Palestine Gov-
ernment suppressed the whole business, even forbidding any pub-
lic mention of the Turkish Government's offer.)
Since the emphasis of Arab demands centers on a united Arab
Empire, it seems fantastic to believe that they also require for
their national development the nine thousand square miles of
Western Palestine. "When the Arab talks of his right of self-
determination in Palestine," comments Herbert Sidebotham, "he
really means his right to suppress Palestine and to merge it with
some other country. Palestine as a political unit is a ghost of
the Jewish past alone. It has never had a separate existence as
a political unit except through the Jeiv nor toill it ever have in
the future." Actually, Arab politicians do not recognize Pales-
tine at all. In all their public statements they deliberately refer
to it as 'Southern Syria.' They protest continually because
Palestine has been severed from the main body. In their minds
it can be no more than a geographical concept. It is only
through the introduction of the Jewish factor that it becomes
meaningful as a national-territorial organism.
One is forced to concede that wherever two divergent races
inhabit the same territory, prejudices, hatreds and envies must
arise, if only due to differences of habits and culture and tem-
perament. Despite this, the prosperity brought in by the Jews
would be an almost certain guarantee of permanent peace if
pernicious propaganda were eliminated. "The Jew would wel-
come fellowship with the Arab," says Broadhurst. 80 And Colo-
nel Wedgwood states fearlessly that the Arabs would give little
or no trouble "were they not encouraged and stimulated to do
so by the effendis of the Higher Arab Committee and by a Gov-
ernment which does not like the Jews and lets the Arabs know
"A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR" 401
it." 81 Arab papers reflect all the contempt the permanent of-
ficials hold for English party politicians. Insolently the Arab
press asks : "What is the British Parliament but a Council of
Elders of Zion ?" 82 Falastin (usually accounted the semi-official
voice of the Government) berates Ormsby-Gore as a stupid
heretic who "cannot free himself from the influence of the Bi-
ble." "The British Government," it warns, "must forget the
Bible" and must order "the Church of England in no uncertain
terms to refrain from interfering in political matters." 83
It must not be doubted that the Arab has some forbidding
grievances, real enough to him, no matter how puzzling they
may appear to alien minds. One of these is the fear of the
emancipation of women. Another is the alarm of the efFendis
lest the end of the feudal period terminate their privileged posi-
tion in society. To these Colonel Blimps of the Near East it
is useless to argue the benefits which Jewish science, industry
and medicine have brought to the people of Palestine. "They
will reply," relates the London Times, "that these are luxuries
which the people of Palestine can do without." 84 Like all
other forms of existence the medieval mind dies hard. This
deep-rooted resistance is shown by the petition of professional
camel drivers in June 1936, complaining against the competition
of such devilish inventions as the automobile and railroad. The
camel drivers are hence losing "their independence and dignity,"
and must be protected by turning the clock back. Another rea-
son, which appears too ridiculous on the surface to be credible,
though Duff assures us it is so, is that "the Arabs still hate the
Jews, and despise them because they hold that Ishmael, and not
Jacob, was the legal son, and that Hagar was the wife of Abra-
ham, and that Sarah was his concubine." 85
The final and clinching argument is that no matter what bene-
fits might come of it, the Arabs do not want Jewish settlement,
and that they have a 'right' under the principle of majority rule
to forbid Jews from immigrating. Would not the same argu-
ment oblige the British to retire from South Africa and other
places where they are in the minority ? Since the successful
402
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
issue of a wrong does not make it right, must not America then
be returned to the Indians ; and perhaps England itself to the
Celts?
Certainly of all peoples, the English must know that the his-
tory of the world is the history of colonization. Every civilized
country is the result of some such process in the past. Today
all the major peoples continue to colonize. In Arab Algeria and
Tunisia, for instance, both France and Italy are steadily pouring
in European immigrants without anyone in particular object-
ing. In the case of the Jews there is infinitely more reason to
seek mass resettlement. Not poverty or impulse alone drives
them forth, but a grim and terrible battle against extinction.
They cannot retreat from Palestine because there is nowhere else
for them to retreat to.
If the question be one of title and legality, the Jews have in
their possession a charter signed by the Nations and counter-
signed by Feisal of the House of Hussein for the Arabs. If a
moral right is to be posed, can it be offered by the voracious ap-
petite of a new Arab imperialism, already swollen and choking
on vast territories it cannot possibly digest ? You may scratch
Palestine anywhere and you find Israel. There is not a spot
which is not indelibly stamped with the footprint of the Jew —
"not a road, spring, mountain or village, which does not awaken
the name of some great king or greater prophet. Surely," cries
Dr. Holmes, "this is his homeland, if ever again he is to have
a home." 86
'SEMITIC BROTHERS'
If British plans ever materialize, Palestine will eventually come
under Arab domination, presumably as part of the great Arab
Confederacy. The fate of the Jews in this eventuality becomes
an interesting conjecture.
There is a pleasant fiction, implicitly believed by many Jews,
that Israel has been well-treated by the followers of Moham-
med ; that some sort of modus vivendi was established in the dim
days of antiquity, so that the two groups got along famously to-
"A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR" 403
gether. This fantasy grew out of the liaison between the Jews
of Spain and their racial kinsmen, the invading Berbers, who were
largely of direct Jewish and Phoenician descent.* 1 It was the
Jewish Berber, General Tarik-es-Ziad, who began the Moorish
conquest of Spain. During the Arab invasion of Spain in 711,
Jewish troops often as not garrisoned important fortresses.
Lloyd George states that "in science and art the superiority of
the early Moslem is attributable to the Jews." Lecky tells us
that "Jewish learning and Jewish genius contributed very largely
to that bright . . . civilization which radiated from Toledo and
Cordova." 88 And H. G. Wells declares that it is "difficult to
say . . . when the Jew ends and the Arab begins, so important
and essential were its Jewish factors." 80
As the invading tribes began to be suffocated by mass con-
versions and the holding of innumerable concubines, whatever
bond of attraction might have existed between the two peoples
completely disappeared. Soon thereafter, to continue to this
day, Moslem rulers placed a penalty of death on apostasy to
Judaism. Jews were forbidden to ride on horses and were
marked with special clothes. Politically they were consigned
to the same second-rate citizenship which Nazi Germany is now
introducing. 90 In this cruel condition they remain, considered
in the same light as dogs, creatures the true Believer utterly de-
spises.
The Arabic culture known to history was a modification of
the several ancient civilizations absorbed bodily by the barbaric
Arab tribes in their swift march of conquest. It never touched
the Arabs of Arabia, the peninsular Arab. These, writes Ber-
tram Thomas, "remained inviolate by their poverty, their re-
moteness, their unwillingness to change. . . An intolerance sur-
vives which is almost without parallel in the world today and
explains why so few European explorers have penetrated deep
into the peninsula — scarcely twenty throughout the ages." 91
As early as Roman times, when the Hebrews with their backs
to the wall were struggling for their very existence, Tacitus in-
forms us that "a considerable body of Arabs . . . took the field
as avowed enemies of the Jewish nation." 92 Wherever the
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
Arab has seized control since, a critical situation has risen for
the Jews. A modern instance is the revolt of Palestine Arabs
in 1834 against the exactions of the Caliphate. Mobs converged
on Jerusalem from all over the country, and for several weeks
held the city. Venting their ugly passions on the horror-stricken
Jews, they gave themselves over to a mad orgy of rapine, mur-
der and pillage, until the Egyptian general Ibrahim, with equal
barbarism and ferocity, annihilated them.
If one may judge from the tone of the Arab press, the lot of
the Jew under the coming 'National Government' will be any-
thing but pleasant. El Jctmiya Arabiyah snarls that "the English
can stand the pride and impudence of the Jews, but the Arabs
know what kind of vermin the Jews are and will know how to
silence them." Another ready example is the editorial in Islarma
on October 4, 1936, appealing to foreign Arabs not to confine
themselves to mere boycott of Jews but to drink their blood.
It may be seen again in the inflammatory circulars systematically
scattered in Jerusalem, reading : "Kill the Jews until not one of
them remains. Gird yourselves and satiate your souls that thirst
for blood, souls that cannot be sated but with the blood of the
. . . alien and loathsome Jew."
Farago found that "Arab agitators visit the peasants and prom-
ise them that at the end of the struggle the land and wives of the
Jews will be distributed amongst them. With this expectation
the peasant digs up his money and buys rifles and ammunition
from wandering gunrunners." 93 Like many other informed
men, Duff gave blunt warning that "as soon as the Palestinian
leaders understood that Great Britain had really left them to their
own devices ... a general massacre of the Jews and the de-
struction of their colonies would occur." 94 It need occasion
no surprise that the words 'Heil Hitler' proved a magic pass-
word during the recent rebellion, protecting Europeans against
attack.
In every Moslem country the situation of Israel is tragic and
frightful. When the French came into Arab North Africa on
a frank war of imperial conquest, the Jews were overjoyed.
Their position had been so terrible that the invading French
A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR"
405
were looked on as if they had been the troops of Messiah. Even
after European intervention, characteristic pogroms have flared
up like a windswept flame. The fiendish attack on the Jewish
quarter in Constantine, Algiers, in 1934, was a particularly atro-
cious event. When French troops finally arrived, they found a
bloodcurdling scene of ruin and horror. Over a hundred Jews
had been slaughtered. Whole families had been locked in their
homes and burned to death. Houses were sacked, women vio-
lated and children hacked to pieces. Among the countless in-
jured were young girls with their breasts cut off, creatures mu-
tilated beyond recognition but somehow alive.
In as dire misery are the one hundred and twenty thousand
Jews in French Morocco. In Tunis, Tripoli and Spanish Mo-
rocco the picture is as wretched. Only the protection of Euro-
pean soldiers saved the North African Jews from an orgy of
torture and merciful annihilation ; and some day, the Socialists
promise, these troops will be withdrawn.
In Iraq the one hundred and ten thousand Jews live under a
sanguinary reign of terror, not much different from that taking
place in Germany. They are mercilessly boycotted. Savage
beatings, murders and robberies are a daily occurrence. Jewish
girls are forcibly seized and dragged into harems. Yusuf Malek
assures us that "in Iraq a Moslem finds it more easy to kill a Jew
than to kill a chicken." 95
In Syria Jews face famine and gradual extinction. Since they
are completely Arabicized, their fate gives an abrupt answer to
Arab claims that the tension in Palestine springs solely from a
conflict of national aims. The Jewish population of Damascus
has collapsed from twenty thousand after the War to less than
four thousand in 1935. In the last five years, ten thousand Jews
have emigrated from Damascus and Aleppo alone. In every
city and village they are systematically terrorized and boycotted.
In the streets and mosques they are openly threatened with the
same fate as befell the unfortunate Assyrians in Iraq, just as soon
as Syria obtains its independence. The French Mandatory Au-
thorities show little concern for Jews and are either vague or
frankly indifferent. Nevertheless, the Jew views the day when
4 o6 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
a native government will be installed, with horror. The sudden
move of Leon Blum's Socialist ministry to make good on its
theories by granting independence to Syria, threw all Syrian
Jewry into a panic. To a man, they are trying to leave the
country before the French-Syrian Treaty goes into effect.
The only redeeming spot on the Syrian map is the autonomous
Christian district of Lebanon. These people are the only friends
the Jews have in Western Asia. Centuries of bloody persecu-
tion have taught the Syrian Christian a lesson he has not forgot-
ten. The Lebanon is completely and whole-souledly pro-
Zionist. It wants the Jews for neighbors by the south, to lessen
its isolation in this forever-menacing Moslem sea. When pan-
Arab congresses held their anti-Jewish sessions, the Lebanese
papers roundly denounced them. 96 The Government of the
Lebanon Republic has even proclaimed the Jewish Day of
Atonement, Yom Kippur, as an official holiday.
Arabia Felix, that immense curtained mystery, is a graveyard
in which lie buried the many strong Jewish tribes who once
graced this area with their intelligence and learning. In this vast
stronghold of the fanatic Ishmaelites no Jew may enter and live.
In Yemen, at the south end of the Peninsula, Jews are locked
into ghettos as in the Middle Ages, reduced to conditions of eco-
nomic desperation even worse, if that be possible, than the Jews
of the pogrom areas of Europe. Their women are at the con-
stant mercy of every wandering desperado who takes it into his
mind to invade the ghetto. Jews must wear a distinctive dress.
They must keep in the shadows. They are prohibited from
riding on horseback. Their children, by edict of December
1928, must embrace Moslemism on the death of their parents.
Those who believe the assurances of the English have only to
read the gory history of the Christian Assyrians in Iraq, after
Britain terminated its Mandate there in 1932, to gain a picture
of what is impending in Palestine. Just as the English made
an arrangement with the Zionists, so they had made a similar one
with the Assyrians, inviting them to rise against the Turks and
promising them independence and protection if they would do
so. Moved by these pledges, the Assyrians were the only peo-
"A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR" 407
pie in what is now Iraq who took up the Allied cause and fought
loyally for the British Empire. 97 Their territory was later placed
under Arab rule because London was anxious to include the
Mosul Oil District within Iraqian frontiers.
When the Assyrians expressed alarm over the British proposal
to grant statehood to Iraq, the Mandates Commission was sol-
emnly assured that the anxiety of these minorities was due to
"mischievous propaganda." Iraq, said the British representative,
was "a country where the Moslem, Christian and Jew have
lived happily side by side for centuries. . . His Majesty's Gov-
ernment fully realizes its responsibilities in recommending that
Iraq should be admitted to the League. Should Iraq prove un-
worthy of the confidence which has been reposed in it, the moral
responsibility must rest with His Majesty's Government" 98
In vain the Assyrians pleaded. The engineer A. M. Hamil-
ton and other thoughtful Englishmen immediately called the
turn without reservation, stating that "the lives of the minorities
have been placed in the hands of people without any morals or
conscience." 99
Scarcely a year after Iraq was granted its 'independence/ and
despite the readiness of His Majesty's Government to assume
"moral responsibility," the Kurdish settlements were bombarded
by airplanes. A month later (in August 1933), a holy war was
proclaimed against the Assyrians. The Government offered
Arab tribesmen one pound bounty for every Assyrian head
brought in, as well as license to plunder any Assyrian property
they could find. The Arab press made it known that all acts
of violence were lawful and that anyone not participating in
this war would be betraying his religion and country. 100 At the
head of the Criminal Investigation Department was an English-
man, who watched this terrific barrage of wild propaganda and
incitement without making a move.
Lieutenant-Colonel A. S. Stafford, British Administrative In-
spector in Iraq, gives a blood-curdling eye-witness account of
what followed. The Assyrians were first systematically dis-
armed. On August 5, an Army detachment swept through
their territory and the Assyrians were hunted down as one stalks
4 o8 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
rabbits. "No pretence was made that these operations had any
purely military objective, for the Army Intelligence Officers
did not even take the trouble to cross-question the captured As-
syrians, who were simply shot as they were rounded up." 101
At Dohuk they were taken from their villages in vans, in batches
of eight or ten, and shot down with machine guns. "The heavy
armoured cars were driven over dead and dying alike." 102
On August 7, the inhabitants of the whole surrounding dis-
trict were ordered to come down to Simel, the largest Assyrian
settlement. After days of sacking, the troops began a cold-
blooded and methodical massacre. "iMachine gunners set up
their guns outside the windows of the houses in which the As-
syrians had taken refuge, and having trained them on the terror-
stricken wretches in the crowded rooms, fired among them un-
til not a man was left standing in the shambles." 103 Women
were ripped open with knives and then made sport of while they
were in a state of agony. Little girls of nine were raped and
burned alive. After being barbarously tortured, priests were
slaughtered, holy books piled over their bodies and burned with
them. When there was no one left to kill, the troops took their
departure, carrying with them for their amusement a large num-
ber of luckless Assyrian girls. The Tribes, who had been inter-
ested spectators of these unspeakable events, then came in and
completed the looting. "I saw and heard many horrible things
in the Great War," related an English eye-witness, "but what
I saw at Simel is beyond human imagination." 104
The troops engaged against the defenseless Assyrians were
given a royal reception on their return. In Mosul the Crown
Prince, now King of Iraq, decorated their colors with his own
hands. The various officers concerned were promoted. En-
thusiastic applause greeted their triumphant procession through
the capital.
After this cowardly slaughter, occurred other massacres, this
time of the Yezidis, "planned by the Central Authorities at Bagh-
dad and conducted by the army with no less barbarity than the
previous ones." 105
To the present day Christians are effectively boycotted in the
"A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR" 409
Government service, debarred from primary schools, and mili-
tated against in all ways. Girls are never safe ; and "acts of
sodomy by force/' states Malek, are committed on boys by edu-
cation and administrative officials. 106
In these circumstances the Zionists may well read a ghastly
projection of the future. In ringing accents the Assyrian
leader Prince Gambar told them : "Despite the empty assur-
ances of Great Britain, those who have eyes with which to see,
and know what Arabs of the type of the Iraqis can do when
let loose, must share your fears as to what is positively to happen
to non-Arabs when placed under Arab rule." 107
CHAPTER II
JEHOVAH ABDICATES IN FAVOR OF DOWNING
STREET
*LET NOT THY RIGHT HAND KNOW WHAT THY LEFT HAND
doeth'
In 1936 again, uncontrolled violence rolled like a sheet of
seething flame over Palestine. For the sixth time since British
occupation, armed revolt broke out, turning the country into a
roaring furnace. And as before, the lawlessness timed itself to
coincide exactly with events of major importance in Empire
politics.
If circumstances are to be believed at their face value, the
recent revolt in Palestine was a marvel of valor and military
genius. For more than two years a handful of petty ruffians,
sniping from ambush in the hills, have held the greatest empire
in the world at bay. "It may be doubted," states Sidebotham,
"whether there were ever more than one thousand men in the
field against us." 1 What London is asking us to believe at
the moment is that in a country half the size of Ohio, thirty-
two thousand troops equipped with airplanes, tanks and all the
trappings of war are unable to subdue a small gang of despera-
does who have succeeded in keeping it in a state of insecurity
and uproar for years. The utter helplessness and awful ineffi-
ciency of the Mandatory in the face of this minor insurrection
is laid on too thick to be credible.
In scarcely more than a century London has managed to seize
for itself over a quarter of the land surface of the globe. Is
not the very existence of this vast Empire a gilt-edged guarantee
that England has never shown herself inept at the business of
handling rebellion ? It is not generally realized that the British
are constantly engaged in putting down insurrection in far-
separated places. In the Hadramaut they have been going
through a merciless mopping-up process. Along India's north-
410
JEHOVAH ABDICATES
411
west frontier they are cleaning out the revolting tribesmen of
Waziristan with a ruthless hand. The colonies without excep-
tion are ruled by the axiom, 'Spare the rod and spoil the child/
In Kenya, another mandated territory, when a government
clerk named Thuku founded the "East Africa Native Associa-
tion" to protest the peonage system introduced by the Colonials,
he was grabbed on the charge of 'sedition' and deported with-
out trial, after the police had slaughtered a score of his followers
for demonstrating in front of the jail where he was held. In
Iraq an emergency similar to the one in Palestine was handled
by Sir Percy Cox with scant ceremony. All the Arab leaders
concerned were immediately placed in custody, offending news-
papers suppressed and their editors arrested. Sir Percy's com-
ments were brief and to the point : ". . . the High Commis-
sioner will not hesitate to take drastic steps against any persons,
tribesmen or townsmen who do not take the present warning,
but continue to emulate the seditious vagaries of those now
placed under restraint." This was language that Arabs could
understand, and the whole affair died aborning. Subsequent re-
bellions were handled in short order by the Iraqi shadow gov-
ernment, by simply detailing a few British airplanes to bomb
the tribesmen into submission.
In Palestine the close integration of officialdom itself with
the 'patriotic' movement is hardly open to doubt. It is suffi-
cient to cite the Nationalist demonstration of October 10, 1934,
attended by prominent Government functionaries in their of-
ficial capacity, where "Arab civilization" was lauded and "the
coming independence and unification of the Arab countries"
(including Palestine) enthusiastically hailed. This hidden corn-
plot reveals itself even more obviously in an incident of twelve
months earlier. An anti-Jewish demonstration had been an-
nounced. The usual preparations had preceded it, the ferocious
bluster and screaming agitation, led by the familiar leaders of the
Arab Executive. Unfortunately for these plans, Nazi violence
in Germany, then unique and shocking, suddenly shook the soul
of civilization like an earthquake. All articulate reaction to
these startling events was overwhelmingly with the stricken
4 I2
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
Jews. Sympathy for human suffering and despair was the pre-
vailing mood, and it was apparent at that moment that anti-
Jewish riots would be more than embarrassing to the British
Government. In an amazing about-face the scheduled disorders
were converted into a peaceful demonstration against the Gov-
ernment, in which the word Jew was not even mentioned. A
strike had been called, but it was quietly recalled, without a
word of explanation. Part of the mob which had been so care-
fully prepared could not, however, be headed off. Several
thousand hoodlums charged the police in Jaffa after having been
told by their own leaders to disperse. Taking his duties seri-
ously, Assistant Superintendent of Police Faraday ordered his
men to fire. In the melee he himself was badly wounded ; and
as a result an irate British judge sentenced some of the rioters to
imprisonment. Immediately the District Court quashed the
sentence and released the prisoners on "promise of good be-
havior." The bewildered Faraday soon after had his post taken
away from him and was exiled to Beersheba. 2
The British are reputed to possess the shrewdest Intelligence
and Secret Service in existence. Concentrated in one small
branch of the War OfHce, known as M.I.5, this superbly organ-
ized spy and counter-spy system is respected wherever espion-
age exists. Yet in strategic Palestine the Authorities never
seemed to know that seditious unrest of the most explosive type
was being openly organized right under their noses. Like the
previous uprisings, the rebellion of 1936 was scarcely a bolt
from the blue. It only became possible after prolonged elabora-
tion and shaping. Much of it was openly bought and paid for.
"Fifty well-armed, resolute Franks with a large sum of money"
observes an official United States Report, "could revolutionize
the whole country." 3 "It is always easy in Arab countries,"
confirms Ernest Main, "to buy agitators and even murderers
for a pittance. It is easy, too, to work up political demonstra-
tions, even culminating in riots, if the fee paid is sufficient. All
you have to do is to summon a local labor contractor and tell
him you want a thousand men to demonstrate. His fee will be,
say, ^50 or £70, and if you hand over this money you will
JEHOVAH ABDICATES 413
get a perfectly good demonstration in the streets, perhaps with
a few persons injured and some windows broken. . . It is im-
portant, therefore, to realize that so-called 'spontaneous' out-
breaks among the Arabs are less common than those that are
engineered." 4
Before this kind of backdrop the riots were openly rehearsed
and agitated. For eighteen months the Government allowed
the Arab press to keep up a daily barrage, systematically brand-
ing the Jews as "the human sexual disease," as "a gang of swin-
dlers," and "a menace to all mankind." Arab leaders publicly
threatened violence and bloodshed. Terrorist organizations
paraded themselves without the slightest attempt at secrecy.
Among others, there was the Red Shadow, the Black Hand, and
a formidable murder gang calling itself simply *G,' over whom,
says Farago, "the British made merry," referring to its members
as 'G-Men.' 5 All over Palestine groups of brown-clad storm
troops were marching, shouting 'Heil Hitler/ At Nablus,
boldly operating in the open, was a military training school for
the Arab Scouts, prime leaders in the disturbances.
Late in March a meeting of influential Arabs, practically all
of them Government employees, was held at Safed to plan the
uprising. A delegation consisting of members of the Iraqian
Parliament arrived to attend. It behaved itself in a flagrant
manner which would have led to strong diplomatic representa-
tions in any other country, but here its stay was made pleasant
by every official courtesy. Fifteen days before the lid finally
blew off of this seething caldron, the Revisionist leader Jabo-
tinsky cabled the High Commissioner warning him that "spe-
cific Arab manifestations on an unprecedented scale are being
exploited to revive the ominous battle cry, 'Eddoivleh MaancC
[the Government is with us]" and received a contemptuous
reply.
There was hardly one of the Arab ring-leaders who was not
on the Government's payroll. In any other country these men,
self-announced plotters of riot and rebellion, would have im-
mediately been tried for high treason. On the statute books
was the Seditious Offenses Ordinance, providing severe penalties
4 i4
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
for any act which conspired "to raise discontent or disaffection
amongst the inhabitants of Palestine ; or to promote feelings of
ill-will and hostility between the different sections of the popu-
lation of Palestine." Yet on one of those rare occasions when
this ordinance was applied, the dangerous firebrand, Hassan
Sidki Dejani, was let off with the derisive fine of £25 after he
had been found guilty of inciting Arab officials to revolt. "If
one thing stands out clear from the record of the Mandatory ad-
ministration," concedes the Peel Report, "it is the leniency with
which Arab political agitation, even when carried to the point
of violence and murder, has been treated."
Responsible Arabs who wanted peace were treated with all
the contumely of renegades who had joined the enemy camp.
In Britain itself, Colonial Office publications were blatantly ad-
vising the Arabs to "unite on a common front." An Arab dele-
gation was invited to present its grievances officially in London
— though no Jewish delegation was asked. 6 The tomtoms beat
in frenzied repetition as Whitehall circles called on the Arabs
not to let this opportunity to smash Zionism go by. The Bu-
reaucracy was now stalking its game brazenly in the clear.
While Arabs who made no secret of their revolutionary aims
were being pampered on the Government payroll, the steam-
roller of official authority was ironing out the Jews. Among
other incidents, every Revisionist leader in Palestine was arrested
on suspicion of being connected with a "secret revolutionary or-
ganization," and held for considerable periods, without trial.
Even the innocuous little Jewish State Party was refused reg-
istration as a legally existing organization. With withering
mockery the Government announced that unless it "eliminated
from its platform the demand for a Jewish majority . . . the
Jewish State Party could not be registered by the Palestine Ad-
ministration."
Under this kind of patronage Arab megalomania developed
like a well-watered weed. A droll example is provided by the
indignant protest sent to a Jewish newspaper by a bandit named
Nabulsi during the height of the riots. Complaining that the
paper was not even concerned "with common politeness," he
JEHOVAH ABDICATES
4i5
says, making his point : "Never have the Official Cotmnumques
designated us as inciters, terrorists and murderers /" 7 Of course
Mr. Nabulsi was quite right — the Official coTmnuniques had
never done so.
Unless the British are the victims of the worst accumulation
of circumstantial evidence that ever made white appear to be
black, the current disturbances, as well as the preceding situa-
tions they have been required so busily to police, were created
with adroit cunning by themselves. The hope was plainly to
institute a struggle which would paralyze the Jews, after which
the Administration could come to terms with the Arabs. And
so we see the fantastic picture of a State surreptitiously engaged
in undermining its own authority and ruining its own commerce
and security by an act of civil rebellion to which it has lent its
own tacit permission. The three American Senators, Austin,
Copeland and Hastings, who visited Palestine in 1936, made
no bones about their impressions. Copeland, product of the
unbending morality of an upper-state New York village, bluntly
wrote that "there are really two strikes going on in Palestine.
One is conducted by Arab terrorists, who throw bombs and
snipe at passersby in the streets and highways. The other is
conducted silently by the Mandatory Government of Palestine
against the proper administration of justice. The prolongation
of the terror in the Holy Land is due . . . to a manifest sym-
pathy for the vandals and assassins displayed by many officers
'who are sworn to uphold the law . . . creating a condition
which could not but shock any American observer" 8
REVOLT BY PERMISSION
For months, fifteen thousand soldiers had apparently been un-
able to render safe a few miles of road between Jerusalem and
Tel Aviv. There had been innumerable hold-ups by armed
gangs, in which Jewish passengers had been hauled out of their
cars and wantonly butchered. Not a soul had been punished
for any of these brutal crimes. With unrestrained arrogance
the intransigeant Arab press hailed these killers as heroes and
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
boasted of further horrors to come. The nerves of the Jewish
community were worn to a frazzle. On April 17, 1936 the
funeral of a murdered Jew was made the occasion of a protest
demonstration. In an ugly mood, the police fired into the
crowd, wounding thirty persons. Immediately after, steel-
helmeted officers invaded Tel Aviv, dragging out householders
on suspicion of having been connected with the protest. Bear-
ers of black-bordered Zionist flags of mourning were beaten into
unconsciousness. Sullen, angry apprehension once more made
the air of the Holy Land a tinder box. It was in the midst of
this charged condition that the explosion was touched off.
The actual lighting of the fuse took place on the nineteenth of
April when a blood-curdling tale was circulated in Jaffa that
four Arab men and women had been beheaded by Jews in Tel
Aviv. Instead of counteracting these wild rumors, the Gov-
ernment added fuel to the fire by dispatching enlarged police
units to Tel Aviv, obviously to protect Arabs from Jewish at-
tack.
The outbreaks were swiftly and shrewdly plotted. On the
scheduled day not a single Arab was to be seen in Tel Aviv
though they generally offer their vegetables for sale as early as
five in the morning. Jews visiting Jaffa were irritably told by
the Chief Officer there that he "really did not understand why
they had come . . . since everybody had already known yes-
terday that anti-Jewish attacks were to take place." 8 Not a
finger was lifted by the Authorities. On the entire road from
Tel Aviv to Jerusalem only one policeman was posted though
the roads were almost bursting with armed and threatening men.
Jaffa burst into flames with the familiar cry "the Government is
with us" urging the demented horde on. By midday the streets
were running with Jewish blood. Many were slaughtered and
mutilated past identification, right under the eyes of the police
who made no effort to interfere.
The contagion spread to all parts of the country like wildfire.
Little boys of six carried automatics, shooting them off on the
streets of Jerusalem as if they were toy pistols. Unhindered,
the Arab press beat a loud tattoo for murder and revolt. Gram-
JEHOVAH ABDICATES 417
ophone records made their appearance in the shops, calling on
the Arabs to annihilate the Jews. Nazi flags and pictures of
Hitler were prominently displayed in store windows. Booklets
explaining Nazi methods of forcing Jews from the Reich were
distributed freely. Only the Haifa district remained immune,
miraculously free of violence to the end, leading Jabotinsky to
ask coldly if it were true that this was "a revolt by leave" in one
part of Palestine, with no revolt where it was requested by the
Authorities that there should be no revolt.
On May 2 1 , the Arab High Committee called a general strike,
stopping all work. Contrary to its own organic law, the Gov-
ernment did not declare the strike illegal. Despite the fact that
it was an openly seditious body, the Arab High Committee was
not interfered with. The queer business by no means ended
here. At the end of June a mutinous memorandum was sub-
mitted to the High Commissioner, signed by 137 senior Arab
officials, telling him bluntly to yield to the Arab High Commit-
tee. This singular paper was duly forwarded through proper
channels to the Colonial Office, "who politely acknowledged it
and so far from rebuking the signatories, thanked them for their
loyalty !" 10 It was followed by even more impudent memo-
randa from Arab officials in the second division, and the
Government-paid judges of the Moslem Courts.
With the exception of Government employees, virtually the
whole terror was led by Syrians, and Arabs from Mesopotamia
and Egypt. Violent men from all quarters slipped in and out
of the border as if it were non-existent, attracted by the lust
for action. The most important of these was Fawzy Bey el
Kaougji, self-styled commander of the Arab bands. A some-
what handsome adventurer of neurotic impulses, Fawzy was a
Syrian who had been sentenced to death by the French for his
activities during the Druse revolt. Escaping to the Hejaz, he
had to fly for his life again, this time for being mixed up in a
tribal rebellion.
More lately he had been Commandant of the Military Training
College of Iraq. The Arab outbreak had already lasted three
months when Fawzy made his sensational appearance in a battle
4 i8 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
in the Nablus area. Soon after, reports came through describ-
ing how he had actually made his way in broad daylight across
the desert from Iraq, accompanied by many motor lorries laden
with full military equipment, and a considerable body of pro-
fessional desperadoes said to have come from the Iraqian Army.
To reach the Jordan River he had to pass through a veritable
network of military posts and patrols by which every water-
hole and lane is watched with a hawk's eye. The Jordan cross-
ings themselves are well known and well guarded. Fawzy
was no ectoplasm which could waft its way across these three-
dimensional obstacles like Shaitan's spirit. The passage was that
of a regular expedition replete with weapons and military bag-
gage ; but there he was on the wrong side of Jordan.
His appearance in Palestine was greeted with a well-organized
blast of publicity not less than that given the British expedition-
ary force of General Dill. 11 Within a few days his photographs,
describing him grandly as "Commander-in-Chief of the Arab
Armies in Southern Syria," were being sold and displayed in
bookstalls throughout the Holy Land. The entire Arab press
featured them with such provocative statements as "long live
the leader of battles, Fawzy, the messenger from Iraq," and "un-
sheath your swords and daggers and press the enemy till he is
strangled." None of this met with the slightest interference
from the all-powerful censorship bureau. Aping the Govern-
ment itself, Fawzy even published his own war communiques,
making extravagant claims of Victories.' These were posted
prominently, sometimes on Government buildings themselves,
where they were allowed to remain for Arabs to see and believe.
An apparently frantic search by the combined forces of the
Army and Police found him as elusive as the proverbisrl greased
pig. While the Authorities were supposedly turning the coun-
try upside down to find him, fifteen thousand Arabs assembled
on the banks of the Jordan to give the 'hero' a royal reception.
From the very start, the rebels showed that they possessed an
inexhaustible supply of weapons and ammunition and were be-
ing guided by a skilled military hand. Most of the Arab arms
were "brand new British weapons and ammunition manufac-
JEHOVAH ABDICATES
419
tured in the celebrated Woolwich Arsenal." 12 It is reliably de-
clared that practically all their bombing operations were con-
ducted with hand grenades of official army issue. 13 Searches
for arms in Arab towns were preceded by a great stir in advance
so as to apprise the villagers that the raid was imminent, giving
them plenty of time to put their houses in order. In many cases,
groups of rebels used police cars and possessed special police
passes.
With bandits and mutineers swarming over every road, sol-
diers were under instruction to fire only in the air. British
Tommies informed Farago : "We are not allowed to use weap-
ons without the "written permission of the District Commis-
sioner /" 14 And Duff was told in disgust by a loyal Arab po-
liceman : "Life is almost impossible for us men of the police
nowadays. We dare not do our duty for fear of being reported
and punished." 15 "Both men and officers," states the London
Morning Post sharply, "have been quite bewildered by the fact
that operations have frequently been canceled at the moment
when they were on the point of being successful." 16 A cloak
of bleak mystery shrouded these strange instructions. Where
they came from, no one seemed to know.
The streets of all cities were made the daily stamping grounds
of gangs who threatened Arab shopkeepers and beat up peasants
who came into town with their vegetables. "For an Arab to be
suspected of a lukewarm adherence to the nationalist cause,"
says Lord Peel, "is to invite a visit from a body of gunmen." 17
Gangs visited villages and threatened to burn them down unless
they supplied quotas of men, firearms and provisions. When
the Mayor of Beisan displayed a foolish unwillingness to swell
the terrorists' funds, his young son's throat was slit in reprisal.
In deadly fear of their own nationals, 1200 wealthy Arabs fled
the country.
Shootings, bombings and every conceivable form of violent
outrage now became the daily routine. Bombs were thrown at
homes, railway stations, hospitals and public buildings. Kinder-
gartens and playgrounds were dynamited, tearing little children
to shreds. Nurses were slain by snipers as they went on duty.
4 2o THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
Trains were fired on and wrecked ; cinema houses blown up ;
crops burned ; trees whose planting represented a lifetime of
heartbreak and industry, maliciously uprooted. Nothing that
would yield to knife or flame was safe from the destructive hand
of the vandal.
The chivalrous stuff these pampered 'patriots' were made of is
typified in the case of a gang who invaded the home of a Safed
rabbi at midnight. They found his three little children on the
veranda and butchered them in their sleep. Their mother,
startled by the commotion, ran out and flung herself down to
protect her brood. The Arabs shot her without mercy. Her
husband coming on this terrible scene had barely time to see his
family dying before his eyes when a bomb hurled by the retreat-
ing intruders decapitated him.
The Yishub was caught in a trap, but it knew from what
source its agony came. Courageously the head of the Palestine
Jewish Community, Mr. Ben Zvi, asked : "Who can say that his
hands are clean in these outrages ? Can the High Commis-
sioner ?" In refreshing contrast to the fawning rhetoric of
Zionist 'statesmen' in London, forthright old Mayor DizengofF
of Tel Aviv saddled the High Commissioner with direct respon-
sibility, bluntly accusing him of having introduced "demorali-
zation, anarchy and lawlessness into the country." He declared
that "the Government railways have become the strongholds of
terrorists from which they set fire to Jewish cornfields and bom-
bard peaceful towns," and that "Palestine is now directed by the
Arab High Committee and hooligans." "You assure us sol-
emnly," he exclaimed (addressing himself to the Government),
"that you are fulfilling your obligations to us, but in practice
you have outlawed the Jews and handed them over to a mob of
criminals." 18
As in previous riots, the Jews were rendered impotent by be-
ing forcibly disarmed. Drivers of vehicles compelled to run the
gauntlet of frequent attacks could not carry so much as a club
to protect themselves with. The police regularly searched Jew-
ish busses and passenger-cars on the roads, while Arab vehicles
derisively passed them, neither examined nor stopped. 19 De-
JEHOVAH ABDICATES
421
spite the fact that vandals were systematically uprooting valuable
groves and applying the torch freely, Senator Copeland found
that owners were flatly refused permission to have armed guards
on their properties. 20 Jewish watchmen found in possession of
pistols were sentenced to long prison terms, though it was shown
that their posts were dangerous and that other watchmen had
been killed in the very neighborhood. Even colonies which
were subjected to recurrent assaults were religiously ransacked
by police, and colonists found in possession of weapons were
punished by imprisonment. Jews were warned that under no
circumstances might they own a rifle or fire a gun. Colonists
exposed to Arab violence were advised to hide out until troops
came. Even the Jewish Ghaffirs and supernumerary constables
were usually armed with truncheons only, or at best, with de-
crepit shotguns that had little military value. Moreover, they
were not permitted to pursue marauders beyond the confines of
their settlements. "Jaffa Jews may be done to death in the very
sight of Tel Aviv's Jewish policemen, but these police may not
go to the rescue !" cries the Palestine Post indignantly. 21
In vain the Jews pleaded to be allowed to defend themselves.
Students and veterans of the battalions who had fought under
Allenby begged to be mobilized, urging that they "did not de--
sire to see any British blood spilled. We are quite capable of
defending our own homeland." The Revisionists offered fifty
thousand Jewish soldiers, some of them seasoned World War
veterans, for police duty. The mobilization of five thousand
Jewish youths at any time, would have made short work of the
killers, but the Authorities had other ideas.
Arabs arrested for carrying arms were either freed outright or
fined as ridiculous a sum as three shillings (about 75^). Those
convicted of murderous assaults or of arson were indulgently
released "on probation." For months, though there had been
numerous murders of Jews, the Government did not take the
matter seriously enough to offer any reward at all. It was only
after a British constable named Bird had been assassinated that
they suddenly came out with a substantial reward. Despite the
wholesale murders which took place in 1936, there was not a
4 22
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
single execution, a more than startling circumstance, since the
normal crime calendar of Palestine accounts for twelve hangings
annually.
Officers who took their duties too seriously were rebuked in
open court or transferred to less desirable posts as a warning to
others. The following cases, selected at random, show the gen-
eral tone of the courts. In one case, three Arabs, arrested for
sending an infernal machine in a suitcase to a Jew in Tel Aviv
and found with a whole arsenal of bombs in their possession, were
released on bond of ^25. In another, two Arabs positively
identified by seven eye-witnesses as having dynamited a cinema
in Tel Aviv, murdering three people and mangling many others,
were given seven days in jail for carrying guns. The murder
charges were not even brought up. In another, some two hun-
dred ruffians armed with knives and iron bars, fell on the Jewish
quarter of Tiberias. When the military and police finally ar-
rived they 'escorted' the assailants out of the vicinity. The
journey was made a source of great merriment. Shop windows
were broken and passersby stoned. "The next day the police
returned and arrested fifteen Jews." 22
When the Administration dealt with outrages it really re-
garded as scandalous, it made short work of the miscreants.
Rebels who damaged the Iraq Petroleum Company's pipelines
were not only apprehended, but their houses and those of their
relatives demolished in reprisal. When the military railway
was scathed by unidentified vandals, the nearby city of Lydda
was fined ^5000. An Arab who set a relative's grain field on
fire was sentenced to four years' imprisonment. 23 Insurgents
caught firing on British troops were speedily handed the death
penalty, these crimes apparently being classified as 'premedi-
tated,' as opposed to the 'unpremeditated,' hence forgivable,
murder and arson committed on the person and property of
Jews.
While Arab papers were allowed to carry on the most un-
bridled anti- Jewish incitement, it was a different matter when
El Jamia al Islamia engaged in what was alleged to be pro-Italian
propaganda. Its editor, Khalil Yousuff, was picked up with no
JEHOVAH ABDICATES
423
more ceremony than if he had been a sack of potatoes, and de-
ported. 24 Similarly, when some swashbucklers with little imagi-
nation took their immunity too literally and dropped some bombs
outside the residence of the High Commissioner, "the Palestine
Government ordered the suspension of all Arabic newspapers in-
definitely, beginning at once." 25
What the attitude was is shown in the order to Jews to bury
their dead at five o'clock in the morning so that there would be
nothing ostentatious about it. At the same time the Arabs were
turning the funeral of an ordinary outlaw into the most spectac-
ular celebration ever seen around Haifa.
Though in every case Jews were the victims, the Authorities
felt justified in alluding to the marauding operations of the in-
surgents as 'Arab-Jewish clashes' requiring the meting out of
equal punishment to both sides 'impartially.' To justify this
piece of hypocrisy, Jews suspected of nationalist leanings were
arbitrarily picked up and jailed, without cause or trial. When
an old Arab woman was assassinated by thieves from Arab Tireh,
known as a den of cutthroats since time immemorial, 26 the peace-
ful little Jewish hamlet, Achuzat Herbert Samuel, was stigma-
tized with the onus of murder by the imposition of a huge col-
lective fine, without the slightest offer of evidence.
Perhaps the most revolting part of this ugly pantomime was
the treatment accorded the Jewish refugees who had escaped the
storm area with their lives. By June more than twelve thousand
homeless creatures had streamed into Tel Aviv for protection,
their possessions destroyed and occupations ruined. The Gov-
ernment finally agreed, under pressure, to contribute the sum of
20 mils (10^) a day per head to their upkeep. After a few
weeks it abruptly notified the Municipality that it would termi-
nate even this meager contribution (June 17, 1936) ; and in an
astounding decree taking effect thirteen days later, it denied the
city of Tel Aviv permission to provide for or deal ivith these
unfortunates. In this amazing order the dictum was laid down
that though the refugees were not to be permitted to return to
their ruined homes, it was up to the voluntary contributions of
Jews abroad to maintain and house them. The Government
424
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
washed its hands of the proposition and refused to accept, or to
allow the Municipality to accept, the responsibility.
Since it is apparent that this whole mad fury of lawlessness has
been prompted from an outside source, the question naturally
arises — where did all the money come from to keep it alive ?
There were men to feed, committees to keep going, agents to
support in foreign countries, and arms and ammunition which
had to be purchased. It is estimated that these activities were
costing in the neighborhood of ^3000 a day. 27 This is a large
sum when it is applied to a struggle lasting many months on end.
Those acquainted with the country know that the rich Arab is
not prepared to donate "even a pound of his own free will for
communal purposes." 28 Nor did his nature show any change
in this case. The Arab landlords, effendis and merchants gave
very little support to the strike. Many, in fact, left the country
to protect themselves.
According to the continental press, the Jerusalem Police found
documents proving that the rioters had received ,£70,000 from
European sources actuated by anti-British as well as anti-Jewish
motives. In addition to this and other sums which came from
Fascist countries, the London Daily Mail reported that a police
raid in Jerusalem discovered receipts and documents indicating
that the Soviet Department for Near East Propaganda had sent
large sums to Palestine to support the insurrection. 29 Another
considerable amount was reported to have been remitted to Arab
emissaries at Cairo, Egypt, via the American Express Company. 30
A great part of the revolt funds came from England itself. Al-
lied anti-Semites in America supplied another portion. 31 Some
came directly from the Palestine Government in various dis-
guises, as the ,£30,000 loan "to needy farmers," actually used
to buy arms and ammunition. 32 The Government-controlled
Moslem Wakf contributed another sizable sum. Mohammedan
countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq which fall in the British
sphere of influence, made a number of public collections for this
purpose. The London Daily Mail of July 15, 1936 reports that
£ 1 1 ,000 was sent from India, apparently without the slightest
interference by either the Indian or Palestine Authorities.
JEHOVAH ABDICATES 425
"One of the surest sources of strike funds," states the London
Times, "remains the contributions from Arab officials in the
Government service, most of whom regularly surrender a frac-
tion of their salary T 33 For the right to continue working,
Government employees were assessed by gangster methods, up
to twenty percent of their monthly salary. By August 15, 1936,
according to a detailed statement published by an Arab paper,
around ,£5000 was collected in Jerusalem from this source.
According to an incomplete list appearing daily in Ad Difaa,
twice that amount was collected in Jaffa by the same date.
This tax, writes Horace Samuel, fell impartially on every Arab
official from the most junior teacher "to the most senior of Sir
Michael MacDonnell's Arab judges in the Court of Appeal, tak-
ing in, presumably, in its stride, Ishak Effendi El Hashim, the
Arab private secretary of Sir Arthur W auchope." 34
By Fall the Levantine began to grow heartily tired of the re-
volt. All this turmoil was the incomprehensible business of
Allah and the strange Angliz who for some reason wanted it that
way. The fellah and Bedouin, for their part, had had enough. 35
The citrus season was coming on. The fruit hanging on the
tree was like ready money. There were not enough hands to
go around. Tradesmen and merchants found themselves al-
most bankrupt and wishing the 'patriots' all in hell in conse-
quence.
The British had moreover accomplished all their objectives for
the moment. They had succeeded in concentrating a huge
military force in the delicately balanced Near East without pro-
test from any source. A Royal Commission was already on its
way to complete the work of demolishing the Mandate. After
dilly-dallying around for months with his huge imported mili-
tary machine, General Dill bluntly made it known that the cur-
tain was about to be rung down on the play.
The Arab ring-leaders were now in an all-but-impossible sit-
uation. With nice consideration Whitehall conceded that their
prestige must be saved at all costs. "The Arab Higher Commit-
tee," states Great Britain and the East, "cannot of itself say that
the strike shall end without renouncing the whole position it has
426
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
taken up. A 'face-saving' development is however possible." 38
With extravagant mummery, as if they were dealing with a
powerful opponent, the Colonials made the proper motions.
Low-flying airplanes scattered tons of Arabic leaflets promising
that if the strike were dropped, a Royal Commission would im-
mediately come and "give the Arabs justice." With ill-concealed
clarity they were told by manifesto and proclamation that all
their demands would be granted.
With brilliant forethought the Bureaucrats cushioned the col-
lapse for their friends in the Arab High Committee. They in-
vited the Arab kings into the situation. But here came a snag :
the Arab kings smelled a rat and would not budge. Abdullah,
who believed he was to be the Emir of a reunited Palestine and
Trans jordan, was mortally afraid of baiting Ibn Saud by a public
declaration, since the latter understood that it was his second
son who was to get the Holy Land throne. Each waited dead
in his tracks, desperately afraid of being double-crossed. 37
Finally, the Iraqi Foreign Minister, Nuri Pasha Said, was
dragooned to act as mediator. He assured the rebels that "the
Palestine Government would not only announce stoppage of
Jewish entry into Palestine but would also declare an amnesty
for individual Arabs participating in the outbreaks, as quid pro
quo concessions for Arab cessation of the strike." 38 Almost
immediately afterwards, Nuri Pasha was overthrown in his own
country and chased out to exile in Egypt. The new Govern-
ment of Iraq turned its back on the pan-Arab world. Ibn Saud
and Abdullah continued to eye each other suspiciously. Only
after these gentlemen had been stiffly reminded that they owed
their eminence to British bayonets, did they cautiously allow
themselves to be drawn into the 'face-saving' process.
With this theatrical piece of staging the 'strike' ended. It was
not a surrender, but in the nature of an honorable armistice.
The plain inference in this gentleman's arrangement was "that
pending the findings of the Commission, the terrorist organiza-
tion is not to be unduly harassed, so that it shall be in a position
to resume hostilities should it not be satisfied with the findings
of the Commission." 39 With superb courtesy, Fawzy Bey and
JEHOVAH ABDICATES 427
his followers were allowed passage into Transjordan. "Though
the Army had successfully surrounded him and his foreign sup-
porters," writes the Jerusalem correspondent of the London
Times, ". . . his capture would have been embarrassing," so he
was "allowed to escape across the Jordan as a more tactful so-
lution," enabling him to "conclude his spectacular career here
with honor and without surrender." 40 Why, one wonders, was
it necessary to allow this invading desperado to depart "with
honor" ? By what providential device was he "surrounded"
immediately after the conclusion of the strike, though seemingly
so elusive before ? And why would his capture have been
"embarrassing" to the Government of Palestine ? Returning to
Baghdad with a large party of followers by motor convoy, Fawzy
was given a rousing official reception which included "a message
of welcome from the Prime Minister, who congratulated him on
his safe return." 41 Since Iraq is frankly a British dependency,
must not this circumstance also be included in the puzzle ?
One hundred and seventy-five days had elapsed. During this
time, Palestine had wallowed in a horrible blood bath which had
cost seven hundred lives and thousands of wounded. Trees by
the hundred thousand had been uprooted ; innumerable stock
animals slain ; forty-eight bridges were destroyed ; telephone
and telegraph wires damaged ; trains derailed, buildings burned
and looted. There had been, all told, 1996 attacks on Jewish
settlements and communities, and numerous other forays di-
rected at busses, police stations and public buildings. Business
was at a standstill. Property loss was estimated at ,£3,000,000.
The extra expenditure for military and police ran to another
£2,200,000.
The Holy Land was tense and anxious as still another of the
obliquitous Commissions entrained from London to 'investigate.'
BLAMING ITALIANS AND COMMUNISTS
While London was thus engaged in victimizing the Jews, of-
ficial publicity agencies were losing no opportunity to squeeze
428
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
every ounce of advantage from the situation. A venomous and
apparently incurable quarrel had developed between England
and the ambitious Italian dictator Mussolini. Frankly worried,
London was straining every nerve to quarantine the Italian by
depicting him as an international criminal who must be ostra-
cized by all decent opinion. The efficient English propaganda
machine was now operating on the old war-time basis. From
London and Jerusalem came a roll of sensational stories fasten-
ing responsibility for the riots on the scowling figure of Musso-
lini. Veiled allusions were made to the Pope and to his liaison
with the Italian Dictator. Catholic nuns, nurses and teachers
were accused of carrying on secret propaganda against Zionists
and British alike. 42 In beautifully chosen words which inferred
an anti-Jewish as well as anti-English plot the British Foreign
Secretary pinned the whole blame on the Italians.
The entire liberal press rose to the bait so dexterously flicked
upon the water. Like a pack of dogs hot after game, the Marxist
press aggressively took up the cry. The London Daily Herald
asserted that Italy had sent enormous sums to Arab leaders
through secret agents. It even went to the point of claiming
that Mussolini had offered the Bedouins of Trans jordan three
dollars a day per man if they would cross over into Palestine and
loot Jewish stores and houses. 43 Responsible publications went
so far as to feature as news a weird story, concocted by the press
officer of Palestine, alleging that posters printed in Italian had
been stuck up all over Jerusalem urging Arabs to slit the gullets
of the Jews. 44 Even the Zionist spokesmen, anxious now for
some unreal explanation of distasteful reality, seized on this frag-
ile straw which the Mandatory for Palestine had thoughtfully
provided.
A scant two years later, Italy, under pressure from its Nazi ally,
was to join the anti-Semitic Internationale so sedulously pro-
moted from Berlin. 45 Jews, who had occupied the most illus-
trious positions in Italian life, were to find themselves, in a single
merciless stroke, ostracized, vilified and threatened with exile.
In 1936, however, before this chameleon-like development in Ital-
ian policy had taken place, Fascist Italy could truly have been said
JEHOVAH ABDICATES
429
to be freer from anti-Semitic agitation than London itself. 46 On
June 20, 1937 the Italian Dictator had told Generoso Pope, New
York publisher : "I authorize you to declare and to make known
immediately upon your return to New York, to the Jews of
America, that their preoccupation for their brothers living in
Italy is nothing but the fruit of evil informers. I authorize you
to specify that the Jews in Italy have received, now receive, and
will continue to receive, the same treatment accorded to every
other Italian citizen and that no form of racial or religious dis-
crimination is in my thought, which is devoted and faithful to
the policy of equality in law and freedom of worship." Ten
years previously he had advised the Rumanians : "Anti-Semitism
is a product of barbarism to which our movement is diametri-
cally opposed. Fascism seeks unity ; anti-Semitism seeks destruc-
tion and separation. If we are to exclude Jews, we will only
strengthen our enemies." 47 In 1935 he had again warned the
pogromists that "if Rumania goes along the road of anti-Semitism
it will have very severe consequences not only inside the country
but in its foreign relations." 48
Before events forced him into the unhappy position of being
the tail to the German kite, Mussolini had been a persistent ad-
vocate of State Zionism. On February 20, 1934 he urged in
Popolo Tf Italia the creation of a "true Jewish State in Palestine,"
pointing out that a "National Home" could logically mean only
this and nothing else. As late as January 18, 1937, he had writ-
ten an editorial warmly lauding the Zionist cause, though soon
after he was found attempting to match cards with Britain by
posing as the friend and patron of the Arab.
There can be no doubt that Mussolini, a hard-fisted realist,
would have considered it good business if he could have disen-
gaged the Jews from the English orbit. A powerful independ-
ent Zion with which he was on a friendly footing would have
suited him perfectly. The Jews themselves eliminated this pros-
pect by their persistent Anglophilism, and Mussolini has come to
regard Zionism as merely a mask for the creation of another zone
of English political and economic expansion in the Mediterra-
nean. It hence looms in the Italian mind as an anti-Italian force.
43 o THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
Nevertheless, not a shred of real evidence has ever been offered
to substantiate the charge that Italian intervention was a factor in
the recent Arab revolt in Palestine.
Far more potent than any interference by Italian or Papist has
been the German intervention, which the English studiously
ignore. It has been shown that agitators now active in the Near
East have been trained in a special school in the Brown House
in Munich ; that pamphlets in Arabic are printed in Berlin and
Hamburg for distribution in Palestine. 49 On October 22, 1933,
it was announced that Eissael Bendek, member of the Arab Ex-
ecutive's Administrative Bureau, would direct a propaganda
campaign in the interests of the Nazi Party. On June 8, 1934
the Jerusalem Arab daily, Mukkattam, reported the formation of
an Arab Nazi Youth Organization. The French Weekly, Mari-
anne, reported in 1937 that a great part of the arms employed in
the rebellion were supplied by the Suhl and Erfurter Gewehrfa-
brik of Germany, which sent, in particular, many rifles and
machine-guns. The Arab journals Falastin and Al Dijah pub-
lished regularly articles of a racial nature, together with large
portraits of the various leaders of the Third Reich. They did
not even attempt to conceal the fact that they had become tools
of the Ministry of Propaganda in Berlin. The shout of 'Heil
Hitler' became a catchword which rang insolently over all Pal-
estine.
Nevertheless, the British Foreign Secretary has persistently
informed Commons that Nazi propaganda in Palestine is not of
such a nature as to require representations to the German Gov-
ernment. This is a subject which Sir Robert Vansittart's pub-
licity bureau has also continuously soft-pedaled.
The Mandatory's press releases, however, made much of Com-
munist agitation in the Holy Land, inferring by unmistakable
innuendo that this was a Jewish introduction and one of the un-
spoken horrors against which patriotic Arabs were rebelling.
This was a deft trick which the Soviets returned even more
deftly. Identifying Zionism with British Imperialism, they
placed themselves in the vanguard of the pan-Arab movement.
Communist hatred of Zionism is fundamentally rooted. Ac-
JEHOVAH ABDICATES 431
cording to Marx, the Jews are not a nation but merely a product
and relic of an outmoded economic system. Hence a Jewish
regeneration based on its own (i.e., capitalist) values is contra-
dictory to the first and initial postulates of Communist theory.
Despite this ideological overgrowth, however, one may suspect
that this rancorous hostility is actuated by a more realistic rea-
son : Palestine as a stronghold of British Imperial interests could
by virtue of its strategic position be turned into one of the key-
stones in the arch of anti-Soviet attack. The Kremlin, there-
fore, not daring to attack England openly, does so by sneaking
through the back door and lambasting the Jews.
As long ago as November 15, 1926, a letter to the Palestine
Arab Executive from the Executive Committee of the Commu-
nist Party of Great Britain offers "the wholehearted help of the
British Communist Party in the great historic mission of estab-
lishing a united workers and peasants republic in the Near East
from Morocco to Syria. . . Great Britain," it asserts, "has
treacherously betrayed the Arabs by establishing Palestine as a
National Home for the Jewish People under an imposed British
Mandate." In Russia the Moscow Pravda roars on August 13,
1935 that "the Communist Party is building a people's front of
the entire Arab Nationalist Movement against Imperialism and
against Zionism." In 1936 the Kremlin decreed "a united front
between the local Communist Party and the Arab nationalists."
By order of the Comintern the Palestine Communist Party was
completely Arabized. 50
Sacrificing outright their social propaganda, which the Arabs
could not be expected to understand, the Palestine section of the
Communist Internationale issued the following manifesto just after
the riots erupted in 1936 : "Arabs, you have seen the open and
clear villainies of the Zionist despoilers. . . Through their despi-
cable methods they have managed to deprive your tribes of most of
their land and to cut you off absolutely from all means of liveli-
hood. But they [the Zionists] are not satisfied with establishing
their National Home on the bayonets of British Imperialism. . .
They are bringing in large quantities of arms with but one aim —
to shoot at the hearts of the Arabs, whom they seek to wipe off
432 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
the face of the earth. The Arab people have two ways open to
them. One is the road to annihilation. The other is the road
to life and honor. He who is ready to take the second road
must choose war, just as his fathers and grandfathers spilled their
blood for their fatherland. The present Strike is our opportu-
nity. The Communist Party joins this Strike, but demands that
it must assume revolutionary proportions, and not by sleeping at
home or sitting around coffee shops. The Strike must not end
until Jewish immigration and the sale of land to Jews will be
stopped, and until the Jews are disarmed and the Arab masses
armed !" 51
As a result of this agitation, organized Jewish labor in Pales-
tine almost alone in the labor world refuses to admit Communists
to its ranks, stating simply "that such people have cut themselves
off from the Jewish people." The Communist is nicknamed
Mups, a contemptuous label which even the most radical
worker resents. "In my candid opinion," wrote Senator Cope-
land, "there is no more solid anti-Communist body in the world
than the four hundred thousand Jewish people in the Holy
Land." 52 Farago, on the other hand, noted that Arabs were be-
ing strongly influenced by Communist propaganda. 53 An official
of the Criminal Investigation Department asserted to Duff that
Communism is "becoming a terrible menace now. The Arab
peasants are being inoculated with the poison. . . The fellaheen
believe that a Bolshie revolution in Palestine will mean three
cows for each man, £4 a month in cash, and 20 dunams of land
apiece. On top of that the Communists will expel the Jews and
all the rich colonies will become the property of the Arab peas-
ants." 54
However, these activities were more sinister vocally than im-
portant in reality. The British are not kindly disposed toward
Communists, and only let them on the loose for short periods
when their inflammatory material is required to keep the pot
boiling. When the dangerous woman agitator, Regina Brod-
skis, was arrested in September 1935, a storehouse of inflamma-
tory literature and a counterfeit seal of the High Commissioner
were found in her possession. Despite these damning facts, this
JEHOVAH ABDICATES
433
woman and her gang were released in the Spring of 1936 "for
lack of evidence." The very unusual nature of this act in it-
self, plus its exact timing with the outbreaks, hardly leaves this
trouble-breeding policy open to doubt.
ANOTHER ROYAL COMMISSION
In October 1936, six distinguished British gentlemen, all well
over on the elderly side, packed their duffle to entrain for the
Holy Land. Their names were Peel, Rumbold, Hammond,
Carter, Morris and Coupland. With one possible exception,
they had spent their lives immersed in the intrigues of Imperial
business. Only Lord Peel, their leader, a handsome man with
a thin pleasant smile and soldierly bearing, lent the slightest sense
of reassuring warmth to this new peregrination of elderly
knights.
These were the gentlemen whom officialdom had hand-
picked from its own midst for the learned work of passing judg-
ment on the late lamented remnants of what had once been a
mandate to the Jewish people for the reconstitution of their Na-
tional Home in Palestine. What they were up to was amply
demonstrated by Ormsby-Gore's preemptory rejection of a
demand in Commons that a woman member be included, to in-
vestigate the condition of women in Palestine. His reason was
that "such a move would be incompatible with Arab ideals" ;
so that now it could be assumed that the six elderly gentlemen
were to investigate only such matters as were "compatible with
Arab ideals."
Here we have a plot so far-fetched that it would be rejected
by most fiction editors as incredible. In the docket is a manda-
tory which, under the most generous construction, must be im-
peached as co-defendant with the Arabs in the case. At its
service it possessed an enormous military and espionage machine.
Yet it knew nothing of the impending outbreaks, did nothing to
forestall them, failed to apprehend the principal culprits, and has
since failed to bring the numerous murderers to justice. For
six long months, with this huge military establishment, by which
434
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
a country like Palestine could have been conquered in a week, it
was unable to put down less than two thousand lawless men.
Now we find this custodian, having turned the patrimony of its
ward into bankruptcy, and suspected of scheming to expropriate
the remnants for itself, setting itself up as an impartial court of
inquiry in order to determine who the culprit is.
In order to secure Parliament's consent to the appointment of
this new body, the Colonial Secretary assured Commons on May
1 8, 1936 that the Commission would "investigate the causes of
unrest and alleged grievances, either of Arabs or of Jews, with-
out bringing into question the terms of the Mandate" Later in
the House of Lords, he repeated this pledge that whatever the
Commission's operations "it 'will not be open to them to chal-
lenge the Mandate itself ?'
At its opening session the new Commission at once began the
usual quibble on words. "We are 'to ascertain the underlying
causes of the disturbances which broke out in Palestine in the
middle of April,' " Lord Peel told his associates. "You will note
the words 'underlying causes.' It does not appear to be neces-
sary, therefore, to inquire into the detailed course of events in
the last six or seven months. If there are claims and counter-
claims arising out of these events, they are matters for the courts
or for the Administration, but we have to deal, I believe, with
wider issues." Thus immediately the Commission tore up its
terms of reference and prepared to tear up the Balfour Declara-
tion and the Mandate.
One has only to read the transcript of evidence to judge this
body's temper, and its badgering and unfriendly attitude towards
Jews. Setting the whole tone of the 'investigation,' Sir Horace
Rumbold unburdened himself of the irritable observation that
"the Jews were an alien race in Palestine." 55 When Leonard
Stein, legal adviser to the Jewish Agency, finished a carefully
prepared statement on the legal character of Jewish rights under
the Mandate, Lord Peel remarked sarcastically : "Thank you for
your very able exposition, which now makes the document [the
Mandate] more obscure to me than ever before!" 56 With
magisterial sharpness Peel demanded to know whether the Jews
JEHOVAH ABDICATES
435
were ready to work on the Sabbath as a condition to securing
public works positions — (which was much the same as if one
had asked a professing Catholic to bring a basket of ham sand-
wiches to his church on Good Friday). At another time the
Jewish Agency was given an unmerciful tongue-lashing for not
constituting itself as an unofficial police body to smoke out 'ille-
gal' Jewish immigrants from the corners and crevices where they
lay shivering. But when the Agency brought up the question of
illegal Arab immigration, the Commission changed its attitude
completely. The fact that no measures were being taken against
this illegal procedure, and the moral encouragement given by the
Government, which employed hordes of these Arab illegals on
its own payroll, did not appear to cause them the least concern. 57
In all, there were eleven witnesses called by the Commission to
expound the Arab political position. Seven of these were mem-
bers or agents of the insurgent Arab High Committee. The
other four, admits the Commission blandly, "appeared with the
full assent of the Arab High Committee" and "supported in toto
the Arab High Committee's case." It was from this kind of
collusive ballot-box stuffing that the 'Arab position' was de-
termined.
When after long delays the much heralded 'Report' finally
made its appearance in July 1937, it was apparent that whatever
else this Commission had 'investigated,' responsibility for the
riots (the only matter which came within its terms of reference)
was not among them. The 'Report' consisted of a monumental
404-page compendium of closely packed, sanctimonious ver-
biage. It breathed brotherly love in every phrase. As a com-
pendium of plausible nostrums it was nothing less than a literary
masterpiece ; but cleansed of all concealing rhetoric it boiled
down to several quite sordid propositions. One was an adroit
effort to absolve the Mandatory from any inference of miscon-
duct or dereliction in its stewardship of the Jewish National
Home. The other was an attempt to justify by principle a
planned embezzlement of its Jewish ward's inheritance.
For this purpose the Report boldly reverses every contention
by which the British Government had justified its strictures
THE RAPE OF PALESTINE
against Zionists in the past. Directly confounding the findings
of previous 'Commissions,' it acknowledges that Arabs are much
better off than they were in 1920, and that this increased pros-
perity has been due to the influx of Jewish capital and the other
factors connected with the growth of the National Home.
It tenaciously remembers, however, that "the Government's
first duty was what Sir Herbert Samuel rightly called 'the invidi-
ous task' of preventing this tide [of Jewish immigration] from
swamping Palestine." It discovers that "the establishment of
the National Home involved at the outset a blank negation of
the rights implied in the principles of national self-government,"
and that "as the Home has grown, the fear has grown with it
that, if and when self-government is conceded, it may not be
national in the Arab sense, but government by a Jewish majority.
That is why it is difficult to be an Arab patriot and not to hate
the Jews. . . In their eyes," continues the Report, "the Jewish
National Home is already too big. Four hundred thousand is a
formidable fraction in a total population of 1,300,000." Thus
the whole attempt to oust the Jews from Palestine is switched
from the basis of alleged economic injury to the Arabs, to that
of conflicting national loyalties.
With absurd disregard for all known facts, the document dis-
closes that "there was little or no friction . . . between Arab
and Jew in the rest of the Arab world until the strife in Pales-
tine engendered it." By every implication, it attempts to give
the false impression that the young intelligentsia of Syria and
Palestine joined in the revolt of Hussein against the Turks, and
hence had an earned right to 'their' country. Not a single men-
tion is made of the part played by the Jewish Legion.
Despite its admission that the Arab has benefited greatly from
Jewish immigration, it returns to the old thesis that the native
cannot possibly compete with the Jew. It finds that the Arab
has to be protected against his own cupidity ; and to bolster its
contention that the land must be allowed to stay undeveloped,
offers the ludicrous argument that any effort at intensive farming
would entail "a complete change in the [Arab] cultivator's hab-
its, chief among which stands the fact that he would have to
JEHOVAH ABDICATES
437
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