Israel and International Law: THE RAPE OF PALESTINE Part 3

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE Part 3

THE MACDONALD LETTER

Once again the Bureaucrats were to find to their amazement

that they had fallen into a pit of their own digging. The Labourites, newer to Imperial sleight-of-hand, had been too incautious - far too obvious in their tactics.

For a few days it appeared to the Jews that this was the end -

that Zionism had been terminated. Jewish idealists who had

fought all their lives for this cause, walked down the streets of

the principal metropolises of Europe, openly weeping.

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Then a sudden revulsion struck the body of Jewry. A cry of

`shameful betrayal' arose, and rapidly gathered volume. Vitriolically the late Lord Melchett challenged the White Paper as "an act of almost unparalleled ingratitude and treachery . . .

towards a credulous and harassed people who believed they had found a haven under the broad aegis of the British flag and the guaranteed word of British statesmen." The venerable Menachem Ussishkin, stolid and unimaginative but one of the few men with common sense in the Zionist leadership, was allowed to speak his mind. "For thirteen years," he declared, "there had been falsification. Lord Passfield . . . has spoken the truth.

England does not want us to build up Palestine. All other

statements are diplomacy, or simply lies ." Cut to the quick,

the usually moribund Jewish Agency lambasted Passfield's document as a crude piece of dishonest writing whose purpose was "to discredit the Jewish Agency, disparage Jewish achievements in Palestine, and encourage the ill-disposed elements of the Arab population."

In America, in France and in Germany, leaders of public opinion were vying with each other in condemning the unprecedented treachery of the Labour Government.
In America, Congressman Hamilton Fish Jr. threatened a Government inquiry into occurrences in Palestine, pointing to the treaty which had made the United States a legal party to the Mandate.
From South Africa, General Smuts thundered that the promise to the Jews had "become world law" which "cannot now be varied unilaterally by the British Government." David Lloyd George drily challenged the good faith of the Government by declaring in Commons: "They dare not try to kill Zionism directly, but they try to put it in a refrigerator." The Jews themselves were now aroused everywhere.
In Warsaw fifty thousand paraded, shouting imprecations against Britain. There was fierce talk of treating the British to the same retaliation they had suffered at the hands of the Sinn Fein movement. Far and wide the hue and cry rose from indignant throats.

In England itself the government of the day was a minority

government and definitely unpopular. All the elder statesmen,

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says Sidebotham, were on the Jews' side .32 The leaders of the

Conservative and Liberal parties gleefully seized on the affair as a mighty club to beat the Labourites over the head with. Loudly they voiced their incensed feelings and clamored for the repeal of this disgraceful pronouncement. Mr. Baldwin, Sir Austen Chamberlain, with Mr. Amery, in a joint letter complained that the White Paper "would create in America and elsewhere a feeling of distrust in British good faith." Such world-famous luminaries as Lord Hailsham and Sir John Simon announced that the Passfield document was a flagrant breach of International Conventions, fouling the honest name of England. Gathering strength from all quarters, the storm on the Passfield White Paper rose to whirlwind proportions.

At this point a shrewd, courageous Jewish leadership could

have made an expeditious end to Colonial Office plotting . Fate

had laid in their laps another rare gift of chance - a situation

they could not have improved on if they had artificed it themselves,

with the Bureaucrats caught flat-footed in a position they

could neither defend at home nor abroad .

Until this time in their relations with London the Zionists had

been suppliants . They occasionally remonstrated, complained

and criticized, but never demanded. Whatever they asked, it

was always in the tone of the poor relation asking alms of his

rich kinsman. Now for the first time in London's experience

the exasperated Zionists approached the point of open rebellion .

Weizmann himself, always so submissive to blandishment or

threat, was miraculously transmuted from rabbit to lion . In

unmistakable terms he swore that the Jewish people would

never swallow this outrage, that neither he nor his colleagues

would negotiate with the British Government so long as this

infamous document continued to adorn its archives . He demanded

its unconditional removal before the Zionists would

consent to resume any relations whatsoever with the Mandatory

Power. His words were dynamite . They meant a showdown

fight with quarter neither given nor asked . To top it all he resigned

as President of the World Zionist Organization and announced

that he was calling an immediate session of the Zionist

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Congress, which alone could decide what steps were to be taken .

The air fairly crackled when two days later Felix Warburg,

head of the Jewish Agency, also resigned, charging that Passfield

had deliberately tricked him in the behind-the-scenes negotiations,

making him "the innocent vehicle of misstatements to

his colleagues of the Jewish Agency." In a rousing attack in

which the roiled banker stepped completely out of character, he

smote the British hip and thigh, making it plain that no reliance

whatsoever could be placed on the word of Passfield or the

Government he represented, and that further relations with

them were therefore hopeless .

Painfully alive to the situation, the Labour Government saw in

consternation that the affair was assuming the proportions of a

cause celebre ; and that its political opponents were hoping it

would prove the pole to tumble it from power . Prominent

Englishmen, convinced that Britain's good name had been tarnished,

were mercilessly criticizing the reports of the `Commissions'

as only meant to whitewash the criminal culpability of

Palestine officials . Lloyd George, still a powerful figure, had

stentoriously warned his nation : "We shall not reconcile the

Arabs, but we shall alienate an even more powerful race, and,

what is worse, British honour will be sullied ." The influential

London Times asserted flatly that the nation could not afford to

disregard the foul odor this matter had raised in all civilized

quarters, which could end in "a disagreeable political result and

financial consequences that might be even more unpleasant ."

The London Sunday Times, recapitulating in a fiery editorial,

wrote : "First the Jews are massacred in their National Home .

The Inquiry Commission instead of fixing the immediate responsibilities,

strays outside its terms of reference and blames the

Mandate, the Jews and everyone but the murderers . Then the

Government instead of throwing the slovenly and biased report

into the waste paper basket, proceeds to act on two of its recommendations

about immigration and land and finally proceeds to

hang up the Mandate altogether until someone else has reported."

And the Manchester Guardian solemnly declared

"No sooner have we cured the cancer o f Ireland in our internaTHE

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tional relations than the indecision o f MacDonald makes a worse

one of Jewry ."

Completely taken aback by the force of the storm that had

gathered, MacDonald offered to do the noble thing. As an

earnest of good intentions he held out the bait of fifteen hundred

immigration certificates .

A circumstance of grave importance now threw its shadow

over the entire proceedings . This was the emergence of the

Socialist labor organizations as a strong factor in Zionist politics.

Although definitely in the minority, they were an important

portion of the support which kept Weizmann in power .

Pressure now began quietly operating on Weizmann from the

Comrades in the Labor groups, who in turn were being highpressured

by the Second Internationale which had finally admitted

them to membership only a few months before . Leon

Blum of France and George Landsbury of England, among

others, members of the Internationale's Pro-Palestine Committee,

appealed to the Comrades in Palestine in the name of the common

solidarity . They asked them to prevent the attempt to

discredit the new Labour Government in Britain, by keeping the

White Paper from coming up for a test vote in Commons . Mac-

Donald promised, if allowed to save his face, that the situation

would be quietly righted. Completely softened up by these assurances,

the Jewish Comrades yielded . Weizmann, relieved of

the torturing conflict with his prior British patriotism, hastily

agreed.33

Friends of Zionism, and bitter opponents of the Labour regime,

waiting eagerly to crush the MacDonald Government by bringing

the affair to a test vote, gulped unbelievingly when they

were informed that Weizmann had given over his golden opportunity

in exchange for a few suave promises and fifteen hundred

immigration certificates. The Zionist Actions Committee

was informed that the scheduled congress, feared by Whitehall

because it was sure to be stormy and wildly anti-British, must be

postponed . Weizmann had reversed himself completely, and

now held out that it was necessary to `negotiate' with the English

Government . His major premise for this recommendation

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was little less than astonishing : Zionist finances were not in

good shape-therefore it were better to eschew `politics' and

concentrate on `practical' matters.

On the Actions Committee sat the Revisionists (right-wing

Zionists) and the Mizrachi (religious Zionists) . The Revisionists

raged ; the Mizrachi resigned in protest ; but the Labourites

and Weizmann's personal followers were in the majority, and

they held fast.

In return MacDonald issued a letter to the Zionists, which

later turned out to be meaningless . Known as the MacDonald

Letter, this communication promised a redefinition of the term

'landless Arabs,' now explained to refer only to such Arabs as

could be shown to have been actually displaced from lands they

formerly occupied ; to investigate what State lands could be

made available for close settlement in accordance with Article

VI of the Mandate ; to reestablish the principle of immigration

"according to economic absorptive capacity" and to allow the

Jewish Agency the right to employ all-Jewish labor on works

or undertakings of its own. It also concedes the White Paper's

error in attempting to substitute the words "Jewish inhabitants

of Palestine" for "the Jewish People" as the beneficiaries of the

Mandate, declaring "that the undertaking of the Mandate is an

undertaking to the Jewish People, and not only to the Jewish

population of Palestine ." "In order to remove certain misconceptions

and misunderstandings" about the Passfield document,

MacDonald agrees that the Mandatory's "obligation to facilitate

Jewish immigration and to encourage close settlement by the

Jews on the land, remains a positive obligation of the Mandate."

On February 13, 1931, the MacDonald Letter, approved by

Weizmann for the Zionists, was laid before Parliament, thus becoming

a State paper . Weizmann greeted this Pyrrhic victory

in the manner of a man who was distributing largesse all around .

He said : ". . . Our work will benefit the whole of Palestine,

including the Arabs, who have suffered from the general economic

crisis, as well as the Palestine Administration which for

the first time in many years now suffers from a serious deficit in

its budget."

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The Government showed its bad faith immediately . The Letter

was released on Saturday, by tradition a hint to newspapers

not to editorialize . MacDonald had ably retreated out of an

ugly situation - and had conceded little. The London politicians

breathed free again . Among others, their old rivals the

French, planning to make capital out of the incident, now had

to drop it.34

But the fire had been fanned so violently that it still smoldered.

At the following sessions of the Permanent Mandates

Commission, the Mandatory was unmercifully cross-examined .

Hastily, Dr. Drummond Shiels, the English representative, replied

that though there had been a great deal of Jewish bad

feeling before, that had all been happily settled, and a love-feast

had subsequently taken place between the Zionists and the British

Government . The now discredited Hope-Simpson Report

would be ignored and a new set of facts and figures, "ascertained

by a development authority on the spot, will be the basis

of the recommendations regarding the C2,500,000 Palestine development

scheme which the British Government is now framing."

35 Eying his interlocutors with a bland smile, Dr . Shiels

asked the Commission whether, in view of the manner in which

the Premier's Letter was received by Weizmann, he (Shiels)

needed to make any further comments on the controversy which

had proceeded.36

The Zionists were not long in finding out that official Britain

had not lost one shade of its determination to crush their movement.

Whitehall had, however, been taught its lesson and had

learned not to be too obviously precipitate . Afterwards, Officialdom

was always outwardly correct in its sympathy for

Jewish aspirations ; but it continued relentless, in a determined

pyramiding of more or less cautious artifice, seeking to break the

back of an enterprise it now cordially detested .

THE KID GLOVE HIGH COMMISSIONER

In July 1931, Lieutenant-General Arthur Grenfell Wauchope

became His Majesty's legate in Palestine, succeeding Chancellor .

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A slight man with a delicately chiseled face, Wauchope had

been the General Officer in command of North Ireland . With

him came the Black and Tans who had wreaked so much havoc

in the Emerald Isle. He was unique in not being a product of

the inflexible system of the Colonial Office .

He proved polite, shrewd, aesthetically inclined, even something

of an artist . He was the first High Commissioner whom

the Jews could even remotely understand . Sir Arthur visited

their colonies - and even expressed some interest in what was

going on. He has been known to give substantial personal gifts

to various Jewish institutions which caught his fancy .

The Jews tended to like him . The regulations passed under

his rule, clearly ear-marked as anti-Semitic measures, were usually

excused by them as proceeding from `Mohammedan pressure,'

or from the sheer inability of a gentile administrator to

get to the bottom of Jewish problems . Even when things grew

inexcusably vexatious, they still refused to credit Wauchope

with a deliberate anti-Jewish policy, and compromised by calling

him vacillating and irresolute . Yet from a practical viewpoint,

Wauchope was hardly an improvement over his predecessors.

During his regime the baleful French Report was

released. Under Sir Arthur the disastrous rebellion of 1936 -38

took place ; followed by the inevitable epilogue, a new investigating

`Commission .' This latest body finally recommended a

plan for further partitioning the country, which if it were placed

into effect, would have produced much of the same result intended

by the abortive White Paper of Lord Passfield .

It is undoubtedly true that Wauchope would infinitely have

preferred not to be a party to this epidemic of Jew-baiting had

circumstances allowed . He is, however, a loyal servant of a

system which has come to regard Zionism as dangerous to the

most precious possession of Englishmen, the Empire .

THE REPORT OF MR. FRENCH

The `expert' Dr . Shiels referred to before the Mandates Commission,

whose findings were to supersede the Hope-Simpson

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Report, not only used that report for his precedent, but went it

one better in every acrimonious reference to Jews . A retired

official of the Indian Civil Service, Lewis French had been sent

ostensibly on a great Zionist development scheme, one of the

concessions agreed to by the Labour Government in its private

conversations with Dr. Weizmann .

With the astuteness of long practice, French stalled for time

until the agitation over the Passfield White Paper was well over .

After a year and a half of ostentatious preparation his report was

submitted to the Arab Executive, and to the Zionists, sitting in

camera. The Zionists hit the ceiling - they had been beautifully

jobbed once more .

The report of Mr . French consisted in the main of a compendium

of generalities against the Jews . He recommended, in

brief, the adoption of a drastic Land Transfer Ordinance completely

prohibiting land purchase by Jews. As if to show French's

comparative reasonableness, his collaborator T . C. Kipching, more

draconian still, appended an auxiliary report asserting that it was

necessary for Jews to give up what land they had already acquired

and migrate from Palestine .

Poor Wauchope, desperately trying to remain something of a

gentleman in this whirlpool of Crown politics, found the crude

dissimulations of this `Report' even more than he could stomach .

He objected . French, fuming at this `traitorous' conduct, threatened

to resign .

In London, the Jewish leaders, realizing how completely they

had been duped, were now hysterically raising the roof . Under

instructions from Downing Street the `expert,' French, grudgingly

agreed to modify his report, and finally resigned, his place

being taken by a subordinate, L . Y. Andrews." Baffling months

of parleying took place in which the worried Zionists were placated

with the usual assurances . These were inevitably passed

on to the rank and file of the movement in Weizmann's conventional

words : "The situation is satisfactory . The Government

desires faithfully to discharge its obligations in the spirit of the

Mandate."

On July 16, 1933 the French Report was finally issued . It

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placed land transfers completely under Government control . It

stated bluntly that the hill Arabs required special protection

against Jews. It elaborated tiresomely on the 'landless Arab'

question. It found the Jews rich and predatory, and piously

referred to the `displaced' Arab as "a son of the soil to be replaced

on the land of his country."

The huge `development scheme' now turned out to be a plan

to purchase citrus land for Arab settlement . Arabs were not

only to be given the land without charge, but the cost of buildings,

livestock, etc., was to be supplied by a paternal Government.

No recognition whatever was made of the fact that

Zionism was and remained a poor and struggling movement,

largely the product of the distress of the Jewish masses, of the

economic pressure forcing their migration and resettlement . At

that very moment there were over seven thousand agricultural

workers in the Holy Land employed on private plantations who

had waited from five to ten years for the chance to get a parcel

of land ; and abroad there were more than forty thousand young

men and women trained on the Zionist agricultural farms who

were waiting anxiously for the chance to locate on a bit of Palestine's

brown earth. Landless Jews, if the Government generously

permitted, would have to buy their acres at prohibitive

prices and depend on Jewish philanthropy for the rest .

Frankly interested in perpetuating the country in its undeveloped

state, French considers as `cultivated land,' areas "on

which a few score of half-starved Bedu families are at present

grazing goats and cutting reed-grass," to use his own description.

The returns of the latter `industry' have been estimated

at three to five pence per dunam per year . In regard to the

marshy Huleh area, a malarial swamp which the Jews were seeking

official permission to drain, French agreed that "settled as

Government tenants, a leavening of Jewish colonists in this tract

would tend to an acceleration of the desired development after

the marshes have been drained ." The brazenness of this observation

is probably unparalleled : the Jews are to buy the swamp,

pay for draining it, and will then be permitted to supply `a leavening'

of Government tenants in its precincts. The Arabs are

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to get the balance without cost. Jewish settlement on the land no

longer appears as one of the primary purposes of the Mandate,

let alone a positive obligation of the Government . It is now

merely to serve as a device, to be applied in small doses only, for

the stimulation and enlightenment of Arab agriculturists .

The French Report proposed legislation of an advanced type

scarcely conceivable outside of Russia . It sought to create a

body of peasants permanently attached to the soil and denied

freedom of movement, a scheme which the indignant Jewish

Agency describes as "an attempt to reestablish the medieval institution

of Glebae Adscriptae." 38 The directness of this subterfuge

is shown in French's recommendation that occupancy

rights be dated as of two years back, "notwithstanding that the

holding may have been since that date let to some other persons,

or may have been left unlet ." The new owner or lessee is left

without remedy or compensation, though he may have incurred

great expense in moving on the land and in improving it . This

provision, granting prescriptive rights to people who may have

left the soil, disregarding the rights of others who may have purchased

or obtained leases meanwhile, is only understandable in

light of the fact that the new holders were invariably Jews .

Another clause of this document practically fixes maximum

rentals in perpetuity, so that more attractive tenant offers to landlords

could not be made . Incensed, the Jewish Agency screwed

up its courage to declare that the purpose "of the proposed clause

is to perpetuate uneconomic use of the land and obstruct development."

In practice, acceptance of this Report would make the establishment

of new Jewish colonies a complete impossibility . The

Jews were to be put in a straight-jacket as they were in the

Russian Pale, forever condemned to be city dwellers and petty

traders.

Thus turned out the great `Palestine Development Scheme'

with which Shiels had cajoled the League's Mandates Commission

almost two years before .

BOOK TWO

CHAPTER I

JEWS HAVE A REPUTATION FOR

INTELLIGENCE

THE ZIONIST ORGANIZATION

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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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

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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 .

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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

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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

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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 .

THE MACDONALD LETTER

Once again the Bureaucrats were to find to their amazement

that they had fallen into a pit of their own digging . The Labourites,

newer to Imperial sleight-of-hand, had been too incautious

- far too obvious in their tactics .

For a few days it appeared to the Jews that this was the end -

that Zionism had been terminated . Jewish idealists who had

fought all their lives for this cause, walked down the streets of

the principal metropolises of Europe, openly weeping .

142

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

Then a sudden revulsion struck the body of Jewry . A cry of

`shameful betrayal' arose, and rapidly gathered volume . Vitriolically

the late Lord Melchett challenged the White Paper as

"an act of almost unparalleled ingratitude and treachery . . .

towards a credulous and harassed people who believed they had

found a haven under the broad aegis of the British flag and the

guaranteed word of British statesmen ." The venerable Menachem

Ussishkin, stolid and unimaginative but one of the few

men with common sense in the Zionist leadership, was allowed

to speak his mind. "For thirteen years," he declared, "there

had been falsification . Lord Passfield . . . has spoken the truth .

England does not want us to build up Palestine . All other

statements are diplomacy, or simply lies ." Cut to the quick,

the usually moribund Jewish Agency lambasted Passfield's document

as a crude piece of dishonest writing whose purpose was

"to discredit the Jewish Agency, disparage Jewish achievements

in Palestine, and encourage the ill-disposed elements of the Arab

population."

In America, in France and in Germany, leaders of public opinion

were vying with each other in condemning the unprecedented

treachery of the Labor Government . In America, Congressman

Hamilton Fish Jr . threatened a Government inquiry

into occurrences in Palestine, pointing to the treaty which had

made the United States a legal party to the Mandate . From

South Africa, General Smuts thundered that the promise to the

Jews had "become world law" which "cannot now be varied

unilaterally by the British Government ." David Lloyd George

drily challenged the good faith of the Government by declaring

in Commons : "They dare not try to kill Zionism directly, but

they try to put it in a refrigerator ." The Jews themselves were

now aroused everywhere. In Warsaw fifty thousand paraded,

shouting imprecations against Britain . There was fierce talk of

treating the British to the same retaliation they had suffered at the

hands of the Sinn Fein movement . Far and wide the hue and cry

rose from indignant throats.

In England itself the government of the day was a minority

government and definitely unpopular. All the elder statesmen,

THE WHITE PAPER BARRAGE

143

says Sidebotham, were on the Jews' side .32 The leaders of the

Conservative and Liberal parties gleefully seized on the affair as

a mighty club to beat the Labourites over the head with . Loudly

they voiced their incensed feelings and clamored for the repeal

of this disgraceful pronouncement . Mr. Baldwin, Sir Austen

Chamberlain, with Mr . Amery, in a joint letter complained that

the White Paper "would create in America and elsewhere a feeling

of distrust in British good faith." Such world-famous luminaries

as Lord Hailsham and Sir John Simon announced that

the Passfield document was a flagrant breach of International

Conventions, fouling the honest name of England . Gathering

strength from all quarters, the storm on the Passfield White Paper

rose to whirlwind proportions .