THE RAPE OF PALESTINE - part 4

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE - part 4

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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,

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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

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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

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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,

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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

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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

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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 .

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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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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 .

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 .

Weitzman 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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145

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 Weitzman in power .

Pressure now began quietly operating on Weitzman 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 . Weitzman, 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 Weitzman 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 . Weitzman 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

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

a State paper . Weitzman 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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147

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 Weitzman, 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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THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

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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149

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. Weitzman .

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

THE WHITE PAPER BARRAGE

1 5 1

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

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE by WILLIAM B. ZIFF - Book 2 of 4

BOOK TWO

CHAPTER I

JEWS HAVE A REPUTATION FOR

INTELLIGENCE

THE ZIONIST ORGANIZATION

An important differentiation must be made between the Jewish

community in Palestine and the World Zionist Group which

officially has the business of repatriation in hand . The community

in Palestine is a nation in embryo, pulsating with new

life. In striking contrast, the Zionist Organization of the World

consists of a loosely knit group of autonomous federations, one

for each country . Any Jew may become a voting member

by the simple procedure of purchasing a shekel (at a cost of

about 50¢), which constitutes his token of membership . The

very circumstances which separate Zionism from the everyday

affairs of life in the various countries of the Diaspora, lend

an air of unreality and philanthropy to the movement . This

nebulousness is amply reflected in the deliberations of its various

branches, and in the vitiated case presented by its spokesmen

in Geneva and London .

Jews have a reputation for expert organizing ability and for

shrewd reasoning, but none of these qualities are evident in the

structure of the Zionist federations . Their business is handled

in the main by magnificent orators whose political conceptions

are limited to the viewpoint of platform lecturers ; and their sessions

are apt to result in mere acrimonious debates between men

who are more scholarly than practical. The fervent support of

many millions of Jews whose only hope lies in Zion has given

this organization infinite possibilities for potency and strength ;

but this latent power has been almost completely wasted by a

group of pedantic spokesmen who obstinately regard all creation

152

JEWS HAVE A REPUTATION

153

as if it could be cut to the pattern of a book . The principal concern

of the American Zionist Organization, for example, is to raise

money for the upkeep of its considerable staff of officeholders,

plus the question of whether a Rabbi Goldman is to be president

or a Rabbi Goldstein is to be president . At a four day convention

held in Providence, in July 1936, during the worst crisis

that Jewry has experienced in five hundred years, the sum total

of its labors was the announcement of a campaign to plant 100,000

trees in the Holy Land, and a resolution voicing confidence in

the Zionist President, Weitzman .

The Zionists maintain a London Executive and a Palestine

Executive who mainly specialize in sending learned memoranda

to the British Government and the League of Nations . With

these executive bodies is affiliated still another politically impotent

appendage, the Jewish Agency . Article IV of the Mandate

solemnly provides that the Jewish Agency "shall be recognized

as a public body for the purpose of advising and cooperating

with the Administration of Palestine in such economic, social

and other matters as may affect the establishment of the Jewish

National Home." On paper it has all the prerogatives of a

chartered colonizing body, instructed to "take steps in consultation

with His Britannic Majesty's Government to secure the cooperation

of all Jews who are willing to assist in the establishment

of the National Home ." The British have, however, reduced its

powers to a collective zero. Caught in the same web of strange

infatuation which has ruled Zionism's dominant leaders, the

Agency, too, relegates politics to the background as unimportant

child's-play . The present Jewish Agency is the result of long

negotiations conducted by Weitzman with certain wealthy non-

Zionists, in the hope of inducting the moneybags of the latter into

an enlarged circuit of operations .' The inclusion of non-Zionists

in this vitally important body was the outcome of the ruinous conception

that economic and cultural interests were the sole levers

capable of raising the Jewish edifice in Palestine . The moneybags,

like moneybags the world over, proved obstinate and hardheaded.

They were willing to offer plenty of sage advice but

kept their checkbooks under lock and key . Outside of their

154

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

accustomed spheres these men proved so inept as to practically

paralyze the Jewish Agency as a political instrument .

From a non-political viewpoint the Jewish Agency has been

extremely successful. It is conscientious, thorough and efficient,

maintains fine statistical and research units, and is usually better

informed regarding economic trends and possibilities than are the

corresponding agencies of the British Administration .

The identical differences of opinion and conflicts of ideology

which are shaking the foundations of society everywhere, are

also evident throughout Zionist ranks . The differences between

Zionist factions are sharp, accentuated by the unhealthy position

the Jew occupies in relation to his environment in Europe . The

same pressures which are creating social conflicts in all countries,

are seen by this doubly harassed people through a magnifying glass .

These irreconcilable groups fall into the usual two camps .

The first, interpreting history in terms of applied Marxian economics,

considers that the course of action lies solely in a Socialist

settlement scheme . What reason, its proponents argue, to

carve out a new unit on the earth's surface if not for the realization

of Socialism . This group, necessarily dualistic, regards all

nationalism with suspicion, and wants a bi-national cooperative

State to include the Arabs . Here are to be found the Zionist

Labor parties, of various degrees of red and pink, known as the

Poale Zion and the Left Poale Zion . They have surrounded

themselves with the same Marxist slogans which proved so hopelessly

inadequate in Germany and Austria . Their literature talks

provocatively of the struggling Palestine industrialists as "an aggressive

capitalist class which strives . . . to create profits out of

the sweat and blood of the `lower classes ."'

They make a considerable effort to instruct their `Arab comrades'

in the mechanics of class-struggle . It is they who have

taught the Arabs the catch-phrases and strike technique which

has been used so successfully against the Jewish National Home ;

and invariably it was these same favored Arabs who led in the

attacks against the Jews themselves .l8 The kind of irresponsible

demagoguery frightened British imperialists were greeted

with can be seen in the deliberations of the First Workers World

JEWS HAVE A REPUTATION

155

Congress. Here the radical leader, Joseph Sprinzak, stated that

participation of Jewish Labor in the Zionist Organization did not

mean a coalition with the bourgeoisie, but "only with the Jewish

workers," a declaration bettered by the Left Poale Zion who asserted

that any cooperation with the Zionist bourgeoisie was

"treason." 2

All the leftist groups possess the traditional Marxist contempt

for religion in any form, and as a result suffer the ineradicable

animosity of the religious elements, who accuse them of trying

to "substitute the religion of Marx" for the fundamental principles

of Judaism .

The opposing camp of Zionist theoreticians suspects what

Herzl also suspected-that if Zionism did not early attain political

control under an assured Jewish majority, all economic

and cultural efforts would finally end in the same ruin which

overwhelmed the Jewish cultural centers in Spain and Lithuania.

They point out that the Laborites tend to be `separatists'

in everything, with their own schools, special theaters,

sports-organizations, and even their own hymn instead of the

Jewish national song, the Hatikvah, thus splitting the weak and

dispersed nation throughout the world as well as its minority in

the Holy Land.

The Nationalists insist on a monist course of action aimed

solely at recreating the Jewish State, emphasizing that in a

modern world the old distinctions between economics and politics

have largely disappeared . They fear that the system of

compromising politics followed by the Labor camp must end

in the doubtful ideal of a Jewish community in an Arab land,

satisfactory to the Marxist mind as long as that ideal is Socialistic.

They assert that during the period of national colonization,

class-struggle is a double misfortune-that it is logically

impossible to call the nation "to unite for the purpose of building

a Fatherland, and simultaneously split and crumble it into

hating and babbling classes. . ." They demand compulsory arbitration

in all labor disputes. In their ranks may be found all

shades of right-wing opinion . Their chief strength lies in

Eastern Europe where they represent the strongest and most

156

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

vital hope among the younger Jews. Giving these stifled

youngsters an outlet to their emotions and creative energies,

Jewish nationalism has unquestionably saved them from the

calamity of Communism .

Consisting mainly of Mr. . Jabotinsky's Revisionists, the rightwingers

demand an emphasis on state diplomacy which recognizes

the extent and pressure of the existing Jewish problem,

"perceiving the aim of Zionism to be a complete and final solution

of the Jewish world-problem in all its aspects ." It demands

an orderly mass migration to relieve the intense pressure

which is crushing the Jewish communities in the Diaspora.

This, it asserts vigorously, is a State function requiring the active

intervention of the State Power, as contrasted to the present

desultory efforts provided by private enterprise and charity .

Revisionism also holds uncompromisingly to a demand for

restoration of the stolen area of Trans-Jordan .

Jabotinsky's external policy is founded on the belief that

Zionism is providential for the solution of British problems in

the East, making the Jewish State London's natural ally . He

points out that all British strongholds from India to the Nile are

inhabited by a solid Mohammedan bloc, intrinsically unstable

and hostile to European penetration. Should Palestine remain

Arab the British must at some future date be thrown bodily

out of the Near East . A Jewish Palestine, on the other hand,

located as an island in this grinding Mohammedan sea, would,

notwithstanding the uncertainties of future politics, be forced

to rely on permanent alliance with Great Britain.

Suffering like the other Zionist leaders from an incurable

Anglophilia, Jabotinsky has offered Jewish Legions from Poland

and elsewhere to police Palestine, or the whole near East if required.

In return the Bureaucrats treat both him and his movement

with surly dislike . Jabotinsky himself is prohibited from

setting foot in Palestine .

The Revisionists, however, do not hesitate at times to damn

British policy with refreshing directness . Whitehall, now knowing

how to evaluate their future strength, unquestionably fears

them.

JEWS HAVE A REPUTATION

157

Also moderately right-wing are the orthodox religious Zionists,

the Mizrachi . Its members may be identified by their long

black coats, curly side-locks, and general inoffensive demeanor.

Mizrachi is capable, when aroused, of common sense and unbending

courage, but it is not aroused often . Among the rightwingers

also is the Jewish State Party, a small group to all

intents and purposes identical with Jabotinsky's group in policy .

In the Center, between all these violently contending factions,

lies the General Zionist group, itself split into factions `A' and

`B,' dependent on whether they lean to the right or the left, respectively.

The General Zionists allege to be Liberals and pure

followers of Herzl . From their ranks are drawn Weitzman,

Wise, Ussishkin, Lipsky and most of the other recognized leaders

of the Zionist world movement . In actual practice they invariably

tend toward simple opportunism, leaning toward the policies

of the party holding the deciding vote at Zionist conventions .

Their political philosophy has been marked by continuous compromise,

retreat and hope .

Tied to the fortunes of these struggling factions in Palestine

are two labor organizations who manage to hate each other with

a bitter detestation not surpassed anywhere .

The required sums for running the somewhat complicated

Zionist machinery are raised by a unique method of self-taxation,

and a system of unctuous levying on the rich, called by the

Jews 'schnorring .' So dependent have the mechanics of Zionist

activity become on these necessary contributions that suspicion

may well be entertained that the major policy of the Zionist

Organization has degenerated into a promotion scheme for the

raising of these vital moneys ; that in short, the tail now wags

the dog . The most important of these organized endowments

are the Keren Kayemeth (Jewish National Fund) and the Keren

Hayesod (Palestine Foundation Fund) . The Revisionists have

their own machinery, the Keren Tel Chai .

This imperative need for money to feed a gradually gathered

army of officeholders appears to dictate much that is otherwise

inexplicable in Zionist policy . The basis of such a precarious

system of revenue is a continuous and increasing tempo of bally158

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

hoo. Booklets must be issued replete with stories of amazing

achievement, leading to the inference that all is going swimmingly

and that these superb successes are only limited by a

regrettable inadequacy of private contributions . The poignant

realization that their revenue is dependent largely on an unceasing

relation of `triumphs' to hard-headed Jews who want

to see value for their money, is the nightmare of Zionist existence,

turning everything they undertake into an operation distinguished

mostly by its ballyhoo. As a net result, the Zionists'

political policy is for all practical purposes bankrupt, since they

may not dare risk puncturing the beautiful bubbles which they

themselves have blown over so many years .

Up to May 1935 the two biggest Zionist funds had collected

a total of jJ 9,400,ooo between them . Despite self-adulatory

publicity, up to that date the land settlement schemes of the two

Kerens had only succeeded in placing a total of 2800 families

on the soil . Effectually prevented by British-fashioned ordinances

from carrying out their ambitious colonization plans, the

Zionist Funds have gone in heavily for such luxuries as grants

to the Hebrew University and the establishment of national libraries.

They have also allowed themselves to be euchred into

subsidizing public health and educational institutions, while the

less obliging Arabs have these identical services paid for out of

the public tax moneys . This whole collapse of healthy function

is strongly intimated in the resignation of Isadore D . Morrison

from the Board of Directors of the Keren Hayesod and The

United Palestine Appeal Board in November 1937 . Charging

"mismanagement, waste, extravagance and misinformation to the

public" in the administration of these funds, he accused the official

Zionist Organizations of having degenerated into mere propaganda

bodies which had long outlived their usefulness .

Not included in the official Zionist bodies is the Agudath

Israel, an ultra-orthodox group who consider women's suffrage

an outrage against God, and Zionism itself a heretical movement.

They believe that when the Almighty is ready he will

send down a messiah who will miraculously lead the way to the

JEWS HAVE A REPUTATION

1 59

Promised Land without political intervention . The unworldly,

wraith-like fanaticism of Agudath Israel has to be seen to be

appreciated . A typical tidbit is the cherem (bull of excommunication)

pronounced on the all-Jewish city of Tel Aviv,

forbidding the Faithful from setting foot there during the gay

merry-making which marks the annual Purim festival . Agudath

Israel is completely persona grata with the Colonial Office, who

see in its zealous messianism the kind of Jew who will give them

no political difficulty.

THE PALESTINE DREYFUS CASE

It was not long before the war between the Zionist factions

degenerated into a wild fracas of words, slander and bricks .

Like the French revolutionist, Carrier, who said "we will make

a graveyard of France rather than fail to regenerate her in our

own way," the leftists were determined to brook no opposition

to their scheme for a cooperative commonwealth. The worst

epithet they could give mouth to was the word `Fascist,' which

they applied to the Hebrew nationalists as if the latter were

predatory wolves . Comically enough, when the `Left' Poale

Zion seceded from the parent body in 1931 it did not hesitate to

denounce its erstwhile Socialist comrades as `Fascist' in turn .

Bad feeling between these rival groups finally ended in wild

physical attacks, in which Revisionist meetings were stormed

with rocks and tear gas bombs . According to Professor Klausner

of Hebrew University, there was not a hospital in the Holy

Land that did not house a Revisionist wounded by leftists .

When thirty Revisionists were injured in Haifa in an assault on

one of their halls, it proved too much even for the Jewish

Agency which on October 23, 1934 declared itself "outraged

by the brutal attacks which were poisoning the atmosphere of

Palestine."

Delighted at this opportunity to smash Jewish nationalism

with the help of Jews, the Government took a hand in the persecutions.

Revisionists, treated as common criminals, were sentenced

to penal servitude, their homes raided and their papers

16o

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

suspended. Its meetings suppressed as dangerous revolutionary

activity, the besmirched and harassed party was for a time practically

driven underground .

In the inner business of Zionist politics the Revisionists had

constituted themselves the opposition to the policy of retreat

initiated by Weitzman and the Zionist Executive . This brought

the Executive down on their heads like a swarm of hornets,

throwing it directly into the laps of the Laborites. A campaign

of slander and repressions followed . Feeling against the Revisionists

rose to a fever pitch, as may be seen from the assertion

by the American Zionist boss, Louis Lipsky, that "a party

which makes disloyalty and violation of discipline a political

principle, which educates its youth to imitation of Hitler organization

methods . . . cannot expect to find place or countenance

within a movement like Zionism ." 3

Here was a unique alliance : the Jewish leftists who hated

the capitalist system and British Imperialism alike ; the Jewish

Agency capitalists who automatically detested leftists and who

could not avoid recognizing British persecution of their cause ;

and the Whitehall bureaucrats who looked on Zionists in general

with distaste and on leftists in the Near East with dread .

All of these regarded as their main enemy in the Palestine sector,

the struggling Revisionist Party .

In this atmosphere of violence and incitement a prominent

left-wing leader, Chaim Arlosoroff, was murdered while walking

with his wife on the beach near Tel Aviv .

Arlosoroff stood for everything the Revisionists were against .

He was an ardent advocate of class war . As a member of the

World Zionist Executive in charge of political affairs, he established

a policy of truckling to British pressure, denied that Palestine

officials were anti-Zionist, and praised Wauchope in unbounded

terms as a genius who really understood the needs of

Palestine. A few weeks before, he had threatened in a letter to

The New Way, Yiddish Zionist organ in Czechoslovakia, that

if the Revisionists ever came into power, Labor Palestine would

carry the fight to the streets and would make a bloody civil war

of it (June io, 1933) .

JEWS HAVE A REPUTATION

161

The murder took place at night in an isolated spot. An appalling

number of European women had suffered rape at Arab

hands, and at first it was assumed that this was a companion

piece to that stream of outrages . Arlosoroff, dying in Hadassah

Hospital, stated that his assailants were unknown to him and

that he was quite certain they were not Jews .

None of this deterred the Labor press from immediately setting

up the charge that here was a political murder . Wildly

they demanded blood revenge . In charge of the investigation

was Captain Harry Rice (Deputy Inspector General of Police),

who got busy at once . He promptly arrested a young Revisionist

named Stavsky .

Stavsky was a stout blond youth of handsome appearance

who had been in the country some three months. His whereabouts

during the time of the murder was amply established by

a score of creditable witnesses, but Mrs . Arlosoroff promptly

identified him as the companion of the man who had fired the

shots. Immediately after, a Revisionist boy named Mintz was

taken into custody, as were two Arabs named Mejid and Lufti.

The state's case was completed with the apprehension of Zvi

Rosenblatt, a young nationalist who was also conveniently

identified by Mrs . Arlosoroff as the man who committed the

actual murder.

Determined to make a clean sweep of the Revisionists, the

Administration ordered a mass arrest of their leaders and held

them without bail, accused of `sedition.' In the formal charges

they were alleged to be part of an organization aiming "to raise

discontent among the inhabitants of Palestine" and "to promote

hostility between different sections of the population ." One

of the supposed "terroristic acts" was the removal of the swastika

flag from the German Consulate Building in Jerusalem by

three of the defendants . Another was an obscure reference in

a confiscated letter to "a certain Jew in Jerusalem whose ideology

rings true and lives within our conscience ." Defense attorney

Cohen protested unavailingly that there was nothing in

this mention of Jesus Christ that could in good sense be construed

as operating against the public peace.

162

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

Among those arrested was a prominent editor named Yevin,

and Aba Achimeir, who was accused of being the intellectual

author of the murder . Achimeir, idol of the extreme nationalists,

was of the new type of Hebrew patriot, rigid, incorruptible,

and single-minded to the point of rhapsody . Slim and

courtly, with black ringlets hanging over a high, pale forehead,

he looked like a figure from one of El Greco's canvases .

Palestine was in a turmoil . In an atmosphere inflamed with

libel and violence, the accused were placed on trial for their

lives . As the trial opened, Achimeir was cleared of complicity

in the murder . Collusion between police and Government witnesses

was clearly proven. Evidence was shown to have been

deliberately falsified . Its case against him having collapsed so

hopelessly, the Government ordered Achimeir's release . This

was on May 16, 1934. On May 17, he was promptly rearrested,

charged with leading a "terrorist Revisionist Organization," and

held incommunicado in Acre Prison .

The boy, Yehuda Mintz, who had been identified by Mrs.

Arlosoroff, was also suddenly freed, without explanation, leaving

Rosenblatt and Stavsky in the dock . At the trial, Mrs.

Arlosoroff, caught in a mass of self-contradictions, was accused

by innumerable witnesses of lying . The Government's own

witnesses, insufficiently drilled in their role, made it manifest

that the accused could not have killed Arlosoroff. It was shown

that at the time he was supposed to have committed the murder

Rosenblatt was one of the main speakers at a mass meeting in

another city . More grimly amusing still was the peculiar position

of Captain Rice in refuting the confession of the Arab,

Mejid, who had admitted to the murder with rape as the motive .

In an action unprecedented in modern jurisprudence, Rice took

the stand to swear to Mejid's innocence, and refused pointblank

to call witnesses in regard to the Arab's confession .

On June io, 1934, in one of the most amazing decisions ever

rendered, Stavsky, whom a flood of testimony had placed elsewhere

at the time of the murder, was sentenced to hang . In

the indictment, he had been accused of holding the flashlight

while Rosenblatt did the actual killing . Rosenblatt who had

JEWS HAVE A REPUTATION

163

been addressing a public meeting at the time of the murder, was

acquitted - yet the co-accused Stavsky was convicted . Said the

doomed man on hearing the sentence : "This is a conspiracy by

the Jewish Labor Party and the Palestine Government against

me. I am totally innocent ."

An immediate censorship was put on the Jewish press restraining

it under peril of confiscation from calling attention to

the patent absurdity of the verdict. Three Hebrew newspapers

were stopped and their owners heavily fined for commenting

on the case as a miscarriage of justice.

Vindictively the Poale-Zion-Zeire-Zion (United Jewish Socialist

Workers Party) issued a statement applauding the verdict,

saying that "nothing could serve so well to clear the atmosphere

in our political life." It asserted that "the foundations of British

judicial institutions . . . leave no ground for doubt as to the

impartiality and legal regularity of the trial ." Despite this vote

of confidence, Joseph F . Broadhurst, Assistant Inspector General

of Police, was later to admit that "there was practically no evidence"

against the accused .4

The Laborites were making all the capital they could out of

this tragic situation, the first time a Jew had been on trial for the

murder of a Jew in the modern history of Palestine . In their

publicity they referred to the Revisionists as a party of murderers.

The Eighteenth World Jewish Congress, instead of occupying

itself with problems connected with British perfidy,

ridiculously voted to send a commission to Palestine to investigate

the alleged use of violence and terroristic methods by the

Revisionist group . The Laborites, by an adroit campaign of

slander only comparable to the scheming by which the German

Nazis used the burning of the Reichstag to corral a huge sympathy

vote, controlled the convention with almost forty-five

percent of the ballots .

Weitzman, mild-mannered to Jewish enemies, had a fierce

side when he faced Jews . He refused to return to the leadership

or even to come to the Congress, reputedly because the

Revisionists had not been expelled .

In the meanwhile the pot, which had only been simmering,

164

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

began to boil. Of the four judges who sat on the case, only

one was Jewish, and he alone had voted for acquittal. Now

this Jewish judge, venerable Moshe Valero, braved the wrath of

the gods and issued a strongly couched statement showing the

virtual impossibility of Stavsky's guilt . Chief Rabbi HaCohen

Kook, beloved Palestine leader, wrote a personal appeal to world

Jewry asking for aid in this flagrant miscarriage of justice .

With ferocious ardor the Labor groups leaped to the defense

of their kill . All over Palestine on the walls of houses and

synagogues, slogans were daubed in red paint, reading, "Pity

the nation whose priests protect murderers ." Labor groups

met and condemned in violent language the attempts to clear

Stavsky.

The question agitated the entire Jewish world, which soon

became convinced that an innocent man had been railroaded to

the death cell for the sake of political expediency . In London

the famous Scotland Yard Inspector Charles Leach took the classic

part that Zola had held in the Dreyfus case of a generation past.

His sharp and biting report was a masterpiece of its kind . The

pressure became so great that the British Government could not

ignore it - the trial was reopened .

Shrewd and capable Horace Samuel was now the defense attorney

. He pointed out, among other things, the renewed confession

of the Arab, Mejid, and demanded that the police records

be made public . Again Captain Rice mysteriously refused .

Evidence showing that the leftists had exploited the murder for

political purposes in the 1933 election and that they had, together

with the Jewish Agency, assisted the prosecution in securing

the conviction of Stavsky as a political measure, was excluded

. Even then the proof of collusion was so patent that the

Palestine Court of Appeals had no other recourse than to free

the condemned man . He had been in prison a year and walked

out with his hair snow white .

The Marxists showed their joy over the verdict by stoning

the synagogue in which Stavsky and Rosenblatt were worshiping.

Davar, Laborite mouthpiece, followed up an official leftist

manifesto by declaring that the two men remained murderers.

JEWS HAVE A REPUTATION

165

Things rapidly came to the point where Stavsky and Rosenblatt

were warned by the Tel Aviv police to leave the city as

their lives were in danger and the police could not be responsible

for their safety .

Cheated out of its sacrificial victim, the Government was determined

to have its revenge . It hounded all witnesses for

Stavsky . An example is the almost immediate deportation of

the widow Becherev and her two children, who had aided in establishing

the accused's alibi . Its displeasure against Jewish nationalists

in general showed no signs of diminishing . It found

Achimeir and the other Revisionist leaders guilty of sedition and

sentenced them to twenty-one months at hard labor . On December

30, 1934 this Government which knew how to punish

Jews while Arabs murdered and revolted with impunity, announced

that it had revoked the citizenship of Yevin and Achimier,

making them men without a country. This new formidable

threat in a world where no nation wanted Jews, was held as

a terrible club over the head of all those who believed that the

Palestine Mandate envisioned the formation of a Jewish State .

LABOR DICTATORSHIP

Until the time of the Arlosoroff murder, the Revisionists had

been gaining ground so rapidly as to make it appear that their

ultimate control of the Zionist Organization was inevitable.

Under cover of the delirious charges and counter-charges growing

out of the Stavsky affair, the Laborites, possessing by far the

best equipped publicity machine, had succeeded in discrediting

their enemies as a band of ruffians and murderers . By a series of

admirable maneuvers and coalitions, the technique of which they

had learned in the traditional Marxian schools of Europe, they

succeeded, though still a minority in the Convention, in excluding

the Revisionists entirely from participation in Zionist affairs .

Expertly organized, and using the General Zionists as a front so

as to keep the Mizrachi from bolting harness, they took control .

Anchored in the seat of power, with the Organization's established

income at their disposal, they became almost impossible

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THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

to dislodge . Ironically, Laborite activities were now directly

subsidized by donations from the same middle class Zionists all

over the world whom leftist party platforms had sworn to destroy.

The Revisionists found themselves virtually outlawed . Jews

who had always been the persecuted now learned the business of

persecution. For the mere matter of his `ideology,' a youth belonging

to the Jabotinsky faction was to find himself completely

shut off from the possibility of obtaining a visa to Palestine . In

the Diaspora all Zionist activities, except those directly connected

with his party, were closed to him . Hatred grew to

irremediable proportions . The Laborites, nicely in the saddle,

perpetuated the idea, with Zionist funds, that Jabotinsky's men

were a degraded lot of "un-Jewish bastards" who had found

their god in Hitler. The persecuted Revisionists were not backward

in referring to their opponents with heart-felt passion as

`vermin.' Denied participation in Zionist affairs, they went

ahead on their own, issuing their own memoranda to the British

and the League of Nations and collecting their own funds. Infuriated,

the Laborites set up a virtuous wail of `sabotage' and

`secession.' Jews who were letting British bureaucrats tread on

them as if they were worms, now fought Jews with an obduracy

that neither gave quarter nor asked it .

The Zionist rulers set an ironclad dictatorship in operation for

better purposes of the battle. Like the Confessional Churches

in Nazi Germany, the Revisionists found themselves in a box .

Any utterance contrary to the ruling fiction that "unbelievable

progress was being made in Palestine" was treated as rank heresy.

The American, Dr . Stephen S. Wise, resigned from the

Administrative and Executive Committees of the Zionist Organization,

assailing the "absolutist regime in Zionist affairs ."

Shouting all the slogans of democracy, the Zionist leadership

proceeded to place in effect a rigid censorship of all news and

utterances . When the only existing Jewish news service offended

them, they entered the news business with funds of

the Jewish Agency. Leading Yiddish newspapers were handed

simple subsidies with the gentleman's understanding that they

JEWS HAVE A REPUTATION

167

would publish no news unfavorable to their patrons . (The important

Yiddische Tageblatt of Poland accused the Zionist Executive

in June 1936, of trying to "imitate the tone of certain

great powers" in its attempt to censor news on the Palestine disorders.)

In January of 1933 the Revisionists had been formally tried

by a Congress Court for the alleged crime of having discussed

Zionist affairs with the Polish Foreign Minister Beck, with the

result that the entire Revisionist Union was ordered suspended

from membership in the Zionist Organization . On July 26,

1933 the recognized leftist Fuehrer, Ben Gurion, laid down

the dictum that "we shall under no circumstances collaborate

with a party of strike-breakers and anti-labor agitators ." On

March 9, 1 934 the Zionist Executive issued a communique announcing

that the Revisionist Party would henceforth be regarded

as dissolved and non-existent. It declares that no Zionist

group is to be regarded as the Revisionist Sonderverbund, or

to style itself so, and asserts that the World Revisionist Party is

outlawed from the Zionist Organization and has no legal status

within that organization or any of its affiliated bodies . On February

6, 1935, not satisfied by declaring the Revisionists nonexistent,

the Executive placed a cherem (ban) on the Revisionist

Fund, the Keren Tel Chai, ludicrously ordering Jews not

to donate any money to it . In 1935 they also incorporated a

provision in reference to the purchase of the shekel which by its

very nature automatically excluded Revisionists.

In the meanwhile, sensing that all this was beginning to make

a bad impression on Jews all around, the Zionist hierarchy had

made a sudden attempt to compromise the situation . Ben Gurion,

speaking for the Executive, agreed to act with Jabotinsky

to end the inter-party strife . Conventions were arrived at and

signed outlawing all acts of violence, libel or slander . Both

parties undertook to discipline their membership on pain of

permanent expulsion . The Revisionist Union promptly ratified

the act of their leader by a plebiscite . The Laborites, however,

wanted no `peace' with the hated bourgeoisie represented by the

Revisionists. After one of the most vituperative campaigns in

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THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

Zionist history, they voted two to one to repudiate Ben Gurion's

signature .

A few months later the provoked Revisionists went through

the motions of resigning from a body which had already all but

thrown them out, and with some other dissident factions formed

the New Zionist Organization . At a great plebiscite which was

to determine the form and content of the new organization, some

750,000 votes were cast - the largest number of ballots ever

voted by Jews on a purely Jewish matter since the days of the

Dispersion . The foundation congress held in Vienna during

the Fall of 1935 was a jubilant and hysterical affair . Jabotinsky's

strategy was to isolate the left-wingers and leave them

hopelessly stranded with their catechisms on the coming Utopia .

But the leftists were no fools : they swiftly compromised with

middle-of-the-road elements who, delighted with the concessions

made to them, decided to remain with the old organization.

Revisionist tactics were also, in part at least, based on the assumption

that Whitehall's known antipathy for Socialists did

not cloak a stronger anti-Semitism underneath . They believed

that the Bureaucrats would welcome their action, as a sensible

piece of Empire strategy . This was from the start a grave misconception

. The Bureaucrats preferred Zionism in the hands

of the most radical Socialists in order to have the better excuse

to lobby against it at home . So the New Zionist Organization,

instead of being welcomed as a happy windfall for the Empire,

was quite competently ignored .

REIGNING ZIONIST PERSONALITIES

No Bill of Rights ever penned can remake overnight the mental

approach of a people whose mind has been ground down by

half a dozen centuries of abject horror . The memory of these

cruel generations left its stamp indelibly on the Jewish spokesmen

who took over the helm of the movement after Herzl's

.death . Invariably they were graduates of the Yeshiva atmosphere

of the Russian Pale .

JEWS HAVE A REPUTATION

169

The circumstances by which they literally fell into leadership

were simple . The great mass of Jewry was busy in the

practical affairs of day-to-day existence . The Socialists, Liberals

and Conservatives kept themselves coolly aloof . The pro-

Zionists, engrossed in their own occupations, were content to

show their sympathy by the donation of funds or by occasional

participation at rallies and meetings . It was a small group of

impassioned scholastics, who had made Zionism a profession all

their lives, who took over the actual machinery of operation.

When the collapse of humanism in post-war Europe endowed

the movement with immediate, critical importance as a political

reality, these men still further intrenched themselves . They

controlled the Zionist income and sources of propaganda . The

great bulk of stunned, ruined Jews were now little more than

fleeing outcasts, trying desperately to extricate their individual

lives from the horrible quagmire in which they found themselves

caught. Artfully the career-Zionists parried their opposition,

contending that any attempt to wash dirty linen publicly during

this precarious period was downright mischievous .

It is only in the light of these circumstances that one can

understand the retention of a group of leaders whose muddled

policies have brought the Zionist movement so close to disaster .

The procedure of these men was from first to last a tragic comedy

of errors . With few exceptions they were brilliant intellectually,

kindly and idealistic. Completely misunderstanding

human motivation, they regarded force of any kind as

barbarian . They were masters of hair-splitting disputation, unmatched

for pure decency of conception, but more useful in

legal briefs than in the serious business of repatriating a nation.

The most influential of them had adopted British nationality,

which under the circumstance of any conflict of interests

brought them up squarely against the question of their prior

patriotism to England .

More fatal still, they lacked the fierce aggressive spirit, the

shrewd realism, which the struggle for national existence demands.

In their minds was ever the idyllic vision of a unique

cultural community, taking precedence over questions of sov170

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

ereign political rule . This completely irrational conception,

springing from the brain of the obstinate scholastic, Achad

Ha'am, served to create an ecstatic polity in which reality could

at no time be dissevered from metaphor and rhetoric . At times

their learned dogmatism lapsed into sheer nonsense, as witness

Rabbi Freehof's declaration that Herzl's Jewish State was not a

State of armies, navies and political schemes, but the embodiment

of "a Jewish civilization in Palestine ." 5 Responsible Zionist

leaders even declared they did not care about politics - their

concern was "with a culture ." Like all intense men, infatuated

with the logic of their own pedantry, they could not understand

in what they were remiss. Co-workers who spoke realistically

were looked down upon as firebrands, radical, uninspired,

or simply reactionary .

Throughout they pursued a course of self-justification in

which their noble theories had an important part . It was they

who first enunciated the conception of duty owed the benighted

local population, later to be transformed into fundamentals of

British policy. With the complication of left wing intrusion

into the movement, shrewd efforts at national self-sufficiency

were left still further behind .

Certainly the Zionist leaders were no match for clever British

bureaucrats, trained in the business of extracting every ounce

of value from every possible situation. Time after time they

missed their chance ; when the Irish were fighting a successful

Sinn Fein, when Mussolini offered his hand in friendship, when

the French turned to them, and when the Arabs themselves

offered peace on an anti-British basis . Far from following a

strategy of resistance, they actually went to the opposite extreme.

Bulwarking their own weaknesses by an intensive propaganda

directed to their fellow Jews, they went to the point of

publicly praising the very British administrators who were conspiring

against them . The influential English Zionists especially,

denounced in grandiloquent sarcasm any attempt to question the

good faith of England, and sabotaged all efforts to bring the

Jewish case to the English public itself.

There were some among the Zionist leaders, such as JabotinJEWS

HAVE A REPUTATION

171

sky, Ussishkin, and Dr. Eder, who fought this policy bitterly in

the inner councils of the movement . Eder for example boldly

told the Court of Inquiry, following the Jaffa disturbances of

1921, that "there can be only one National Home in Palestine,

and that a Jewish one, and no equality in the partnership between

Jews and Arabs, but a Jewish preponderance as soon as

the numbers of the race are sufficiently increased ." But these

men were by one artifice or another squeezed out of any position

of real power .

The most influential of all the Zionist personages is the President

of the World Zionist Organization, Dr . Chaim Weitzman .

Weitzman was born in Motele, Russia, in 1874, and was reared

in an atmosphere of poverty, piety and learning . A devoted

follower of Achad Ha'am, he was one of the founders of the

`democratic faction,' a group which stressed the cultural aspects

of Zionism as contrasted to the political demands which were always

paramount with Herzl. During this early period he was

consequently ranged on the side of Herzl's bitterest critics .

Weitzman is bald, but not unhandsome . His bearing is mild

and thoughtful, but intense, brooding eyes lend fire to his personality.

He has made himself into a great chemist by his own

efforts and possesses a warm personal charm together with impeccable

manners .

He is a marvelous money-raiser, capable of button-holing a

prospect and turning on the full stream of his great charm, to

leave the interview with a check in his pocket . He has always

followed the path of least resistance, and early tied up his political

fortunes with those of the Laborites when it appeared that

their star was in the ascendant . He is a master of the technique

of demagoguery, capable of convincingly blotting out his own

failures with such statements as "we will show the world that

Jewish idealism can bring forth a civilization as noble and fructifying

as any which history has known."

Considering the unfettered criticism leveled at him by his

peers for "a leadership that has proven itself a failure and is

bankrupt in all fields of its activity," 6 he has managed to maintain

an almost mesmeric hold over the Zionist Organization .

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THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

Part of this technique of control is the assertion to uneasy Jews

that "England will deal only with Weitzman ."

He is almost pathologically amenable to British importuning .

At a World Congress in 1931, after Dr . Stephen S. Wise had

called attention to London's betrayal of Zionist interests, Weitzman

made this remarkable statement : "I disassociate myself

from and protest against both the form and contents of Wise's

speech . . . but I wish to remind the British reader of Dr .

Wise's speech that Dr . Wise is a champion of the British cause

in America, rendering great service to Great Britain." 7 After

having been rejected at that Congress in favor of a new leadership,

he declared to the Laborites who had followed him staunch

to the end, tears streaming down his beard : "The last hour before

my departure, I wish to spend with those who fought for

the pure and only Zionism, heroically opposing the dark forces

of the Congress [the nationalists] . . . I still believe that the

Balfour Declaration was only a war gain and by its gravity it

was bound to sink . . . I believe that you and I are two creative

forces in Zionism ."

At another Congress he answered Zionists who had charged

Britain with sabotaging their movement, by advising them that

"our task is to cause a minimum of embarrassment to the Mandatory

power. . . It is our delicate task to present the wishes of

the Zionist movement to the Mandatory power, not demanding

but interpreting."

In this almost bizarre description of the head of a political

movement, Weizmann's henchman Louis Lipsky says : "He

staked his leadership upon his faith in Great Britain . Often, he

took upon himself the defense of its policies, with disastrous results

to his influence in the movement . With a certain perversity

derived from his dialectical experience in the Yeshiva, he

would take up the case for Great Britain at a time when it was

entitled to no such advocacy on his part ." 8 In an almost classic

statement coming from a political leader, Weitzman extenuated

British persecution of his own people in the following words

"On the British side it soon became apparent that the very factors

which had brought about the issuance of the Balfour DecJEWS

HAVE A REPUTATION

173

laration, were, in certain circumstances, liable to operate against

the execution of a policy based upon it . The British devotion

to fair play and instinctive support of the weaker side, was responsible

in some quarters for a feeling that the Arabs o f Palestine

needed to be protected against the richer, better organized

Jews. . ." 9

His utterances are unpredictable . On March 28, 1931 he

flatly accused the Jews "of contributing to the Arab's fears"

and of not making the proper concessions . On April 9, 1931,

he stated bluntly that cooperation between Jews and Arabs

would have been possible if England had not prevented it . A

few days later, speaking at Manchester, England, he stated his

unequivocable satisfaction "that the Mandate was in the hands of

England." At still another time he orated : "I have no sympathy

or understanding with the demand for a Jewish majority

in Palestine . . . A majority is not required for the development

of Jewish civilization and culture ." 10 A few years later he is

found trying to sell his fellow-Jews the idea of a greatly restricted

territory because a `Jewish State' is being offered as part

of the bargain .

The policies by which he guided the Zionist movement may

be judged from his continuous flow of statements of a religiosemystic

nature, inviting acceptance of the bi-national state idea.

At the Basle Congress of 1927 he described the Zionist movement

as "spiritual and cultural - not aggressive . . . it is only

the expression of an urge ." Arabs and Jews were somehow to

"come together . . . above politics and above programs." This

was the typical kind of millennium over which Weitzman could

work himself into a religious fervor .

The English bureaucrats think much of him. Gandhi too admires

him greatly . In these two facts many critical observers

think the epitaph of Zionism has been written.

The great opponent of Weitzman is the little ex-soldier,

Vladimir Jabotinsky. Jabotinsky is one of the few Jewish leaders

with any adequate idea of the kind of policies the present

Jewish crisis demands . Among Hebrew nationalists he is idolized .

In the ghettos of Eastern Europe he is already a tradition . He

174

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

is hated without reservation by the Marxists who see him as their

ready-made enemy . Once he answered some leftist attacks by

throwing a handful of pennies contemptuously in their faces,

saying : "Here is your patriotism ."

As a spell-binder Jabotinsky is almost without rival . He can

hold an audience breathless, and often will talk for three or four

hours at a stretch . As an expert conniver in the business of inner

Zionist intrigue he is hopeless . He is handicapped by a

deficient understanding of the structural mechanics of modem

political warfare . Half a dozen times he has had thrown in his

lap the chance to seize control of shattered Zionist affairs, and

half a dozen times he has muffed it . He is impetuous and headstrong,

and a poor judge of men. Despite these inadequacies

he is the only existing leader capable of supplying the flashing

personality and keen insight into events required if anything is

to be salvaged from the impending collapse of the Zionist adventure.

Outside of Dr. Wise, whose influence is scanty, the other personalities

of the movement largely reflect all that Weitzman represents.

A fine example is the head of the all-important Political

Department of the Jewish Agency, in Palestine, Moshe

Shertok. Shertok is a commonplace fellow with wavy hair, a

left-wing product who, called into court as a witness on a case,

declined to take oath on the Torah, declaring that "to do so was

in contradition to his philosophy of life. . ." 11 Some idea of his

caliber is shown in the evidence before the Royal Commission

investigating the 1936 riots, where he announced in the name of

the Socialist Federation of Labor that a thousand of the rioting

Arabs, who had left their jobs at the Jewish settlements in order

to join the rebellion, should have their places kept in reserve for

them in case they wished to return .12

The chief political officer of the Zionist Executive, in London,

is a pudgy professor of mathematics named Selig Brodetsky .

Like most of Weizmann's cabinet, he considers wheedling to be

the measure of political sagacity . On October 24, 1934 he asserted

that "we are fighting discrimination against Jews in the

Jewish National Home." Yet less than four months later he

JEWS HAVE A REPUTATION

175

was heard declaiming in London : "Our partnership with Great

Britain was based on idealism on both sides, infused by the spirit

of the Bible . And if Great Britain saw something in Palestine

which might be useful to herself, we should welcome, not decry

this community of interest . Our watchword is cooperation

with Great Britain . . . The present High Commissioner, Sir Arthur

Wauchope, has shown an understanding of the meaning of

Palestine which is most gratifying ."

Among others whose influence is strong is David Ben Gurion,

a Laborite, now virtually Weizmann's Prime Minister. When

not handicapped by his associations, Ben Gurion is inclined to

show courage and general good sense . After the I929 pogroms

he split no hairs in declaring that "we must take care not to fall

into the trap prepared by hostile British officials who desire to

instigate here a bloody religious war ." Later, to save himself

from the fate which befell Jabotinsky and other irreconcilables,

he switched policy, and can be usually found hand-in-glove with

Weitzman.

Among the other men on the inner Zionist councils with hard

common sense is Menachem Ussishkin, a stolid, bearded engineer

from Odessa . Unlike his associates he is unimaginative and no

intellectual. He never hesitates to speak his mind . He declared

in the squabble over acceptance of the MacDonald Letter

that given a choice between Weitzman and the Jewish people

he had no hesitancy in foregoing Weitzman . His associates

consider him a nuisance and a danger but don't know how to

get rid of him. He was long ago removed from the Executive

and booted upstairs to become President of the Jewish National

Fund. Ussishkin is a stranger to finesse and lacks a cultural

background. In charge of the Commission sent in i 9 i 9 to deal

with the Military in Palestine, he and his colleague Dr . Eder are

said to have served 'Eno's Fruit Salts' to General Storrs at a dinner,

under the impression that it was the English national drink .

Ussishkin's great attribute is a healthy pugnacity, sadly lacking

in Jewish leadership ; and the Zionists might have done

worse than to have had him at the helm in the stormy weather

they have been experiencing during all these years .