THE RAPE OF PALESTINE Part 2

THE ARAB VIEW OF ZIONISM

During all the period that the Zionists had been without benefit

of Balfour Declaration or Mandatory `assistance,' the attitude

of the Arabs toward the Jewish National Movement had been

one of almost unanimous approval. In 1906, Farid Kassab, famous Syrian author, had expressed the view uniformly held by Arabs: "The Jews of the Orient are at home. This land is their only fatherland. They don't know any other." 28 A year later Dr. Gaster reported that he had "held conversations with some of the leading sheikhs, and they all expressed themselves as very pleased with the advent of the Jews, for they considered that with them had come barakat, i.e., blessing, since the rain came in due season ." 29

The Muslim religious leader, the Mufti, was openly friendly,

even taking a prominent part in the ceremony of laying the

foundation stone for the Hebrew University on Mt. Scopus.

Throughout Arabia the chiefs were for the most part distinctly

pro-Zionist; and in Palestine the peasantry were delighted at

every prospect of Jewish settlement near their villages. They

let few opportunities slip to proclaim in flowery oriental rhetoric the benefits that Jewish colonization was bringing them.

Land acquisition was easy. Commercial intercourse between

Arab and Jew was constant and steady. In the face of the practical regard with which the impoverished natives viewed these queer Moskubs 30 who brought with them manna from heaven, the anti-Zionist elements, if they existed, kept silent. Remarkably enough, the incoming Zionists, vigorous, modern, and capable, were treated with high respect, while the native Jew still remained despised.

The Arab National Movement itself, puny, inexperienced,

and hated by the huge Levantine population who continued to

regard themselves simply as Ottoman subjects, looked to the

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strong, influential Zionist Organization for sympathy and assistance.

Hussein of the Hejaz who had been booted upstairs by the

British into a position of recognized authority in the Arab Nationalist Movement after the War, distrusted European nations and their statesmen to the very marrow of his bones . He looked to the Zionists, as a kindred folk, for the financial and scientific experience of which the projected Arab state would stand badly in need. When the Balfour Declaration was communicated to him in January 1918, he had replied "with an expression of good will towards a kindred Semitic race." 31

In May of the same year, at Aqaba where he held court and

made camp, Hussein was visited by Dr. Weizmann, head of the

Zionist Commission. At this desert conference the British Government and the Arab Bureau in Cairo were well represented.

Feisal, dark, majestic son of the Sherif, spoke as the Arab representative. Intimate mutual cooperation between the two Movements was pledged. The Zionists were to provide political,

technical and financial advisers to the Arabs; and it was agreed that Palestine was to be the Jewish sphere of influence and development.

This alliance fitted perfectly with Hussein's ideas.

Basic hostility to all Christian powers characterized father and

son, who felt that the Jews were the indispensable allies, and

indeed the instruments, of a new Arab renaissance. They

regarded a dominantly Jewish Palestine as the necessary foundation to a greater Arabia; and were anxious for a rapid development of the Peninsula if it were to become capable of resisting the attacks which their weakness must sooner or later

invite.

When Feisal came to Europe in 1919 representing the Arab

cause, the Zionists submitted their plans to him. Both Feisal

and Lawrence approved of them, and early in 1919 these conversations culminated in a Treaty of Friendship. Solemnly

signed, this convention provided for the "closest possible collaboration" in the development of the Arab State and the coming Jewish Commonwealth of all of Palestine. National boundaries were

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considered; 32 Mohammedan Holy Places were to be under Mohammedan control; the Zionist Organization undertook to provide economic experts to the new Arab State; and the Arabs

agreed to facilitate the carrying into effect of the Balfour Declaration and to "encourage and stimulate immigration of Jews into Palestine on a large scale." 33

On March 3, I9I9, Feisal acting officially for the Arab movement, wrote: "We Arabs look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement. Our deputation in Paris is fully acquainted with the proposals submitted yesterday by the Zionist Organization to the Peace Conference and we regard them as moderate and proper. We will do our best, insofar as we are concerned, to help them through. We will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home."

The Arab leaders placed themselves on record everywhere in

an obvious effort to attain Zionist support for their own aspirations, then under the cloud of European Imperialist ambitions.

A representative example is Feisal's public communication to

Sir Herbert Samuel, pleading the need to "maintain between

us that harmony so necessary for the success of our common

cause."

On meticulous English records, carefully buried in the Government vaults, the entire story is written in comprehensive detail.

At all discussions British representatives were present.

Lawrence was the official translator at almost all of them . Officially, Major Ormsby-Gore was liaison officer on the ground.

It was he who pulled the strings between Arab and Jew, at a

time when Zionism was still persona grata to the gentlemen who rule Whitehall.

THE MILITARY JUNTA

Whatever the mighty deeds and feats of derring-do by English

arms elsewhere in the Great War, it is not a fact that they

alone conquered Palestine. It is only a fact that an English general led the attacking forces, much as Marshal Foch commanded the Allies on the Western Front.

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When with pennants flying, Sir Edmund Allenby made his

historic entry into Jerusalem on December 9, 1917, the Hebrew

battalions were also there. Sir John Monash's Australians were

the bulk of his effectives. Under his command, among others,

was a contingent of French Colonials and a force of Italian

Bersaglieri from Lybia. As he victoriously entered, Allenby

was flanked on one side by M. Francois Georges-Picot and on

the other by Major d'Augustino, the French and Italian representatives respectively.

It was understood all around that the expressed Jewish wish

was to have the British in control during the early period when

the foundations of the Jewish National Home were to be laid.

The Zionists were at the time much afraid of the practical results which might follow from the International control favored by the French and Italians; and they looked on the English as their friends and sponsors. Under this Jewish insistence the Latins generously allowed their interests to lapse, and the English military was left in complete authority.

The surrender of Jerusalem coincided exactly with the Feast

of Chanukah, which commemorates the recapture of the Temple from the heathen Seleucids by Judas Maccabeus in the year 165 B.c. Lending color to this coincidence, General Allenby said on entering: "We have come not as conquerors but as deliverers."

But hardly had the Turks been driven out when it became apparent to Jew and Arab alike that the entire Administration was uncompromisingly opposed both to the letter and the spirit of the Declaration. 
In his solemn proclamation after taking the Capital, Allenby spoke as if the Declaration had never been issued.

In fact no mention was made of the Jewish National Home

in any official announcement in Palestine until May 1, 1920.

Even all references to the Jewish Legion, unstintingly praised in the military dispatches for its gallantry in action, were suppressed by G.H.Q. from the dispatches as published in the Palestine and Egyptian papers. The amazed Zionists suddenly discovered that "the Military Administration . . . was anti-Zionist and perhaps anti-Jewish." 34

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Weizmann and his cohorts had been used to dealing with

suave statesmen whose assurances were still ringing in their ears.

Balfour had just reiterated that "no one is now opposed to

Zionism. The success of Zionism is secure." 35 Ormsby-Gore

had even gone so far as to urge the immediate creation of a Jewish passport. In Jerusalem the consuls of almost every country were, out of courtesy, newly appointed Jews. The official British Peace Handbook on Zionism, giving on the highest possible authority the Government's conception of what it had agreed to, read: "Jewish opinion would prefer Palestine to be controlled for the present as a part, or at least a dependency, of the British Empire; but its administration should be largely entrusted to Jews of the Colonist type. . . Zionists of this way of thinking believe that, under such conditions, the Jewish population would rapidly increase until the Jew became the predominant partner of the combination ."

The Zionists were under the impression that they had "gained

the adhesion of the Powers to practically the exact terminology

of the Basle program adopted in 1897" under the direction of

Herzl. 3B They were totally unprepared for the unexpected attitude of the Military, and stood around rubbing their hands in consternation.

The Generals, looking on the pro-Zionist commitment of the

Foreign Office as little less than criminal lunacy, virtually refused to carry out London's orders. In this they were obviously abetted by headquarters in Cairo which, in addition to holding the direction of military operations, contained a staff of political observers. 
For reasons which will be discussed later, the Military considered the Jews to be dangerous Bolsheviks who were conspiring to upset the Empire. Moreover, the rivalry with the French was now going on full blast and the Generals hoped to exclude them from Syria altogether. Sir Arthur Money, who took over the administration for Allenby, in high elation reported that he had interviewed a number of `Syrians' and that "their idea of Government for Palestine was that we should govern it; the idea was pure bliss to them." 

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In his mind's eye he already considered Palestine a British colony from which Jews were to be excluded.

The Zionists were put in their place with a bang. Despite

the Jewish majority in Jerusalem, "the Army . . . appointed

two-thirds of the Jerusalem Corporation Arab and only one third Jewish." 37 General Money decided that all tax forms and receipts should be printed in English and Arabic only; and the Military Governor of Jaffa declared insolently that he was going to address Jewish delegations in Arabic.

The attitude of the Generals toward the Jews was contemptuous and hostile; and subordinates were swiftly responsive to the cue supplied by their superior officers. General Money asserted with cool complacency: "I have asked many people in position - in England and elsewhere - why England has capitulated to the Zionists, but none of them has been able to give me a straight answer." He came to the amusing conclusion that the Holy Land had been handed over to Weizmann who had demanded it as his pound of flesh for having invented "in the nick of time . . . some ultra-Teutonic deadliness of gas and bombs." 38

Not uninstructive of the whole tone of this administration is

the case given by Horace Samuel, late Judicial Officer in Palestine, of a medical official "who quite frankly and with barely concealed relish announced that Jew-baiting had been the sport of kings for centuries and centuries." 39 All told, the British officers, quite apart from any question of higher politics, "regarded the Balfour Declaration as damn nonsense, the Jews as a damn nuisance, and natives into the bargain; and the Arabs as damn good fellows." 40

HAND-RUBBING STATESMEN

It was tragic for the hopes of Zion that the spirit of the Ghetto

still stared from the brooding eyes of Jewish leaders. With a

few notable exceptions, they carried with them into the new

movement the spirit of philosophic resignation, the unworldly

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dreaming and weakness under attack which had characterized

life in the Russian Pale. Wise politicians would have known

that the Balfour Declaration was only the beginning of their

troubles; that from this time onward, the Jewish estate would

have to be protected by every artifice that stubborn determination and vigilance could invent. But the inexperienced Zionists considered their provisional charter to be the solution to all problems. Learnedly they mapped and blueprinted the perfect society which was gradually to unfold its petals like a lovely orchid in the new Land of Israel.

Shocked by these pedantic vagaries, the shrewd Nordau urged

that a half million Jews be thrown into Palestine at once. The

Bolshevik horror alone could have supplied such a number of

weary refugees who would have been eager to migrate to the

Holy Land under any conditions. The practical difficulties to

such a project were by no means insuperable, and, fully as important, Arab resistance to the policy of the Jewish National

Home was at this time scarcely visible. Arab landowners, holders of great vacant stretches, were under the impression that radical land legislation was impending and were anxious to sell at any price. It was a golden opportunity, never to come again.

But Zionist spokesmen at that time were opposed to what

they considered `premature' immigration, and wanted to build

on `sound' lines. With cautious logic they demanded to know

"How will these people live? We have no houses for them -

they will starve! " 41

"Let them live in tents - let them starve!" replied Nordau.

"But you had better bring them in at once while the opportunity lasts. Gentlemen, you have the Balfour Declaration: but you don't know England!"

The Hierarchy, condemning Nordau and his followers as

`impractical, unidealistic and headstrong,' was content to wait .

Its initiative had been immobilized by the collapse of Russia

which had been the great center of Zionism. The Bolsheviks,

coming into power, had outlawed the movement on the grounds

that it was a tool of the Imperialists and a betrayal of the Jewish masses. Quoting the master, Marx, to show that Jews were

BRASS BUTTONS AND STUFFED SHIRTS 83

only a social class and not a nation, they declared Jewish nationalism a counter-revolutionary activity.

Completely upset by this volcanic withdrawal of their principal

source of support, the bewildered Zionists did nothing .

Their complete reliance on the good faith of British assurances

caused them to neglect the most logical and prudent step, that

of consolidating their position quickly, before opposition forces

had had time to collect themselves.

The British could hardly believe their eyes when the Jewish

leaders, obsessed with vague schemes for national ownership of

the land, actually welcomed the drastic legislation ordered by

Allenby prohibiting land sales as well as immigration. They

did not even protest when the Jewish Legion was catagoriclly disbanded and told to leave the Holy Land for their points of

origin, though the balance of Allenby's force remained under

arms.

In London a Jewish Commission had been arranged for, ostensibly to take over the business of developing the country

under the protecting arm of the Military. Headed by Dr.

Weizmann, it arrived July 24, 1918, equipped, with the authority of the British Government, to advise the Palestine Administration on Jewish affairs. As head of this essentially political body, Weizmann's first act was to warn his hearers to beware of treacherous insinuations that Zionists were seeking political power. 42

The Generals, who had been treating the Jewish population

as if it were non-existent, did not even bother with blandishments; they simply ignored the Commission altogether. Not even a pretense of friendship with the Government could be maintained.

With a pointed demonstration of contempt, when the Jewish

National Anthem was played at a concert in a Jewish school,

General Money and his staff deliberately kept their seats. Putty-souled Zionist leaders, who might have used the incident for a complete show-down fight in a world where the advantage of sympathy and legality was all theirs, remembered the knout of the Czars, sweated and kept silent.

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Incident multiplied itself on incident, and for twenty months

the status quo of the country remained unchanged. The only

time the Zionist leaders opened their mouths was when "the

notorious anti-Semite Colonel Scott (acting head of the judiciary) publicly insulted the Jews and the Jewish religion in the corridor of the Law Courts ."" The howl that went up,

forced by Orthodox institutions, compelled him to resign.

The Zionists were badly rattled. Wanting the hardihood

necessary to handle this admittedly difficult situation, they could only sit helplessly by, hoping for the best. They watched

apathetically while a civil agent of the Government, an apostate

Jew named Gabriel, busied himself in promoting British commercial interests while the Jews, treated as social, commercial and political outcasts, were kept at a distance. With equal meekness they stood by while the Government sabotaged Jewish efforts to come to an understanding with the Arabs.

With conscious design the Administration fostered hostility

between Arab and Jew. It directly advised the amazed Arabs

of Palestine and Egypt to abstain from any concessions to the

Jews. It formed the Muslim-Christian Association and used it

as a weapon against the Zionists on the slightest pretext. It instructed astonished Arab young-bloods in the technique and

tenets of modern nationalism, in order to resist Jewish `pretenses.'

And in London it contacted reliable anti-Jewish elements,

to form a liaison which has endured to this day.

The Arabs were not only instigated and advised, but supplied

with funds, and their arguments ghost-written by Englishmen

in high places. They proved a tolerably good investment.

Their ready compliance may be seen in the very convenient demands put forward in the Third Arab Palestine Congress (timed to coincide with the British plot to force the French out of the Near East altogether) that the Holy Land be not separated from Syria.

During all this time the Military had been playing a high game

of politics on its own, maneuvering carefully to present the

forthcoming Peace Conference with a fait accompli which

would set the lily-livered civilian officials in London back on

BRASS BUTTONS AND STUFFED SHIRTS 85

their heels. Tension was strong between British and French as

to who should control the Eastern Mediterranean. The French,

traditional protectors of Syria, had a long-hooked finger in the

pie. On Bastille Day, during the sessions of the Peace Conference, when the Tri-color flag was run up at Sidon, a chill went down the spines of the military gentlemen in Jerusalem .

The Generals aimed at one big Arab state or federation of

states, to include the Hejaz, Iraq, Syria and Palestine, which was to lie, as Egypt had lain, in the political and economic pocketbook of Britain. For this consummation to be realized it was essential that the population of Palestine should be so anti-

Zionist and the population of Syria so anti-French that with the

best will in the world, bier entendu, it would be impossible to

put into force a French control of the Levant or a Zionist policy

in Palestine .

Now began a technique of instigation and incitement from

which the Anglo-Saxon rulers of the Holy Land have never

varied wherever they had a point to be gained . Tension between

France and England over this continuous stream of intrigue

finally reached a point where a breath would have precipitated

it into armed conflict . The French statesman M . Barthou

sharply protested . With its tongue in its cheek, London blandly

forwarded the protest to Palestine, abjuring the Generals to behave

themselves .

Matters came to a head in I92o when Feisal staged a revolt

against the French in Damascus, with money and ammunition

supplied by the British General Headquarters .44 He had been

proclaimed King by a `Syrian Congress' which included Palestinians,

and which asserted the principle that Palestine was a

part of Syria and could not be cut off from it . Almost simultaneously,

in order to show how impossible it was to implement

the Balfour Declaration in the face of native hostility, the Generals

arranged a pogrom in Jerusalem. They hoped it would

mean the end of Zionism, that the League of Nations, which had

not yet officially named a mandatory, would be forced to `recognize

the rights' of the native population and cancel out the Zionist

adventure .

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POGROM AND WORLD HORROR

The Governor of Jerusalem was General Louis Bols . Chief

of Staff to Bols was Colonel Waters Taylor, whose ideal polity

was a military government in perpetuity, and who later became

an anti-Zionist organizer in London .

When Colonel Patterson, staunch Zionist friend, heard that

Bols had been appointed, he was shocked . He writes : "I knew

Bols well, having worked with him for two years . I knew him

as an out and out anti-Semite, who would leave no stone unturned

to destroy the Jewish National Home root and branch."

So moved was this honest English soldier that he boarded a train

for Cairo that very day in order to warn Weizmann of the danger,

urging him to oppose Bols' appointment with might and

main. In reply Weizmann informed Patterson that his fears

"were really exaggerated, as he had just had a two-hour conversation

with Bols and had found him a very nice man ." Despite

Weizmann's optimistic appraisal, the result of Bols' appointment

was soon to be written in Jewish blood.

Ominous incidents crowding fast on the heels of the intensive

propaganda which followed the crowning of Feisal in Syria, had

caused a number of saner Zionists to warn the Government . It

responded by ordering the disarming of the population, enforcing

the order only insofar as the Jews were concerned .

The riots of April 1920 broke on the heads of the astonished

Jews like a clap of thunder . Misled by the naivete of their responsible

leaders, they awoke from their dreams of a Jewish

Commonwealth to scenes no different than those from which

they had fled in Russia .

The action was perfectly timed . Moslem crowds had gathered

for the Nebi Moussa festival in Jerusalem . The usual

frenzy of chants and wild dances was driving them into a dangerous

emotional delirium . Propaganda of the wildest sort was

being circulated ; and whispers went through the crowd, which

was going rapidly berserk.

Now agitators were addressing this churning mass, urging

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87

them forward against the Jews . Hesitant for a moment, the reassuring

cry arose : "The Government is with us!"

The stage had been ably set . All Jewish policemen had been

relieved from duty in the `Old City,' a walled section of Jerusalem

where the bulk of the Jews resided. Totally unopposed

and making a directed attack from three different parts of the

town at the same moment, the mob rushed into the Jewish

Quarter, brandishing knives and clubs .

Shrieking madness covered the Old City. The most horrible

and repugnant scenes took place . Amongst other manifestations

of patriotism, some elderly Jews were locked in a house

which was set on fire, while a number of women were subjected

to rape.

Shivering with the emotion of an unhappy, betrayed man,

Weizmann, supreme Jewish leader, wept bitterly. In another

part of the city, Jabotinsky, the little Russian writer with the

prognathous jaw, was raging. Cursing the wordy timidity of

his Zionist confreres he swiftly gathered together a group of ex-

Legionnaires. Heartened, other young Jews joined the "Self-

Defense." Where they appeared the rioters ran for their lives .

Meanwhile the Government surrounded the Old City with a

cordon of police and troops, preventing Jabotinsky's boys from

going to the assistance of the defenseless Jews, giving them over

for three days to murder, loot and rape before the authorities

raised a hand to interfere .45

Jabotinsky and his Legionnaires were arrested as fast as they

could be apprehended . It was symptomatic of the general tone

of the Administration that Howes, the Commandant of Police,

caused Jabotinsky to be held in the common lockup, while Arab

agitators who had also been arrested were accommodated in a

pleasant room in the Governate itself . Zionist stock slumped

still lower when Jewish notables were refused an audience,

while motor cars were placed at the disposal of Arab leaders for

the purpose of granting them an interview with the Chief Administrator

.46

With ghoulish thoroughness the Government both during and

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after the riots searched the Jews for arms, deliberately rendering

them defenseless, and causing numerous arrests of those

guilty of protecting their homes and loved ones. Cynically

Sir Louis Bols complained in a dispatch to Cairo : "They [the

Jews] are very difficult to deal with . . . They are not satisfied

with military protection, but demand to take the law in their

own hands."

So devilishly inhuman a course would hardly seem credible if

it were not supported by the word of many witnesses, some of

them distinguished Englishmen, revolted by this sickening parade

of events. The tone of the Administration was so hostile

that a celebrated American archaeologist, a non-Jew, told Horace

Samuel "quite specifically" that because of his sympathy for

the riot victims "he found himself deliberately cold-shouldered

by the British officials ." 47 A thoroughly upset British lady felt

compelled to write that "for the first time yesterday I felt

ashamed of being born an Englishwoman ." 48

Jerusalem had undergone an orgy of slaughter, rape, torture

and sack . Everywhere homes and stores were wrecked . Sixty

innocents lay dead, and innumerable victims were injured, the

memory of unspeakable horror engraved on their consciousness,

never to fade. Far away in the little Galilee village of Tel Hai

the knightly Captain Trumpledor was killed with nine of his

men, murmuring as he fell, "It is good to die for one's country ."

In a vermin-infested jail, awaiting trial, was Jabotinsky - Jewish

patriot and ex-officer of His Majesty's Army- now stripped

of his honors and treated like a dangerous felon. With scant

ceremony he was tried, and with his Legionnaires sentenced to

fifteen years at hard labor .

Shocked by this savage order, the Jews shut their shops in

protest. The Government replied with a ukase ordering the

shops reopened under penalty of a fine of £ 50 ; an action more

than interesting in view of the way subsequent Arab strikes

were handled .

Suddenly, like a typhoon which had gathered from nowhere,

a tremendous wave of protest swept the world . England with

her hands full in Ireland and India, smarting under the con-

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demnation she was receiving in all civilized quarters, was aghast .

The Generals' plan had become a boomerang .

The League had not yet granted an official mandate ; and the

French, irritated to the boiling point, took action to throw

Feisal out. Angling for Jewish support, they let it be known

that they would not refuse if the mandate for Palestine were offered

to them.

The English were in a tight spot . They stood morally condemned

before the world . The precious life line to India was

in danger.

Here was another shining opportunity laid right in the Zionists'

laps. The functionaries in Whitehall were in rapid retreat .

To show their good faith they severed the heads of the top administrator

of Palestine together with his Chief of Staff, and

served them up on a platter for the edification of the French

and the Zionists. The Jews at this moment could have named

their own price . They were now top-dog in a situation that

had reversed itself . But Zionist leaders continued to temporize

and placate . With no conception of the moment for swift, decisive

action, they settled down to ponder their old vaporous

ideas.

page 104

CHAPTER VII

THE MANDATE BY THE LEAGUE

WEIZMANN OBLIGES

At the Peace Conference, held at Versailles in February i q I g,

the historic opportunity for which Herzl had built and struggled

had suddenly come to a head. The Allies were tired and in a

generous mood. The hysteria founded on the claim that the

`War was fought for democracy' was still much in evidence.

Jewry was, moreover, reckoned as a world force whose good will

could count powerfully in the reconstruction period which was

following. At this psychological moment, had Zionist leaders

possessed the political shrewdness which induced the other nations

to scramble eagerly for the biggest hunk of spoil they

could get, the Jewish problem would have found its solution,

and would not today be a plague spot in the life of Europe .

Poland was being handed whole sections of Germany and the

Ukraine to satisfy its `economic needs' as well as the ideals of

democracy. Other nations similarly were fighting for and securing

their share . The Jews could have demanded and received

not only the present boundaries of Palestine, but a large

part of the rich Lebanon Valley, the fertile Hauran, and the

vast uninhabited territory to the east . This area was practically

vacant ; and the signs were already written on the heavens that

Israel must soon evacuate Europe or perish. The Arabs, undeterred

by the restraining `principles' of the Zionists, had demanded,

and received, more than they had ever envisioned in

their wildest dreams . At a moment when public opinion would

have completely approved of the Zionists taking immediate possession,

they demurred on `democratic' and `social' grounds .

An example of their attitude is contained in the assertion by Sir

Herbert Samuel that "the immediate establishment of a complete

and purely Jewish State in Palestine would mean placing a

majority under the rule of a minority ; it would therefore be

contrary to the first principles of democracy. . ."

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91

Both at Versailles and later, the chief Jewish negotiator,

Weizmann, maintained the mild demeanor of humanist and philosopher

. Asked what the Zionists wanted, he contented himself

with the remark : "Ultimately, such conditions that Palestine

should be just as Jewish as England is English ." 1 Lloyd

George commented that "Weizmann was the only modest man

at the Peace Conference . . . who was decent in his demands" :

a bitterly questionable compliment to the oppressed Jews who

survey it in retrospect .

Throughout the Versailles Conference the view taken by the

British delegation, and supported by the Plenipotentiaries, "was

that if there was to be a Jewish nationality, it could only be by

giving the Jews a local habitation and enabling them to found in

Palestine a Jewish State ." 2

Powerful America, holding the economic future of Europe in

her pocket, was heart and soul for a Zionist solution . The official

American recommendation at the Peace Conference was

for the establishment of a Jewish State. A commission of prominent

Americans had been sent by President Wilson to investigate,

and their recommendations, adopted by the President and

other American delegates without dissent, were direct and forthright,

stating bluntly that "it is right that Palestine should become

a Jewish State." 3

The frank of America on this proposal was tantamount to its

acceptance by the Conference . With the exception of some

demurrage from the Catholic Church, which wanted to make

doubly sure that its own interests in the Holy Land were protected,

opposition virtually did not exist . The Arabs themselves

were more than friendly and in fact were looking to the obviously

influential Zionists for support of their own program .

Again, as in the case of the Balfour Declaration, the only oppositionists

were Jews - capitalists or Marxists - who considered

Zionism a move of gravely dangerous import . In England a

"League of British Jews" led by the important Claude G . Montefiore

was formed to lobby against the proposition . In America

three hundred representatives of Jewish moneybags, led by the

Reform Rabbis, forwarded a protest to the Peace Conference

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"against the program of political Zionism ." But the only effect

of these hysterical renunciations was to cause the Plenipotentiaries

to scratch their heads in wonder and dismiss the authors

as a bunch of well-meaning crackpots .

Heavily in the Zionists' favor was the biting rivalry between

the British and French, each determined to shut the other out of

the Near East if it could . Sticking in the craw of the British

was the Sykes-Picot Treaty, which all but handed the Levant

over to France . The British realized that they had made a bad

bargain, and now this Treaty came back to haunt them . They

had allowed oil, trade, potential rail-heads, and with them a de

facto control of the route to India, to slip through their fingers .

Able tacticians, they pointed out that the Balfour Declaration to

which Paris had agreed, invalidated the Sykes-Picot Agreement .

The French, secure in the largest military establishment on

earth, already almost at war with England over Lloyd George's

support of the ill-fated Greek invasion of Asiatic Turkey, countered

by claiming Palestine as an integral part of Syria, over

which they held traditional rights of protection .

Though the Kaiser was chopping wood somewhere in Holland,

and Generals Hindenburg and Ludendorff were now just

two harmless old boys out on probation, the old German dream

was still very much alive . The English had quietly taken it

over as part of their profit in the war they had just fought for

humanity . If it was to be put into operation they needed Palestine

desperately.

The French stood pat . They wanted Palestine, but were

willing to accept a condominium . The British were aghast .

They relied on the Jews and on President Wilson to provide

the necessary brake to French ambitions .

As it became evident that the Zionists held the decision in

their hands they were courted by both sides. Sir Mark Sykes

and M. Georges-Picot, authors of the earlier agreement, both

declared themselves as favoring the Zionist solution .

What the French had not figured on was the almost pathological

pro-Anglicism of the Jews, enduring product of an earlier

generation of English friendship . It must be noted that

THE MANDATE BY THE LEAGUE

93

there was nothing either in the Balfour promise or in the negotiations

at Versailles which assured Great Britain of the Mandate.

It was still very much open to the Powers to appoint

anyone they pleased . The only positive commitment was that

Palestine was to be a National Home for the Jews .

The Zionists, prompted by London, now went into action .

In the name of the Jewish people the American Jewish Congress

solemnly pleaded with the Powers for the appointment of Great

Britain as Mandatory because of her "peculiar relationship to

the return of the Jews to Zion ." Similar action was taken at

congresses representing the millions of Jews in Poland and

the Austro-Hungarian Empire . Now at the Versailles Conference

the Zionist Organization formally asked that the Mandate

should be entrusted to Great Britain under the sovereignty of

the League of Nations . This request was made in an elaborate

statement on the future of Palestine, in which the word `Commonwealth'

reappears as a synonym for the Jewish `National

Home.' This determined demand for English stewardship left

nothing for France to do but gallantly withdraw her claim . She

had been checkmated by a master tactician, and she took her

licking gracefully.

Condensing a volume of duplicity and ingratitude in a few

words, De Haas remarks that "the British at once commenced a

process of whittling the phraseology before the Supreme Council

of the Peace Conference ." 4

So matters stood when in April of 1920 the League Council

met at San Remo to go through the motions of ratifying the

Mandate. World indignation over the pogrom inspired by the

Generals was blazing at white heat . The French, smiling delightedly,

were confident that the Zionists had had enough of

English patronage. Despite the recommendations of the Peace

Conference, technically the Sykes-Picot Agreement was the

document which governed the future status of Palestine . It was

still possible for Herzl's followers, enjoying the powerful French

and American support, to upset the British applecart by demanding

another mandatory . Weizmann, however, still believed

implicitly in English honesty and good faith . He again

94

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

reiterated the demand that England be confirmed as the trustee

for the Jewish estate .

The reaction of the Arabs to the San Remo decision was extremely

friendly . Representatives of the Arab territories welcomed

the idea of the Jewish State which was soon to rise up in

their midst . King Feisal of Iraq wrote a cordial letter congratulating

the Zionists on their triumph .

London's delight knew no bounds . At a public demonstration

to celebrate the grant and its inclusion in the peace treaty

with Turkey, Lord Balfour, reminding the Arabs that they had

been handed vast areas on a gold platter, hoped that "remembering

all that, they will not begrudge that small niche - for it

is no more than that geographically . . . being given to the

people who for all these hundreds of years have been separated

from it - and who surely have a title to develop on their own

lines in the land of their forefathers ."

A few months later the matter was clinched for England .

The Treaty of Sevres was signed between Turkey and the

Western Powers. It reiterated the decisions of the Nations,

ceding Palestine with the proviso that the "Mandatory will be

responsible for putting into effect the Declaration originally

made on November 2, 1917 by the British Government and

adopted by the other Allied Powers in favor of the establishment

in Palestine of the National Home of the Jewish People ."

Secure in the knowledge that the overlordship of this coveted

territory was now theirs, London sprang a series of new surprises

on the Zionists . It quibbled on words, seeking to reduce

the content of the Mandate by a wearing down process before

producing it in its final form .

The Zionists made plea after plea, realizing that they had put

their feet in quicksand . They appealed to the League as if the

procrastination lay there . On February 27, 1922, representatives

of the Zionist Organization went through the play-acting

of informing the League Council in Paris that the Jews of Palestine,

at a conference in Jaffa, appealed to the Allied and Associated

Powers "to nominate Great Britain as their trustee, and to

confer on her the government of Palestine with a view to aiding

THE MANDATE BY THE LEAGUE

95

the Jewish People in building up their Commonwealth ." s A

confirmed Zionist, President Harding made his interest known

unofficially ; and in April of 1922 the United States Congress

stated by resolution its profound satisfaction that "owing to the

outcome of the World War and their part therein, the Jewish

people, under definite and adequate international guarantee, are

to be enabled . . . to recreate and reorganize a National Home

in the land of their fathers," commending "this act of historic

justice about to be consummated" as "an undertaking which will

do honor to Christendom."

Still the British continued to hem and haw, utilizing every

trifling technicality to spar for time . It was not until the revised

convention with Turkey, the Treaty of Lausanne, was

signed in 1923, that the Mandate, adroitly mutilated, was accepted

in its final form .* The Jewish Agency, originally conceived

to be a chartered colonizing body like the Hudson Bay

Company, was given the right to act in an advisory capacity, its

powers limited by language ambiguous enough to be interpreted

in any direction the ruling power of Palestine wanted . Also

inserted in its phraseology at the last moment was an innocuous

little paragraph which the Zionists paid but scant attention to .

It provided that in the territory east of Jordan, the Mandatory

could postpone such provisions of the Mandate as might be inapplicable

to local conditions . It was understood that this related

only to the unsettled condition of this area and the possibilities

of policing it properly . What this innocent appearing

clause meant in far-sighted English minds the Jews were presently

to discover.

In view of later English contentions that under the Mandate

they were forced to consult the Arabs in implementing their actions,

it is interesting to note that the Arabs were not approached

when that responsibility was handed to Britain - only the Jews

were consulted . It is also remarkable that the word `Arab'

never once occurs in the whole document as apart from the recognition

of Arabic as one of the official languages of the country.

A most casual reading makes it plain that the League had

* See Appendix `A,' p . 571 .

96

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

engaged itself to a definite and positive policy of Jewish development,

not only permitted, but fostered and subsidized by the

Government of Palestine. The Balfour Declaration and its consequence,

the Mandate for Palestine, ushered in a new concept

of international law, widening the scope of the law itself . While

in all other cases it is the actual inhabitants of the countries in

question who are dealt with, as being too backward to govern

themselves, under the Palestine Mandate it is the Jewish people

as a whole who are the beneficiaries. The Mandate is clearly

for an absent people who are not yet there on the ground, with

the existing populations secondarily guaranteed full liberty and

civil rights.' This alteration of basic law came under discussion

at the twelfth meeting of the Twentieth Session of the Mandates

Commission (June 1931) in connection with a British observation

to the effect that "in international law there was no

such thing as a Jew from the standpoint of nationality ." To

this the Vice-Chairman of the Commission replied that the remark

would be correct except for the existence of the Balfour

Declaration and the Mandate, which had introduced a new element

into this law in favor of the Jewish People .

Included in the Preamble was the Balfour Declaration and its

ratification by the Powers at San Remo . The Preamble concludes

that "recognition has thereby been given to the historical

connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the

grounds for reconstituting their National Home in that country,"

certainly implying that the future Palestine should be as

Jewish as the Palestine of the Bible .

Of the direct commitments the most important was Article II

which stated that "the Mandatory shall be responsible for placing

the country under such political, administrative and economic

conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish

National Home as laid down in the Preamble . . ." While Article

VI ordered the Mandatory to "facilitate Jewish immigration"

and to "encourage, in cooperation with the Jewish Agency

. . . the close settlement of Jews on the land including State

lands and wastelands not required for public purposes ."

On December 3, 1924, the United States became one of

THE MANDATE BY THE LEAGUE

97

the contracting parties to this international arrangement . This

treaty, known as the American-British Mandate Convention on

Palestine, recites verbatim all the terms of the Mandate worked

out by the League of Nations. In the correspondence relating

to the several draft treaties submitted, it is plainly evident

that the American Government considered England only as the

temporary custodian for what was soon to be a Jewish State and,

for this reason only, allowed herself to relinquish the special

capitulation rights she had enjoyed under the old Turkish regime.

The final draft of this agreement guarantees that "the

United States and its nationals shall have and enjoy all the rights

and benefits secured under the terms of the Mandate to members

of the League of Nations and their nationals, notwithstanding

the fact that the United States is not a member of the League of

Nations."

The determination of America to safeguard this arrangement

from the conniving hand of European political vandalism is

stated in Article VII . It reads : "Nothing contained in the present

Convention shall be affected by any modification which may

be made in the terms of the Mandate, as recited above, unless

such modification shall have been assented to by the United

States ."

For once the Nations were attempting to solve their problems

in a consciously intelligent manner . They had tackled the question

of Jewish homelessness vigorously, and rested from their

labors sincerely believing that they had rid the world of one of

its oldest problems.

THE FIRST PARTITION

At the time of the Peace Conference there was no haggling

over the size of the Jewish territory . The American Commission

took it for granted that "the new State would control its

own source of water power and irrigation, from Mount Hermon

in the east to the Jordan ." 8 As conceived at the time by the

Plenipotentiaries, Palestine was to comprise a minimum of some

sixty thousand square miles, bounded on the north by Syria, on

98

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

the southwest by Egypt, on the east by Iraq and Saudi and on

the south by Saudi and the Hejaz . The English viewpoint, embodied

in British Peace Handbook No. 6o on Syria and Palestine,

even contended that Damascus itself could very well be included,

asserting that the whole "portion of the center of Syria

that lies to the east of Jebel esh-Sharki may easily be separated

from northern Syria and associated with Palestine ." To the

east it was understood that the Zionists could have any part of

the great desert they wanted ; and that the southern boundary

was to be established at the historic line, the "River of Egypt ." s

With the San Remo decision tucked comfortably away in

its waistcoat, Downing Street, suddenly showing a neighborly

spirit, began to make territorial concessions to the French at the

expense of the Jewish National Home . Satisfied with those elements

relating purely to the safety of their Empire, English

negotiators were completely indifferent to proper Palestinian

boundaries from any other point of view . The Zionists were

in consternation when London serenely yielded, without the

slightest objection, every area on which the future economy of

the country was to be based .

Since the coming Hebrew Commonwealth had no visible fuel

supplies of its own, it appeared to be vitally dependent upon

water power for industrial expansion . Of essential significance

to its future industrial growth was the River Litany in the north

and the watershed lying directly south of Mount Hermon . This

strategic sector, as well as the lands of Naphthali, Dan and

Manasseh, was lopped off and uselessly handed to Syria. Also

trimmed away was the Hauran, ancient granary of Israel, and

most of fertile, well-watered Galilee whence came the chief

Zealots and patriots of the Roman wars .

Mincing no words, Colonel Wedgwood wrote that this first

jettison of the patrimony of Israel had been actuated by a fit of

sheer pique to annoy the Jews.'°

Outraged by what he also considered an act of unpardonable

vandalism, President Wilson rose from his sick bed and cabled

the following protest to the British Cabinet : "The Zionist cause

depends upon rational northern and eastern boundaries for a

THE MANDATE BY THE LEAGUE

99

self-sustaining, economic development of the country. This

means on the north, Palestine must include the Litany River and

the watersheds of the Hermon, and on the east it must include

the plains of the Jaulon and the Hauran . Narrower than this is

a mutilation. . . I need not remind you that neither in this country

nor in Paris has there been any opposition to the Zionist

program, and to its realization the boundaries I have named are

indispensable."

This was in the Spring of 1920 . Procrastinating, sugaring the

Zionists with promises, London finally amended the Franco-

British Convention to recover a few square miles of the headwaters

of the Jordan and ignored further protest . The area of

the Jewish National Home had now been shrunk to some 44,000

square miles : approximately 1o,ooo square miles west of the Jordan

and 34,000 to the east .

The logic of this inexplicable indifference to British interests

became clear later when the Zionists began to get a glimpse of

what was in the back of the bureaucratic mind . Even at the

sacrifice of desired territory, they wanted to make certain that

Zionism could not succeed . A Zionist Palestine they regarded

as a new Ireland in embryo, a development even more fraught

with trouble for the Empire .

They proceeded cautiously . Time was in their favor.

Bols and the Generals had been dumped overboard . To show

good faith a hand-picked Jew, Sir Herbert Samuel, had been appointed

first High Commissioner under the coming Civil Administration

. Of this change, Colonel Patterson commented

grimly : "Bols went, but the system he implanted remained .

The anti-Semitic officials that he brought with him into the

country remained . . ." it

CHAPTER VIII

A MAN NAMED SAMUEL

UNDER THE

CHAPTER VIII

A MAN NAMED SAMUEL

UNDER THE COLONIAL OFFICE

The Military Administration was over. Anxious, but still

unprotesting, the Zionists discovered that the Palestine Mandate

had been incomprehensibly shifted to the Colonial Office for

implementation . There were some among them who knew what

this move meant, but the Zionist leadership as a whole was far

too inexperienced and trusting to do anything about it .

The country was now being directly governed by the Crown

Colony Code and by a bureau which by the very nature of its

experiences and interests could not fail to be opposed to the

Mandate. This type of administration is maintained almost

solely for the control of uncivilized tropical or sub-tropical

races. The English themselves were later to admit that it "is not

a suitable form of government for a numerous, self-reliant, progressive

people, European for the most part in outlook and equipment,

if not in race ." 1 The evolution of self-rule even in backward

India left this stage behind in i9oq .

The worst of its features is the unwritten law of the Colonial

that the Colony exists chiefly to supply cheap raw material to,

and to buy manufactured goods from, the mother country. It

is his business to discourage industrial development, which might

eventually offer substantial competition to the factories at Glasgow

or the mills of Lancashire. The perfect example of desirable

condition was that offered by Indian and Egyptian cotton,

which after being hauled over half the globe to England,

was retransported to Egypt and India and sold at a handsome

profit in the shape of cotton goods.

The Colonial Office, caring nothing about developing a body

of officials acquainted with the needs of the country, actually

does the reverse. It wants no functionaries even remotely identified

with the territory they rule ; hence it rotates these officials

100

A MAN NAMED SAMUEL

ioi

from one colony to the other . Typical of the men who were to

interpret the needs of Zionism were Police Chief R . B. G. Spicer,

late Police Chief in Kenya Colony ; Chief Secretary Mark Aitchison

Young, previously Colonial Secretary for Sierra Leone ; Michael

Francis Joseph McDonnell, Chief Justice of the Palestine

Supreme Court, formerly Assistant District Commissioner of the

Gold Coast ; and Sir John Chancellor, High Commissioner of unlamented

memory, who came from Southern Rhodesia where he

had kept the peace with rifles.

These were all career men, suffering invariably from an ingrown

sense of superiority ; some of them educated and clever,

others recruited from the backwash of the English slums . They

were taught an attitude of cold reserve, a system of playing native

factions off expertly against each other, a technique of incitement,

and a calloused disregard for everything not connected

with the spirit of the Crown Colony Code .

Under this set of regulations, created to serve settlements of

Englishmen marooned among easily subdued or barbarian natives,

the Zionists found that even the slightest trivialities had to

be referred to some bureaucrat in London for decision . The

plans for a hotel in Jerusalem not only had to be submitted to

the Department of Public Works but that department had to refer

the plans and specifications to London . De Haas and Wise

give some details on the bizarre workings of this Code in Palestine.

Native-born Jews and immigrants holding public office

could not cooperate financially or as a matter of formal association

in the development of the country. The Crown Colony

Code forbade it . A judge was denied the right to participate

in what was hoped to be an important financial institution for

issuing mortgages and bonds on Jewish property . The reason

given was the Crown Colony Code . Another official was refused

permission to aid in the development of so unprofitable a

venture as the Hebrew Opera Company. The reason ? The

Crown Colony Code .2 Even though there is only a scant handful

of English school-children in the area, under the Code, Palestine

must pay for special British School Inspectors.

Just what rights the Crown Agents had in a mandated area

102 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

was never made clear. But the Zionists were not to be bothered

by formalities . They had a colossal disrespect for politics .

They declared that what they wanted was to `build up the country'

and let politics take care of itself.

A JEWISH RULER AFTER TWO THOUSAND YEARS

Sir Herbert Samuel arrived in due course, dressed for the occasion

in gold braid and a resplendent white uniform . Throughout

the Jewish world he had been trumpeted as the new Moses,

the man of destiny . When he at last arrived in Jerusalem, the

whole majestic symbolism of the event fairly staggered the imagination

of Jewry everywhere . Jews went hysterically wild

with joy.

Samuel was an impressive man, handsome and soldierly looking

as he clicked his heels before the welcoming cameras ;

though closer inspection was not so reassuring, revealing a

moody face whose whole expression was searching and suspicious

. He had been Home Secretary in the British Government

during the War and "had a reputation for treating Jews in

a way that would not redound to the credit of a liberal gentile

administrator." 3 The famous `Tay Pay' O'Connor had briefly

described him as having an "utter disregard for all the occupations

and prizes of life except those to be found in politics ." 4

His inability to understand even the most obvious conditions

under which the masses of Jewry lived is shown by an incident

occurring in the Fall of 1 q 1q when Samuel was functioning as

leader of a British Committee of Investigation in Poland . Failing

to reach an agreement after eight days of negotiations with

the Warsaw Zionists, he asked in order to obtain a result : "Do

you then accept the paragraphs of the Peace Treaty aiming at

the protection of minorities ?" When this had been affirmed

he inquired conclusively : "So you consequently do not want

to be a nationality but a religious group?" Whereupon the

Zionists broke up the negotiations as hopeless and stalked out of

the room .5

The heavens were almost covered with omens in reference to

A MAN NAMED SAMUEL

103

the mettle of Mr . Samuel ; but nevertheless the Zionists allowed

themselves to be hoaxed into accepting him . Acting on a polite

hint from high British quarters, they actually sponsored him ; and

officially his appointment was the result of their direct demand .

Ruefully, Weizmann was later to admit : "Perhaps 1 am responsible

for this chapter `Samuel.'" r -

History will undoubtedly look on the man Samuel with wonder,

as a striking commentary on his times. His first official

act was to throw the brave Jews, jailed for their part in the selfdefense

during the riots, into the same class with Arab rapists by

magnanimously pardoning both, all in the same breath and the

same document?

Shortly after his arrival he held a reception for the members

of his staff . The reaction, blurted out of the mouth of one of

them was : "And there I was at Government House, and there

was the Union Jack flying as large as life, and a bloody Jew sitting

under it ." 8

Sir Herbert was surrounded from the first by anti-Zionist

subordinates, whom he was afraid to offend by appearing to favor

the Jews . Horace Samuel declares that throughout his

whole tenure of office Sir Herbert suffered acutely from the

consciousness of being a Jew, causing him to pivot right around

to an actual pro-Arab attitude .

The important Political Department of the Secretariat was assigned

to an officer who labored under an intensive and fanatical

hostility to the declared policy of His Majesty's Government in

Palestine, one E. T. Richmond. Richmond who had referred in

a signed article in the Nineteenth Century to "that iniquitous

document known as the Mandate for Palestine," 9 was fairly

representative of the body of officialdom . These men made no

secret of their antipathy to the policy of the Balfour Declaration,

which they had been appointed to carry out, contributing

the most violent anti-Jewish articles to such journals as the

Edinburgh Review, the Nineteenth Century and the Fortnightly

Review.10 There was only one officer in Samuel's entire

retinue who could even remotely be described as pro-

Zionist. That was the gentle-mannered Sir Wyndham Deeds

104

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

whose influence was reduced to little . In the subordinate jobs,

particularly on the Police Force and Intelligence Department,

nearly all the key non-British positions were filled by Arabs,

who were quick to respond to the cue given them by their superiors.

The situation became so obvious that a number of

Jewish officers of the Administration threw up their jobs "with

the statement that they were doing so because there did not seem

to be room for Jewish officials in the National Home .""

It is no exaggeration to say that every subterfuge used to obstruct

Zionist advance in future years, originated with Samuel.

Characteristic of the man was this statement attributed to him

"If the Jews really want Palestine they will pay more for it than

it is worth ." At the Fifth Session of the Permanent Mandates

Commission he stated that it was "the fundamental intention of

the Government" to deal with the Arabs "as if there had never

been a Balfour Declaration." 12 Samuel's interference almost

lost the important Dead Sea concession for the Jews . He had

deliberately held it up, not considering it seemly that Jews

should get such a valuable concession .13

Incongruously enough, Sir Herbert was so religious that he

believed it a sin for Jews and non-Jews to intermarry . He deliberately

snubbed a senior Christian official who had married

a Jewish girl, remaining stiffly rude to both man and wife, even

on those occasions when the duties of His Majesty's service

made it impossible to avoid him .

THE POGROM OF 1921

The result of Samuel's policies was a pogrom . Only a scant

year had passed since the previous massacre of Jews in Jerusalem.

Once again the lust for blood asserted itself in the narrow

streets. As usual, the riots were timed with a major change in

British policy, soon after to be announced.

It was the end of April . The Moslems were celebrating their

annual festival of the Prophet Moses . This fiesta at which

howling creatures with quivering eyes and distorted features

worked themselves into a lather, had been the starting point for

A MAN NAMED SAMUEL

105

trouble the year before . Each year, as the Moslems carried on

their wild dances in the streets, anxiety spoke from the faces of

the Jews until the Nebi Moussa festival was over . Notwithstanding

this, the British Commandant of Police was conveniently

away. The few Jews on the police force had been mysteriously

taken off duty for the day.

"Bolsheviki ! Bolsheviki ! The Zionists are flooding the

country with Bolsheviki !" This ugly cry had reverberated

from many throats, Christian and Moslem alike, for a long period

of months. With tacit consent the Authorities had given

sullen approval to the accusation that "every Jew is a Bolshevik."

This malignant propaganda had been carried on openly

under the eye of the Administration until the saturated minds

of every section of Palestine's population literally dripped with

the poison .14

Suddenly during the Festival the mad shout arose that "the

Mosques were being attacked by the Bolsheviks" (Jews) . At

Jaffa, starting point of trouble, the Arabs went on an orgy of

murder and pillage "under the official protection and assistance

of a substantial number of Jaffa police ." 15 In many cases the

observance of a benevolent neutrality was insufficient, and the

police gave full vent to their patriotism by shooting at Jews, directing

the mob and plundering Jewish shops .

A howling horde led by uniformed policemen armed with

rifles, bombs and ammunition stormed the Zionist Immigration

Depot. Thirteen newly arrived immigrants were butchered

amid horrible scenes of rape and looting . The water-front

workmen, huge ruffians armed with long boat-hooks, ran

through the streets impaling Jews on their weapons . Respectable

looking Arabs with well-ironed fezzes, polished shoes, wellcreased

pants and starched collars, rushed into stores and helped

themselves to all kinds of merchandise .16

The conflagration immediately spread beyond the Jaffa district.

In Tel Aviv the disarmed Jews courageously formed a

self-defense, holding the `patriots' at bay with hastily mustered

sticks and stones . On May 5, the settlement of Petach Tikvah

was attacked by thousands of armed fellaheen from nearby viiio6

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

lages. The assault was delivered in military formation, "directed

by a gentleman with binoculars ." 17 Hopelessly outnumbered

the colonists fought with desperate courage for their

lives. The colony Kfar Saba was destroyed and Rehovoth and

Hedera badly damaged. Everywhere Arabs ruined beautiful

fruit orchards, the work of a lifetime, burned homes and carried

off movable property and cattle. Only the circumstance

that almost all Jewish workers were former soldiers prevented

the Jewish National Home from being consumed in one grand

conflagration ."'

The most revolting spectacles had taken place . Defenseless

old people and little children alike had been cut to ribbons and

mutilated beyond recognition. Women were dragged out into

the open street and outraged before being murdered. Bedlam

shrieked all over the land of Moses, Isaiah and Jesus . Forty

Jews had been killed and countless others injured on the first day

alone, before the iron hand of official censorship made all other

casualty figures a pure matter of conjecture. Horace Samuel

observes bitterly that the Government "refrained from publishing

the number of the Arabs who had been killed in the attack

on Petach Tikvah, for fear presumably of unduly depressing

and discouraging Arab susceptibilities." 19 The property damage

was incalculable .

All Palestine believed that British officials had prepared the

disturbances behind the scenes .20 Returning to England after

her visit to the Holy Land, the wife of the Labor leader Philip

Snowden fixed the responsibility on "the activity of certain

British subjects in Palestine and certain English politicians in

England." 21 Arab politicos openly boasted of their alliance

with the British `Black Hundreds.' The visiting American

clergyman, Dr . Dushaw, speaking to an English soldier in the

infested area, asked him what his orders were and received the

reply : "I must not shoot ." 22 The policy of the police can be

judged from the case of Shakeer Ali Kishek, one of the Bedouin

chieftains who had led the attack on Petach Tikvah . Subsequently

arrested, he "was immediately released on bail as a

A MAN NAMED SAMUEL

107

graceful gesture ; while . . . the chief notable of the colony,

one of the most respected Jewish colonists in the whole of

Palestine, Abraham Shapiro, was arrested by order of the same

officers, not on any charge, but administratively, and carted off

to Jerusalem in a motor lorry." 23

As a token of its displeasure the Government plastered a punitive

fine on the villages that had attacked Hedera, which the

Arabs never bothered about paying . Warrants were issued

against some individuals living in the notorious Tulkarm district

who were identified as having been involved in the murderous

assaults, but "no efforts were made to execute the warrants."

24

The Authorities refused pointblank to make any investigation,

so the Zionist Commission together with Judge Horace

Samuel and Mr . Sacher engaged the services of a British enquiry

agent, "who, immediately after he had gotten on the track, was

promptly ordered by the military authorities to leave the Jaffa

district ." 25

According to the principal Medical Officer the total number

of casualties in the pogrom were 95 killed and 290 wounded.26

Lending a ghoulish touch to the after-performance, while the

Jews were bowed in mourning for their dead, General Storrs,

Governor of Jerusalem, arranged gay parades and interesting literary

lectures as if celebrating some festival occasion.27

The insurrection of 1921 marked a variation of Administration

technique . It constituted a precedent for the principle -

observed by all ensuing Administrations with almost religious

scrupulousness - that every outbreak of armed Arab violence

was ipso facto to be rewarded with political concessions and to

be followed by a Commission of Inquiry whose importance was

to be in proportion to the scale of the revolt .

The Haycraft Commission was appointed to investigate and

fix responsibility for the terrible events which had just passed .

One of its three members was Harry Luke, the man whom

Palestine Jewry was to hold responsible for the terrible excesses

of 1929, when Jewish Palestine almost went up in smoke. This

108

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

body finally ended by finding guilty the `Bolshevik' Jews who

had been coming into the country and who had aroused the

patriotic Arabs by their May Day demonstrations .

Within forty-eight hours of the Jaffa massacre, Samuel, shivering

in his pants, phoned the Governor of Jaffa, instructing him

to announce to the Arabs that in accordance with their request,

immigration had been suspended .28 Though this prohibition

was a general one in its official terms, it was interpreted to apply

only to Jews. Immigrants who were non-Jews were not affected

by it . The most ludicrous stories are told of the way

this ordinance was applied, Arab officials often compelling incoming

immigrants to expose themselves physically in order to

prove that they were not Jews, before they would allow them

to land.29

Samuel went so far as to offer the Arabs complete control over

immigration, a tender they foolhardily refused . Reduced to

simple terms, what they demanded was the enforced return of

the Jews to their pre-war status as a tolerated minority without

political rights.

This was the same Samuel who had asserted in 1917 that Jewish

immigration must be regulated by the responsible Jewish

body in Palestine, and not by the Government ; and who had

declared on the second anniversary of the Balfour Declaration

that Palestine must become "a purely self-governing community

under the auspices of an established Jewish majority ." 30 Sir

Herbert was now thoroughly scared . Sir Wyndham Deeds,

the only pro-Zionist in his Cabinet, was shunted off, to be superseded

by one Sir Gilbert Clayton . Like a disturbed crustacean

Samuel retreated backward as far as he could go .

THE GRAND MUFTI

Implicated in the disturbances of 1920 was a political adventurer

named Haj Amin al Husseini .31 Haj Amin, a leering ruffian

with misshapen ears and close-cropped scanty beard, was

descended from an Egyptian family known for its turbulence

and penchant for intrigue . In a general housecleaning underA

MAN NAMED SAMUEL

log

taken to appease the Jews at the San Remo Conference, he had

been sentenced by a British court to fifteen years at hard labor,

as a dangerous gang leader and agitator. Conveniently allowed

to escape by the police, Haj Amin was hiding out in neighboring

Syria, a fugitive from justice . This was the gentleman whom

Samuel now recalled from exile and appointed to one of the

most important positions the Government had to offer . Just

as London controls the Eastern Moslems through the acquiescent

Agha Khan, so it was now planned to harness the Western

Moslems by setting up a counterpart to the defunct Western

Caliphate, in Jerusalem .

Haj Amin was not in the literal sense an Arab patriot . He

considered Western Nationalism a work of the devil . His ideal

was the old Moslem particularism functioning in an area without

boundaries, where none but the Faithful would be allowed

to remain with bowels . Beyond that, he was somewhat stupid,

honest in his way, ambitious, and a fanatical hater of Jews .

During the war he had been an officer in the Turkish Army .

With a pardon from Sir Herbert tucked up his flowing black

sleeve, this man who had fled Palestine as a common felon, now

returned to find himself one of the key figures in the Administration.

Despite the opposition of the then Moslem High

Council, which regarded him as a parvenu hoodlum of the most

unsavory stripe, Haj Amin was appointed by the High Commissioner

as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem for life . Meeting in

secret conclave the Moslem bigwigs rejected his nomination by

an overwhelming vote . Stiffly Sir Herbert acquainted the discomfited

Moslem notables with his displeasure and ordered them

to accept the reprieved convict as their religious leader.

This was only the beginning . Samuel was determined to go

whole hog in anchoring this son of the Husseini in the seat of

power. He created the `Supreme Moslem Council,' which was

presumably authorized to elect its own leadership by democratic

vote. In the balloting the Government candidate, Haj Amin

al Husseini, polled only nine electoral votes against nineteen,

eighteen and twelve for his three rivals . This fact, however,

weighed little with the High Commissioner, who forced the

110

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

chosen candidate, Sheikh Hussam ed Din Effendi Jarallah, to

step aside, and made Haj Amin President . Soon after, the Mufti

was created Reis al Ulema, president of the religious (Sharia)

courts, thus concentrating in his hands the highest posts of distinction

and power Palestine had to offer a Moslem .

Few men have had such benefactors as Haj Amin discovered

in Sir Herbert Samuel . In his person he now combined the

headship of the Church and the Law, so closely connected in

the Islamic religion . Under the Turks the Wak f, or religious

bequests, were under rigid State supervision from Istanbul .

These were now handed over to the Mufti free of all control

by the State . He was given complete authority over all Wak f

or other charitable endowments, as well as the Mohammedan

courts and educational institutions, including even the Industrial

School in Jerusalem . In addition he was provided with a handsome

salary out of the public funds ; and a staff of two hundred

and fifty paid assistants was allowed the Supreme Moslem Council

to superintend the six hundred men employed in the various

Wak f departments.

As if to make the anti-Jewish lineup airtight, Sir Herbert took

the pet scheme of the Generals, the Moslem-Christian Union,

under his wing. Although a large number of Arabs objected,

he gave it semi-official standing . Under his generous patronage

it soon developed strong roots .

THE CHURCHILL WHITE PAPER

In June 1922, Samuel drew up a long document, deadly in its

import to the Jews, which when signed by Winston Churchill

became known as the Churchill White Paper . The Papal Secretary,

Cardinal Gaspari, annoyed by the procrastination in

formulating Article XIV of the Mandate, regulating the Holy

Places, had put up an outright demand that this Article be clarified

and acted upon . Whitehall chose this occasion for another

of its flank attacks on the Zionist position in Palestine .

London's principal objective now was covertly to cut off the

Zionist Organization from any share in the Administration . The

A MAN NAMED SAMUEL III

document it issued to accomplish this purpose constituted a bold

reinterpretation of the Balfour Declaration . With carefully

chosen words it smashes at the legal base for Zionist repatriation,

arriving at the remarkable conclusion that the terms of

Balfour's Declaration "do not contemplate that Palestine as a

whole should be converted into a Jewish National Home, but

that such a Home should be founded in Palestine ."

In phrases unctuous with sophistry the White Paper attempts

to explain away Britain's pledged word and the commitments

on which the Jewish National Home was based . The purpose

of the Declaration, it now discovers, "is not the imposition of a

Jewish nationality . . . but the further development of the existing

Jewish community, with the assistance of Jews in other

parts of the world, in order that it may become a centre in which

the Jewish people as a whole may take, on grounds of religion

and race, an interest and a pride . But in order that this community

should have the best prospect of free development and

provide a full opportunity for the Jewish people to display its

capacities, it is essential that it should know that it is in Palestine

as of right and not on sufferance . That is the reason why it

is necessary that the existence of a Jewish national home in

Palestine should be internationally guaranteed, and that it should

be formally recognized to rest upon ancient historic connection."

Thus in two short years Samuel had changed from an impassioned

advocate of the reborn Jewish State, to a pleader for

"a national Jewish home in Palestine ." As a trial balloon for

the Colonial Office he had already reinterpreted the Declaration

to mean that "these words [National Home] mean that the

Jews . . . should be enabled to found here their home, and that

some amongst them, within the limits fixed by numbers and

the interests of the present population, should come to Palestine

in order to help by their resources and efforts to develop the

country to the advantage of all its inhabitants ." Thus, in a

sentence, the 2ooo-year old Jewish dream, the unbroken hope

for which countless generations of martyrs fought and prayed,

is reduced to a philanthropic scheme for improving the eco112

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

nomic position of the Palestine Arabs by bringing in a leavening

of able, enterprising Jews .

Buried in the Churchill-Samuel White Paper was a neat little

paragraph holding that while Jews had every right to return to

their homeland freely, this immigration must not be so great in

volume "as to exceed whatever may be the economic capacity

of the country at the time to absorb new arrivals ." This

sounded very nice and sensible ; but it was to prove the formula

which future anti-Semitic administrations utilized to justify their

depredations by principle .

Included also was a scheme for an elective Legislative Assembly

to be composed of a trinity of Arabs, Jews and British officials,

who would presumably spend their time in the subtleties

of reciprocal intrigue. Samuel had originated this as bait for the

Arabs, who were mortifying His Excellency by referring to

the Administration as `that Jewish Government .'

Ably the White Paper juggled words, hemmed and hawed,

to make it clear that Palestine was in future to be considered

like any other non-Jewish country, under certain conditions

willing to accept a given number of Jews and even to grant

them a certain specious autonomy-but no more. Herzl's

dream had been permanently laid in moth balls .

The Zionists were in an uproar. The White Paper had been

sprung on them out of the clear sky, a few days before the

terms of the Mandate were to be published in their final form .

Fuming with indignation, the Zionist Executive balked . At

this, Churchill called in the ever reliable Weizmann and pointed

out to him that the tenor of the Memorandum was a reflection

of British needs in the Near East. Britain had to go slow . Her

situation in Egypt and India was critical in the extreme .

Churchill, the friend of Zionism, pleaded with Weizmann and

his colleagues, the friends of Great Britain, to accept the

Memorandum and to trust that Britain, realizing why they had

accepted it, would make ample amends at some future date .32

Having reminded Weizmann of the obligations of British patriots,

the clever English statesman drove his arguments home by

A MAN NAMED SAMUEL

11 3

threatening to cancel the entire Mandate if the Executive did

not agree in twenty-four hours .33

Weizmann hurriedly called a meeting of his colleagues, most

of whom wanted desperately to call Churchill's bluff . The

fact was that the only method by which the projected revision

of Jewish status in Palestine could be accomplished legally, was

with the consent of the Jewish leaders. But Weizmann wheedled

and cajoled, and his associates finally agreed, signing the

death warrant of their own movement in one of the most astonishing

capitulations to high pressure salesmanship on record .

There can be no doubt that the largest share of the Zionist

acquiescence to this move rested on an exaggerated loyalty to the

interests of their friend and patron, Britain . They were told

that this was merely a temporary makeshift to pull British administrators

through a bad spot in the Levant. Had they stood

their ground, any coercive tactics used against them would have

reacted infallibly against the schemers in London and Jerusalem .

The French still wanted Palestine, and the only title Britain had

there was vested in her Jewish wards .

Acceptance of the White Paper at the same time placed the

Zionist stamp of approval on another outrage even more deadly

to their hopes.

SEVERANCE OF TRANSJORDAN

On the second anniversary of the Balfour Declaration Samuel

had quite rationally declaimed that "you cannot have numbers

without area and territory. Every expert knows that for a

prosperous Palestine an adequate territory beyond the Jordan is

indispensable ." Yet it was Samuel who cut off Trans-Jordan

from the Jewish National Home and handed it to some foreign

Arabs for a private pasturage .

Palestine east of the Jordan comprised some two-thirds of the

entire mandated area - by far the best part of it, well-watered,

fertile, and as empty as the American West when Daniel Boone

crossed over from Carolina . The history of Israel is written

IIq

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

indelibly over every part of its hills and plains. It was the

permanent home of two of the Twelve Tribes, as well as the half

tribe of Manasseh . The five cities of the plain were Trans-

Jordanic . Two of them, Nebo and Pisgah, are like household

words.

Between 1918 and 1921, when the creation of a Jewish National

Home was being negotiated with the Zionists by the

British Government, there was no question of a Palestine West

of the Jordan River or East of the Jordan River. The Balfour

Declaration embraced both sides of the Jordan. When one of

the Zionist spokesmen mentioned the eastern boundary of Palestine

he was informed that there was no eastern boundary because

in the east Palestine bordered on the desert .34 It is important

also to recall that in the Zionist proposals presented to

the Peace Conference in February I9I9 (the text of which, like

that of all Zionist political documents of the time, had first been

seen and approved by the British Government) Trans-Jordan

was as a matter of course included in the boundaries of Palestine.

This whole area was embraced in the British Mandate largely

because of London's insistence on "a good eastern frontier for

the Jewish Government in Palestine ." Argument had arisen as

to whether Syria or Palestine should get the territory . Unanimously

the British papers pounded the drums for its inclusion

lest Palestine be unforgivably mutilated by letting the French

have it. The London Times insisted that Palestine without

Trans-Jordan was a travesty on good sense ; 35 the Manchester

Guardian alleged that both from a historical and economic

viewpoint Trans-Jordan was an organic part of the Holy Land.

Downing Street had demanded Trans-Jordan in the name of

"the forthcoming Zionist Government," 36 and the French finally

conceded the issue . Under the Leygues-Harding Agreement,

signed December 23, 1920, in Paris, this territory was relinquished

by the French in favor of the Palestine Mandate

Agreement . Britain now had a solid land bridge to Iraq and

"

the East, but the military clique was not satisfied as long as there

was a Gallic foot on that part of the globe .

A MAN NAMED SAMUEL

115

Feisal, puppet of the British generals, had just been driven

out of Syria by French rifles. His brother, Abdullah, a plump,

bearded little man, strikingly like a dark edition of Lenin in appearance,

was approached by the Military, who were still looking

for a tool with which to pull their chestnuts out of the fire .

In March of 1921 the so-called Churchill Conference took place

in Cairo, where it was decided that Feisal, rejected by the

French, would get the throne of Iraq and that his brother Abdullah

who had been crowned King of Iraq during Feisal's

`reign' in Damascus, should be quietly supported in one last

attempt at ousting the French .37

Abdullah, gathering an army of his wild nomads, marched out

of the Hejaz and headed north for Syria . He got as far as

Amman in Trans-Jordan, when the French quietly let it be

known that they had had just about their belly full of English

intrigue.

Samuel again grew jittery . He had to curb the Military or

face the possibility of the French attacking Abdullah in Trans-

Jordan and remaining there . But Abdullah refused to budge .

It seemed necessary to placate him in some fashion-and Sir

Herbert had a brilliant idea : he invited the little Arab to a

conference to `talk things over,' and suggested that he park a

while in the territory of the Jewish National Home . Abdullah,

gaping at this unexpected chance for power, thought that this

would be very nice. He took over the administration of Eastern

Palestine "for a period of six months," ostensibly to restore

order 38 - a rather comic provision since the only disorder in the

territory was that created by Abdullah and his Sherifian Army

itself.

Stroking his chin quizzically at Samuel's droll move, Churchill

waited for the Zionists to blow the roof off . For once Winston

Churchill, master of bluff and stratagem, was nonplussed . The

Zionists had been gagged by Samuel's threat of still further restrictions,

and their silence was token of acquiescence .

Secure in the knowledge that Jewish spokesmen would not

prove troublesome, London began searching for a basis to

further separate Eastern Palestine from the rest of the country .

x16

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

The earlier drafts of the Mandate all contained twenty-seven

paragraphs, none of which mentioned a separate Transjordan .

The final text, sprung with the quickness of legerdemain, consisted

of twenty-eight paragraphs . The new one, number twentyfive,

empowered the Mandatory with the consent of the Council

of the League of Nations, "to withhold or set aside, in the territories

between the Jordan River and the eastern boundaries of Palestine,

the employment of such mandate agreements which are

found to be inapplicable because of local conditions," certainly

an innocent enough appearing proviso. It was explained on the

basis of Britain's anxiety lest Jewish life be sacrificed if colonization

were attempted before this turbulent, lawless area was

pacified and made suitable for European settlement . It must be

pointed out that this article, though it stipulates for the first

time a difference between East and West Palestine, nevertheless

considers the former an integral part of the Jewish National

Home and in no sense even infers its right to separation ; its

carefully chosen words merely `entitling' the Mandatory to meet

temporary emergency conditions, as they might arise, in a special

manner - that is by "postponing and withholding" the application

of the Mandatory provisions for the Jewish National

Home.39

Great Britain had no rights in this territory which enabled

her to dispose of it . Article V of the Mandate stipulates that

"the Mandatory shall be responsible that no Palestine territory

shall be ceded or leased to, or in any way placed under the

control of the Government of any foreign power." Certainly

the act of handing it over to these invaders from the Hejaz was

a clear violation of both the spirit and letter of this provision .

Right after the Zionists, cringing under Churchill's empty

threat, ratified the White Paper, Abdullah and his invaders were

installed as masters of Eastern Palestine . In July the terms of

the Mandate for Palestine were approved by the League of Nations,

and in the same month Abdullah was formally instated as

Emir of Transjordan . Adding insult to injury, the Palestine

exchequer handed him f i 8o,ooo to cover his initial expenses -

the beginning of a long list of generous subsidies paid out of the

A MAN NAMED SAMUEL

11 7

treasury of the Jewish National Home. Sonorously Sir Herbert

declared "in the name of the British Government . . . that

Great Britain is willing to recognize the independence of Transjordan

under Emir Abdullah ." This was a polite euphemism

since Transjordan was ruled directly through a British Resident

acting on behalf of the High Commissioner.

The second brutal rape of the territory of the Jewish National

Home was now all but accomplished. Transjordan henceforward

became the only territory in the world to all intents and

purposes JUDENREIN (free of Jews) . It was the first country to

prohibit Jews from even practicing a profession or owning land .

Its ban on them was complete .

Beyond whimpering a little, the Zionist Executive kept its

peace, and actually covered up this gigantic theft of the Jewish

patrimony by a new festival campaign "for the Jewish National

Fund." As late as October 1934, Dr. Weizmann was with gentle

self-abnegation declaring that "we do not wish to change

the status of Trans-Jordan by applying the Balfour Declaration

there. . ." 40

SAMUEL IS REPLACED

Probably no man was so cordially detested by his own people

as this latter-day Herod called Herbert Samuel . In any other

community this deep-seated resentment would have flared up

in periodic attempts at violence . Jews, who have an instinctive

abhorrence of lawlessness as a method of settling their problems,

kept their peace but hardly hated him the less .

Among his public acts was the matter of the allotment of

the Crown lands, which under the Mandate were to have been

placed at the disposal of the Zionists . The story of their distribution

is amazing .

The cream of these Government lands were in the Beisan

area, in the fertile region known as the Ghor Valley. When

the British first took over they found this territory, according

to the subsequent report of Lewis French, inhabited by a degraded,

sickly population who lived in mud hovels, "and of too

118

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

low intelligence to be receptive to any suggestions for improvement

of their housing, water supply or education . . . There

were no trees, no vegetables . The fellaheen, if not themselves

cattle thieves, were always ready to harbour these and other

criminals. . . The Bedu, wild and lawless by nature, were constantly

at feud with their neighbors on both sides of the Jordan,

and raids and highway robberies formed their staple industry ."

His Excellency had visited Beisan, chief marketing town of this

section, and had been "received with hostility and contumely"

by the ruffian population, a Transjordan tribe of nomads who

had pitched camp there for the winter .

Nettled, Samuel returned to his earlier technique of placating

the tribesmen with gifts . He immediately announced that he

was giving the Beisan lands to the same truculent nomads who

had insulted him . All told, the Government gave these Arabs

almost four hundred thousand dunams (a dunam is about a quarter

of an acre) 41 of the best land in Palestine, while the Jews

received not so much as a square yard .42 At the most conservative

estimate the land was worth at least C 6 per dunam, even

at that time . It was disposed of to the Bedouins for C i per

dunam, to be paid in yearly installments of two shillings each .

Immediately these lands became the subject of the most cynical

speculation. Tribesmen were not interested in the hard

work cultivation requires and most of them were given far more

acreage than they could handle by themselves . The net result

was that the major part of the soil was immediately offered to

the Zionists at fancy prices . Even more sardonic, much of the

land given to these Bedouins was resold later to the Government

at a profit of some 5oo percent, to be used for the resettlement

of so-called displaced Arabs .43 Everywhere Arab speculators

entered, scenting a middleman's profit. Many of the

tribesmen sold at inflated prices and disappeared into Transjordan

and Iraq, rich beyond their fondest dreams of avarice .

The Government was now in fact compelled to tackle a new

problem : that of preventing the Beisan lands from subsequently

falling into the hands of land-hungry Jews, who were willing to

offer almost any price .

A MAN NAMED SAMUEL 119

It was during Sir Herbert's regime that Arab opposition to

the Jews took definite form and grooved itself . The entire

Administration was honey-combed with anti-Semitic officials

who made the Executive Offices a nest of pro-Arab activity.

Samuel, masking himself behind a screen of `liberalism,' made

not the slightest move to interfere .

When in 1925 Sir Herbert was relieved by Lord Plumer,

Jewish Palestine woke as from a nightmare and breathed free

again . He had done about as much damage as it was possible

for one man to do to the Jewish cause ; but the Zionist Organization

thought it politic to go through the mummery of

giving him a testimonial banquet.44

FIELD MARSHAL LORD PLUMER

When the hated Samuel finally packed his duffle and left for

England, the Zionists experienced another of those swift surprises

that were so continually being prepared for them . Article

IV of the Mandate makes it clear that the Jewish Agency

has certain powers, that it should be consulted concerning the

appointment of any High Commissioner. The Bureaucrats destroyed

the vestigial remnant of this section of England's pledge

when they made a test case of it and appointed Field Marshal

Lord Plumer out of the clear sky. The Zionists, living up to

precedent, simply looked startled and went about their business

of `non-political' activities .

Compared to Samuel, Plumer was a vision of fair delight .

By any other reasonable criterion he was a total loss . The

Field Marshal was a hard man, iron-willed, who ruled with a

clenched fist. He was the only High Commissioner who held

his Jew-baiting subordinates within reasonable check . The best

that can be said for him is that under his rule there were no pogroms.

When the Arabs, persisting naively in the same tactics

which were so successful under Samuel, approached him in delegation,

warning that if a planned procession of Jewish war

veterans were held, they "would not be responsible for the peace

of Jerusalem," Plumer withered them by replying, "No one asked

120

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

you to be responsible .. I am the High Commissioner and I will

be responsible." The Arabs never tried that trick again as long

as the Field Marshal remained in Palestine.

However, the old policies continued unchanged . Typical of

his regime is the loan of f 20,000 to the Beersheba Bedouins in

1928 to quiet their grumbling against the indirect Governmental

refusal to allow land sales to Jews .45 It was also under Plumer

that Jews were practically banned from participation in the defense

forces of the country . A whole succession of carefully

developed ordinances directed against Zionist penetration

marked his regime . Despite this, the Zionists, with good reason

fearful of his unknown successor, were sorry to see him go .

When he resigned, a sudden outburst of Jewish energy

brought General Smuts, Zionist friend and incorruptible executive,

under consideration for the post. Smuts declined, obviously

not caring to accept the burden of reconciling his conscience

with the policies of the Colonial Office .

Page 135

CHAPTER IX

THE WHITE PAPER BARRAGE

THE THIRD HIGH COMMISSIONER

The soldier Plumer was succeeded in 1928 by Sir John Chancellor.

Chancellor was an unfortunate choice for the Jews.

He had the general appearance of the Shakespearean actor who,

with a certain forgivable pompousness, loves to play the great

man. His graying hair and regular features were imposing ; but

his countenance was too complacent and unwrinkled for a man

his age, giving an impression of appalling smugness . His contempt

for Jews was so deliberate as to appear ostentatious .

It was under this man that the bloody outbreak of 1929 took

place. When these excesses brought on an unlooked-for wave

of world indignation that threatened to swamp his regime, he issued

an hysterical statement condemning the Arabs in terms of

unbridled virulence . When he saw the Zionists disinclined to

press their advantage and yielding to British blandishments, he

maneuvered the placing of political responsibility onto Jewish

shoulders.

Chancellor was hardly equal to the standards of shrewd manipulation

set by the Colonial Office . When he retired in July

1931, he became an anti-Zionist spokesman in London . No

tears were shed when he left the country, to be succeeded by

Lieutenant-General Arthur Grenfell Wauchope .

THE POGROM OF 1929

There are few chapters in civilized history that can match for

sheer inhumanity and outrage the record of the British Government

in Palestine. Now was to be written in letters dripping

red with blood one of the crowning achievements of that record.

With characteristic blind-optimism the Zionist leaders were

running around like fussy ants, unconscious that a heavy heel was

about to crush down on their hill. With fine disregard for ac-

121

122

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

teal conditions, they were making ready to repair to Europe for

a Congress which was announced as "a turning point in the history

of Zionism - the close of an illustrious epoch and the beginning

of a new and still greater period ." Ignored were the

desperate appeals of Palestine Jewry, who knew better how to

evaluate the signs and portents written on sky and fencepost

than the mighty orators who held the fort in Europe .

For a period of six years the Zionist Executive had been negotiating

with powerful Jewish bodies with a view to forming

a vastly enlarged Jewish Agency. Such financial giants as Felix

Warburg of New York, and a galaxy of non-Zionist Jews, experienced,

shrewd and capable, were now lined up . In high exultation

Weizmann announced the forthcoming creation of an

enlarged Jewish Agency in fact, to include an equal proportion

of non-Zionists along with the Zionists .

Alarmed, the Palestine Administration watched developments

like a cat at a rat-hole . Article IV of the Mandate, long ignored,

gave the Jewish Agency considerable power . The Bureaucrats

in Jerusalem, over-estimating the financial assistance,

the fierce energy and political shrewdness which they feared

would now be supplemented for the easy-going incompetence of

conventional Zionist spellbinders, had been setting the stage for

a discouraging blow. With an unctuous play at unknowing innocence,

they built an imposing heap of the most inflammable

tinder to be found in the country, and waited patiently for just

the right moment before setting a match to it.

Carefully the story was built and circulated that the Jews

planned to tear down the Mosque of Omar, which Moslems believe

marks the exact center of the earth, and to rebuild the

Temple on its site.

Immediately adjoining the Mosque is located the most sacred

of all Jewish devotional objects, the Wailing Wall, last remnant

of Solomon's Temple. To the practical-minded Zionists

these few ancient stones did not assume any absolute significance

. But it was the sanctuary of the religious Jews ; and a

symbol of Jewish right in the land of their fathers. Thus any

THE WHITE PAPER BARRAGE

123

attack on it became identified with an attack on the rights of all

Jewry. Four centuries of Turkish rule had protected Jewish

title to this holy place without disturbance . Neither the Wall

itself nor the immediate patch of Temple area at the top had any

particular interest to Islam. For as long as the memory of man,

no Moslem had been known to concern himself with the spectacle

of these few bearded Jews weeping over the ancient stones .

Now suddenly they discovered a deep interest in the vicinity of

the Wall and ended by claiming ownership for themselves. A

whole series of petty persecutions, abetted by the authorities in

Jerusalem, followed . Stones were thrown at the worshipers,

who were jeered at and insulted . The pavement in front was

systematically covered with offal from donkeys on the day of

the Sabbath services. A rest room was erected abutting the

Wall itself, and a hospice was established adjacent to it, with a

Home for the Aged in another adjoining house . Dervishes were

put in a nearby garden, who synchronized their dancing, drumming

and noisemaking with the Jewish worship . Finally a

Muezzin popped up on the roof of an abutting house, coming

out five times daily to scream out his incitement to the Faithful .

The Wall had been a cul de sac, and when the Government

allowed, or instigated, the Moslems to erect a mosque on the

right side of it, and to break through the Wall proper to open

a new avenue to the Mosque of Omar, all Jewish Palestine rose

in indignant protest. Donkeys and their Moslem masters now

passed in droves through the sacred precincts which had been

undisturbed for centuries except for the soft prayers of the

worshipers.

On the Day of Atonement, holiest day of the Jewish calendar,

Keith-Roach, Governor of Jerusalem, learned that the worshipers

had placed a portable screen at the Wall to protect themselves

from Arab abuse . The Neilab, or closing services, were

being recited when an English officer, under the Governor's instruction,

violently broke into the midst of the worship, with

no more regard than if he were invading a den of thieves, and

removed the screen .

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THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

Incident now followed incident, with the Arabs growing daily

more pugnacious and the Administration openly abetting them .

Matters had been allowed to develop to such a point of high

tension that it seemed as if taut nerves must burst if even a firecracker

popped . In the Arab press an intensive anti-Zionist and

anti-Jewish campaign was going full blast . The Protocols o f

the Elders o f Zion were being widely circulated . The Communists,

too, like great carrion birds sensing disaster from afar,

had joined in the campaign of incitement, urging "an Arab fight

to the finish against Zionism ."' Just before the actual bloodshed

started, they took advantage of the growing excitement to

issue a manifesto urging a general strike against the policy of the

Jewish National Home .

The Zionist hierarchy had treated this pernicious propaganda

with aloof disdain as small-time matters of a passing character,

and airily dismissed as `alarmists' those friends who warned them

that blue fury was about to blaze in the Land of Israel . Like

happy children they went traipsing off to their Congress in

Switzerland. The only Zionist official left in Palestine was an

accountant, who when warned that the outbreaks were impending,

"merely shrugged his shoulders indifferently ." 2 The

High Commissioner had arranged to be absent from his post for

the first time, and was on visit to London. In charge as Acting

High Commissioner was Harry Luke, polished, suave, and

known to be unfriendly to Jews.3 Ruling Jerusalem was Ronald

Storrs, a somewhat bald man with fine patrician features and a

definite flair for the arts.4 Storrs was a cousin of Archer Cust,

secretary to Chancellor and an outspoken anti-Zionist, and was

said to be a political protege of Brigadier General Blakeney, a

violent anti-Semite who suffered from the delusion that the Zionists

"were trying to poison him ."

On August 16 a fanatical Moslem demonstration was held in

Jerusalem . The mob yelling, "For Mohammed with the sword!"

roared on to the Wailing Wall where they tore up Jewish

prayerbooks and burned liturgical documents . This violence had

been permitted by the Government and no arrests were made.

Arab agitators began touring the country, bringing word from

THE WHITE PAPER BARRAGE

125

the Mufti that Friday the twenty-third was to be der Tag, instructing

the villagers to await orders on that day .

In this atmosphere of threat and uncertainty the Government

once more deliberately disarmed the Jews, leaving the colonies

defenseless.5

The riots were precipitated by the police themselves, who

with extraordinary savagery attacked a procession of mourners

who were carrying the casket of a seventeen-year-old Sephardic 6

boy who had been stabbed to death by Arabs. Old men, women

and children were beaten up indiscriminately .? The city was

swarming with fellaheen and Bedouins armed with clubs, knives

and guns and they needed no further invitation . Like a flood

of death they broke loose over the city with the old cry : "Al

daula Maana !" (The Government is with us.)

In Jerusalem the police watched the riots start with several

hundred screaming cutthroats brandishing their weapons and

shouting for Jewish blood, without making the slightest effort to

stop them. One mob proceeded from the Mosque to the Nablus

Gate for an attack on the Jewish Quarter of Meah Shearim .

Six mounted policemen went with them, watching the proceedings

with interest . In the Georgian Quarter of Jerusalem whole

families were slaughtered by these howling `patriots .' Violation,

murder and pillage took place while British officials stood on the

balcony of the nearby Government House - heard the screaming

and the shots - and did nothing.

For eight days the country was given over to an orgy of violence.

Far from declaring martial law the moment these outbreaks

occurred, no attempt was made to disarm the invaders .

Even after the massacres began the police did not use their firearms,

under "orders from headquarters ." 8 The Acting High

Commissioner, Luke, cynically informed an anxious Jewish delegation

begging for help, that he had "given orders not to

shoot."

Jewish youths responded with hidden arms and clubs in the

desperate work of self-defense. A group of visiting Oxford

students did what they could to redeem the good name of England

by ranging themselves on the side of the defenders and

126

THE ARAB VIEW OF ZIONISM

During all the period that the Zionists had been without benefit

of Balfour Declaration or Mandatory `assistance,' the attitude

of the Arabs toward the Jewish National Movement had been

one of almost unanimous approval . In 19o6, Farid Kassab, famous

Syrian author, had expressed the view uniformly held by

Arabs : "The Jews of the Orient are at home . This land is their

only fatherland . They don't know any other ." 28 A year later

Dr. Gaster reported that he had "held conversations with some

of the leading sheikhs, and they all expressed themselves as very

pleased with the advent of the Jews, for they considered that

with them had come barakat, i .e., blessing, since the rain came in

due season ." 29

The Moslem religious leader, the Mufti, was openly friendly,

even taking a prominent part in the ceremony of laying the

foundation stone for the Hebrew University on Mt. Scopus.

Throughout Arabia the chiefs were for the most part distinctly

pro-Zionist ; and in Palestine the peasantry were delighted at

every prospect of Jewish settlement near their villages . They

let few opportunities slip to proclaim in flowery oriental rhetoric

the benefits that Jewish colonization was bringing them .

Land acquisition was easy. Commercial intercourse between

Arab and Jew was constant and steady . In the face of the practical

regard with which the impoverished natives viewed these

queer Moskubs 30 who brought with them manna from heaven,

the anti-Zionist elements, if they existed, kept silent . Remarkably

enough, the incoming Zionists, vigorous, modern, and capable,

were treated with high respect, while the native Jew still remained

despised.

The Arab National Movement itself, puny, inexperienced,

and hated by the huge Levantine population who continued to

regard themselves simply as Ottoman subjects, looked to the

BRASS BUTTONS AND STUFFED SHIRTS ?7

strong, influential Zionist Organization for sympathy and assistance

.

Hussein of the Hejaz who had been booted upstairs by the

British into a position of recognized authority in the Arab Nationalist

Movement after the War, distrusted European nations

and their statesmen to the very marrow of his bones . He looked

to the Zionists, as a kindred folk, for the financial and scientific

experience of which the projected Arab state would stand badly

in need. When the Balfour Declaration was communicated to

him in January 1918, he had replied "with an expression of good

will towards a kindred Semitic race ." 31

In May of the same year, at Aqaba where he held court and

made camp, Hussein was visited by Dr. Weizmann, head of the

Zionist Commission . At this desert conference the British Government

and the Arab Bureau in Cairo were well represented .

Feisal, dark, majestic son of the Sherif, spoke as the Arab representative

. Intimate mutual cooperation between the two Movements

was pledged . The Zionists were to provide political,

technical and financial advisers to the Arabs ; and it was agreed

that Palestine was to be the Jewish sphere of influence and development.

This alliance fitted perfectly with Hussein's ideas .

Basic hostility to all Christian powers characterized father and

son, who felt that the Jews were the indispensable allies, and

indeed the instruments, of a new Arab renaissance . They

regarded a dominantly Jewish Palestine as the necessary foundation

to a greater Arabia ; and were anxious for a rapid development

of the Peninsula if it were to become capable of resisting

the attacks which their weakness must sooner or later

invite.

When Feisal came to Europe in i 919 representing the Arab

cause, the Zionists submitted their plans to him . Both Feisal

and Lawrence approved of them, and early in i 9 i 9 these conversations

culminated in a Treaty of Friendship . Solemnly

signed, this convention provided for the "closest possible collaboration"

in the development of the Arab State and the coming

Jewish Commonwealth of Palestine . National boundaries were

78

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

considered ; 32 Mohammedan Holy Places were to be under Mohammedan

control ; the Zionist Organization undertook to provide

economic experts to the new Arab State ; and the Arabs

agreed to facilitate the carrying into effect of the Balfour Declaration

and to "encourage and stimulate immigration of Jews

into Palestine on a large scale ." 33

On March 3, I9I9, Feisal acting officially for the Arab movement,

wrote : "We Arabs look with the deepest sympathy on

the Zionist movement . Our deputation in Paris is fully acquainted

with the proposals submitted yesterday by the Zionist

Organization to the Peace Conference and we regard them as

moderate and proper . We will do our best, insofar as we are

concerned, to help them through . We will wish the Jews a

most hearty welcome home ."

The Arab leaders placed themselves on record everywhere in

an obvious effort to attain Zionist support for their own aspirations,

then under the cloud of European Imperialist ambitions .

A representative example is Feisal's public communication to

Sir Herbert Samuel, pleading the need to "maintain between

us that harmony so necessary for the success of our common

cause."

On meticulous English records, carefully buried in the Government

vaults, the entire story is written in comprehensive detail.

At all discussions British representatives were present .

Lawrence was the official translator at almost all of them . Officially,

Major Ormsby-Gore was liaison officer on the ground .

It was he who pulled the strings between Arab and Jew, at a

time when Zionism was still persona grata to the gentlemen who

rule Whitehall .

THE MILITARY JUNTA

Whatever the mighty deeds and feats of derring-do by English

arms elsewhere in the Great War, it is not a fact that they

alone conquered Palestine . It is only a fact that an English general

led the attacking forces, much as Marshal Foch commanded

the Allies on the Western Front .

BRASS BUTTONS AND STUFFED SHIRTS 79

When with pennants flying, Sir Edmund Allenby made his

historic entry into Jerusalem on December 9, 1917, the Hebrew

battalions were also there. Sir John Monash's Australians were

the bulk of his effectives . Under his command, among others,

was a contingent of French Colonials and a force of Italian

Bersaglieri from Lybia . As he victoriously entered, Allenby

was flanked on one side by M. Francois Georges-Picot and on

the other by Major d'Augustino, the French and Italian representatives

respectively .

It was understood all around that the expressed Jewish wish

was to have the British in control during the early period when

the foundations of the Jewish National Home were to be laid .

The Zionists were at the time much afraid of the practical results

which might follow from the International control favored

by the French and Italians ; and they looked on the English as

their friends and sponsors . Under this Jewish insistence the

Latins generously allowed their interests to lapse, and the English

military was left in complete authority .

The surrender of Jerusalem coincided exactly with the Feast

of Chanukah, which commemorates the recapture of the Temple

from the heathen Seleucids by Judas Maccabeus in the year

165 B.c. Lending color to this coincidence, General Allenby

said on entering : "We have come not as conquerors but as deliverers

."

But hardly had the Turks been driven out when it became apparent

to Jew and Arab alike that the entire Administration was

uncompromisingly opposed both to the letter and the spirit of

the Declaration . In his solemn proclamation after taking the

Capital, Allenby spoke as if the Declaration had never been issued.

In fact no mention was made of the Jewish National Home

in any official announcement in Palestine until May 1, 1920.

Even all references to the Jewish Legion, unstintingly praised in

the military dispatches f or its gallantry in action, were suppressed

by G.H.Q. from the dispatches as published in the Palestine and

Egyptian papers . The amazed Zionists suddenly discovered

that "the Military Administration . . . was anti-Zionist and

perhaps anti-Jewish ." 34

8o

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

Weizmann and his cohorts had been used to dealing with

suave statesmen whose assurances were still ringing in their ears.

Balfour had just reiterated that "no one is now opposed to

Zionism. The success of Zionism is secure ." 35 Ormsby-Gore

had even gone so far as to urge the immediate creation of a Jewish

passport. In Jerusalem the consuls of almost every country

were, out of courtesy, newly appointed Jews . The official

British Peace Handbook on Zionism, giving on the highest possible

authority the Government's conception of what it had

agreed to, read : "Jewish opinion would prefer Palestine to be

controlled for the present as a part, or at least a dependency, of

the British Empire ; but its administration should be largely entrusted

to Jews of the Colonist type. . . Zionists of this way of

thinking believe that, under such conditions, the Jewish population

would rapidly increase until the Jew became the predominant

partner of the combination ."

The Zionists were under the impression that they had "gained

the adhesion of the Powers to practically the exact terminology

of the Basle program adopted in 1897" under the direction of

Herzl.3B They were totally unprepared for the unexpected attitude

of the Military, and stood around rubbing their hands in

consternation.

The Generals, looking on the pro-Zionist commitment of the

Foreign Office as little less than criminal lunacy, virtually refused

to carry out London's orders. In this they were obviously

abetted by headquarters in Cairo which, in addition to

holding the direction of military operations, contained a staff of

political observers . For reasons which will be discussed later,

the Military considered the Jews to be dangerous Bolsheviks

who were conspiring to upset the Empire . Moreover, the

rivalry with the French was now going on full blast and the

Generals hoped to exclude them from Syria altogether . Sir

Arthur Money, who took over the administration for Allenby,

in high elation reported that he had interviewed a number of

`Syrians' and that "their idea of Government for Palestine was

that we should govern it ; the idea was pure bliss to them ." In

BRASS BUTTONS AND STUFFED SHIRTS 81

his mind's eye he already considered Palestine a British colony

from which Jews were to be excluded.

The Zionists were put in their place with a bang . Despite

the Jewish majority in Jerusalem, "the Army . . . appointed

two-thirds of the Jerusalem Corporation Arab and only onethird

Jewish ." 37 General Money decided that all tax forms and

receipts should be printed in English and Arabic only ; and the

Military Governor of Jaffa declared insolently that he was going

to address Jewish delegations in Arabic .

The attitude of the Generals toward the Jews was contemptuous

and hostile ; and subordinates were swiftly responsive to the

cue supplied by their superior officers . General Money asserted

with cool complacency : "I have asked many people in

position - in England and elsewhere - why England has capitulated

to the Zionists, but none of them has been able to give me

a straight answer ." He came to the amusing conclusion that

the Holy Land had been handed over to Weizmann who had

demanded it as his pound of flesh for having invented "in the

nick of time . . . some ultra-Teutonic deadliness of gas and

bombs." 38

Not uninstructive of the whole tone of this administration is

the case given by Horace Samuel, late Judicial Officer in Palestine,

of a medical official "who quite frankly and with barely

concealed relish announced that Jew-baiting had been the sport

of kings for centuries and centuries ." 39 All told, the British officers,

quite apart from any question of higher politics, "regarded

the Balfour Declaration as damn nonsense, the Jews as a

damn nuisance, and natives into the bargain ; and the Arabs as

damn good fellows." 40

HANDRUBBING STATESMEN

It was tragic for the hopes of Zion that the spirit of the Ghetto

still stared from the brooding eyes of Jewish leaders . With a

few notable exceptions, they carried with them into the new

movement the spirit of philosophic resignation, the unworldly

8

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

dreaming and weakness under attack which had characterized

life in the Russian Pale . Wise politicians would have known

that the Balfour Declaration was only the beginning of their

troubles ; that from this time onward, the Jewish estate would

have to be protected by every artifice that stubborn determination

and vigilance could invent . But the inexperienced Zionists

considered their provisional charter to be the solution to all

problems. Learnedly they mapped and blueprinted the perfect

society which was gradually to unfold its petals like a lovely

orchid in the new Land of Israel .

Shocked by these pedantic vagaries, the shrewd Nordau urged

that a half million Jews be thrown into Palestine at once . The

Bolshevik horror alone could have supplied such a number of

weary refugees who would have been eager to migrate to the

Holy Land under any conditions . The practical difficulties to

such a project were by no means insuperable, and, fully as important,

Arab resistance to the policy of the Jewish National

Home was at this time scarcely visible . Arab landowners, holders

of great vacant stretches, were under the impression that

radical land legislation was impending and were anxious to sell

at any price. It was a golden opportunity, never to come again .

But Zionist spokesmen at that time were opposed to what

they considered `premature' immigration, and wanted to build

on `sound' lines . With cautious logic they demanded to know

"How will these people live ? We have no houses for them -

they will starve ! " 41

"Let them live in tents - let them starve !" replied Nordau.

"But you had better bring them in at once while the opportunity

lasts. Gentlemen, you have the Balfour Declaration : but you

don't know England !"

The Hierarchy, condemning Nordau and his followers as

`impractical, unidealistic and headstrong,' was content to wait .

Its initiative had been immobilized by the collapse of Russia

which had been the great center of Zionism . The Bolsheviks,

coming into power, had outlawed the movement on the grounds

that it was a tool of the Imperialists and a betrayal of the Jewish

masses. Quoting the master, Marx, to show that Jews were

BRASS BUTTONS AND STUFFED SHIRTS 83

only a social class and not a nation, they declared Jewish nationalism

a counter-revolutionary activity .

Completely upset by this volcanic withdrawal of their principal

source of support, the bewildered Zionists did nothing .

Their complete reliance on the good faith of British assurances

caused them to neglect the most logical and prudent step, that

of consolidating their position quickly, before opposition forces

had had time to collect themselves .

The British could hardly believe their eyes when the Jewish

leaders, obsessed with vague schemes for national ownership of

the land, actually welcomed the drastic legislation ordered by

Allenby prohibiting land sales as well as immigration . They

did not even protest when the Jewish Legion was ca'Talierly disbanded

and told to leave the Holy Land for their points of

origin, though the balance of Allenby's force remained under

arms.

In London a Jewish Commission had been arranged for, ostensibly

to take over the business of developing the country

under the protecting arm of the Military . Headed by Dr.

Weizmann, it arrived July 24, 1918, equipped, with the authority

of the British Government, to advise the Palestine Administration

on Jewish affairs . As head of this essentially political

body, Weizmann's first act was to warn his hearers to beware

of treacherous insinuations that Zionists were seeking political

power.42

The Generals, who had been treating the Jewish population

as if it were non-existent, did not even bother with blandishments

; they simply ignored the Commission altogether. Not

even a pretense of friendship with the Government could be

maintained.

With a pointed demonstration of contempt, when the Jewish

National Anthem was played at a concert in a Jewish school,

General Money and his staff deliberately kept their seats . Puttysouled

Zionist leaders, who might have used the incident for a

complete show-down fight in a world where the advantage of

sympathy and legality was all theirs, remembered the knout of

the Czars, sweated and kept silent .

84

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

Incident multiplied itself on incident, and for twenty months

the status quo of the country remained unchanged . The only

time the Zionist leaders opened their mouths was when "the

notorious anti-Semite Colonel Scott (acting head of the judiciary)

publicly insulted the Jews and the Jewish religion in the

corridor of the Law Courts ."" The howl that went up,

forced by Orthodox institutions, compelled him to resign .

The Zionists were badly rattled . Wanting the hardihood

necessary to handle this admittedly difficult situation, they could

only sit helplessly by, hoping for the best . They watched

apathetically while a civil agent of the Government, an apostate

Jew named Gabriel, busied himself in promoting British commercial

interests while the Jews, treated as social, commercial

and political outcasts, were kept at a distance. With equal

meekness they stood by while the Government sabotaged Jewish

efforts to come to an understanding with the Arabs .

With conscious design the Administration fostered hostility

between Arab and Jew . It directly advised the amazed Arabs

of Palestine and Egypt to abstain from any concessions to the

Jews. It formed the Moslem-Christian Association and used it

as a weapon against the Zionists on the slightest pretext . It instructed

astonished Arab young-bloods in the technique and

tenets of modern nationalism, in order to resist Jewish `pretenses.'

And in London it contacted reliable anti-Jewish elements,

to form a liaison which has endured to this day .

The Arabs were not only instigated and advised, but supplied

with funds, and their arguments ghost-written by Englishmen

in high places . They proved a tolerably good investment .

Their ready compliance may be seen in the very convenient demands

put forward in the Third Arab Palestine Congress (timed

to coincide with the British plot to force the French out of the

Near East altogether) that the Holy Land be not separated from

Syria.

During all this time the Military had been playing a high game

of politics on its own, maneuvering carefully to present the

forthcoming Peace Conference with a fait accompli which

would set the lily-livered civilian officials in London back on

BRASS BUTTONS AND STUFFED SHIRTS 85

their heels. Tension was strong between British and French as

to who should control the Eastern Mediterranean . The French,

traditional protectors of Syria, had a long-hooked finger in the

pie. On Bastille Day, during the sessions of the Peace Conference,

when the Tri-color flag was run up at Sidon, a chill went

down the spines of the military gentlemen in Jerusalem .

The Generals aimed at one big Arab state or federation of

states, to include the Hejaz, Iraq, Syria and Palestine, which was

to lie, as Egypt had lain, in the political and economic pocketbook

of Britain. For this consummation to be realized it was

essential that the population of Palestine should be so anti-

Zionist and the population of Syria so anti-French that with the

best will in the world, bier entendu, it would be impossible to

put into force a French control of the Levant or a Zionist policy

in Palestine .

Now began a technique of instigation and incitement from

which the Anglo-Saxon rulers of the Holy Land have never

varied wherever they had a point to be gained . Tension between

France and England over this continuous stream of intrigue

finally reached a point where a breath would have precipitated

it into armed conflict . The French statesman M . Barthou

sharply protested . With its tongue in its cheek, London blandly

forwarded the protest to Palestine, abjuring the Generals to behave

themselves .

Matters came to a head in I92o when Feisal staged a revolt

against the French in Damascus, with money and ammunition

supplied by the British General Headquarters .44 He had been

proclaimed King by a `Syrian Congress' which included Palestinians,

and which asserted the principle that Palestine was a

part of Syria and could not be cut off from it . Almost simultaneously,

in order to show how impossible it was to implement

the Balfour Declaration in the face of native hostility, the Generals

arranged a pogrom in Jerusalem. They hoped it would

mean the end of Zionism, that the League of Nations, which had

not yet officially named a mandatory, would be forced to `recognize

the rights' of the native population and cancel out the Zionist

adventure .

86

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

POGROM AND WORLD HORROR

The Governor of Jerusalem was General Louis Bols . Chief

of Staff to Bols was Colonel Waters Taylor, whose ideal polity

was a military government in perpetuity, and who later became

an anti-Zionist organizer in London .

When Colonel Patterson, staunch Zionist friend, heard that

Bols had been appointed, he was shocked . He writes : "I knew

Bols well, having worked with him for two years . I knew him

as an out and out anti-Semite, who would leave no stone unturned

to destroy the Jewish National Home root and branch."

So moved was this honest English soldier that he boarded a train

for Cairo that very day in order to warn Weizmann of the danger,

urging him to oppose Bols' appointment with might and

main. In reply Weizmann informed Patterson that his fears

"were really exaggerated, as he had just had a two-hour conversation

with Bols and had found him a very nice man ." Despite

Weizmann's optimistic appraisal, the result of Bols' appointment

was soon to be written in Jewish blood.

Ominous incidents crowding fast on the heels of the intensive

propaganda which followed the crowning of Feisal in Syria, had

caused a number of saner Zionists to warn the Government . It

responded by ordering the disarming of the population, enforcing

the order only insofar as the Jews were concerned .

The riots of April 1920 broke on the heads of the astonished

Jews like a clap of thunder . Misled by the naivete of their responsible

leaders, they awoke from their dreams of a Jewish

Commonwealth to scenes no different than those from which

they had fled in Russia .

The action was perfectly timed . Moslem crowds had gathered

for the Nebi Moussa festival in Jerusalem . The usual

frenzy of chants and wild dances was driving them into a dangerous

emotional delirium . Propaganda of the wildest sort was

being circulated ; and whispers went through the crowd, which

was going rapidly berserk.

Now agitators were addressing this churning mass, urging

BRASS BUTTONS AND STUFFED SHIRTS

87

them forward against the Jews . Hesitant for a moment, the reassuring

cry arose : "The Government is with us!"

The stage had been ably set . All Jewish policemen had been

relieved from duty in the `Old City,' a walled section of Jerusalem

where the bulk of the Jews resided. Totally unopposed

and making a directed attack from three different parts of the

town at the same moment, the mob rushed into the Jewish

Quarter, brandishing knives and clubs .

Shrieking madness covered the Old City. The most horrible

and repugnant scenes took place . Amongst other manifestations

of patriotism, some elderly Jews were locked in a house

which was set on fire, while a number of women were subjected

to rape.

Shivering with the emotion of an unhappy, betrayed man,

Weizmann, supreme Jewish leader, wept bitterly. In another

part of the city, Jabotinsky, the little Russian writer with the

prognathous jaw, was raging. Cursing the wordy timidity of

his Zionist confreres he swiftly gathered together a group of ex-

Legionnaires. Heartened, other young Jews joined the "Self-

Defense." Where they appeared the rioters ran for their lives .

Meanwhile the Government surrounded the Old City with a

cordon of police and troops, preventing Jabotinsky's boys from

going to the assistance of the defenseless Jews, giving them over

for three days to murder, loot and rape before the authorities

raised a hand to interfere .45

Jabotinsky and his Legionnaires were arrested as fast as they

could be apprehended . It was symptomatic of the general tone

of the Administration that Howes, the Commandant of Police,

caused Jabotinsky to be held in the common lockup, while Arab

agitators who had also been arrested were accommodated in a

pleasant room in the Governate itself . Zionist stock slumped

still lower when Jewish notables were refused an audience,

while motor cars were placed at the disposal of Arab leaders for

the purpose of granting them an interview with the Chief Administrator

.46

With ghoulish thoroughness the Government both during and

88

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

after the riots searched the Jews for arms, deliberately rendering

them defenseless, and causing numerous arrests of those

guilty of protecting their homes and loved ones. Cynically

Sir Louis Bols complained in a dispatch to Cairo : "They [the

Jews] are very difficult to deal with . . . They are not satisfied

with military protection, but demand to take the law in their

own hands."

So devilishly inhuman a course would hardly seem credible if

it were not supported by the word of many witnesses, some of

them distinguished Englishmen, revolted by this sickening parade

of events. The tone of the Administration was so hostile

that a celebrated American archaeologist, a non-Jew, told Horace

Samuel "quite specifically" that because of his sympathy for

the riot victims "he found himself deliberately cold-shouldered

by the British officials ." 47 A thoroughly upset British lady felt

compelled to write that "for the first time yesterday I felt

ashamed of being born an Englishwoman ." 48

Jerusalem had undergone an orgy of slaughter, rape, torture

and sack . Everywhere homes and stores were wrecked . Sixty

innocents lay dead, and innumerable victims were injured, the

memory of unspeakable horror engraved on their consciousness,

never to fade. Far away in the little Galilee village of Tel Hai

the knightly Captain Trumpledor was killed with nine of his

men, murmuring as he fell, "It is good to die for one's country ."

In a vermin-infested jail, awaiting trial, was Jabotinsky - Jewish

patriot and ex-officer of His Majesty's Army- now stripped

of his honors and treated like a dangerous felon. With scant

ceremony he was tried, and with his Legionnaires sentenced to

fifteen years at hard labor .

Shocked by this savage order, the Jews shut their shops in

protest. The Government replied with a ukase ordering the

shops reopened under penalty of a fine of £ 50 ; an action more

than interesting in view of the way subsequent Arab strikes

were handled .

Suddenly, like a typhoon which had gathered from nowhere,

a tremendous wave of protest swept the world . England with

her hands full in Ireland and India, smarting under the con-

BRASS  

BUTTONS AND STUFFED SHIRTS 89

demnation she was receiving in all civilized quarters, was aghast .

The Generals' plan had become a boomerang .

The League had not yet granted an official mandate ; and the

French, irritated to the boiling point, took action to throw

Feisal out. Angling for Jewish support, they let it be known

that they would not refuse if the mandate for Palestine were offered

to them.

The English were in a tight spot . They stood morally condemned

before the world . The precious life line to India was

in danger.

Here was another shining opportunity laid right in the Zionists'

laps. The functionaries in Whitehall were in rapid retreat .

To show their good faith they severed the heads of the top administrator

of Palestine together with his Chief of Staff, and

served them up on a platter for the edification of the French

and the Zionists. The Jews at this moment could have named

their own price . They were now top-dog in a situation that

had reversed itself . But Zionist leaders continued to temporize

and placate . With no conception of the moment for swift, decisive

action, they settled down to ponder their old vaporous

ideas.

page 104

CHAPTER VII

THE MANDATE BY THE LEAGUE

WEIZMANN OBLIGES

At the Peace Conference, held at Versailles in February i q I g,

the historic opportunity for which Herzl had built and struggled

had suddenly come to a head. The Allies were tired and in a

generous mood. The hysteria founded on the claim that the

`War was fought for democracy' was still much in evidence.

Jewry was, moreover, reckoned as a world force whose good will

could count powerfully in the reconstruction period which was

following. At this psychological moment, had Zionist leaders

possessed the political shrewdness which induced the other nations

to scramble eagerly for the biggest hunk of spoil they

could get, the Jewish problem would have found its solution,

and would not today be a plague spot in the life of Europe .

Poland was being handed whole sections of Germany and the

Ukraine to satisfy its `economic needs' as well as the ideals of

democracy. Other nations similarly were fighting for and securing

their share . The Jews could have demanded and received

not only the present boundaries of Palestine, but a large

part of the rich Lebanon Valley, the fertile Hauran, and the

vast uninhabited territory to the east . This area was practically

vacant ; and the signs were already written on the heavens that

Israel must soon evacuate Europe or perish. The Arabs, undeterred

by the restraining `principles' of the Zionists, had demanded,

and received, more than they had ever envisioned in

their wildest dreams . At a moment when public opinion would

have completely approved of the Zionists taking immediate possession,

they demurred on `democratic' and `social' grounds .

An example of their attitude is contained in the assertion by Sir

Herbert Samuel that "the immediate establishment of a complete

and purely Jewish State in Palestine would mean placing a

majority under the rule of a minority ; it would therefore be

contrary to the first principles of democracy. . ."

90

THE MANDATE BY THE LEAGUE

91

Both at Versailles and later, the chief Jewish negotiator,

Weizmann, maintained the mild demeanor of humanist and philosopher

. Asked what the Zionists wanted, he contented himself

with the remark : "Ultimately, such conditions that Palestine

should be just as Jewish as England is English ." 1 Lloyd

George commented that "Weizmann was the only modest man

at the Peace Conference . . . who was decent in his demands" :

a bitterly questionable compliment to the oppressed Jews who

survey it in retrospect .

Throughout the Versailles Conference the view taken by the

British delegation, and supported by the Plenipotentiaries, "was

that if there was to be a Jewish nationality, it could only be by

giving the Jews a local habitation and enabling them to found in

Palestine a Jewish State ." 2

Powerful America, holding the economic future of Europe in

her pocket, was heart and soul for a Zionist solution . The official

American recommendation at the Peace Conference was

for the establishment of a Jewish State. A commission of prominent

Americans had been sent by President Wilson to investigate,

and their recommendations, adopted by the President and

other American delegates without dissent, were direct and forthright,

stating bluntly that "it is right that Palestine should become

a Jewish State." 3

The frank of America on this proposal was tantamount to its

acceptance by the Conference . With the exception of some

demurrage from the Catholic Church, which wanted to make

doubly sure that its own interests in the Holy Land were protected,

opposition virtually did not exist . The Arabs themselves

were more than friendly and in fact were looking to the obviously

influential Zionists for support of their own program .

Again, as in the case of the Balfour Declaration, the only oppositionists

were Jews - capitalists or Marxists - who considered

Zionism a move of gravely dangerous import . In England a

"League of British Jews" led by the important Claude G . Montefiore

was formed to lobby against the proposition . In America

three hundred representatives of Jewish moneybags, led by the

Reform Rabbis, forwarded a protest to the Peace Conference

92

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

"against the program of political Zionism ." But the only effect

of these hysterical renunciations was to cause the Plenipotentiaries

to scratch their heads in wonder and dismiss the authors

as a bunch of well-meaning crackpots .

Heavily in the Zionists' favor was the biting rivalry between

the British and French, each determined to shut the other out of

the Near East if it could . Sticking in the craw of the British

was the Sykes-Picot Treaty, which all but handed the Levant

over to France . The British realized that they had made a bad

bargain, and now this Treaty came back to haunt them . They

had allowed oil, trade, potential rail-heads, and with them a de

facto control of the route to India, to slip through their fingers .

Able tacticians, they pointed out that the Balfour Declaration to

which Paris had agreed, invalidated the Sykes-Picot Agreement .

The French, secure in the largest military establishment on

earth, already almost at war with England over Lloyd George's

support of the ill-fated Greek invasion of Asiatic Turkey, countered

by claiming Palestine as an integral part of Syria, over

which they held traditional rights of protection .

Though the Kaiser was chopping wood somewhere in Holland,

and Generals Hindenburg and Ludendorff were now just

two harmless old boys out on probation, the old German dream

was still very much alive . The English had quietly taken it

over as part of their profit in the war they had just fought for

humanity . If it was to be put into operation they needed Palestine

desperately.

The French stood pat . They wanted Palestine, but were

willing to accept a condominium . The British were aghast .

They relied on the Jews and on President Wilson to provide

the necessary brake to French ambitions .

As it became evident that the Zionists held the decision in

their hands they were courted by both sides. Sir Mark Sykes

and M. Georges-Picot, authors of the earlier agreement, both

declared themselves as favoring the Zionist solution .

What the French had not figured on was the almost pathological

pro-Anglicism of the Jews, enduring product of an earlier

generation of English friendship . It must be noted that

THE MANDATE BY THE LEAGUE

93

there was nothing either in the Balfour promise or in the negotiations

at Versailles which assured Great Britain of the Mandate.

It was still very much open to the Powers to appoint

anyone they pleased . The only positive commitment was that

Palestine was to be a National Home for the Jews .

The Zionists, prompted by London, now went into action .

In the name of the Jewish people the American Jewish Congress

solemnly pleaded with the Powers for the appointment of Great

Britain as Mandatory because of her "peculiar relationship to

the return of the Jews to Zion ." Similar action was taken at

congresses representing the millions of Jews in Poland and

the Austro-Hungarian Empire . Now at the Versailles Conference

the Zionist Organization formally asked that the Mandate

should be entrusted to Great Britain under the sovereignty of

the League of Nations . This request was made in an elaborate

statement on the future of Palestine, in which the word `Commonwealth'

reappears as a synonym for the Jewish `National

Home.' This determined demand for English stewardship left

nothing for France to do but gallantly withdraw her claim . She

had been checkmated by a master tactician, and she took her

licking gracefully.

Condensing a volume of duplicity and ingratitude in a few

words, De Haas remarks that "the British at once commenced a

process of whittling the phraseology before the Supreme Council

of the Peace Conference ." 4

So matters stood when in April of 1920 the League Council

met at San Remo to go through the motions of ratifying the

Mandate. World indignation over the pogrom inspired by the

Generals was blazing at white heat . The French, smiling delightedly,

were confident that the Zionists had had enough of

English patronage. Despite the recommendations of the Peace

Conference, technically the Sykes-Picot Agreement was the

document which governed the future status of Palestine . It was

still possible for Herzl's followers, enjoying the powerful French

and American support, to upset the British applecart by demanding

another mandatory . Weizmann, however, still believed

implicitly in English honesty and good faith . He again

94

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

reiterated the demand that England be confirmed as the trustee

for the Jewish estate .

The reaction of the Arabs to the San Remo decision was extremely

friendly . Representatives of the Arab territories welcomed

the idea of the Jewish State which was soon to rise up in

their midst . King Feisal of Iraq wrote a cordial letter congratulating

the Zionists on their triumph .

London's delight knew no bounds . At a public demonstration

to celebrate the grant and its inclusion in the peace treaty

with Turkey, Lord Balfour, reminding the Arabs that they had

been handed vast areas on a gold platter, hoped that "remembering

all that, they will not begrudge that small niche - for it

is no more than that geographically . . . being given to the

people who for all these hundreds of years have been separated

from it - and who surely have a title to develop on their own

lines in the land of their forefathers ."

A few months later the matter was clinched for England .

The Treaty of Sevres was signed between Turkey and the

Western Powers. It reiterated the decisions of the Nations,

ceding Palestine with the proviso that the "Mandatory will be

responsible for putting into effect the Declaration originally

made on November 2, 1917 by the British Government and

adopted by the other Allied Powers in favor of the establishment

in Palestine of the National Home of the Jewish People ."

Secure in the knowledge that the overlordship of this coveted

territory was now theirs, London sprang a series of new surprises

on the Zionists . It quibbled on words, seeking to reduce

the content of the Mandate by a wearing down process before

producing it in its final form .

The Zionists made plea after plea, realizing that they had put

their feet in quicksand . They appealed to the League as if the

procrastination lay there . On February 27, 1922, representatives

of the Zionist Organization went through the play-acting

of informing the League Council in Paris that the Jews of Palestine,

at a conference in Jaffa, appealed to the Allied and Associated

Powers "to nominate Great Britain as their trustee, and to

confer on her the government of Palestine with a view to aiding

THE MANDATE BY THE LEAGUE

95

the Jewish People in building up their Commonwealth ." s A

confirmed Zionist, President Harding made his interest known

unofficially ; and in April of 1922 the United States Congress

stated by resolution its profound satisfaction that "owing to the

outcome of the World War and their part therein, the Jewish

people, under definite and adequate international guarantee, are

to be enabled . . . to recreate and reorganize a National Home

in the land of their fathers," commending "this act of historic

justice about to be consummated" as "an undertaking which will

do honor to Christendom."

Still the British continued to hem and haw, utilizing every

trifling technicality to spar for time . It was not until the revised

convention with Turkey, the Treaty of Lausanne, was

signed in 1923, that the Mandate, adroitly mutilated, was accepted

in its final form .* The Jewish Agency, originally conceived

to be a chartered colonizing body like the Hudson Bay

Company, was given the right to act in an advisory capacity, its

powers limited by language ambiguous enough to be interpreted

in any direction the ruling power of Palestine wanted . Also

inserted in its phraseology at the last moment was an innocuous

little paragraph which the Zionists paid but scant attention to .

It provided that in the territory east of Jordan, the Mandatory

could postpone such provisions of the Mandate as might be inapplicable

to local conditions . It was understood that this related

only to the unsettled condition of this area and the possibilities

of policing it properly . What this innocent appearing

clause meant in far-sighted English minds the Jews were presently

to discover.

In view of later English contentions that under the Mandate

they were forced to consult the Arabs in implementing their actions,

it is interesting to note that the Arabs were not approached

when that responsibility was handed to Britain - only the Jews

were consulted . It is also remarkable that the word `Arab'

never once occurs in the whole document as apart from the recognition

of Arabic as one of the official languages of the country.

A most casual reading makes it plain that the League had

* See Appendix `A,' p . 571 .

96

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

engaged itself to a definite and positive policy of Jewish development,

not only permitted, but fostered and subsidized by the

Government of Palestine. The Balfour Declaration and its consequence,

the Mandate for Palestine, ushered in a new concept

of international law, widening the scope of the law itself . While

in all other cases it is the actual inhabitants of the countries in

question who are dealt with, as being too backward to govern

themselves, under the Palestine Mandate it is the Jewish people

as a whole who are the beneficiaries. The Mandate is clearly

for an absent people who are not yet there on the ground, with

the existing populations secondarily guaranteed full liberty and

civil rights.' This alteration of basic law came under discussion

at the twelfth meeting of the Twentieth Session of the Mandates

Commission (June 1931) in connection with a British observation

to the effect that "in international law there was no

such thing as a Jew from the standpoint of nationality ." To

this the Vice-Chairman of the Commission replied that the remark

would be correct except for the existence of the Balfour

Declaration and the Mandate, which had introduced a new element

into this law in favor of the Jewish People .

Included in the Preamble was the Balfour Declaration and its

ratification by the Powers at San Remo . The Preamble concludes

that "recognition has thereby been given to the historical

connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the

grounds for reconstituting their National Home in that country,"

certainly implying that the future Palestine should be as

Jewish as the Palestine of the Bible .

Of the direct commitments the most important was Article II

which stated that "the Mandatory shall be responsible for placing

the country under such political, administrative and economic

conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish

National Home as laid down in the Preamble . . ." While Article

VI ordered the Mandatory to "facilitate Jewish immigration"

and to "encourage, in cooperation with the Jewish Agency

. . . the close settlement of Jews on the land including State

lands and wastelands not required for public purposes ."

On December 3, 1924, the United States became one of

THE MANDATE BY THE LEAGUE

97

the contracting parties to this international arrangement . This

treaty, known as the American-British Mandate Convention on

Palestine, recites verbatim all the terms of the Mandate worked

out by the League of Nations. In the correspondence relating

to the several draft treaties submitted, it is plainly evident

that the American Government considered England only as the

temporary custodian for what was soon to be a Jewish State and,

for this reason only, allowed herself to relinquish the special

capitulation rights she had enjoyed under the old Turkish regime.

The final draft of this agreement guarantees that "the

United States and its nationals shall have and enjoy all the rights

and benefits secured under the terms of the Mandate to members

of the League of Nations and their nationals, notwithstanding

the fact that the United States is not a member of the League of

Nations."

The determination of America to safeguard this arrangement

from the conniving hand of European political vandalism is

stated in Article VII . It reads : "Nothing contained in the present

Convention shall be affected by any modification which may

be made in the terms of the Mandate, as recited above, unless

such modification shall have been assented to by the United

States ."

For once the Nations were attempting to solve their problems

in a consciously intelligent manner . They had tackled the question

of Jewish homelessness vigorously, and rested from their

labors sincerely believing that they had rid the world of one of

its oldest problems.

THE FIRST PARTITION

At the time of the Peace Conference there was no haggling

over the size of the Jewish territory . The American Commission

took it for granted that "the new State would control its

own source of water power and irrigation, from Mount Hermon

in the east to the Jordan ." 8 As conceived at the time by the

Plenipotentiaries, Palestine was to comprise a minimum of some

sixty thousand square miles, bounded on the north by Syria, on

98

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

the southwest by Egypt, on the east by Iraq and Saudi and on

the south by Saudi and the Hejaz . The English viewpoint, embodied

in British Peace Handbook No. 6o on Syria and Palestine,

even contended that Damascus itself could very well be included,

asserting that the whole "portion of the center of Syria

that lies to the east of Jebel esh-Sharki may easily be separated

from northern Syria and associated with Palestine ." To the

east it was understood that the Zionists could have any part of

the great desert they wanted ; and that the southern boundary

was to be established at the historic line, the "River of Egypt ." s

With the San Remo decision tucked comfortably away in

its waistcoat, Downing Street, suddenly showing a neighborly

spirit, began to make territorial concessions to the French at the

expense of the Jewish National Home . Satisfied with those elements

relating purely to the safety of their Empire, English

negotiators were completely indifferent to proper Palestinian

boundaries from any other point of view . The Zionists were

in consternation when London serenely yielded, without the

slightest objection, every area on which the future economy of

the country was to be based .

Since the coming Hebrew Commonwealth had no visible fuel

supplies of its own, it appeared to be vitally dependent upon

water power for industrial expansion . Of essential significance

to its future industrial growth was the River Litany in the north

and the watershed lying directly south of Mount Hermon . This

strategic sector, as well as the lands of Naphthali, Dan and

Manasseh, was lopped off and uselessly handed to Syria. Also

trimmed away was the Hauran, ancient granary of Israel, and

most of fertile, well-watered Galilee whence came the chief

Zealots and patriots of the Roman wars .

Mincing no words, Colonel Wedgwood wrote that this first

jettison of the patrimony of Israel had been actuated by a fit of

sheer pique to annoy the Jews.'°

Outraged by what he also considered an act of unpardonable

vandalism, President Wilson rose from his sick bed and cabled

the following protest to the British Cabinet : "The Zionist cause

depends upon rational northern and eastern boundaries for a

THE MANDATE BY THE LEAGUE

99

self-sustaining, economic development of the country. This

means on the north, Palestine must include the Litany River and

the watersheds of the Hermon, and on the east it must include

the plains of the Jaulon and the Hauran . Narrower than this is

a mutilation. . . I need not remind you that neither in this country

nor in Paris has there been any opposition to the Zionist

program, and to its realization the boundaries I have named are

indispensable."

This was in the Spring of 1920 . Procrastinating, sugaring the

Zionists with promises, London finally amended the Franco-

British Convention to recover a few square miles of the headwaters

of the Jordan and ignored further protest . The area of

the Jewish National Home had now been shrunk to some 44,000

square miles : approximately 1o,ooo square miles west of the Jordan

and 34,000 to the east .

The logic of this inexplicable indifference to British interests

became clear later when the Zionists began to get a glimpse of

what was in the back of the bureaucratic mind . Even at the

sacrifice of desired territory, they wanted to make certain that

Zionism could not succeed . A Zionist Palestine they regarded

as a new Ireland in embryo, a development even more fraught

with trouble for the Empire .

They proceeded cautiously . Time was in their favor.

Bols and the Generals had been dumped overboard . To show

good faith a hand-picked Jew, Sir Herbert Samuel, had been appointed

first High Commissioner under the coming Civil Administration

. Of this change, Colonel Patterson commented

grimly : "Bols went, but the system he implanted remained .

The anti-Semitic officials that he brought with him into the

country remained . . ." it

CHAPTER VIII

A MAN NAMED SAMUEL

UNDER THE

CHAPTER VIII

A MAN NAMED SAMUEL

UNDER THE COLONIAL OFFICE

The Military Administration was over. Anxious, but still

unprotesting, the Zionists discovered that the Palestine Mandate

had been incomprehensibly shifted to the Colonial Office for

implementation . There were some among them who knew what

this move meant, but the Zionist leadership as a whole was far

too inexperienced and trusting to do anything about it .

The country was now being directly governed by the Crown

Colony Code and by a bureau which by the very nature of its

experiences and interests could not fail to be opposed to the

Mandate. This type of administration is maintained almost

solely for the control of uncivilized tropical or sub-tropical

races. The English themselves were later to admit that it "is not

a suitable form of government for a numerous, self-reliant, progressive

people, European for the most part in outlook and equipment,

if not in race ." 1 The evolution of self-rule even in backward

India left this stage behind in i9oq .

The worst of its features is the unwritten law of the Colonial

that the Colony exists chiefly to supply cheap raw material to,

and to buy manufactured goods from, the mother country. It

is his business to discourage industrial development, which might

eventually offer substantial competition to the factories at Glasgow

or the mills of Lancashire. The perfect example of desirable

condition was that offered by Indian and Egyptian cotton,

which after being hauled over half the globe to England,

was retransported to Egypt and India and sold at a handsome

profit in the shape of cotton goods.

The Colonial Office, caring nothing about developing a body

of officials acquainted with the needs of the country, actually

does the reverse. It wants no functionaries even remotely identified

with the territory they rule ; hence it rotates these officials

100

A MAN NAMED SAMUEL

ioi

from one colony to the other . Typical of the men who were to

interpret the needs of Zionism were Police Chief R . B. G. Spicer,

late Police Chief in Kenya Colony ; Chief Secretary Mark Aitchison

Young, previously Colonial Secretary for Sierra Leone ; Michael

Francis Joseph McDonnell, Chief Justice of the Palestine

Supreme Court, formerly Assistant District Commissioner of the

Gold Coast ; and Sir John Chancellor, High Commissioner of unlamented

memory, who came from Southern Rhodesia where he

had kept the peace with rifles.

These were all career men, suffering invariably from an ingrown

sense of superiority ; some of them educated and clever,

others recruited from the backwash of the English slums . They

were taught an attitude of cold reserve, a system of playing native

factions off expertly against each other, a technique of incitement,

and a calloused disregard for everything not connected

with the spirit of the Crown Colony Code .

Under this set of regulations, created to serve settlements of

Englishmen marooned among easily subdued or barbarian natives,

the Zionists found that even the slightest trivialities had to

be referred to some bureaucrat in London for decision . The

plans for a hotel in Jerusalem not only had to be submitted to

the Department of Public Works but that department had to refer

the plans and specifications to London . De Haas and Wise

give some details on the bizarre workings of this Code in Palestine.

Native-born Jews and immigrants holding public office

could not cooperate financially or as a matter of formal association

in the development of the country. The Crown Colony

Code forbade it . A judge was denied the right to participate

in what was hoped to be an important financial institution for

issuing mortgages and bonds on Jewish property . The reason

given was the Crown Colony Code . Another official was refused

permission to aid in the development of so unprofitable a

venture as the Hebrew Opera Company. The reason ? The

Crown Colony Code .2 Even though there is only a scant handful

of English school-children in the area, under the Code, Palestine

must pay for special British School Inspectors.

Just what rights the Crown Agents had in a mandated area

102 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

was never made clear. But the Zionists were not to be bothered

by formalities . They had a colossal disrespect for politics .

They declared that what they wanted was to `build up the country'

and let politics take care of itself.

A JEWISH RULER AFTER TWO THOUSAND YEARS

Sir Herbert Samuel arrived in due course, dressed for the occasion

in gold braid and a resplendent white uniform . Throughout

the Jewish world he had been trumpeted as the new Moses,

the man of destiny . When he at last arrived in Jerusalem, the

whole majestic symbolism of the event fairly staggered the imagination

of Jewry everywhere . Jews went hysterically wild

with joy.

Samuel was an impressive man, handsome and soldierly looking

as he clicked his heels before the welcoming cameras ;

though closer inspection was not so reassuring, revealing a

moody face whose whole expression was searching and suspicious

. He had been Home Secretary in the British Government

during the War and "had a reputation for treating Jews in

a way that would not redound to the credit of a liberal gentile

administrator." 3 The famous `Tay Pay' O'Connor had briefly

described him as having an "utter disregard for all the occupations

and prizes of life except those to be found in politics ." 4

His inability to understand even the most obvious conditions

under which the masses of Jewry lived is shown by an incident

occurring in the Fall of 1 q 1q when Samuel was functioning as

leader of a British Committee of Investigation in Poland . Failing

to reach an agreement after eight days of negotiations with

the Warsaw Zionists, he asked in order to obtain a result : "Do

you then accept the paragraphs of the Peace Treaty aiming at

the protection of minorities ?" When this had been affirmed

he inquired conclusively : "So you consequently do not want

to be a nationality but a religious group?" Whereupon the

Zionists broke up the negotiations as hopeless and stalked out of

the room .5

The heavens were almost covered with omens in reference to

A MAN NAMED SAMUEL

103

the mettle of Mr . Samuel ; but nevertheless the Zionists allowed

themselves to be hoaxed into accepting him . Acting on a polite

hint from high British quarters, they actually sponsored him ; and

officially his appointment was the result of their direct demand .

Ruefully, Weizmann was later to admit : "Perhaps 1 am responsible

for this chapter `Samuel.'" r -

History will undoubtedly look on the man Samuel with wonder,

as a striking commentary on his times. His first official

act was to throw the brave Jews, jailed for their part in the selfdefense

during the riots, into the same class with Arab rapists by

magnanimously pardoning both, all in the same breath and the

same document?

Shortly after his arrival he held a reception for the members

of his staff . The reaction, blurted out of the mouth of one of

them was : "And there I was at Government House, and there

was the Union Jack flying as large as life, and a bloody Jew sitting

under it ." 8

Sir Herbert was surrounded from the first by anti-Zionist

subordinates, whom he was afraid to offend by appearing to favor

the Jews . Horace Samuel declares that throughout his

whole tenure of office Sir Herbert suffered acutely from the

consciousness of being a Jew, causing him to pivot right around

to an actual pro-Arab attitude .

The important Political Department of the Secretariat was assigned

to an officer who labored under an intensive and fanatical

hostility to the declared policy of His Majesty's Government in

Palestine, one E. T. Richmond. Richmond who had referred in

a signed article in the Nineteenth Century to "that iniquitous

document known as the Mandate for Palestine," 9 was fairly

representative of the body of officialdom . These men made no

secret of their antipathy to the policy of the Balfour Declaration,

which they had been appointed to carry out, contributing

the most violent anti-Jewish articles to such journals as the

Edinburgh Review, the Nineteenth Century and the Fortnightly

Review.10 There was only one officer in Samuel's entire

retinue who could even remotely be described as pro-

Zionist. That was the gentle-mannered Sir Wyndham Deeds

104

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

whose influence was reduced to little . In the subordinate jobs,

particularly on the Police Force and Intelligence Department,

nearly all the key non-British positions were filled by Arabs,

who were quick to respond to the cue given them by their superiors.

The situation became so obvious that a number of

Jewish officers of the Administration threw up their jobs "with

the statement that they were doing so because there did not seem

to be room for Jewish officials in the National Home .""

It is no exaggeration to say that every subterfuge used to obstruct

Zionist advance in future years, originated with Samuel.

Characteristic of the man was this statement attributed to him

"If the Jews really want Palestine they will pay more for it than

it is worth ." At the Fifth Session of the Permanent Mandates

Commission he stated that it was "the fundamental intention of

the Government" to deal with the Arabs "as if there had never

been a Balfour Declaration." 12 Samuel's interference almost

lost the important Dead Sea concession for the Jews . He had

deliberately held it up, not considering it seemly that Jews

should get such a valuable concession .13

Incongruously enough, Sir Herbert was so religious that he

believed it a sin for Jews and non-Jews to intermarry . He deliberately

snubbed a senior Christian official who had married

a Jewish girl, remaining stiffly rude to both man and wife, even

on those occasions when the duties of His Majesty's service

made it impossible to avoid him .

THE POGROM OF 1921

The result of Samuel's policies was a pogrom . Only a scant

year had passed since the previous massacre of Jews in Jerusalem.

Once again the lust for blood asserted itself in the narrow

streets. As usual, the riots were timed with a major change in

British policy, soon after to be announced.

It was the end of April . The Moslems were celebrating their

annual festival of the Prophet Moses . This fiesta at which

howling creatures with quivering eyes and distorted features

worked themselves into a lather, had been the starting point for

A MAN NAMED SAMUEL

105

trouble the year before . Each year, as the Moslems carried on

their wild dances in the streets, anxiety spoke from the faces of

the Jews until the Nebi Moussa festival was over . Notwithstanding

this, the British Commandant of Police was conveniently

away. The few Jews on the police force had been mysteriously

taken off duty for the day.

"Bolsheviki ! Bolsheviki ! The Zionists are flooding the

country with Bolsheviki !" This ugly cry had reverberated

from many throats, Christian and Moslem alike, for a long period

of months. With tacit consent the Authorities had given

sullen approval to the accusation that "every Jew is a Bolshevik."

This malignant propaganda had been carried on openly

under the eye of the Administration until the saturated minds

of every section of Palestine's population literally dripped with

the poison .14

Suddenly during the Festival the mad shout arose that "the

Mosques were being attacked by the Bolsheviks" (Jews) . At

Jaffa, starting point of trouble, the Arabs went on an orgy of

murder and pillage "under the official protection and assistance

of a substantial number of Jaffa police ." 15 In many cases the

observance of a benevolent neutrality was insufficient, and the

police gave full vent to their patriotism by shooting at Jews, directing

the mob and plundering Jewish shops .

A howling horde led by uniformed policemen armed with

rifles, bombs and ammunition stormed the Zionist Immigration

Depot. Thirteen newly arrived immigrants were butchered

amid horrible scenes of rape and looting . The water-front

workmen, huge ruffians armed with long boat-hooks, ran

through the streets impaling Jews on their weapons . Respectable

looking Arabs with well-ironed fezzes, polished shoes, wellcreased

pants and starched collars, rushed into stores and helped

themselves to all kinds of merchandise .16

The conflagration immediately spread beyond the Jaffa district.

In Tel Aviv the disarmed Jews courageously formed a

self-defense, holding the `patriots' at bay with hastily mustered

sticks and stones . On May 5, the settlement of Petach Tikvah

was attacked by thousands of armed fellaheen from nearby viiio6

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

lages. The assault was delivered in military formation, "directed

by a gentleman with binoculars ." 17 Hopelessly outnumbered

the colonists fought with desperate courage for their

lives. The colony Kfar Saba was destroyed and Rehovoth and

Hedera badly damaged. Everywhere Arabs ruined beautiful

fruit orchards, the work of a lifetime, burned homes and carried

off movable property and cattle. Only the circumstance

that almost all Jewish workers were former soldiers prevented

the Jewish National Home from being consumed in one grand

conflagration ."'

The most revolting spectacles had taken place . Defenseless

old people and little children alike had been cut to ribbons and

mutilated beyond recognition. Women were dragged out into

the open street and outraged before being murdered. Bedlam

shrieked all over the land of Moses, Isaiah and Jesus . Forty

Jews had been killed and countless others injured on the first day

alone, before the iron hand of official censorship made all other

casualty figures a pure matter of conjecture. Horace Samuel

observes bitterly that the Government "refrained from publishing

the number of the Arabs who had been killed in the attack

on Petach Tikvah, for fear presumably of unduly depressing

and discouraging Arab susceptibilities." 19 The property damage

was incalculable .

All Palestine believed that British officials had prepared the

disturbances behind the scenes .20 Returning to England after

her visit to the Holy Land, the wife of the Labor leader Philip

Snowden fixed the responsibility on "the activity of certain

British subjects in Palestine and certain English politicians in

England." 21 Arab politicos openly boasted of their alliance

with the British `Black Hundreds.' The visiting American

clergyman, Dr . Dushaw, speaking to an English soldier in the

infested area, asked him what his orders were and received the

reply : "I must not shoot ." 22 The policy of the police can be

judged from the case of Shakeer Ali Kishek, one of the Bedouin

chieftains who had led the attack on Petach Tikvah . Subsequently

arrested, he "was immediately released on bail as a

A MAN NAMED SAMUEL

107

graceful gesture ; while . . . the chief notable of the colony,

one of the most respected Jewish colonists in the whole of

Palestine, Abraham Shapiro, was arrested by order of the same

officers, not on any charge, but administratively, and carted off

to Jerusalem in a motor lorry." 23

As a token of its displeasure the Government plastered a punitive

fine on the villages that had attacked Hedera, which the

Arabs never bothered about paying . Warrants were issued

against some individuals living in the notorious Tulkarm district

who were identified as having been involved in the murderous

assaults, but "no efforts were made to execute the warrants."

24

The Authorities refused pointblank to make any investigation,

so the Zionist Commission together with Judge Horace

Samuel and Mr . Sacher engaged the services of a British enquiry

agent, "who, immediately after he had gotten on the track, was

promptly ordered by the military authorities to leave the Jaffa

district ." 25

According to the principal Medical Officer the total number

of casualties in the pogrom were 95 killed and 290 wounded.26

Lending a ghoulish touch to the after-performance, while the

Jews were bowed in mourning for their dead, General Storrs,

Governor of Jerusalem, arranged gay parades and interesting literary

lectures as if celebrating some festival occasion.27

The insurrection of 1921 marked a variation of Administration

technique . It constituted a precedent for the principle -

observed by all ensuing Administrations with almost religious

scrupulousness - that every outbreak of armed Arab violence

was ipso facto to be rewarded with political concessions and to

be followed by a Commission of Inquiry whose importance was

to be in proportion to the scale of the revolt .

The Haycraft Commission was appointed to investigate and

fix responsibility for the terrible events which had just passed .

One of its three members was Harry Luke, the man whom

Palestine Jewry was to hold responsible for the terrible excesses

of 1929, when Jewish Palestine almost went up in smoke. This

108

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

body finally ended by finding guilty the `Bolshevik' Jews who

had been coming into the country and who had aroused the

patriotic Arabs by their May Day demonstrations .

Within forty-eight hours of the Jaffa massacre, Samuel, shivering

in his pants, phoned the Governor of Jaffa, instructing him

to announce to the Arabs that in accordance with their request,

immigration had been suspended .28 Though this prohibition

was a general one in its official terms, it was interpreted to apply

only to Jews. Immigrants who were non-Jews were not affected

by it . The most ludicrous stories are told of the way

this ordinance was applied, Arab officials often compelling incoming

immigrants to expose themselves physically in order to

prove that they were not Jews, before they would allow them

to land.29

Samuel went so far as to offer the Arabs complete control over

immigration, a tender they foolhardily refused . Reduced to

simple terms, what they demanded was the enforced return of

the Jews to their pre-war status as a tolerated minority without

political rights.

This was the same Samuel who had asserted in 1917 that Jewish

immigration must be regulated by the responsible Jewish

body in Palestine, and not by the Government ; and who had

declared on the second anniversary of the Balfour Declaration

that Palestine must become "a purely self-governing community

under the auspices of an established Jewish majority ." 30 Sir

Herbert was now thoroughly scared . Sir Wyndham Deeds,

the only pro-Zionist in his Cabinet, was shunted off, to be superseded

by one Sir Gilbert Clayton . Like a disturbed crustacean

Samuel retreated backward as far as he could go .

THE GRAND MUFTI

Implicated in the disturbances of 1920 was a political adventurer

named Haj Amin al Husseini .31 Haj Amin, a leering ruffian

with misshapen ears and close-cropped scanty beard, was

descended from an Egyptian family known for its turbulence

and penchant for intrigue . In a general housecleaning underA

MAN NAMED SAMUEL

log

taken to appease the Jews at the San Remo Conference, he had

been sentenced by a British court to fifteen years at hard labor,

as a dangerous gang leader and agitator. Conveniently allowed

to escape by the police, Haj Amin was hiding out in neighboring

Syria, a fugitive from justice . This was the gentleman whom

Samuel now recalled from exile and appointed to one of the

most important positions the Government had to offer . Just

as London controls the Eastern Moslems through the acquiescent

Agha Khan, so it was now planned to harness the Western

Moslems by setting up a counterpart to the defunct Western

Caliphate, in Jerusalem .

Haj Amin was not in the literal sense an Arab patriot . He

considered Western Nationalism a work of the devil . His ideal

was the old Moslem particularism functioning in an area without

boundaries, where none but the Faithful would be allowed

to remain with bowels . Beyond that, he was somewhat stupid,

honest in his way, ambitious, and a fanatical hater of Jews .

During the war he had been an officer in the Turkish Army .

With a pardon from Sir Herbert tucked up his flowing black

sleeve, this man who had fled Palestine as a common felon, now

returned to find himself one of the key figures in the Administration.

Despite the opposition of the then Moslem High

Council, which regarded him as a parvenu hoodlum of the most

unsavory stripe, Haj Amin was appointed by the High Commissioner

as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem for life . Meeting in

secret conclave the Moslem bigwigs rejected his nomination by

an overwhelming vote . Stiffly Sir Herbert acquainted the discomfited

Moslem notables with his displeasure and ordered them

to accept the reprieved convict as their religious leader.

This was only the beginning . Samuel was determined to go

whole hog in anchoring this son of the Husseini in the seat of

power. He created the `Supreme Moslem Council,' which was

presumably authorized to elect its own leadership by democratic

vote. In the balloting the Government candidate, Haj Amin

al Husseini, polled only nine electoral votes against nineteen,

eighteen and twelve for his three rivals . This fact, however,

weighed little with the High Commissioner, who forced the

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THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

chosen candidate, Sheikh Hussam ed Din Effendi Jarallah, to

step aside, and made Haj Amin President . Soon after, the Mufti

was created Reis al Ulema, president of the religious (Sharia)

courts, thus concentrating in his hands the highest posts of distinction

and power Palestine had to offer a Moslem .

Few men have had such benefactors as Haj Amin discovered

in Sir Herbert Samuel . In his person he now combined the

headship of the Church and the Law, so closely connected in

the Islamic religion . Under the Turks the Wak f, or religious

bequests, were under rigid State supervision from Istanbul .

These were now handed over to the Mufti free of all control

by the State . He was given complete authority over all Wak f

or other charitable endowments, as well as the Mohammedan

courts and educational institutions, including even the Industrial

School in Jerusalem . In addition he was provided with a handsome

salary out of the public funds ; and a staff of two hundred

and fifty paid assistants was allowed the Supreme Moslem Council

to superintend the six hundred men employed in the various

Wak f departments.

As if to make the anti-Jewish lineup airtight, Sir Herbert took

the pet scheme of the Generals, the Moslem-Christian Union,

under his wing. Although a large number of Arabs objected,

he gave it semi-official standing . Under his generous patronage

it soon developed strong roots .

THE CHURCHILL WHITE PAPER

In June 1922, Samuel drew up a long document, deadly in its

import to the Jews, which when signed by Winston Churchill

became known as the Churchill White Paper . The Papal Secretary,

Cardinal Gaspari, annoyed by the procrastination in

formulating Article XIV of the Mandate, regulating the Holy

Places, had put up an outright demand that this Article be clarified

and acted upon . Whitehall chose this occasion for another

of its flank attacks on the Zionist position in Palestine .

London's principal objective now was covertly to cut off the

Zionist Organization from any share in the Administration . The

A MAN NAMED SAMUEL III

document it issued to accomplish this purpose constituted a bold

reinterpretation of the Balfour Declaration . With carefully

chosen words it smashes at the legal base for Zionist repatriation,

arriving at the remarkable conclusion that the terms of

Balfour's Declaration "do not contemplate that Palestine as a

whole should be converted into a Jewish National Home, but

that such a Home should be founded in Palestine ."

In phrases unctuous with sophistry the White Paper attempts

to explain away Britain's pledged word and the commitments

on which the Jewish National Home was based . The purpose

of the Declaration, it now discovers, "is not the imposition of a

Jewish nationality . . . but the further development of the existing

Jewish community, with the assistance of Jews in other

parts of the world, in order that it may become a centre in which

the Jewish people as a whole may take, on grounds of religion

and race, an interest and a pride . But in order that this community

should have the best prospect of free development and

provide a full opportunity for the Jewish people to display its

capacities, it is essential that it should know that it is in Palestine

as of right and not on sufferance . That is the reason why it

is necessary that the existence of a Jewish national home in

Palestine should be internationally guaranteed, and that it should

be formally recognized to rest upon ancient historic connection."

Thus in two short years Samuel had changed from an impassioned

advocate of the reborn Jewish State, to a pleader for

"a national Jewish home in Palestine ." As a trial balloon for

the Colonial Office he had already reinterpreted the Declaration

to mean that "these words [National Home] mean that the

Jews . . . should be enabled to found here their home, and that

some amongst them, within the limits fixed by numbers and

the interests of the present population, should come to Palestine

in order to help by their resources and efforts to develop the

country to the advantage of all its inhabitants ." Thus, in a

sentence, the 2ooo-year old Jewish dream, the unbroken hope

for which countless generations of martyrs fought and prayed,

is reduced to a philanthropic scheme for improving the eco112

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

nomic position of the Palestine Arabs by bringing in a leavening

of able, enterprising Jews .

Buried in the Churchill-Samuel White Paper was a neat little

paragraph holding that while Jews had every right to return to

their homeland freely, this immigration must not be so great in

volume "as to exceed whatever may be the economic capacity

of the country at the time to absorb new arrivals ." This

sounded very nice and sensible ; but it was to prove the formula

which future anti-Semitic administrations utilized to justify their

depredations by principle .

Included also was a scheme for an elective Legislative Assembly

to be composed of a trinity of Arabs, Jews and British officials,

who would presumably spend their time in the subtleties

of reciprocal intrigue. Samuel had originated this as bait for the

Arabs, who were mortifying His Excellency by referring to

the Administration as `that Jewish Government .'

Ably the White Paper juggled words, hemmed and hawed,

to make it clear that Palestine was in future to be considered

like any other non-Jewish country, under certain conditions

willing to accept a given number of Jews and even to grant

them a certain specious autonomy-but no more. Herzl's

dream had been permanently laid in moth balls .

The Zionists were in an uproar. The White Paper had been

sprung on them out of the clear sky, a few days before the

terms of the Mandate were to be published in their final form .

Fuming with indignation, the Zionist Executive balked . At

this, Churchill called in the ever reliable Weizmann and pointed

out to him that the tenor of the Memorandum was a reflection

of British needs in the Near East. Britain had to go slow . Her

situation in Egypt and India was critical in the extreme .

Churchill, the friend of Zionism, pleaded with Weizmann and

his colleagues, the friends of Great Britain, to accept the

Memorandum and to trust that Britain, realizing why they had

accepted it, would make ample amends at some future date .32

Having reminded Weizmann of the obligations of British patriots,

the clever English statesman drove his arguments home by

A MAN NAMED SAMUEL

11 3

threatening to cancel the entire Mandate if the Executive did

not agree in twenty-four hours .33

Weizmann hurriedly called a meeting of his colleagues, most

of whom wanted desperately to call Churchill's bluff . The

fact was that the only method by which the projected revision

of Jewish status in Palestine could be accomplished legally, was

with the consent of the Jewish leaders. But Weizmann wheedled

and cajoled, and his associates finally agreed, signing the

death warrant of their own movement in one of the most astonishing

capitulations to high pressure salesmanship on record .

There can be no doubt that the largest share of the Zionist

acquiescence to this move rested on an exaggerated loyalty to the

interests of their friend and patron, Britain . They were told

that this was merely a temporary makeshift to pull British administrators

through a bad spot in the Levant. Had they stood

their ground, any coercive tactics used against them would have

reacted infallibly against the schemers in London and Jerusalem .

The French still wanted Palestine, and the only title Britain had

there was vested in her Jewish wards .

Acceptance of the White Paper at the same time placed the

Zionist stamp of approval on another outrage even more deadly

to their hopes.

SEVERANCE OF TRANSJORDAN

On the second anniversary of the Balfour Declaration Samuel

had quite rationally declaimed that "you cannot have numbers

without area and territory. Every expert knows that for a

prosperous Palestine an adequate territory beyond the Jordan is

indispensable ." Yet it was Samuel who cut off Trans-Jordan

from the Jewish National Home and handed it to some foreign

Arabs for a private pasturage .

Palestine east of the Jordan comprised some two-thirds of the

entire mandated area - by far the best part of it, well-watered,

fertile, and as empty as the American West when Daniel Boone

crossed over from Carolina . The history of Israel is written

IIq

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

indelibly over every part of its hills and plains. It was the

permanent home of two of the Twelve Tribes, as well as the half

tribe of Manasseh . The five cities of the plain were Trans-

Jordanic . Two of them, Nebo and Pisgah, are like household

words.

Between 1918 and 1921, when the creation of a Jewish National

Home was being negotiated with the Zionists by the

British Government, there was no question of a Palestine West

of the Jordan River or East of the Jordan River. The Balfour

Declaration embraced both sides of the Jordan. When one of

the Zionist spokesmen mentioned the eastern boundary of Palestine

he was informed that there was no eastern boundary because

in the east Palestine bordered on the desert .34 It is important

also to recall that in the Zionist proposals presented to

the Peace Conference in February I9I9 (the text of which, like

that of all Zionist political documents of the time, had first been

seen and approved by the British Government) Trans-Jordan

was as a matter of course included in the boundaries of Palestine.

This whole area was embraced in the British Mandate largely

because of London's insistence on "a good eastern frontier for

the Jewish Government in Palestine ." Argument had arisen as

to whether Syria or Palestine should get the territory . Unanimously

the British papers pounded the drums for its inclusion

lest Palestine be unforgivably mutilated by letting the French

have it. The London Times insisted that Palestine without

Trans-Jordan was a travesty on good sense ; 35 the Manchester

Guardian alleged that both from a historical and economic

viewpoint Trans-Jordan was an organic part of the Holy Land.

Downing Street had demanded Trans-Jordan in the name of

"the forthcoming Zionist Government," 36 and the French finally

conceded the issue . Under the Leygues-Harding Agreement,

signed December 23, 1920, in Paris, this territory was relinquished

by the French in favor of the Palestine Mandate

Agreement . Britain now had a solid land bridge to Iraq and

"

the East, but the military clique was not satisfied as long as there

was a Gallic foot on that part of the globe .

A MAN NAMED SAMUEL

115

Feisal, puppet of the British generals, had just been driven

out of Syria by French rifles. His brother, Abdullah, a plump,

bearded little man, strikingly like a dark edition of Lenin in appearance,

was approached by the Military, who were still looking

for a tool with which to pull their chestnuts out of the fire .

In March of 1921 the so-called Churchill Conference took place

in Cairo, where it was decided that Feisal, rejected by the

French, would get the throne of Iraq and that his brother Abdullah

who had been crowned King of Iraq during Feisal's

`reign' in Damascus, should be quietly supported in one last

attempt at ousting the French .37

Abdullah, gathering an army of his wild nomads, marched out

of the Hejaz and headed north for Syria . He got as far as

Amman in Trans-Jordan, when the French quietly let it be

known that they had had just about their belly full of English

intrigue.

Samuel again grew jittery . He had to curb the Military or

face the possibility of the French attacking Abdullah in Trans-

Jordan and remaining there . But Abdullah refused to budge .

It seemed necessary to placate him in some fashion-and Sir

Herbert had a brilliant idea : he invited the little Arab to a

conference to `talk things over,' and suggested that he park a

while in the territory of the Jewish National Home . Abdullah,

gaping at this unexpected chance for power, thought that this

would be very nice. He took over the administration of Eastern

Palestine "for a period of six months," ostensibly to restore

order 38 - a rather comic provision since the only disorder in the

territory was that created by Abdullah and his Sherifian Army

itself.

Stroking his chin quizzically at Samuel's droll move, Churchill

waited for the Zionists to blow the roof off . For once Winston

Churchill, master of bluff and stratagem, was nonplussed . The

Zionists had been gagged by Samuel's threat of still further restrictions,

and their silence was token of acquiescence .

Secure in the knowledge that Jewish spokesmen would not

prove troublesome, London began searching for a basis to

further separate Eastern Palestine from the rest of the country .

x16

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

The earlier drafts of the Mandate all contained twenty-seven

paragraphs, none of which mentioned a separate Transjordan .

The final text, sprung with the quickness of legerdemain, consisted

of twenty-eight paragraphs . The new one, number twentyfive,

empowered the Mandatory with the consent of the Council

of the League of Nations, "to withhold or set aside, in the territories

between the Jordan River and the eastern boundaries of Palestine,

the employment of such mandate agreements which are

found to be inapplicable because of local conditions," certainly

an innocent enough appearing proviso. It was explained on the

basis of Britain's anxiety lest Jewish life be sacrificed if colonization

were attempted before this turbulent, lawless area was

pacified and made suitable for European settlement . It must be

pointed out that this article, though it stipulates for the first

time a difference between East and West Palestine, nevertheless

considers the former an integral part of the Jewish National

Home and in no sense even infers its right to separation ; its

carefully chosen words merely `entitling' the Mandatory to meet

temporary emergency conditions, as they might arise, in a special

manner - that is by "postponing and withholding" the application

of the Mandatory provisions for the Jewish National

Home.39

Great Britain had no rights in this territory which enabled

her to dispose of it . Article V of the Mandate stipulates that

"the Mandatory shall be responsible that no Palestine territory

shall be ceded or leased to, or in any way placed under the

control of the Government of any foreign power." Certainly

the act of handing it over to these invaders from the Hejaz was

a clear violation of both the spirit and letter of this provision .

Right after the Zionists, cringing under Churchill's empty

threat, ratified the White Paper, Abdullah and his invaders were

installed as masters of Eastern Palestine . In July the terms of

the Mandate for Palestine were approved by the League of Nations,

and in the same month Abdullah was formally instated as

Emir of Transjordan . Adding insult to injury, the Palestine

exchequer handed him f i 8o,ooo to cover his initial expenses -

the beginning of a long list of generous subsidies paid out of the

A MAN NAMED SAMUEL

11 7

treasury of the Jewish National Home. Sonorously Sir Herbert

declared "in the name of the British Government . . . that

Great Britain is willing to recognize the independence of Transjordan

under Emir Abdullah ." This was a polite euphemism

since Transjordan was ruled directly through a British Resident

acting on behalf of the High Commissioner.

The second brutal rape of the territory of the Jewish National

Home was now all but accomplished. Transjordan henceforward

became the only territory in the world to all intents and

purposes JUDENREIN (free of Jews) . It was the first country to

prohibit Jews from even practicing a profession or owning land .

Its ban on them was complete .

Beyond whimpering a little, the Zionist Executive kept its

peace, and actually covered up this gigantic theft of the Jewish

patrimony by a new festival campaign "for the Jewish National

Fund." As late as October 1934, Dr. Weizmann was with gentle

self-abnegation declaring that "we do not wish to change

the status of Trans-Jordan by applying the Balfour Declaration

there. . ." 40

SAMUEL IS REPLACED

Probably no man was so cordially detested by his own people

as this latter-day Herod called Herbert Samuel . In any other

community this deep-seated resentment would have flared up

in periodic attempts at violence . Jews, who have an instinctive

abhorrence of lawlessness as a method of settling their problems,

kept their peace but hardly hated him the less .

Among his public acts was the matter of the allotment of

the Crown lands, which under the Mandate were to have been

placed at the disposal of the Zionists . The story of their distribution

is amazing .

The cream of these Government lands were in the Beisan

area, in the fertile region known as the Ghor Valley. When

the British first took over they found this territory, according

to the subsequent report of Lewis French, inhabited by a degraded,

sickly population who lived in mud hovels, "and of too

118

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

low intelligence to be receptive to any suggestions for improvement

of their housing, water supply or education . . . There

were no trees, no vegetables . The fellaheen, if not themselves

cattle thieves, were always ready to harbour these and other

criminals. . . The Bedu, wild and lawless by nature, were constantly

at feud with their neighbors on both sides of the Jordan,

and raids and highway robberies formed their staple industry ."

His Excellency had visited Beisan, chief marketing town of this

section, and had been "received with hostility and contumely"

by the ruffian population, a Transjordan tribe of nomads who

had pitched camp there for the winter .

Nettled, Samuel returned to his earlier technique of placating

the tribesmen with gifts . He immediately announced that he

was giving the Beisan lands to the same truculent nomads who

had insulted him . All told, the Government gave these Arabs

almost four hundred thousand dunams (a dunam is about a quarter

of an acre) 41 of the best land in Palestine, while the Jews

received not so much as a square yard .42 At the most conservative

estimate the land was worth at least C 6 per dunam, even

at that time . It was disposed of to the Bedouins for C i per

dunam, to be paid in yearly installments of two shillings each .

Immediately these lands became the subject of the most cynical

speculation. Tribesmen were not interested in the hard

work cultivation requires and most of them were given far more

acreage than they could handle by themselves . The net result

was that the major part of the soil was immediately offered to

the Zionists at fancy prices . Even more sardonic, much of the

land given to these Bedouins was resold later to the Government

at a profit of some 5oo percent, to be used for the resettlement

of so-called displaced Arabs .43 Everywhere Arab speculators

entered, scenting a middleman's profit. Many of the

tribesmen sold at inflated prices and disappeared into Transjordan

and Iraq, rich beyond their fondest dreams of avarice .

The Government was now in fact compelled to tackle a new

problem : that of preventing the Beisan lands from subsequently

falling into the hands of land-hungry Jews, who were willing to

offer almost any price .

A MAN NAMED SAMUEL 119

It was during Sir Herbert's regime that Arab opposition to

the Jews took definite form and grooved itself . The entire

Administration was honey-combed with anti-Semitic officials

who made the Executive Offices a nest of pro-Arab activity.

Samuel, masking himself behind a screen of `liberalism,' made

not the slightest move to interfere .

When in 1925 Sir Herbert was relieved by Lord Plumer,

Jewish Palestine woke as from a nightmare and breathed free

again . He had done about as much damage as it was possible

for one man to do to the Jewish cause ; but the Zionist Organization

thought it politic to go through the mummery of

giving him a testimonial banquet.44

FIELD MARSHAL LORD PLUMER

When the hated Samuel finally packed his duffle and left for

England, the Zionists experienced another of those swift surprises

that were so continually being prepared for them . Article

IV of the Mandate makes it clear that the Jewish Agency

has certain powers, that it should be consulted concerning the

appointment of any High Commissioner. The Bureaucrats destroyed

the vestigial remnant of this section of England's pledge

when they made a test case of it and appointed Field Marshal

Lord Plumer out of the clear sky. The Zionists, living up to

precedent, simply looked startled and went about their business

of `non-political' activities .

Compared to Samuel, Plumer was a vision of fair delight .

By any other reasonable criterion he was a total loss . The

Field Marshal was a hard man, iron-willed, who ruled with a

clenched fist. He was the only High Commissioner who held

his Jew-baiting subordinates within reasonable check . The best

that can be said for him is that under his rule there were no pogroms.

When the Arabs, persisting naively in the same tactics

which were so successful under Samuel, approached him in delegation,

warning that if a planned procession of Jewish war

veterans were held, they "would not be responsible for the peace

of Jerusalem," Plumer withered them by replying, "No one asked

120

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

you to be responsible .. I am the High Commissioner and I will

be responsible." The Arabs never tried that trick again as long

as the Field Marshal remained in Palestine.

However, the old policies continued unchanged . Typical of

his regime is the loan of f 20,000 to the Beersheba Bedouins in

1928 to quiet their grumbling against the indirect Governmental

refusal to allow land sales to Jews .45 It was also under Plumer

that Jews were practically banned from participation in the defense

forces of the country . A whole succession of carefully

developed ordinances directed against Zionist penetration

marked his regime . Despite this, the Zionists, with good reason

fearful of his unknown successor, were sorry to see him go .

When he resigned, a sudden outburst of Jewish energy

brought General Smuts, Zionist friend and incorruptible executive,

under consideration for the post. Smuts declined, obviously

not caring to accept the burden of reconciling his conscience

with the policies of the Colonial Office .

Page 135

CHAPTER IX

THE WHITE PAPER BARRAGE

THE THIRD HIGH COMMISSIONER

The soldier Plumer was succeeded in 1928 by Sir John Chancellor.

Chancellor was an unfortunate choice for the Jews.

He had the general appearance of the Shakespearean actor who,

with a certain forgivable pompousness, loves to play the great

man. His graying hair and regular features were imposing ; but

his countenance was too complacent and unwrinkled for a man

his age, giving an impression of appalling smugness . His contempt

for Jews was so deliberate as to appear ostentatious .

It was under this man that the bloody outbreak of 1929 took

place. When these excesses brought on an unlooked-for wave

of world indignation that threatened to swamp his regime, he issued

an hysterical statement condemning the Arabs in terms of

unbridled virulence . When he saw the Zionists disinclined to

press their advantage and yielding to British blandishments, he

maneuvered the placing of political responsibility onto Jewish

shoulders.

Chancellor was hardly equal to the standards of shrewd manipulation

set by the Colonial Office . When he retired in July

1931, he became an anti-Zionist spokesman in London . No

tears were shed when he left the country, to be succeeded by

Lieutenant-General Arthur Grenfell Wauchope .

THE POGROM OF 1929

There are few chapters in civilized history that can match for

sheer inhumanity and outrage the record of the British Government

in Palestine. Now was to be written in letters dripping

red with blood one of the crowning achievements of that record.

With characteristic blind-optimism the Zionist leaders were

running around like fussy ants, unconscious that a heavy heel was

about to crush down on their hill. With fine disregard for ac-

121

122

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

teal conditions, they were making ready to repair to Europe for

a Congress which was announced as "a turning point in the history

of Zionism - the close of an illustrious epoch and the beginning

of a new and still greater period ." Ignored were the

desperate appeals of Palestine Jewry, who knew better how to

evaluate the signs and portents written on sky and fencepost

than the mighty orators who held the fort in Europe .

For a period of six years the Zionist Executive had been negotiating

with powerful Jewish bodies with a view to forming

a vastly enlarged Jewish Agency. Such financial giants as Felix

Warburg of New York, and a galaxy of non-Zionist Jews, experienced,

shrewd and capable, were now lined up . In high exultation

Weizmann announced the forthcoming creation of an

enlarged Jewish Agency in fact, to include an equal proportion

of non-Zionists along with the Zionists .

Alarmed, the Palestine Administration watched developments

like a cat at a rat-hole . Article IV of the Mandate, long ignored,

gave the Jewish Agency considerable power . The Bureaucrats

in Jerusalem, over-estimating the financial assistance,

the fierce energy and political shrewdness which they feared

would now be supplemented for the easy-going incompetence of

conventional Zionist spellbinders, had been setting the stage for

a discouraging blow. With an unctuous play at unknowing innocence,

they built an imposing heap of the most inflammable

tinder to be found in the country, and waited patiently for just

the right moment before setting a match to it.

Carefully the story was built and circulated that the Jews

planned to tear down the Mosque of Omar, which Moslems believe

marks the exact center of the earth, and to rebuild the

Temple on its site.

Immediately adjoining the Mosque is located the most sacred

of all Jewish devotional objects, the Wailing Wall, last remnant

of Solomon's Temple. To the practical-minded Zionists

these few ancient stones did not assume any absolute significance

. But it was the sanctuary of the religious Jews ; and a

symbol of Jewish right in the land of their fathers. Thus any

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123

attack on it became identified with an attack on the rights of all

Jewry. Four centuries of Turkish rule had protected Jewish

title to this holy place without disturbance . Neither the Wall

itself nor the immediate patch of Temple area at the top had any

particular interest to Islam. For as long as the memory of man,

no Moslem had been known to concern himself with the spectacle

of these few bearded Jews weeping over the ancient stones .

Now suddenly they discovered a deep interest in the vicinity of

the Wall and ended by claiming ownership for themselves. A

whole series of petty persecutions, abetted by the authorities in

Jerusalem, followed . Stones were thrown at the worshipers,

who were jeered at and insulted . The pavement in front was

systematically covered with offal from donkeys on the day of

the Sabbath services. A rest room was erected abutting the

Wall itself, and a hospice was established adjacent to it, with a

Home for the Aged in another adjoining house . Dervishes were

put in a nearby garden, who synchronized their dancing, drumming

and noisemaking with the Jewish worship . Finally a

Muezzin popped up on the roof of an abutting house, coming

out five times daily to scream out his incitement to the Faithful .

The Wall had been a cul de sac, and when the Government

allowed, or instigated, the Moslems to erect a mosque on the

right side of it, and to break through the Wall proper to open

a new avenue to the Mosque of Omar, all Jewish Palestine rose

in indignant protest. Donkeys and their Moslem masters now

passed in droves through the sacred precincts which had been

undisturbed for centuries except for the soft prayers of the

worshipers.

On the Day of Atonement, holiest day of the Jewish calendar,

Keith-Roach, Governor of Jerusalem, learned that the worshipers

had placed a portable screen at the Wall to protect themselves

from Arab abuse . The Neilab, or closing services, were

being recited when an English officer, under the Governor's instruction,

violently broke into the midst of the worship, with

no more regard than if he were invading a den of thieves, and

removed the screen .

124

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

Incident now followed incident, with the Arabs growing daily

more pugnacious and the Administration openly abetting them .

Matters had been allowed to develop to such a point of high

tension that it seemed as if taut nerves must burst if even a firecracker

popped . In the Arab press an intensive anti-Zionist and

anti-Jewish campaign was going full blast . The Protocols o f

the Elders o f Zion were being widely circulated . The Communists,

too, like great carrion birds sensing disaster from afar,

had joined in the campaign of incitement, urging "an Arab fight

to the finish against Zionism ."' Just before the actual bloodshed

started, they took advantage of the growing excitement to

issue a manifesto urging a general strike against the policy of the

Jewish National Home .

The Zionist hierarchy had treated this pernicious propaganda

with aloof disdain as small-time matters of a passing character,

and airily dismissed as `alarmists' those friends who warned them

that blue fury was about to blaze in the Land of Israel . Like

happy children they went traipsing off to their Congress in

Switzerland. The only Zionist official left in Palestine was an

accountant, who when warned that the outbreaks were impending,

"merely shrugged his shoulders indifferently ." 2 The

High Commissioner had arranged to be absent from his post for

the first time, and was on visit to London. In charge as Acting

High Commissioner was Harry Luke, polished, suave, and

known to be unfriendly to Jews.3 Ruling Jerusalem was Ronald

Storrs, a somewhat bald man with fine patrician features and a

definite flair for the arts.4 Storrs was a cousin of Archer Cust,

secretary to Chancellor and an outspoken anti-Zionist, and was

said to be a political protege of Brigadier General Blakeney, a

violent anti-Semite who suffered from the delusion that the Zionists

"were trying to poison him ."

On August 16 a fanatical Moslem demonstration was held in

Jerusalem . The mob yelling, "For Mohammed with the sword!"

roared on to the Wailing Wall where they tore up Jewish

prayerbooks and burned liturgical documents . This violence had

been permitted by the Government and no arrests were made.

Arab agitators began touring the country, bringing word from

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125

the Mufti that Friday the twenty-third was to be der Tag, instructing

the villagers to await orders on that day .

In this atmosphere of threat and uncertainty the Government

once more deliberately disarmed the Jews, leaving the colonies

defenseless.5

The riots were precipitated by the police themselves, who

with extraordinary savagery attacked a procession of mourners

who were carrying the casket of a seventeen-year-old Sephardic 6

boy who had been stabbed to death by Arabs. Old men, women

and children were beaten up indiscriminately .? The city was

swarming with fellaheen and Bedouins armed with clubs, knives

and guns and they needed no further invitation . Like a flood

of death they broke loose over the city with the old cry : "Al

daula Maana !" (The Government is with us.)

In Jerusalem the police watched the riots start with several

hundred screaming cutthroats brandishing their weapons and

shouting for Jewish blood, without making the slightest effort to

stop them. One mob proceeded from the Mosque to the Nablus

Gate for an attack on the Jewish Quarter of Meah Shearim .

Six mounted policemen went with them, watching the proceedings

with interest . In the Georgian Quarter of Jerusalem whole

families were slaughtered by these howling `patriots .' Violation,

murder and pillage took place while British officials stood on the

balcony of the nearby Government House - heard the screaming

and the shots - and did nothing.

For eight days the country was given over to an orgy of violence.

Far from declaring martial law the moment these outbreaks

occurred, no attempt was made to disarm the invaders .

Even after the massacres began the police did not use their firearms,

under "orders from headquarters ." 8 The Acting High

Commissioner, Luke, cynically informed an anxious Jewish delegation

begging for help, that he had "given orders not to

shoot."

Jewish youths responded with hidden arms and clubs in the

desperate work of self-defense. A group of visiting Oxford

students did what they could to redeem the good name of England

by ranging themselves on the side of the defenders and

126

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

fighting with chivalric courage . On August 24, Luke decided

to disarm all Jewish special constables in response to a request of

the Mufti." The possession of arms by the Jews was everywhere

and at all times illegal . Jews were sentenced to long

prison terms for even owning a dagger, standard Bedouin equipment.

Those defending themselves were arrested and charged

with murder .

A typical incident took place in the village of Jabniel where

troops were finally dispatched in response to the frantic appeals

of the villagers for help . Their first act on arrival was to arrest

ten men in the village found in possession of arms . To what

lengths the Administration was willing to go in immobilizing the

Jewish self-defense is shown in the case of the Jewish police constable,

Hinkis, sentenced to death for `murdering' one of the

attacking hoodlums . No wonder the Hebrew newspaper Davar

asked in despair : "Is there a law which compels our men to deliver

their lives and the lives of their children to massacre, their

daughters to rape, their property to plunder ? What theory

and what kind of regime is it that demands such things from

men ?"

Horrible days of nightmare followed for the Jewish colonies,

who found themselves beleaguered by veritable armies of

screaming savages . The colony at Ekron sent a delegation to

the British officer stationed at Naaneh . He received them brutally

and refused to offer any advice as to how the Jews were to

defend their lives and property . Asked what was to be done

with the cattle, he said, "put them in the synagogue ." And

when the Jewish physician of Ekron pressed him for a sensible

answer, he boxed his ears. Shaken by this ruffian attitude the

colonists decided to evacuate their homes, and went down to the

railroad station . At four in the afternoon, the same officer appeared

with a guard and demanded all the weapons in the

place .1 "

It was at Hebron and Safed that the worst slaughters took

place . At the former town the British officer in charge was a

man named Cafferata. To understand the type of men the

Mandatory placed in charge of the Jewish National Home, it is

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127

merely necessary to know that Cafferata was an intimate of the

Princess Kerachi, one of the moving spirits in the anti-Semitic

Internationale then taking form in Europe . Openly warned,

the Jews at Hebron had appealed day by day to the Government

for protection, and had been `eased' away. During the

horrible massacre that finally took place, Cafferata stood calmly

by, eying the awful scene as if it were some kind of theatrical

tableau. Witnesses were unanimous in reporting that even a

warning, or a few shots in the air, would have dispersed the mob.

The attackers stormed the houses, and sliced their occupants to

ribbons. Everything worth stealing was carried off . The rest

was soaked in stolen gasoline and set on fire. If it had not been

for some friendly Arab families, not a single Jewish soul in

Hebron would have remained alive . After this bestial orgy had

gone on for some hours, the mob was commanded to scatter .

The police, says an eye-witness, then "shot into the air, and at

once the street was empty ." 11

Hebron was only a carbon copy of terrible events taking

place all over this stricken land . At Safed, after the same looting

and slaughter, the Jewish quarter was set on fire . A sickened

onlooker described its appearance as ghastly - as if guns

had shot it to pieces .12 It was not until the burning petroleum

was turning it into a crackling furnace, that the Chief of Police

finally gave orders to his men to shoot with blank cartridges .

This "stopped the massacre immediately, but not the pillage ." 13

Refugees from Hebron and other places filled the schools and

hospitals . The Government did not even deem it necessary to

furnish mattresses and foodstuffs, and the Jewish relief organizations

were not adequate to the misery ." At Hebron the

wounded were herded under horrible conditions at the police

stations, without medical aid or water . According to a survivor,

Zwi Greenberg, "the Governor only wanted us to wire

'Hebron all right ."'

Whatever interpretation one might place on the role of the

Government in this crazy melange of revenge, its actions following

the riots can hardly be described as anything less than

contemptible. Its press releases set a new high in official men128

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

dacity and ill-concealed dislike for the stricken victims themselves.

In its reports the attacker is classed with the attacked,

the criminal with the innocent, even though not a single case existed

of Jewish assault on an Arab quarter or of Jewish looting .

Following its usual technique, all Jewish newspapers were suppressed

; while Arab publications with open brazenness proclaimed

Arab guilt and aggression, as if victors in some medieval

holy war. Some picture of the utter depths this bias reached

can be gained from the notice issued by the Administration that

it "deprecated any mention of the Arabs having mutilated their

victims." To this Duff exclaims : "They had not mutilated

them - they had merely hacked them to pieces ." 15

Since the days of the Crusaders no such massacre of Jews in

Palestine had occurred . Six colonies had been totally destroyed .

The property loss was incalculable . In the blackened rooms of

what were once their homes lay the mangled bodies of hundreds

of innocent creatures who had come, eager-eyed, to this country

to build a new life for themselves . The wounded and maimed

were everywhere . Were it not for the miracle that the Arabs attacked

in broad daylight instead of night, giving the Jewish selfdefense

an opportunity to organize, the Jewish Yishub * would

have been wiped off the map of the Near East.

WHO WAS RESPONSIBLE ?

All witnesses agree that the uprising was neither spontaneous

nor unforeseen . As in the previous pogroms, evidence of careful

preparation was plainly written . Setting the general tone of

comment, the correspondent for Alif Beh, great Arab newspaper

of Damascus, wrote "that the uprising was the result of

British intrigue . . . The English were looking for an excuse to

reject the demands of the Jewish Agency to participate in the

administration of the country, and encouraged the Arabs to

teach the Jews a lesson ." Lawrence, supposed to know the

Arab better than any living Englishman, stated that "if you had

four hundred decent British policemen in Palestine there would

Hebrew name for the Jewish Community .

THE WHITE PAPER BARRAGE

129

have been no trouble for the Jews there ." 16 The venerable

Hindu poet, Rabindranath Tagore, urging a united fight on England

by all the oppressed races, charged her with "seeking to

perpetuate a state of war between the Arabs and the Jews ." 17

The Frankfurter Zeitung accused London of seeking to "prove

through recurrent struggles between Jews and Arabs that England

must stay forever in Palestine ." 18 Adding its voice to the

uproar, the League's Mandates Commission lashed out at the

British Government, virtually accusing it of sabotaging the Jewish

National Home.19

Everywhere it was admitted that the mob, justified or not,

had acquired the belief that the Administration was on their

side. Among other incidents, when some Arabs were placed in

custody for their part in the Hebron massacre, they exclaimed

in righteous indignation : "How is this ? Weren't we told that

the English are with us against the Jews ; and now the soldiers

take us prisoners !" 20

In a paroxysm of revulsion Palestine Jewry spit out the gag

that had smothered its voice and directly fastened responsibility

on the Administration for the riots. In a grim Protest Memorandum

to the High Commissioner signed by the whole Jewish

community, no words were minced in calling blunt attention

to "officers of the Government whose responsibility for these

events is beyond doubt. . ." 21 The Memorial o f the Jews of

Hebron submitted to the High Commissioner "in the name of

sixty-five slaughtered, eighty-five wounded, and many orphans

and widows, and in the name of the remnants of the plundered

and the tortured," pathetically "accuses the Government, which

did not fulfill its duty . . . the Commander Cafferata, who deprived

us o f the means o f appealing for help and defense, betrayed

us with empty promises, and gave the murderers and robbers

their opportunity ; the Police, which . . . behaved with

contemptible baseness ; and the Emissaries of the Mufti and the

Moslem Council . . . who proclaimed the massacre ."

The drums of horrified protest now rolled with increasing

tempo all over the world . The Administration had overplayed

its hand again. Realizing its error it was doing its best to cover

130

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

up, and once again the Zionists were presented with a brilliant

opportunity for reversing the tables .

Chancellor himself, noting which way the wind blew, repudiated

the entire affair in these blasting words : "I have just learned

with horror of the atrocious acts committed by bodies of ruthless

and bloodthirsty evil-doers, savage murders perpetrated on

defenseless members of the Jewish population regardless of sex,

accompanied . . . by acts of unspeakable savagery, of the burning

of farms and houses in town and country and of the looting

and destruction of property . These crimes have brought upon

their authors the execration of all civilized people throughout

the world ." The Government was in full retreat all along the

line, casting anxious glances at the effect on America where vital

economic interests were involved, and at Egypt, Ireland and

India, where local patriots were utilizing the occasion to justify

their own hatred for the foreign usurper .

The Zionists, however, were hardly political-minded enough

to understand their opportunity . They considered that the Jews

had no strength and that their strategy must continue to be one

of wheedling for slight gains . Catching its breath, the Government

placated them with soft words, condemned its minions in

Palestine and promised redress . The Zionists sat down to wait

while various `Commissions' were sent down from London to investigate.

Having held the business-end of a live wire so long the Zionists

should have been prepared for shocks . But when the `Commissions'

after long delays brought in pro-Arab reports, they

stared in bewildered amazement. They looked on still more unbelievingly

when practically everyone accused of having a hand

in the riots was promoted . Cafferata, the evil genius of Hebron,

was decorated for `heroism.' Luke was rewarded for his efforts

by being made Governor of Malta, a caustic commentator remarking

that his appointment could do no harm since trouble

had already started there.

Chancellor's "bloodthirsty evil-doers" all got off with nominal

sentences. The highest term any of the Hebron murderers

received was eighteen months . At no time were more than the

THE WHITE PAPER BARRAGE

1 3 1

most farcical efforts made at conviction . Characteristic of the

style in which this business was handled was the case of a fellah

who had killed the two young sons of a woman named Fruma

Charkel by dashing their brains out . He had known the family

for years, and had only laughed at the mother's plea for mercy

while the little boys were being battered to death . With her

surviving son she appeared against him, as did the invalid father

and several other eye-witnesses to the attack, including the revered

Rabbi Epstein . Despite this weight of testimony the

court finally freed the Arab, finding "insufficient evidence ." 22

Even more ribald were the `awards and amends' which the

Government had contritely promised the riot victims, and

which were finally doled out after an interminable wait. Here

are some of the `compensation awards,' selected at random

Rabbi Hassoun, whose house at Hebron had been destroyed and

plundered, with a claimed damage of £ 3000, received £ i i . i os.

The Jewish Community of Hebron, with a loss of £ 2000 including

the destruction of its synagogue, asylum and other communal

institutions, was paid k54. Asher Karlinsky, whose

house at Hebron was completely gutted, received i 4s . M.

Klenger of Safed, with a loss estimated at £ i i,ooo, came off

somewhat better with an award of 040 ; while a sister of

Rabbi Dvoretz of Hebron, who had her hand cut off and her

home reduced to a shambles, was given the sum of f2. I OS' . In

nice contrast, Hassan Albudeiri, an Arab lawyer of Jerusalem,

who had some "personal belongings" burned, was awarded

£ 348.

Beyond muttering at length on "the shameful attitude of the

Government," the Jews took it like a dose of castor oil, which

having once been poured down their throats, admitted of no

further argument . But a still more fantastic occurrence, which

even this patient people could not stomach, arose when the

Arabs at Hebron, claiming `prescription rights,' commenced to

plough and plant the land abandoned by the Hebron Jews in

their flight. They, moreover, declined to pay debts owing to

Jewish creditors, asserting them to be non-existent under the

Palestine law which provides that the lender must appear in per132

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

son to swear that the borrower received the money . The lenders

had, however, all been massacred by the borrowers . There

seemed to be nothing in the law which provided for such a situation,

leading the newspaper Doar Hayom to ask in outraged

fury whether it was the policy of the Government "to have the

Hebron murderers inherit the money of their victims ." 23

However, like all abominations, these things began to lose

their edge as time went on and were soon half-buried in the

past. In many of the villages eternal peace was declared between

Arab and Jew, to the accompaniment of colorful oriental

festivities and the usual slaughter of a sheep to wipe out the

blood feud.

But it was only a matter of a few months before the British-

Moslem combination was up to its old tricks of provocation . A

fair illustration is the case of technical school student Zilbaski,

who was arrested in April 1930 for chasing Arab hoodlums who

had been stoning worshipers at the Wailing Wall . Fined seven

shillings he was warned, in essence, not to interfere with the

pleasures of Arabs .

COMMISSIONS AND WHITE PAPERS

Headed by men whose `broad Socialist principles' had more

than once declared themselves flatly in favor of the Jewish

Homeland, the Labour Party sat firmly entrenched in power in

England. Lord Passfield, ne Sidney Webb, Marxist radical, was

Colonial Secretary. Arthur Henderson, who had drawn up a

handsome resolution in 1917 approving the Zionists' right "to

form a Free State under International Agreement, where the

Jewish people may return and work out their own salvation

without interference by those of alien race or religion," was the

power behind the throne . Perched directly in the saddle was

J. Ramsay MacDonald, Prime Minister and a self-announced

Zionist who had asserted after visiting the Near East in 1922

"The Arab population do not and cannot use or develop the resources

of Palestine . . . The country is undeveloped and underpopulated."

THE WHITE PAPER BARRAGE

133

During pre-war days the Socialist Internationale had been

openly hostile to Zionism of any brand, recognizing in fine that

a Zionist proletariat was a contradiction in terms, a force devoted

incongruously both to separatist and merging principles .

Shifting its position after the War, Labor Zionism was adopted

as part of the international politics of the Socialist world . A Socialist

Pro-Palestine Committee was created to place the mighty

strength of the movement behind Zionism . Among the most

wordy in their enthusiasm for this fabulous commission were

the English members, MacDonald, Landsbury, and others, who

were later to disembowel their little Jewish brother with their

left hand while they embraced him with their right.24

These were the men, self-announced exponents of the coming

brotherhood, who held the destinies of the Jewish experiment in

their fingers . Confident of the outcome the Zionists settled

back complacently to await the result of London's 'investigations.'

First to report was the Shaw Commission, releasing its

findings in the Spring of 1930 . The Zionists were stunned . It

was evident that the `Comrades' in Downing Street had let them

down pretty sadly . The Shaw report was outspokenly anti-

Jewish . Charged only with investigating responsibility for the

riots, it had gone far afield, conducting a probe altogether outside

its sphere of reference ; creating a most clever confusion of

issues, and engagingly shunting off the main purpose of the investigation

to the background .

It included among the immediate causes of the outbreak,

the enlargement of the Jewish Agency, though it is doubtful

whether any of the murderers at Hebron and Safed, where half

of the Jewish victims were killed, ever heard of the Jewish

Agency or its enlargement . It touched deftly on the cupidity of

the Jews, and blamed the Zionists for bringing in too many

potential Bolsheviks into the country . It held the primary cause

of the riots to be, in essence, the crafty way in which the Zionists

had taken advantage of the innocent Arabs, who were being

deprived of soil and sustenance . Thus was created the 'landless

Arab' fiction which was to serve the Government of Palestine

as a convenient symbol for many years . In a statement, bizarre

1 34 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

even in this land of extravaganza, it found an extenuating circumstance

for the outbreak in that it was "not premeditated ."

The Grand Mufti, a self-convicted perjurer whose guiltlessness

was best proven when he referred the Commission to The Protocols

o f the Elders o f Zion,* was given an adept whitewashing .

The Commission made no mention of the source or prevalence

of arms in Palestine, and failed to investigate the extent of the

looting by Arabs with which the riots were accompanied and

the importance of this looting as an incentive for the disturbances.

It endorsed Luke's action in disarming the Jews and refusing to

fire on the mobs. It omitted to report that all the special Jew

ish constables had been publicly paraded and disarmed at the demand

of the Arabs. While stating that all the special constables

were of British nationality, it is nowhere mentioned that a large

proportion of those disarmed because they were Jews were exservicemen

o f the British Army, many o f whom had held the

King's Commission .

Only two short years before, the Government of Palestine

had published the fact that "the country suffers from a lack of

population - it is under-cultivated and needs capital ." 25 But

the Commission now found that Palestine was overcrowded ;

there were too many people and not enough land to go around .

Recommended in solution was the curtailment of Jewish immigration

and land purchase, and a Government subsidy to buy

up acreage which was to be handed scot-free to the 'landless

Arabs' wherever these worthies could be found . Completely

challenging Jewish position in Palestine, the Arabs were to be

given `proportionate equality,' a phrase which Hopkin Morris,

one of the Commissioners, defined to mean that "not another

Jewish immigrant can be admitted to Palestine ." Just how uncorrupted

these recommendations might be can be easily estimated

from Hopkin Morris' acknowledgment in Commons, not

more than six months later, that "the Jews are perfectly right -

what was promised to them meant a Jewish State ." (November

1 7, 1 930.)

Another member of the Commission, Lord Snell, turned in a

* See note 6, page 542 .

THE WHITE PAPER BARRAGE

1 35

minority report fairly bristling with contempt for the findings

of his colleagues. He accuses the Administration of encouraging

the Arabs "to believe that they have suffered a great wrong

and that the immigrant Jew constitutes a permanent menace to

their livelihood and future," despite the plain fact that "Jewish

activities have increased the prosperity of Palestine and raised

the standard of life of the Arab worker." Far from finding the

country overcrowded, he notes that "wide tracts are lying

waste" which should be made available to the Jews .

Time has shown conclusively that the findings of the Shaw

Commission, as well as those of the bodies which followed in

its train, were so wrong as to seem wilfully ridiculous. Each

one of these Commissions proved itself more hostile than its

predecessor, making recommendations so opposed to the selfevident

facts as to lead one to believe that the substance of their

findings must have been dictated in advance . This presumption

is at least indicated, since each of these bodies appeared to

operate on a preconceived plan aimed at erecting a structure of

precedent which was to serve as authority for future commissions,

thus creating a new body of apparent facts to substitute

for the actual facts .

The Zionists had been mercilessly jobbed . They choked and

spluttered in amazed exasperation. The incredible posing of

'landless Arabs' in a country suffering from a drastic shortage of

workers, was past understanding . So, too, was the Commission's

demand that Jewish capitalists be forced to put all Arab unemployed

to work before another Jew could come in, which meant

literally the employment of all the natives of Northeast Africa

and Arabia (since these outsiders were already flowing into the

country in a steady stream) .

Lloyd George, coming to the point where the Shaw Report

declared that there was "no more room" in Palestine, termed

the learned labors of Britain's Commissioners "mischievous nonsense."

He roared : "The report made for the Government,

of which I was the head in 1q i q, by competent and experienced

engineers, stated that by well-planned schemes of irrigation one

million acres could be added to the cultivable area of Palestine,

136

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

and that by this plan sixteen persons could be maintained for

every one there now." 26

THE REPORT OF HOPE-SIMPSON

Whitehall had made provision for the howl that went up

from distracted Jewry . They had another rabbit ready to be

pulled out of the hat, in the shape of a new Commission which

was to investigate the investigations of the previous Commission .

The trick was something like that of the catch-penny auctioneer,

who glibly makes good to his spluttering victim by selling him

another object more worthless than the first, accepting the parcel

complained of in part payment . This is the kind of business

that experienced British dealers in international legerdemain

were now practicing on the naive, frightened Zionists.

The new Commission, headed by Sir John Hope-Simpson '27

was replete with a staff of `experts.' Sir John had had a good

deal of experience in the mass movement of emigre populations .

He had gained his knowledge of the refugee problem as Vicepresident

of the Refugee Settlements Commission (which had

conducted the mass transplantation of 1,300,000 Asiatic Greeks)

in Athens from 1926 to 1930. He therefore seemed to be

an ideal man by both understanding and experience for this

job.

On November zo, 193o, Hope-Simpson's report was published

by the Government simultaneously with a Cabinet decision

acting upon it . 28 With the lightning stroke of an expert

matador the Zionist development in Palestine had now been

handed the coup de grace . The great Jewish experiment was

now all but officially dead .

In releasing both the Cabinet's White Paper and Hope-

Simpson's report so precipitously, both precedent and practice

were coolly ignored. Under time-sanctioned Colonial usage,

the Zionists would normally, as party to the matter, have been

allowed to study the Report and make the usual observations

and criticisms before it was actually put into effect .

Hope-Simpson's Report consisted of a symposium of oblique

THE WHITE PAPER BARRAGE

1 37

attacks against the Jews . It embodied all the anti-Semitic conceptions

of its day : the professed inability of native races to

compete with superior Jewish ability and cunning, the omnivorous

greed of the `rich' Jew for further gain . It carried a

de facto recommendation for numerus clausus in all directions,

as the only method of keeping these objectionable Jewish attributes

within reasonable bounds. As Sir John puts it, "it is the

Government's duty under the Mandate to see to it that the Arab

position is not prejudiced by Jewish immigration ." The Commissioner

decries the purchase of land by Jews and suggests that

they be prohibited by law from buying more . The unfortunate

Arab had to be protected against the Hebrew who was crawling

over his land like a plague . This, clothed in the niceties of diplomatic

language, was the substance of Hope-Simpson's findings .

To support them he brought up an array of figures and facts,

which had they been accurate, would have been imposing.

Hope-Simpson went so far as to compute (with a figure inferring

mathematical precision) that 29 .4% of the Arab rural

population was landless, leaving in the reader's mind a vague impression

that it was owing to Jewish settlement activities that

landlessness had reached such alarming proportions . With nice

precision, leading to the patent inference that it is the result of

an exact survey, he gives the area of cultivable land as 6,544,00c?

dunams. He makes no effort to explain the astounding difference

between this estimate and the figure of 11 ,ooo,ooo dunams

supplied by the Director of Lands of the Palestine Government

to the Shaw Commission ; or the figure of i z, z 3 3,000 dunams

given by the Johnson-Crosbie Report on the position of agriculturists

in Palestine, which had appeared shortly before . Later

it was discovered that the method investigator Hope-Simpson

used to arrive at this precise computation was to send up a man

in an airplane, who decided what land was or was not cultivable.

This original system, wholly unique in the history of

agronomy, was able to establish in a few weeks that the official

Government figures, accepted as correct for years, were ioo%

off.

Operating on figures which events were also to show unsup138

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

ported by factual evidence, Hope-Simpson discovered that a

fellah family needs 130 dunams of land, 28a whereas the 61,4o8 fellah

families actually had only go dunams per family ; leading

ipso facto to the only possible conclusion, that the land was already

overcrowded and immediately faced with a pressing problem

of Arab landlessness .29 Everywhere he uses the words

'landless' and `tenant' indiscriminately and interchangeably, leading

one to wonder whether the great tenant-farmer class of

England itself should not, on the same score, also be considered

'landless.'

Bespeaking the common distaste and distrust for Jews, Hope-

Simpson states with ominous reserve : "The Federation of Jewish

Labour continues to carry out, at the expense of World

Jewry, a social and economic experiment of great interest but

of questionable value . The Jewish Agency either approves of

this experiment or is impotent to suppress it." (Even more explicit

in its left-handed charge that the Jews were introducing

Bolshevism into Palestine, was the White Paper based on Hope-

Simpson's Report, issued at the same time .) With a queer, newfound

type of ethics, Sir John proclaims in regard to the settlements

which were being subsidized by the Jewish National

Fund, that "it is undesirable from the point of view of ordinary

morality that colonists should be allowed to benefit by the large

expenditure which has been made for their settlement, and yet to

escape payment of the amount spent upon them . . ."

In addition to these generalities, several practical measures

are included in the Hope-Simpson Report . One was the demand

that irrigation work of any kind be virtually prohibited 30

(which would put an absolute stop to Jewish irrigation development)

; and another that the Government buy land out of the

public funds, i.e., with Jewish money, to hand over to all Arabs

who could prove they were landless . Jews were to be virtually

restricted to the cities. Not even in Czarist Russia had anyone

ever suggested a scheme as cruel and unfair as this .

Hope-Simpson, who had been sent to the Holy Land under

instructions to investigate the slaughter, looting and rapine perpetrated

on Jewish colonists, like his predecessors and successors,

THE WHITE PAPER BARRAGE 1 39

had left his field of reference far behind and nowhere now to be

seen. In the meanwhile, to leave a convenient retreat in case

anything went wrong, still another `Commission,' headed by

Lewis French, retired officer of the Indian Service, was puttering

away in Jerusalem .

THE PASSFIELD WHITE PAPER

Lord Passfield, smug dean of English social reform theoreticians,

was not long in assimilating the technique of the Colonial

Office when he took over the portfolio of Colonial Minister in

the Labour Cabinet. A radical whose expressed admiration of

Soviet method and theory remained constant, he also observed

the Bolshevik inconsistency toward the Jew : he did not concede

that they had the right to be Zionists . He frankly admitted

that he was opposed to the Histadruth (The Jewish

Federation of Labor) . He did not approve of the type the

Histadruth was bringing into the country, stating openly that

he preferred the old type of Palestinian immigrant of before the

War, the `pious' Jew who went there to die . He emphasized

that since he was a Socialist, he was not opposed to the new immigrants

because they were Socialists and trade unionists, "but

because they were Zionists ." 31

He was nasty to Jews wherever a convenient opportunity

arose, and pursued the Zionists with all the hatred a zealot holds

for infidels . Asked in I93o by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency

for a New Year's message to Jewry, he curtly refused . Before

he took the bull by the horns to issue his `White Paper,' he had

attempted to push through an ordinance ghettoizing Palestine

Jewry in the cities, frustrated only by an energetic fight on the

part of the Jewish Agency .

Despite all this, the Jewish Socialists continued to vocalize

their undying `solidarity' with Comrade Webb, the fellow-

Marxist. Commenting on a perfectly venal statement Passfield

had just issued, the influential Socialist New York Jewish Forward

stated editorially on July 9, I93o that "the whole document

breathes a warm desire to convince the Jewish world of

140

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

the full friendship toward Jews and toward the Jewish work in

Palestine felt by the Labor-Government . . . Comrade Webb

seeks to throw a new light upon certain happenings and show

that these have been misinterpreted by the Jews ." The wiser

conservative daily Ha'aretz points out that the Labour Government

of England has lent itself whole hog "to the Colonial office's

conspiracy to liquidate Zionism." The `conspiracy' to

which Ha'aretz alludes had been in preparation so long that

nothing short of a miracle could head it off . On November

20, 1930, Officialdom deemed that the sapping operation had

been completed . Comrade Webb himself, with pious words of

explanation,_ touched off the fuse.

The Zionists abruptly awoke to the realization that they had

built on sand ; that it was the end of them and their dreams of

salvation, their fund collecting, their stereotyped statement that

"our relations with the Mandatory are satisfactory ."

All the distortions, the veiled anti-Jewish hostility of the

Hope-Simpson Report, were in the White Paper . Benignly it

asserts that since there are only 6,5oo,ooo dunams available, there

is not enough for the Arabs, who require 8,ooo,ooo ; therefore

land purchases in future would be permitted "only if they do not

interfere with the Government's plans for development," an

artful method of saying that Jews could no longer settle on the

soil. To make the matter air-tight it sets up the principle that

land with tenants on it cannot in future be sold - in effect freezing

the vast stretches held by great Levantine landlords, mostly

emigres living with their retinues in Cairo and Paris .

The, outcome of this reasoning was the recommendation for

complete stoppage of immigration "in view of the responsibility

under the Mandate" and of the "close relationship of immigration

and the land development policy ." In keeping with the

same argument it holds that the older type of Jewish immigration

benefited the Arabs, whereas "The Zionists' contentions regarding

the benefits which their colonization work has bestowed

upon the Arabs has been proven . . . fallacious ."

Massing a frontal attack on the stupefied Jewish Agency, Socialist

Passfield cries that a "modus vivendi" must "be established

THE WHITE PAPER BARRAGE

141

between the Government and the Jewish Agency regarding

their respective functions, and full account must be taken of the

influence in policy exerted by the General Federation of Jewish

Labor over the Jewish Agency. . . It is necessary to take

into account the part played by the General Federation o f

Jewish Labor . . . [which has] adopted a policy implying the

introduction o f a new social order ." Here we have an astonishing

though not unusual spectacle : the pot calls the kettle black ;

the British Labour Party, speaking as the Government of Great

Britain, sanctimoniously expresses dissatisfaction with its Jewish

comrades for following a line of policy in Palestine identical to

that which the Labour Party itself is committed to in England .

Loading its guns for bear, the Government released at the

same time a statement of policy announcing the realization of

Samuel's pet scheme, the Legislative Council. This maneuver,

which would have handed the country over irrevocably to Arab

politicos, was issued with the remarkable explanation that it

"should be of special benefit to the Arab section of the population."

As a sop to the Jews the White Paper included the usual

verbiage in reference to the Government's good intentions, and

the droll "hope that the White Paper will restore the confidence

of the Jews in the British Government ." This gratuitous bit of

buffoonery was too much for even the compliant Zionist leadership.

With cries of stung anguish it bolted the traces and

started to run amuck .