THE RAPE OF PALESTINE - part 7

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE - part 7

CHAPTER V

CLOSE SETTLEMENT ON THE LAND

SOIL HUNGER

The early Zionist thinkers instinctively grasped the direct relationship

between a sound peasant class rooted in the soil, and

the project of a national renaissance . The British, too, understood

that a National Home without ownership of the soil was

a misnomer. Their Peace Handbook on Syria and Palestine

reads : "The essence of the Zionist ideal is the desire to found

upon the soil of Palestine a revived Hebrew nation based upon

an agricultural life and the use o f the Hebrew language . . .

There is so much unoccupied land in Palestine that there is plenty

of room for Zionist development without ousting the existing

Moslem population."

The early colonists found the park-like country their ancestors

had left, a treeless desert . Epidemics made even the raising of

cattle impossible. The mountain slopes, once covered with a

never-ending succession of vineyards and orchards, were now

bare rock, washed clean by the torrential rains . The rest of

the country alternated between swamp and desert . Crawling

like dull maggots over these dried bones was a scanty population,

scarcely less haggard, wild and unkempt than the land itself.

Land hunger rode on the shoulders of the returning Jews,

driving them like a man with a lash . They came from the

ghettos of the Russian Pale, men with soft hands, intellectuals,

lawyers, writers, doctors and shopkeepers, inspired by the passionate

dream of turning this pestilential desert into a blossoming

countryside . . They themselves, the dreamers of Zion, would

erect its first peasantry with their own lives and bodies .

Their hardships were almost insupportable . Epidemic pestilences

killed off so many that it became a byword that the

graveyards of these settlements were more populous than the

villages themselves . Undeterred, the new settlers pressed on

254

CLOSE SETTLEMENT ON THE LAND

2S5

doggedly. They were living an epic ; and their eyes danced

with it long after their bodies grew worn from a ceaseless struggle

with a sick earth. This blazing emotion is beautifully described

by the Hebrew poet, Uri Zvi Greenberg

"In a sunburst of love we went up,

Boys and girls to Zion ;

Passionate faith from the roots of our hair

To the tips of the nails of our feet

A boundless love for the mother earth of the Jews

That agonies could not quench,

Nor the teeth of the foxes destroy . . ."

Unlike the advent of European capitalism throughout the

East, the only privilege these colonists asked was to be allowed

to work the soil with their own hands . They consciously understood

that the body of the Jewish nation had been maimed

by a cruel destiny which had driven the Jews from the soil, had

closed manual labor to them, and had crowded them into one

thin stratum of the social pyramid . The renaissance of Jewry

lay in this astonishing attempt to reverse a process consciously

taking place in social adjustment, abjuring personal ambitions,

to erect again by the national will what history had destroyed .

These Jews from the vitiated air of ghettos, men and women

whose psychology and muscles alike were better adjusted to

the counting room and Yeshiva than to heavy labor, made themselves

over by the sheer force of their own idealism into the finest

scientific farmers in the world . Their neat, well-painted

houses went up surrounded by thriving green vineyards, healthy

young orchards, flowers and shadetrees . In the eyes of believing

observers it was a miracle, only to be explained in the light

of Biblical Prophecy .

There has been no braver colonizing group in history, nor

any who operated under more disheartening conditions . With

a song on their lips these determined young people laid the

groundwork for an agricultural prosperity which was to be the

backbone of the coming Jewish nation . Their magnificent accomplishments

were unhesitatingly acknowledged by the English

after the War. "Every traveler in Palestine who visits

256

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

them," relates an official report, "is impressed by the contrast

between these pleasant villages, with the beautiful stretches of

prosperous cultivation about them, and the primitive conditions

of life and work with which they are surrounded ." 1 Beverley

Nichols remarks : "As I walked around, I became more and more

astonished that any race of men, let alone intellectual Jews, could

possibly tackle such an unfriendly soil . . . Yet over this wilderness

the ex-clerks, ex-doctors, ex-shopkeepers swarmed like ants,

staggering under the weight of the stones they were removing,

panting as they wielded their spades ." 2 Father Alfred Sachetti

exclaims in admiration : "What had been up to six years ago a

wild unproductive waste land has been transformed into a fertile

and productive country ." 3 And the Rev. Dr. W. M. Christie

reports : "When you see a green spot in Palestine today you

may be sure it is a Jewish colony." 4

When with premature gratitude the enthusiastic Jews welcomed

the British overlords who were taking the place of the

Turks, they had no reason to suppose that in the near future the

further acquisition of land by them was to be considered in the

nature of a crime against humanity . The British were pledged

to their cause. London had wholeheartedly acknowledged that

"the immigration of Jews and their close settlement on the land,

including State lands and waste lands not required for public

purposes, are integral and indispensable factors in the execution

of the charge laid upon the Mandatory of establishing in Palestine

a National Home for the Jewish People ." s

How far the Jewish position has actually retrogressed since

the English came, may be estimated from the simple fact that the

per capita land possession of Jews in Palestine has shrunk from

approximately 8 dunams in 1921 to only 3 dunams in 1936 . Of

the total land area of 26,319,000 dunams, only 1,300,000 dunams

are in Jewish hands, of which more than half was acquired before

the War . In 1935, the peak year of investment, only

18,250 acres were acquired ; but the price paid was the enormous

sum of J, 1,700,000 . Even at this uneconomic cost, less than

3 % of the huge sums flooding into the country went into the

establishment of new farms .

CLOSE SETTLEMENT ON THE LAND

2S7

These figures mean that Jews numbering 3 3 % of the population

are sequestered on 5% of the land, forcing into existence a

queer economy by which the Jewish farm population must

mathematically decrease with the growth of the Jewish national

structure. Even in the short period between 1931 and 1 935,

we find the proportion of Jewish farmers decreasing from 18%

to 13 .9%, making the Palestine Jews the most highly urbanized

national group on earth.

Here you have the most unhealthy of all possible conditions

a land-hungry people attempting to build a sound national

economy and owning, after decades of struggle, less than three

hundred thousand acres altogether .6 On this fact is shipwrecked

the basic principles on which Zionist planning was constructed.

For all reasonable purposes, it forebodes the creation

not of a free economy but of a new ghetto, this time in an Arab

instead of an Aryan land .

The causative factors behind this condition are not hard to

find. In the early period of Jewish settlement, around 1885,

prices averaged ten francs, or eight shillings, per dunam for good

agricultural land . By 19oo the price had risen to around sixteen

shillings . By 1935 it was anything that anyone cared to

ask. Taking 1932 as an illustration, we find 18,293 land transactions

concluded by Jews ; whereas in 1926, when more than

twice the area of new land had been acquired, there were only

11,821 such transactions? This meant that land-hungry Jews,

caught in a trap, were reduced to buying land from each other,

the price skyrocketing in accordance with the inevitable law

of supply and demand . During the fiscal year 1933-34 when

practically no new land was acquired by Jews, the Palestine

Government received from them close to J 200,000 in registration

fees for land transfers. In many instances a parcel of land

passes through eight or ten hands a year and its price is pyramided

to the most unbelievable heights . "Nowhere in the

world," comments the Royal Commission of 1937, "were such

uneconomic land prices paid as by the Jews in Palestine."

The parent of this distorted condition was none other than

the Government itself . A series of bold expedients flowed from

258

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

Jerusalem, directly formulated to prevent Jews from acquiring

the soil of the country. As fast as one artifice proved inadequate,

newer and more offensive ones were invented . The

English set themselves up as the protectors and patrons of the

Arabs, much as though Palestine were an endowed institution

for the improvident and the inept for whose benefit all competitive

factors must be excluded .

The keystone to the British arch was the alleged landless

Arab situation . In his report, French had listed some thirty

seven hundred claimants. The extent of this fabrication was

later conceded when, despite the prodding of the Administration,

only five hundred Arabs could be discovered who even had

a provisional claim. Just how there could be any 'landless'

people in an underpopulated country suffering for years from

an acute labor shortage, the Administration never attempted to

explain. Major Cecil Quinlan answered the best part of the

question with the laconic remark that "the so-called 'landless'

Arab does not exist, except in disordered imaginations ." 8

The Mandate provided that Jews be given State lands for the

purpose of "close settlement." Nowhere in that document is

there anything mentioned about an opposed obligation to Arabs ;

but the Government, making its own interpretation, decided that

this must have been a typographical error . It early handed the

Arabs 140,000 acres of its most fertile holdings . Later to appease

the Jews it gave them a consolation prize of some i 8,ooo acres, of

which only 962 were actually cultivable.

The Administration's Annual Report for 1920-21 gives figures

of 942,000 dunams of State land and two or three million dunams

of waste lands. When the Zionists, grown restive finally, put a

fierce demand on the Government to fulfill its obligations, it was

dismally discovered that the two or three million dunams of waste

land referred to had now vanished in thin air.

The technique under which this piece of legerdemain was accomplished

was not involved. It consisted of simple nostrums

and a characteristic method of dealing off the bottom of the deck .

In reply to a pointed question by the Mandates Commission in

1926, His Majesty's spokesman, Ormsby-Gore, represented that

CLOSE SETTLEMENT ON THE LAND

2 59

"the delay of the grant of Government land to Jews is connected

with the question of survey which has not yet been effected ."'

A Vaad Leumi Memorandum notes in disgust that despite this excuse,

"hundreds of thousands of Government lands . . . have

been distributed among Arab fellaheen, in lots of such size that

they could not work them properly ." All Jewish demands for

land were rejected- "even the claims of the discharged Jewish

soldiers who had participated in the British military conquest of

the country being disregarded ." At the very moment Ormsby-

Gore was offering his explanation to the League, a special Land

Commission was carrying out a liquidation of the Government

estates, "apparently instructed to hand them over to Bedouins ."

Again in 1931, a Vaad Leumi protest to the League notes that

the Government was distributing State lands to Arabs "in parcels

of thousands of dunams per family," while Jewish demands were

studiously ignored .

Pleased with these outright gifts, the Bedu had little intention

of demeaning themselves by manual labor . They at once offered

their new-found acreage to Jews at prices only limited by Bedouin

ability to count . The indignant Administration put an end

to this practice by attaching a string to further gifts, prohibiting

sale of the land for thirty to fifty years . In other cases the Arabs

were beneficiaries of paternal loans, never intended to be repaid,

placing the Jews in the unenviable position of financing activities

aimed directly at themselves . All a Bedouin had to do, to blackmail

this singular Government, was to threaten to sell to Jews and

a subsidy would be forthcoming .

The Administration's sympathy for 'landless' Arabs went an

amazing distance. Four days before the 1936 riots broke out it

gave the Dajani family 10,000 dunams in the rich Jordan Valley .

The 'landless' Dajani family, as it happens, is fabulously wealthy,

owning among other things, the site of `The Last Supper,' for

which they are said to have recently refused C 1,000,000. The

Government even handed out its land to foreigners who made no

pretense of Palestine residence. To mention only a few cases, six

Syrian families located in Damascus and Beirut received over

7000 dunams of the Ashrafiye lands. Of the 3 579 dunams dis260

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

tributed in Tel-Es-Shock, 3469 dunams went to a family group

of four brothers and sisters living in Egypt .1o

Even when Jews bought areas on which the Government felt

it had a lien, it exacted its pound of flesh . A case in point is the

Huleh basin, consisting of 12,000 acres of miasmatic swamp .

This suppurating area had polluted the country, for generations

back, with malaria and dysentery . The job of draining it would

ordinarily be regarded by any other government as a task incumbent

on itself . Instead, the Palestine Administration granted

concession rights for reclamation of the area to two Syrian merchants,

renewing the concession in 1924 and again in 1927, though

the Syrians made no attempt to proceed with the work and were

evidently not in a position to undertake a development project

of this magnitude . It was only after years of procrastination on

the part of the Government that the Jewish Palestine Land Development

Company was able to secure official approval to take

over the concession rights . As the price of its consent the Government

stipulated that when the work was finished, one-third of

the new land would have to be handed over for Bedouin settlement.

It was necessary to pay the original foreign concessionaires

C 200,000, a sum which could only be considered in the

light of a gift . This was in 1935 . In 1935 the Government was

still quibbling over the text of the concession . It also has mysteriously

withheld decision on a number of minor points arising

from an engineering report made several years previously . These

dilatory tactics have effectually prevented any progress being

made in the work of reclamation, which is thus shunted into the

indefinite future .

The huge task of draining this quagmire will take at least a

decade. It will involve an outlay of over £ 1,000,000 . To this

must be added interest on investment, and amortization of principal,

plus such baksheesh as must be paid to petty officials who

would otherwise find a way to throw a sabot into the machinery,

even after the work has been started . When the 16,ooo dunams

which must be given free to the Arabs are deducted, some rough

idea is secured of what this much-touted enterprise will cost the

Jews.11

CLOSE SETTLEMENT ON THE LAND

261

A FAMINE IN LAND

Having devised the 'landless Arab' thesis, it was only a short

step to the principle that the Arab must be protected against

himself and saved from exploitation by the Jew who would take

his land away from him. For this purpose there was introduced

a series of ordinances so plainly meant to prevent Jews from acquiring

land in their National Home that were ten percent of

them introduced into England, and directed at Englishmen, an

armed revolution would follow .

But Zionist spokesmen had been used to the rope's end too long

to be able to react with anything resembling normal indignation.

They recognized helplessly that they were being victimized, but

saw nothing else to it but to smirk ingratiatingly on their tormentors.

Once more it is grizzled old Menachem Ussishkin who

growls like a lone wolf to the British Government : "Since you

have given your consent to the establishment of a Jewish National

Home, you must have realized that it is impossible to build on

anything but on the land . We have paved every field and marsh

with gold, but you, instead of helping us, have piled stones in our

way and have made the country into a hell ." 12

As early as 1920 a Land Transfer Ordinance already read that

"any person wishing to make a disposition of immovable property

must first obtain consent of the Government," a statute which the

Shaw Report frankly admits was introduced to prevent the easy

sale of land. This was followed in 1929 by the Cultivator's Protective

Ordinance, which demanded that buyers make an additional

payment to tenants who might be occupying the land as

well as to the owners . 1931 saw a new edict which provided

that irrespective of any provision in the contract, land could not

be transferred if there were "any tenants" cultivating it . A tenant

was described as anyone who has access to the land by "right

or custom, usage or on sufferance," 13 a person hired for agricultural

work who is paid in kind, squatters of any and all types ;

anyone who cultivated the land by either express or implied permission,

or who had been cultivating the land on the assumption

that he had the right to do so for a period of two years ; or any262

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

one who comes and grazes on the land or cuts reeds for basketmaking,

or one who is a descendant o f a would-be tenant under

the ordinance.

This startling piece of legislation derived its full force from the

primitive nature of Bedouin life . While the Bedouin grazed his

flocks wherever he pitched camp, he always made the same general

circle of travel, returning year after year to the identical

spots . Thus he automatically became a `tenant' under the regulation.

Most of the land purchased by Jews came from the tremendous

estates of absentee landlords, a handful of land-barons

who owned, for example, eighty percent of the soil of Galilee and

at least half of southern Palestine .14 These vacant acres were

trespassed on by all comers, and, by the very nature of things,

were bound to harbor itinerant tenants, squatters and migratory

Bedouins.

The other claw of the pincers lay in the fact that all the

archaic Turkish land and tax laws were still operative .15 This

meant that the verification of title went back to the old Ottoman

religious law . The British had made no attempt to determine

title, and the footnote to every Kuhan (title deed) contained the

phrase : "The title is not deemed to be guaranteed." Under the

new Cultivator's Ordinance all titles were placed in jeopardy as

having been gained illegally, since they were subject to tenant's

rights.

It now transpired that `tenants' could be evicted only by the

High Commissioner himself. This transfer of discretion to a political

appointee, rather than to the courts, prevented any appeal

and gave the frankly anti-Jewish officials of the Administration

arbitrary powers of decision . These powers were further increased

by the Land Disputes Ordinance enacted in March 1932 .

This remarkable edict empowered the District Commissioner,

should he find that a trespasser was forcibly evicted by the rightful

owner, to regard the dispossessed party as the possessor .

Granted magisterial status, no appeals against the findings of this

petty functionary were possible. The enactment additionally

forbade interference with the `rights' of invaders coming to graze,

cut wood or reeds, or for any other purpose (even if the owner's

CLOSE SETTLEMENT ON THE LAND

263

fences had been cut down and his crops destroyed), until in each

case "a competent court ruled on the matter ."

On July 2 5, 1 933 the Administration released the Statutory

Tenant Law, effectually freezing the ownership of large vacant

areas in their present hands . Anyone who occupied or grazed

the land for a year, with or without permission, became a "statutory

tenant ." He could not be evicted without being given a

new piece of land in a nearby area approved by the High Commissioner

.

These restrictions made it next to impossible to purchase lands

on which claim could not be made by `tenants .' The inevitable

result was that Jews buying land had to pay for it twice : one

payment to the owner and the other to his `tenants,' in order to

obtain their voluntary consent to leave the property . In many

cases the sums given the `tenants' were larger than the already inflated

prices paid to the sellers . The whole intent behind this

singular legislation is shown in the law affecting tenants where

the land is not sold . Here the tenant is not protected in any

fashion whatsoever, and may be evicted at the landlord's pleasure .

Even on land long owned by Jews, here is how this `advanced'

legislation operates. `A' owns a piece of land ; `B' squats on that

land, claiming the right to cultivate it . In the ensuing conflict,

B' is not ejected from the parcel and allowed recourse to the

courts, but instead the cultivation o f the land is stayed by both

parties until the determination of the courts . Since land cases

are known to sleep through the judicial chambers for five or six

years, and appeals are seldom, if ever, heard under one year, the

result is apparent. Nor does the final settlement of one trespassing

case protect the owner against new ones. As fast as new

trespassers may appear, new court orders must be obtained against

them through the same lengthy litigation .

Here was an obvious invitation to blackmail which the Arabs

were not slow to take advantage of . False claims were regularly

manufactured against Jewish land with the object of extorting

money from the owners . Arab tribes, often as not under the

fatherly advice of the District Commissioners, turned this situation

into a profitable business . They squat in the Jewish colonies,

264

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

taking over a piece of land by main force if necessary, claiming

it on the basis of prior possession ; and then compromise on some

compensation from the owner, who usually prefers a limited loss

of money to prolonged litigation. The Bedu then drive their

herds further on, looking for another opportunity to repeat this

agreeable adventure . There are Arab attorneys in Jerusalem

who specialize in causing squatters to do this sort of thing and

who make a very good business out of it . As may be expected,

Jews are the sole sufferers . "In not a single instance," declares

the land expert Ussishkin, "has an Arab owner been pestered in

such a way. Bedouins who would so intrude on an Arab parcel

of land would be ejected by the police without further ado ."

A few actual cases will show how these measures operate in

practical application . A large parcel of land, in Jewish hands

for forty years, was disputed by Arabs on the basis of an alleged

document signed five hundred years ago granting the land to the

Moslem Church . District Commissioner S . H. Perowne immediately

declared the land under dispute and prohibited work

there. Jewish farmers who tried to plough their fields were

arrested.16 At the settlement of Tel Hai in Galilee, Bedouins

brought their cattle to pasture in the colony's fields, destroying

the crops. They claimed to be in possession of a document entitling

them "to pasture anywhere ." A fight ensued, the police

were called, and the usual order issued to both parties to cease

work in the colony "until the title to the land was established ."

At Hedera, where the land had been in Jewish possession for

forty-five years, Bedouins came in, uprooted the crops, injured

workers and killed a watchman. The police ordered all cultivation

to cease "until the Court decides the dispute between the Jews

and the Bedouins ."

A typical case is that of the Wadi Hawareth land . After paying

liberal baksheesh to the tenants and after reams of red tape

had been unwound to secure title, the Jews were unable to take

possession : the land had already been ploughed by Arab squatters

. Similarly, at Haifa Bay, thirty-five hundred dunams legally

bought and paid for by the Jewish National Fund were

given to Arabs, by decision of the District Commissioner, after

CLOSE SETTLEMENT ON THE LAND

265

they had driven off the Jewish watchman and taken the land by

armed force. At Tulkarm, in a regular pestilence of squatter

suits, the courts decided that thirty-six hundred dunams of land

had been "purchased illegally" and directed that they be given,

without compensation, to the squatters. While ignorant Bedouins

were more than willing participants in this hilarious game of plaguing

Jews, what lay behind their actions can be judged from the

Kuskustabun case, where three Jewish farmers were badly injured

by armed Arab invaders . Here it was conclusively proven that

the Arabs "undertook to trespass and plough the land upon the

advice of District Officer Lees." 17

Not satisfied with its previous measures in which Jewish ingenuity

discovered more leaks than the Government considered

supportable, it announced in 1936 a brand new principle in pro-

Arab paternalism, this time swinging back to the Middle Ages for

its inspiration . The present purpose is to anchor the peasant in

the land irrespective of his will to change his status . In future

"no land-owner shall be permitted to sell any of his land unless

he retains a minimum subsistence area . As a safeguard against

collusive sales this minimum area shall be inalienable and shall

revert to the Government if it ceases to be cultivated by the

owner-occupier." 18

Many other, pettier schemes were originated by the Government

of Palestine in its campaign of harassment . The Jews,

urgently needing a source of cheap fertilizer for their groves,

had been buying it from Arabs whose every village was literally

built on an accumulation of century-old dung . Arabs are rarely

known to even remove this filth from the vicinity of their dwellings,

much less use it . In September 1937 the Administration

published a Draft Animal Manure Ordinance vesting the ownership

of manure in the proprietor of the land on which it is

dropped. Any attempt to remove or sell it without official permission

henceforth becomes an offense punishable by fine of f25

or six months' imprisonment, or both.

Another edict stipulates that the amount of damages which

may be demanded from a seller who breaks his contract, cannot

be included in the contract itself, but must be fixed by the court .

266

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

This `Order in Council' was intended as a staggering blow to

Jewish land purchases, since the only effective way of preventing

Arab owners from changing their minds under pressure was to

include in the contract a provision for damages to be paid together

with the return of the buyer's deposit . Another decree

released early in 1936 was "designed to protect water supplies

from interference by private individuals." Special permission

had now to be obtained from the District Commissioner before a

well could be constructed or enlarged . Jews might own the

land, but the water underneath it belonged to the Administration

in Jerusalem. All water supplies, reads the Ordinance, "river,

spring, or underground," may anywhere be declared public property

at the discretion of the High Commissioner. Beyond serving

to frustrate the irrigation plans of the Jews, this revolutionary

measure has no plausible purpose nor has one ever been offered.

When other artifices proved inadequate, the Government has

followed a system of `loans' to Arab owners, in themselves often

greater than the market value of the land . Sometimes its money

is passed over outright on the score of `relief,' whether owing to

poor crops, damage caused by the elements, or the characteristic

laziness of Arab tillers. It frankly finances and operates Arab

agricultural cooperatives in competition with those of the Jew ;

and it maintains nurseries and other agricultural services of which

Arabs are the sole beneficiaries.

The unremitting campaign of Arab leaders, clearly abetted

from Government House, thundering against the `crime' of selling

property to Jews will be discussed again in Chapter I Book

III. It may be remarked, however, that without the Zionist the

market for Palestine land does not exist . Acreage in this corner

of creation is worth next to nothing. In neighboring Syria it

can hardly be given away. In Transjordan it is worth only a

dollar or two a dunam. Holding a monopoly on the soil, the

Levantines are having a royal holiday. "No one can doubt,"

says Broadhurst, "that the Arabs have exploited the Jews for all

they are worth, fattening their pockets in the process ." 19 Despite

the current campaign against land sales, Arab owners have

been keeping a canny eye fixed on the price barometer . As we

CLOSE SETTLEMENT ON THE LAND

267

shall see, the very leaders of this agitation have proven themselves

as anxious, privately, to circumvent the Government's restrictions

as the Jews. There is ample evidence, also, that Government

officials themselves have not been above surreptitious speculation,

while at the same time being a party to driving the prices up out

of sight by radical legislation .

That official restrictions were designed to force Jews to pay

through the nose for such land as they were able to acquire is

conclusively shown by official figures . Buying in the open market

for the purpose of "resettling landless Arabs," the Government

paid 072,240 for 17,240 dunams, or an average of C4 per

dunam. In the same period the Jews purchased in the same market,

62,114 dunams for which they paid C 1,647,837, an average

of C25 per dunam.

DOUBLE STANDARD OF TAXATION

In vivid contrast to this flood of radical legislation is Palestine's

system of land taxation, beyond question the most reactionary in

existence. Until recently the obsolete Turkish system, based on

the economy of Mohammed's time, was retained intact by the

Government as being perfectly satisfactory in all respects .

There were two basic taxes . One was the Werko, based on

land valuations . The joker lay in the fact that the last appraisement,

by which the tax was set, had been made in the nineties of

the last century. New valuations were only made in cases of

change of ownership . This meant that the old owners were paying

a tax based on pre-War values, while the new owners were assessed

on the basis of crazily inflated post-War prices. Thus the

new proprietor paid twenty to thirty times more for each dunam

in tax than the previous owner used to pay for the same land before

it was sold, and continued to pay for the adjoining acres still remaining

in his possession. "This unjust and abnormal position,"

complains the Jewish Agency, on March 10, 1935, "expressed itself

in the creation of two classes of taxpayers paying different

rates for similar property," of whom "the only sufferers were

Jews." The relative difference in this levy was often literally

268

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

enormous . An illustration of the whole taxing scheme is provided

by the village of Shattah, which paid less than £4 in tax,

while the neighboring Jewish colony of Kfar Yehezkiel, owning

half the area of land, paid £55 .

The other main grouping was the Osher or tithe, amounting to

1o% on all agricultural income. This was usually canceled in the

case of Arabs, sometimes by personal decision of the High Commissioner

himself, though District Commissioners were also authorized

to grant remission at their discretion. The extent of

this practice can be seen in the announced remission of seventy

percent of the tithe due the Government in 1932, amounting

to £ 173,000. In 1933 the total remission of tithes to Arabs was

,093,500 out of an assessment of £ 1,245,000 ; and in 1 934,

£ 130,000 out of a total tax of £ 245,000. In 1935 the High

Commissioner reported that of a tithe of £ 17 1,021, only £ 19,-

750 had been collected. The fellah's contribution to Government

revenues (tithe, land tax and all other agricultural taxes)

diminished annually, falling from 25% of the total in 1921-22 to

4.8% in 1934-35-

Though after eighteen years of effort the Government was

seemingly unable to complete the survey for land registration

purposes (which would have put an abrupt end to the plague of

squatter suits), it had not the slightest difficulty in finishing the

survey for taxation purposes within a year after deciding that a

remodeled system was in order. The new Rural Property Tax

Ordinance was placed into effect in 1935, substituting a single

basis of levy for the multiple Turkish tithe, house and land taxes .

Says the Royal Commission of 1937, pointedly : "This effected

a large reduction, in some cases up to seventy percent, in the

taxes payable by the [Arab] peasantry ." 20

Though hailed as a simplified system it was, on the face of it,

an intricate maze . It involved some sixteen brackets of taxation,

varying from the highest to the lowest by several thousand percent,

the brackets themselves divided into innumerable blocks in

the various districts . Providentially, the highest tax brackets coincided

exactly with Jewish enterprises and holdings and the

lowest with those of the Arabs . As the lower grades of ground

CLOSE SETTLEMENT ON THE LAND

269

crop land pay only a nominal tax, or no tax at all, the holdings

of the fellaheen are practically exempted from impost of any

kind. This type of acreage, coinciding with Arab agricultural

undertakings, is divided into eight grades, the highest of which

pays twenty-five mils per dunam, while the sixth grade drops to

eight mils per dunam. The seventh and eighth grades pay no tax.

Irrigated land was divided into nine grades, seemingly in accordance

with the districts where Jews may or may not be

found, and was assessed accordingly. Fallow land, owned entirely

by great Arab landlords, pays no tax whatsoever, putting

an actual premium on land speculation and completely reversing

every known process by which land policy in other nations is

guided. In any other country infant industry is nursed along

and protected . It is the pioneers who are relieved of taxes ; and

in places like Italy and Spain, the Holy Land's chief competitors

in citrus, growers are directly subsidized . Under this latest arrangement

it was the citrus industry, on which the entire export

trade of the country depended, which was placed in the highest

tax division, not even non-bearing groves being excepted . The

tax here vaulted to 825 mils per dunam, the highest rate of taxation

on this type of plantation in the world .21 Excluded specifically

from this category, the all-Arab citrus district of Acre

`pays' 41o mils per dunam .22

Under the same law, taxation on urban property is similarly

gerrymandered . House property, including valuation of the

site, pays a tax of r z V2 % of the net annual value . Premises with

an annual value up to ,f 2o, invariably Arab, are exempted from

levy . In industrial buildings the Ordinance says that "the tax

shall be at such a rate, not exceeding fifteen percent of the net

annual value, as shall be prescribed by the High Commissioner.

The High Commissioner is empowered to apply the Ordinance

by order to specific areas ." One may easily presume that it is

the Jewish sections alone which pay the fifteen percent, a circumstance

glaringly evident in the exemptions granted in a list

of mixed cities, which on examination turn out to affect only

Arab blocks. Not even schools, clinics or village councils are

excepted from these crushing levies .

270

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

The theory behind this entire performance is made unmistakably

clear in the assessments charged to the German colony of

Sarona, thoroughly Nazi in sentiment since the coming of Hitler .

Almost surrounded by the continuously growing city of Tel

Aviv, the fields of Sarona are now located in one of the most

highly priced urban developments in the world, with individual

holdings worth an average of 4400,000 in cash. Yet the farmers

of this colony continue to pay a tax as negligible as if their

lands were located in the wilderness on the other side of Jordan.

There are still other tax schemes directed without too much

disguise at the Jewish pocketbook, such as the Land Transfer

Tax, Government Inspection Tax, and Animal Tax, all of them

cut from the same cloth as the land taxes and all brilliantly successful

in mulcting this stricken people who by international consent

are returning to their homeland .

Page 285 pdf page 270 book

CHAPTER VI

BRICKS WITHOUT STRAW 1

SABOTAGING INDUSTRY

Practically all countries today take an eager if not anxious interest

in the development of their own prosperity . It is invariably

the government which points the way to methods for developing

business, which seeks to attract capital and enterprise

and to enlarge its commerce in every way possible . As backward

as the Turks were made out to be in matters of government,

they were happy enough to assist new industry in their domains .

Under the Industrial Act of December 1917, newly established

factories in Palestine received five dunams of State land free on

application, were granted exception from import duties until

they were well established, and were relieved of taxation for

fifteen years.

The present mandatory for Palestine, however, appears to do

everything possible to halt the development of business and to

omit doing anything designed to help it . In view of its peculiar

obligations under the Mandate, it would appear that the Administration

should have favored the new settlers in every way,

that it would nurse their industries sympathetically during the

early and critical period, and in general lend its support by the

usual means, favored taxation, protective tariffs, loans and subsidies.

That the Palestine Government is well able to understand

this matter of elementary economy is shown plainly enough in

the concessions granted to the Iraq Petroleum Company in an

agreement signed January 14, 193 1, to run for a period of seventy

years. This convention between a private corporation and the

Government of Palestine is one of the most remarkable ever

penned, and is worth quoting in extenso. It provides that neither

Palestine nor Transjordan shall derive any revenue from the pipeline

passing through their territory . The Government agrees

271

272 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

that "no import tax, transit tax, export tax, or other tax or fiscal

charge of any sort shall be levied on petroleum, naphtha, ozokerite

or natural gases, whether in crude state or any form or derivatives

thereof, whether intended for consignment in transit or

utilized for the industrial operations of the undertaking ." The

Company is given the far-reaching right to bring in, free of duty,

all stores, equipment, materials, etc., required for its undertakings,

"including all equipment for offices, houses or other buildings,"

directly or indirectly required for the development of its

business in Palestine .

Article VII of this compact gives the concessionaire the privilege

of constructing one or more private ports in the region and

of levying port, harbor or other taxes, as well as authority to determine

who shall have the right to entry at such a port ; and the

Palestine railroads are placed at the Company's disposal at a special

schedule of rates . Article XVII entitles the Company to

lease State lands at a nominal rental. Lands privately owned are

to be expropriated by the High Commissioner for this purpose

if the Company cannot come to agreement with the owners .

The Company may bring in cheap labor at its own discretion to

compete with the higher-priced local labor. Finally, this document

frees the Company from any kind of land tax, income tax,

or any other toll or liability . Thus this foreign corporation is

presented with all the benefits of a tax-supported community, and

is at the same time released from any possible levy or demand, in

what is altogether the most amazing concession ever granted by a

modern State . On February", 1933 the Palestine Government

handed this concessionaire, free of charge, 2250 dunams of valuable

land in the industrial Haifa Bay area to build a terminus for

its oil line.

In return for all this, the Company did not even allow casual

favors to the local market, so that a four-gallon tin of gasoline,

which might sell for 4o¢ in Iraq, retails for $1 .9o in Palestine.

Neither does Palestinian trade derive any benefit from the large

oil tankers which sail from Haifa. Everything connected with

the petroleum trade, from the time of its boring, through its transBRICKS

WITHOUT STRAW

273

portation down to the tanker and retail marketing, is in the hands

of foreign trusts .2

When it comes to the Jews, for whose benefit the Mandate

was supposed to have been framed, another view is taken entirely

. Their industries, instead of being welcomed, are discouraged.

Practically nothing is done to assist them . The Government's

attitude can hardly be described as being other than

antagonistic. Tariffs and duties are levied in topsy-turvy fashion,

as they would be in a lunatic asylum ; and whatever caters

to the needs of industry, such as mail service, telegraphic system,

railways, ports and roads, is maneuvered so as to place it at a

disadvantage.

The Government has a tariff on old shoes imported into the

country ; but bases its customs policy on the theory that tariffs

lead to a high cost of living . It considers it immoral to deprive

its citizens of the benefits of low-cost merchandise dumped in

from everywhere by subsidized foreign trusts ; yet it does not

hesitate to levy prohibitive import duties on all raw materials required

by its own industry.

The only authority the Administration regards as competent

to dictate the needs of business is the Customs Department,

headed by a pompous official who starts with the idea that the local

manufacturer must prove that he is producing a superior article

at a lower price than those dumped in the Palestine market

by outside competitors, before he can be regarded as anything

but a public enemy. Such foreign trade statistics as exist are not

only badly jumbled but published long after they can do anyone

any good . Drily, the President of the Tel Aviv-Jaffa Chamber

of Commerce advised the Administration that "the movement of

trade is a matter of some importance to those who are responsible

for the conduct of the country's economic affairs, and it should

not be treated as a departmental secret reluctantly disclosed to

the public." 3

By what is at least the strangest of coincidences, whenever a

Palestine factory competes with English goods, even for the home

market, it is sure to find all protective tariffs taken away from

274

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

it and impossibly high duties leveled against the bulk materials

and machinery necessary to turn its finished products out . These

cramping tactics may even go the lengths of a carte blanche refusal

to allow the contemplated enterprise to operate on any

terms.

An example of this condition is contained in the several attempts

to establish brewery enterprises in the Holy Land . The

first project was started by a man named Delfiner, who intended

to produce, besides beer, certain chemical products out of the

waste materials of alcohol production . A capital investment of

,L8o,ooo was made, a location bought near Mikweh Israel, and

machinery ordered. Innocently, the founder of the factory applied

for exemption from duty on the ferments and malt required

in beer-making until these materials could be produced

locally. The Government did not even bother about a response ;

and after eight months of patient waiting, Mr. . Delfiner, beginning

to see the light, gave up his project and took his loss .

In the meanwhile a group of French capitalists, headed by a

Mr. Dreyfuss, leased a portion of the wine cellars in Rishon

L'Zion and started reconstruction for brewery purposes . Turned

wise by Delfiner's experience, before going into production they

applied to the Government, asking that the existing excise tax on

spirits of five mils per liter and the customs duty of twenty mils

per liter be not changed after the setting up of their business .

On receipt of this request the Administration immediately did

the opposite . It decided to raise the excise tax on spirits (which

had not yet been begun to be manufactured) to fifteen mils per

liter and committed itself to an arrangement admitting Syrian

beer, on which not even an excise tax was levied, free of duty .

Reconstruction work was stopped and negotiations entered into

with the Government, which stated off the record that it considered

this enterprise an unwarranted attempt to compete with

the import of English beer. So in March 1934 the Dreyfuss

group, having had an object lesson in Near Eastern politics, gave

up the ghost.4

In every branch of trade the same tactics are to be seen . A

fair illustration of what takes place is given in the iron wire in

BRICKS WITHOUT STRAW

275

dustry, a business calling for a great outlay of capital . Here a

heavy tariff is slapped on raw material, which Palestine does not

produce, and no duty whatsoever placed on the finished article .

Another example is that of the aluminum industry. Imported

raw aluminum was taxed at the rate of three cents per pound ;

while the levy on finished aluminum goods was six cents . When

a factory was set up in Haifa, it was quickly discovered that the

tariff was insufficient to allow for competition even in the home

market. The owner asked for an increase to ten cents per pound .

The Government took this request under the usual advisement

and promptly reduced the duty on finished aluminum ware to

three cents a pound .

An even more graphic illustration is provided in the tax on

automobiles. A newly industrialized land is bound to develop

a voracious appetite for cars and trucks of all kinds . But the

Jews made the mistake of showing a preference for American

cars, which they considered more suitable to the terrain than the

lighter English makes .5 The Government then placed a per

pound tax on incoming motor vehicles of forty mils per kilogram.

6 This enormous impost would add to the normal cost of

a small American car the fantastic sum of $2700 for duty alone,

with the same toll on old cars as on new. In a desperate effort

to circumvent this assessment, the Jews opened up a car-assembling

plant in Tel Aviv . Jerusalem at once retaliated by placing

a duty on bodies and parts, twenty-five to fifty percent higher

than that on complete vehicles.

The attitude of the official Zionists to all this is incredible . It

is reflected in Weizmann's declaration that "one hears complaints

of alleged injustices with regard to protective tariffs . People do

not want to realize that if a Jew from Schnepeshok [a touch of

humor] comes to Palestine and manufactures inferior buttons,

the British Government is not obliged to secure this button by

a protective tariff." 7 The manufacturers of Palestine, caught in

a very real web of economic peonage, were far from impressed

with the philosophical ruminations of the Zionist orators in Europe.

There were not wanting individuals who declared themselves

boldly. One of them was the silk manufacturer, Sachs,

276

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

who found himself paying a prohibitive duty on raw silk, with

no protection whatever against the dumping of Japan and other

countries .$ Shortly before he was compelled to shut down his

factory, Weitzman and the High Commissioner Wauchope

strolled through.

"How do you like it here ?" asked Sir Arthur politely .

Sachs : "Very much indeed - but I would like it better if we

had a decent Government ."

Weitzman, hurriedly : "Excuse him, Excellency -Mr. . Sachs

cannot ably express himself in English ."

"Pardon me," replied Sachs, looking straight at Weitzman,

"but I speak English very well!"

Part of the situation this manufacturer referred to showed glaringly

on the cost sheets . A meter of Japanese cloth sells for 12 %2

mils, while the labor alone costs 15 mils in Palestine and the raw

material 2o-z5 mils. The factory production cost of a simple

article like cotton sports shirts came to a total of 150 mils in

Palestine, while the corresponding Japanese article was laid down

in Haifa for 8o mils. In 1936 it cost a Palestine manufacturer

43o mils to make a pullover, while the identical article brought

in from Germany or Austria retailed for 320-350 mils.

Agricultural products found their competition fully as severe .

Syrian shipments are able to consistently undersell locally grown

vegetables in all Palestine cities. Practically the whole of Syria's

exports in this line are concentrated on the Holy Land . Syrian

eggs retail in the Palestine market for eighteen cents a dozen,

while Palestine eggs cannot be sold profitably for less than thirtysix

cents a dozen. In 1935 the local production of table fowl was

1,86o,ooo. Imports for the same year came to 2,000,000, all free

of duty. A heavy impost, levied on practically all feed, made it

a physical impossibility to produce commercial poultry as cheaply

as it could be shipped in from abroad .

Adding to the miseries of business, the Government's immigration

policy caused all industrial plans to become a matter of

hazard due to labor uncertainty . In all Jerusalem there are only

a handful of qualified electricians and carpenters . One has to

wait interminable periods for even the simplest installations - yet

BRICKS WITHOUT STRAW

271

the Authorities refuse to grant visas to skilled workmen now

refugees from Germany or starving in Rumania and Poland .

The transplanting of a higher standard of life into the medieval

setting of the Near East has invited still other troubles . In

Egypt, woman and child labor is obtainable in large quantities at

two or three piasters a day, and in the Syrian factories children

are employed at almost no pay at all . It is obvious that either of

two simple factors can cut the heart out of an unprotected Palestine

industry in a realistic world : the mass production of States

with strong industries and vast local markets, and the extremely

low wage scales in the surrounding agricultural countries of the

Near East.

In such a thoroughly destructive situation, industry can only

hope to secure and hold isolated and unique markets, and even

these, as we shall see, are not safe from attack . Though Palestine's

industry has shown a striking development resulting from

the headlong rush of Jewish investment and enterprise, it has

been able to penetrate only a fraction of its home market and is

in extreme jeopardy everywhere else . What this condition adds

up to in figures is seen in the problem of Japanese dumping . In

1929 the Holy Land imported 67000 of Japanese goods . By

1935 this figure had skyrocketed to £646,ooo, while during this

same period Japanese purchases from Palestine held at the ludicrous

amount of £ S .

Certain favored groups are saved from a portion of this disabling

condition by Governmental exception . All of the various

missionary institutions and enterprises are exempted from tax or

toll of any kind . Under this immunity the churchmen run hotels,

farms, manufacture wine on which no excise duty is levied, and

engage in other flourishing businesses under favorable conditions .

Also relieved of tax and imposts are "all members of His Majesty's

forces" and all officers of the Palestine Government. So

is the great Iragian-owned trans-desert transport service between

the Holy Land and Iraq, which thus escapes the exorbitant levies

placed on motor vehicles, tires and gasoline .9

Specific Arab industries are also shown generous consideration .

An eloquent token is the exemption of the Arab soap industry of

278

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

Nablus from the high tax on olive oil for industrial purposes ; and

the grotesquely contrasting customs protection given olives themselves

. Study of the agricultural products protected by Government

impost discloses them to be almost exclusively Arab .

Such fellaheen crops as wheat, barley and seminola are safeguarded

by high duties and a rigid regulation of imports under a

system of licenses.

On scattered occasions Jewish industry participates unavoidably

in these advantages . One such instance concerns the shoe industry.

After dumping practices almost succeeded in wiping

this business out of existence, the Arabs made such a howl that

the Government was moved to remedy the situation in 1932 by

protective duty . The net result shows in sharp relief the viciousness

of the open door system : there was an immediate decrease

in imports, dropping in two years from £ 8o,ooo to £40,000,

and an equalizing increase in the sale of local manufactures .

The Jews have also been the beneficiaries of other favors not

meant for them . The result of glutting the Palestine market

with foreign goods inadvertently gave Japan and Germany a toehold

from which they were invading the entire Near and Middle

East, ousting Britain from her favored position . In printed cotton

goods, one of Britain's pet specialties, Japan took first place as

leading exporter to Palestine, more than doubling English sales

in the same market. In 1936 London was shocked to discover

that Germany had jumped to first place as seller to the Palestine

market, with English goods losing position steadily .'°

This dangerous piece of backfire shocked the Bureaucrats into

action. As a result, quickly imposed tariffs have bettered the

situation considerably and a number of closed Jewish factories

have been able to reopen.

It is an error, however, to assume that Whitehall has suddenly

suffered from an attack of conscience . This was poignantly

demonstrated during the recent Tozareth Haaretz (favoring

home products) campaign. In this `Buy Palestine' movement,

the Jews literally put on a volunteer tariff of their own, deliberately

buying home-manufactured goods though they had to

pay a large premium for the privilege . This enthusiastically supBRICKS

WITHOUT STRAW

279

ported crusade was a considerable factor in enabling Jewish industry

to survive, and bespeaks the almost unique patriotism of

Palestine Jewry. Its effectiveness was evidenced during the

three months' campaign early in 1937, when Jewish leaders estimated

it was worth C4,000,000 in increased sales of local products.

Out of this campaign grew a typical frenzy of official

harassment . Jewish stores advertising the sale of `Palestine Goods

Only' were visited by Government agents seeking an excuse to

make arrests. At the same time, street peddlers selling `Only

Palestine Products' were hustled off to police stations to explain

why they preferred to limit their wares to those made in their

own land .

BANKING AND CURRENCY

Due to all the disabling uncertainties, the credit situation in

Palestine is a severe one . It is further complicated by an archaic

credit system which the Authorities refuse to alter . So the financing

of industry lapses into an impossible stalemate ; with the

banks on one side, so full of money that they are loath to take on

new accounts, and on the other, an aggregation of puzzled industrialists

who are wondering from day to day what the Government

is going to do next. Finance in Palestine has consequently

developed into something like a roulette game, with all bets called

when the wheel stops.

Apart from trivial quotas, the banks grant no real long-term

credits. No security market is in existence, a particular blow to

moderate-sized new undertakings. These are, in general, precariously

financed, the limited capital of the owner being eaten

up early by bloated land prices and building costs . The Near

Eastern expert, Dr . Alfred Michaelis, states that consequently

"numerous moderate and small-sized factories are in danger of

closing down for financial reasons ." 11

The legal interest rate is 9%, but this is vastly exceeded in practice

; while the banks pay I %2 % interest on deposits . Despite

the favorable circumstances provided in Palestine's swift growth,

the hostile attitude of the Government makes industrial and agri2.80

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

cultural mortgages most difficult to obtain, even at the gouging

interest rates prevailing . The establishment of adequate mortgage

banks is hampered by the Administration's land legislation

and attitude generally, frightening off interested financial institutions

in London and New York . The Arabs fare a little better.

Looking out for its self-selected wards, the Administration

has established an agricultural bank out of the public funds with

a capital of (400,000. It grants Arab farmers long-term credits

at nominal interest rates . The Jews, however, must contend

with the existing credit situation as best they can .

The Palestine pound is based on the British pound sterling . The

setting of its money values at this artificially high level automatically

exposes Palestine to the paralyzing competition of surrounding

nations whose devaluated and blocked currencies give

them an immeasurable advantage in all markets .

Due again to the Administration's own strictures, the banks of

Palestine are mainly branches of foreign institutions, with no particular

interest in the welfare of the country . Barclay's Bank,

an offshoot of the institution in London, has offices in Jerusalem

and six other towns and is banker to the Palestine Government .

The Ottoman Bank (Anglo-French) has five branches, and the

Italian Banco di Roma, four . In Tel Aviv is found the Polska

Kasa Oszczednosci (Polish) . There are a few local Jewish institutions

but, with little exception, they are of trivial importance.

This circumstance is all the more remarkable since the great bulk

of the money on deposit everywhere belongs to Jews . The savings

of the Arab fellaheen are usually kept in jars and similar hiding

places .

It is apparent here, too, that the British are determined to hang

a millstone around the neck of Palestine industry, and that if

equivocation and quibbling will not accomplish this purpose

they are prepared to strike directly at the heart of the country's

financial structure . This is conveyed in the draft ordinance of

April 1936, deleting from the law the provision requiring banks

to publish annual balance sheets . Thus not only was industry

deprived of any adequate insight into the country's financial situation,

but it was placed hopelessly at the mercy of foreign wireBRICKS

WITHOUT STRAW

281

pulling. This was made uncomfortably clear during the unsettled

condition which followed after Italy's invasion of Ethiopia,

when apprehensive withdrawals threatened the collapse of Palestine's

whole economic structure .

In February 1936 the Government published notice of impending

legislation which speaks volumes. This regulation proposes

that "no company or cooperative society shall carry on a

banking business without obtaining from the High Commissioner

a license to do so, and the High Commissioner may grant, refuse,

or revoke such license without explanation."

CITRUS

Pride of the Yishub is the Jaffa orange, reputedly the finest in

the world . An incident occurring in Paris a few years ago spoke

more for the quality of this fruit than a mountain of figures . A

fruit vendor had made a charge of two francs for a single orange,

which the writer considered outrageous . After having been so

informed, the vendor shrugged his shoulders and said testily

"Mais, M'sieu - c'est un Ja f a !"

Before the advent of the Zionists, oranges were scarcely a factor

in the Palestine economy and grapefruit were unknown . By

1931 the Holy Land was producing five percent of the oranges

for sale on world markets, jumping in 1938 to the unbelievable

proportion of eighteen percent. Nowhere else in the world is

scientific farming brought to such a high point in perfection . In

some of the larger groves complete filing systems are used in

which the case history of every tree is charted with all the thoroughness

of a medical clinic .

Citrus is the heart of Jewish agricultural enterprise and the

keystone to the National Home's prosperity. In 1934 it represented

eighty-three percent of all Palestinian exports . Unlike

competitor countries, where a healthy home consumption provides

a secure back-log for this industry, Palestine with its small

population has only a negligible internal market. A falling off

in foreign sales would necessarily place its citrus growers in the

most precarious of situations, serious enough to snap the back282

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

bone of the country's commerce . Here is an imperative which

would automatically dictate the commercial policy of any other

government . But in Palestine, declares S . Tolkowsky, General

Manager of the Jaffa Citrus Exchange, this key industry "remains

like a fatherless child, whom everybody is free to kick and exploit

and whom nobody will protect ." 12

In the Old World, oranges come within the luxury category .

The arc of production is, moreover, rapidly climbing everywhere,

making competition for existing markets very difficult . The

acuteness of this phase is amply demonstrated in Palestine production

alone. In 1936 it was some eight million cases, whereas

in 1940, when the young groves- come into full bearing, it is estimated

that total shipments will reach twenty-two million cases .

What this situation will result in can be discovered from the overwhelming

hardships already crucifying the industry . Impassable

trade restrictions are robbing it of existing foreign markets .

Exorbitant taxes make the planters' lives a nightmare . In general,

the obstructive tactics of the Mandatory are shooting them

head-first into catastrophe .

At Jaffa, where the industry is situated, there is neither a port

nor sufficient storage space . At Haifa, the transit sheds, under

the control of the Government, are pathetically inadequate and

become more congested each season as the new orchards begin to

bear. The single railroad between the orange section and Haifa

is a Government monopoly. It is short of cars and locomotives,

and during the turbulent rains which fall at the height of the picking

season it often does not run at all . Following nerve-wracking

delays, shippers are compelled to load their fruit in open

wagons ordinarily used for the transport of manure . Since the

orange is highly perishable, many thousands of boxes are lost annually

at the railway stations . Fruit is inspected outside rather

than within the dock warehouses, adding to the spoilage, in a

scene of indescribable congestion and confusion . Galling delays

frustrate every step in the attempt to export . The net result

is that full shiploads often reach their markets with as much as

fifty percent of waste fruit .

The alternative possibility of truck hauling did not exist until

BRICKS WITHOUT STRAW

283

recently . Over the sixty miles of sand dune between Haifa and

Tel Aviv-Jaffa, the most important commercial centers in the

country, the Administration had obstinately refused to construct

a road. It was only when the present war-beclouded horizon

made the building of this artery an inevitable military necessity,

that it was undertaken.

In practically all European countries, quotas, currency restrictions,

or prohibitive duties make the situation more precarious

with every passing year . The principal competitor nations,

Spain and Italy, overcome this hazard by favorable commercial

treaties and clearing agreements negotiated with the countries in

which they market their fruit. Such intercession as the Palestine

Government attempts is almost inevitably in the nature of cavalier

interference . One single rule costing the growers over a million

boxes of fruit was the order excluding oranges from export which

count more than one hundred to the box . The Administration

refuses to introduce any uniform inspection system and calmly

ignores the demands of distracted Jewish growers for compulsory

spraying and smoking of disease-ridden groves - practically all

of them Arab . The desperate Jewish growers have had to establish

their own inspection service on roads leading to the Colonies

to keep their trees from being ravaged by the black scale and

other destructive pests .

Over the objection of the Arabs, also, Jews are making a strenuous

effort to create a voluntary, all-inclusive citrus exchange for

the maintenance of high standards of sizing, packing and shipping.

They hope to win the better prices fetched by wellselected,

well-advertised and well-marketed fruit. The Government,

however, seems to regard this effort as an extravagant

irritation of Arabs who wish to keep to their old ways .

In the matter of trade agreements the Administration lays exaggerated

stress on formal difficulties, which it pretends cannot be

overcome . Yet Great Britain itself levies so heavily on Palestine

citrus that the tariff represents as much as half of the actual cost

of production. The only value this high duty could have is to

protect a British island in the West Indies, whose sole export

amounts to twenty thousand cases . The desperate Palestine grow284

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

ers offered to buy this whole crop at attractive prices in exchange

for relief - but their offer met with no response .

A reasonable reading of this mystery is offered in the deliberate

British effort to develop Cyprus, where Jews are now practically

excluded, into a direct competitor to Palestine . The Jaffa orange

has made such a great European reputation that the market it has

established becomes a most desirable plum for anyone who can

steal it. The bureaucrats have set themselves to take over this

lucrative industry if they can. Cyprus oranges have been exempted

from customs duty in the Empire. Land is cheap, labor

is cheap, and the Palestine competitor is being frozen in his tracks

by tariff walls . The Island is now being systematically advanced

as "a place of settlement for retired Colonial officials of all ranks"

and other Britons looking for a good thing . In the official British

press it is provocatively described as "practically undeveloped ." 13

That the tragic troubles besetting the citrus growers cannot

be credited to merely lackadaisical administration is shown by a

host of other circumstances . An illuminating example concerns

the boxes in which the fruit is packed, which the growers had

been buying in Poland and Rumania. When these countries

placed severe import tolls on Palestine fruit, to favor Italian and

Spanish oranges, the Palestinian growers retaliated by setting up

machinery to make their own boxes . This was the signal for the

Government of Palestine to act . It promptly plastered a high

tariff on box-wood, so that they could not be produced locally

except at prohibitive cost.

The result of this official persecution is not slow in showing itself.

Jewish groves, established at extravagant prices, bearing

the entire cost of advertising and marketing Palestine fruit, and

harassed from every source, are losing their hard-won position,

even in Palestine . Isaac Rokeach, President of the Jaffa Citrus

Exchange, estimates that at least one-third of the Jewish citrus

growers have been unable to meet the interest on their debts for

the last two years .l4

In his 1935 Report, the High Commissioner candidly calls attention

to this end result of his policies, saying : "A decrease of

investment in citrus plantations was also observed owing to deBRICKS

WITHOUT STRAW

285

cline in profits and fear of over-production. Arab farmers, however,

with little or nothing to pay for their land and their larger

margin between receipts and costs, have placed large additional

areas under citrus." 15 The simple figures tell the rest . Citrus,

once a Jewish monopoly in Palestine, is gradually passing into

Arab hands. The Arab area increased during 1935 by 20,000

dunams - the Jewish area, by Io,ooo.

ECONOMIC INSANITY

Practically all countries today maintain a strict control over

their exchange transactions, and also supervise the search for new

markets. Their rulers are prepared to bargain for each minute

advantage at the drop of a hat . This is accomplished by a direct

manipulation of currency, noteworthy in the case of Germany,

and special agreements of various kinds, most common of which

is the `favored nation' type . Under this arrangement a mutual

exchange of purchase value is arrived at, cemented by tariff discriminations

in favor of the preferred party .

Without exception, industrial nations follow the rule of buying

only where they can sell, and view with serious misgivings even

the slightest upset of their trade balance . The United States,

after studying the bewildering list of marks introduced by Dr.

Schacht, each with a different value and all manipulated to Germany's

trade advantage, came to the conclusion in July of 1936

that they constituted discriminatory trade practice and promptly

placed a retaliatory duty on German goods .

On June 10, 1937, Commons listened to Lieutenant-Colonel

Amery, former First Lord of the Admiralty, threaten a sharp increase

in duty against American products . "It is impossible," he

said, "to get back to the gold standard as long as that great

creditor nation still is forcing us to take an excess of imports ."

Echoed by the whole British Cabinet, Foreign Minister Eden

stated that an agreement with the United States "for the reduction

of customs duties on a most-favored-nation basis," was one of the

main objects of His Majesty's Government.16 The Colonial Office,

too, is not oblivious to these rudiments of economic good

286

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

sense . In a recent report it expresses glowing gratification because

Cyprus was able to show a small favorable balance for the

three months ending June 30, 1936, with imports of £305,o87

against exports of 4305 ,35 1 -

Alone in the world, Palestine's trade policy is characterized by

an entirely negative attitude . There the Government considers

that the Mandate rules out the possibility of trade agreements,

quotas and compensations, though these are regarded by other

countries as the sole means of establishing satisfactory trade relations

. Though it seems to levy tariffs and imposts as it pleases

under the less imposing name of `taxes,' the Government officially

takes refuge in the position that its "obligations under the Mandate"

prevent it from `discriminating' against countries belonging

to the League, from whom the Administration of Palestine theoretically

derives its authority.

It is obvious that Germany and Japan, two of the worst offenders

in the dumping process, are hardly entitled, even under this interpretation,

to continued privileges . Officially they have retired

from the League and all its obligations . In Syria, under similar

mandate, the French slapped a prompt surtax on German goods,

and forced both Germany and Japan to conclude favorable trade

agreements which included adequate guarantees of payment in

Syrian currency .

Palestine is one of the few countries restrained from taking

counter measures when a foreign government leaves the gold

standard and spills its depreciated wares on the market, or even

directly subsidizes some of its exports . Latvian butter shippers,

for example, receive such generous grants-in-aid from their Government

that they are able to sell their product cheaper in Jaffa

than it can be produced on neighboring farms . The Holy Land

is literally flooded with goods from a large number of countries,

sold at a price with which no industry depending entirely on its

own resources can hope to compete . Much of this dumping is

accomplished through organized cartels which are able to maintain

their home prices at such a high level that they can accept

payments on export goods barely sufficient to cover the cost of

materials and transport . Recent years have witnessed a vast inBRICKS

WITHOUT STRAW

287

crease in the dumping of goods by highly organized countries,

effected through export premiums, subsidies to industry, etc ., by

which the State endeavors to balance its payments without reference

to the home cost. In the case of Egyptian sugar, prices in

Cairo and Alexandria are exactly double those prevailing in Palestine

where competition has to be met from Czechoslovakia and

other beet-sugar producers.

All nations, without exception, enjoy preferential treatment in

regard to Palestine, turning it out, a little ewe lamb, to pasture

among the wolves.17 The Holy Land has consequently fallen

heir to a dangerous condition where it buys infinitely more abroad

than it sells . The result of this policy showed in 1935 when Palestine

had the staggering trade deficit of JJ 13,800,000, representing

the difference between imports of C r 8,ooo,ooo and exports of

only £4,200,000, a fatal disproportion which has risen yearly .

In 1936 the situation became still more serious. Imports for the

first quarter show a reduction of 14.2 % over the corresponding

period for 1935, while exports for the same period declined by

18.5%. Not only is the present deficit the largest in the world,

reckoned per head of population, but it was created at the very

time when every country was making the most strenuous efforts

to balance up its trade accounts either by diminishing imports or

increasing exports.

Under some circumstances these huge arrears might not be

cause for overwhelming anxiety. It could be argued that in the

development of a young and progressive country the import

of large quantities of production equipment is a vital necessity,

which must be considered as a capital investment rather than an

expenditure. It is undoubtedly significant that the largest single

import in 1935 was industrial machinery, valued at £992,ooo as

compared with 0967,000 in 1934 and 0467,000 in 1933 . Other

items of producers' materials showed similar pleasant increases .

Despite this optimistic circumstance, the facts as we have seen

them are not conducive to so liberal an interpretation . State

policies which allow for a constriction of foreign markets, and

make possible a condition where a locally manufactured blouse

costing 270 mils to make, has to compete with an identical blouse

288

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

imported from Austria which retails for 250 mils, hardly make

an assumption of this sort acceptable .

A picture of what is occurring can be gained from the increase

in egg imports from i 1,ooo,ooo eggs in 1929, to 76,000,000 eggs

in 1935, a frightening clue into real condition, when it is considered

that Palestine is still in the main an agricultural country.

The import value of food, drink and tobacco alone in 1935 was

43,646,877, while manufactured articles were 00,789,934.

These are certainly forbidding enough figures, fully justifying

Jabotinsky's dour warning that "the Jews are not settlers in Palestine-

they are just tourists!"

Certainly nothing but ruin can come to the infant industry of

this small land by turning it into a stronghold of free trade while

all the countries, including Great Britain itself, operate on the

principle of commercial treaties, mutual preferences and protective

tariffs . It seems obvious that the boasted `prosperity' of the

National Home is a delusion, since it depends upon the continued

import of funds, and not on the sound mechanics which trial and

error have proven to be the only operative media anywhere . To

become economically independent, the National Home must find

a way to produce within its borders, goods and services with

which to pay for the supplies it is compelled to buy from the outside

world. Otherwise the difference between imports and exports

must be charged off out of capital ; which meant that the

country had to pay out more than twice as much in 1935 alone

than was brought in by all the immigrants of 1936 put together.

The actual fact is that the four hundred thousand Jews in Palestine

find themselves in a grim economic battle with the world,

unprotected and prevented from protecting themselves . Since

the Zionist enterprise in Palestine represents a plunging investment

on the part of scattered Israel, desperately attempting to

salvage its remaining resources, Zionist Jewry, despite mutual

self-delusions, must be living largely on its dwindling capital.

Such, indeed, must inevitably prove to be the case . If no other

factor than the customs system operated, Jewish industrial position

would still remain dangerous and unhealthy, its catastrophic

ferments sure to expose themselves the instant the river of money

BRICKS WITHOUT STRAW

289

pouring into this tiny area abated. That Jewish ingenuity has

succeeded in partly circumventing these determined disabilities is

of little real importance, as it can be assumed that new restrictions

will constantly be invented to take the place of those which have

proven ineffective .

In the matter of currency alone, imports from such countries

as Germany, Rumania and Poland have to be paid for in full,

whereas when these States purchase from Palestine, the sums

owing are placed in blocked accounts, or goods which have to

be taken in lieu of money ; and it is a long time, if ever, before

the exporter collects on his debt . Such a condition would be

laughable in any other country, which would insist at once on

being paid in local currency under pain of excluding the off ending

States from its markets .

All these signs of economic insanity are the more remarkable

since the mere existence of a great excess of imports over exports

should place the National Home in an ideal bargaining position .

The very weakness of her trade position would provide a club

with which to secure important concessions from foreign nations

the instant a quota system was set up. Under an interested Government,

Palestine's trade would become a fat prize for which all

commercial nations would angle . It is almost four times that

of Egypt, six times that of Syria and five and a half times that of

Iraq.

Turkey, one of the prime offenders, sold Palestine in 1935 a

total of £ 3 38,807 and bought in return, £ 6646. Governed under

a system of strict State control over foreign trade, the Turks

put a virtual embargo on Palestine products. They ended by

banning all Palestine citrus in 1936. 111

Rumania, another typical illustration, sold Palestine £ 1,208,-

204 in 1935 and bought from her during that time a total of

£ 30,000. Despite this enormous advantage, Bucharest insisted

that sixty percent of the oranges it buys from the Holy Land had

to be shipped in Rumanian boats . To obtain the present import

licenses for two hundred thousand cases of fruit, Palestine

exporters had to purchase from Rumania fifteen orange cases for

every box of fruit sold . The same method of box-wood against

290 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

citrus fruit was forced on Palestine by Russia, whose balance of

trade with the Jewish National Home is twenty-three to one in

Russia's favor. In this policy these countries aped a similar one

announced in Poland. Taking full advantage of the defenseless

position of Palestine, Warsaw uses it as a dumping grounds for

cheap Polish goods, selling the Holy Land £400,000 annually,

and buying £ 40,000 in return.

Another of this unending list of examples is Hungary which

sells the Holy Land in the neighborhood of £ 120,000 every year,

and buys about £ i o0o worth of its goods in return . Like many

of her neighbors, Hungary has a complete embargo on Palestinian

fruit, out of deference to trade agreements with other orangegrowing

nations. Even in such countries as France and Belgium,

the sale of Palestine fruit is dropping consistently due to the presence

of new trade agreements by these countries with other

orange producers . Palestine is mulcted from every direction.

In order to sell Germany, last season, 216,ooo cases of fruit worth

less than £ ioo,ooo, she had to buy German goods of specified

classes to an equal value, notwithstanding an adverse trade balance

of £ 2,000,000.

Whatever specious legality the Administration might take

refuge in to justify its present course, Article XVIII of the Mandate

specifically empowers it to conclude special agreements

"with any State the territory of which in 1914 was wholly included

in Asiatic Turkey or Arabia." One of these States is

Iraq, which in 1935 exported to Palestine £237,000, and managed

by discriminatory duties to hold imports from that country

to £ 10,000 . The ratio of Iraq's sales to, and purchases from, Palestine

is now about thirty-one to one . Another is Syria whose

cheap labor and abundant irrigation facilities offers a destructive

competition to the fruit and vegetable growers of the Holy

Land. Syria sold Palestine during 1 935, £ 1,310,363 and bought

only £ 302,988 in exchange . The exports of Palestine to all the

countries of the Near East amount to only seventeen percent of

its imports from these same States, showing a deficit of £ 2,29o,-

00o in 1935 . This may be compared with the Iraqian balance

BRICKS WITHOUT STRAW 291

of trade for the same Near Eastern countries including Palestine,

coming to 890,000 dinars in imports against exports of 1,113,000

dinars. In the identical sphere of Near Eastern trade, Syria

shows imports of 5,763,493 Syrian pounds against exports of

7,121,693 Syrian pounds .

Under the stimulus of an interested Government, Syria has

started an impressive industrial development of her own . Industrial

exports, which a few years ago were far smaller than

those of Palestine, now exceed Palestine's by sixty percent . Even

more astounding is the fact that most of these are being concentrated

on the Holy Land . Syrian industrial export to Palestine

for 1935 added to £520,000, as against an industrial export by

Palestine to Syria of £ 110,000. In the trade relations between

Egypt and Syria we find a wholly different condition . After a

brief tariff war in 1934, a mutual trade agreement was reached

between the two countries leveling off the disproportion under

which Syria had suffered, to the point where Syrian and Egyptian

exports practically balanced each other .

As if playing a practical joke, the sole trade arrangement approved

by the Administration was made with Germany in 1933

during the world Jewish boycott of that country . Here Palestine

agreed to take double the amount of German goods for the

value of all oranges shipped to the Reich . Zionist politicians with

their hands out, had set the example in August 1933, by an arrangement

for the transfer of German-Jewish capital in the form

of German merchandise, thus flooding the whole Near East with

German goods . This scheme, which seemingly had the full blessing

of the Palestine authorities, resulted in a tremendous fillip to

German trade. German exports leaped from £780,000 in 1932

to £2,035,000 in 1936. How the trade wind blew as a result of

this policy is illustrated in the drop of Palestine's sales to Germany

from £6oo,669 in 1934 to £ 131,000 in 1936.

The whole sum and substance of the Government's attitude can

be seen in its failure to provide for a Palestine trade secretary in

any of the British Consulate-General's offices - even those in

neighboring countries. Such arrangements as are made in the

292

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

name of Palestine are literally fantastic . One is the treaty granting

free zones to Iraq and Iran in Haifa port . Iraq, despite its

anti-Jewish attitude, is given complete facilities for landing, warehousing

and transshipment of goods and the Zone is placed under

the absolute control of Iraq customs officials . Under this curious

`commercial agreement' Iraq also receives concessions "in respect

of local taxation," and is allowed duty reductions in favor

of her produce averaging from fifty percent to eighty percent .

In return for all this, Palestine receives privileges which add up to

a collective zero .19 The result of this `agreement' has merely

been to aggravate Haifa's already serious problem of congestion .

The effect of this stultifying process was recently described by

Dr. F. Rottenstreich, Palestine member of the Zionist Executive .20

In 1937, he disclosed, Jewish workers in Palestine industry had

decreased by twenty-eight percent from the previous year .

He flatly accused the Government of boycotting Palestinian

products, asserting that it even went abroad for goods not manufactured

in Great Britain rather than patronize local manufacture.

Something of the same condition was described by the Palestine

Arab Congress back in 1925, which sarcastically mentions a

special Stores Department existing only to buy from Europe such

articles as "a thermometer, for instance, at PTio, when similar

thermometers of the same sort, manufacture and patent, are sold

in Jerusalem pharmacies at PT3 ." 21

While everything connected with Jewish interests is being

booted around like a football, the usual solicitousness for Arabs

continues. This is shown handsomely in the case of the Arab

specialty of wheat growing . When a high tariff proved ineffectual,

the flour trade was placed under a system of rigid licenses,

with Jews allowed an annual import of only ten thousand tons

though the Tel Aviv demand alone was estimated at seventeen

thousand tons . Finally the High Commissioner stopped the imports

of wheat altogether during May, June and July of 1935.

This policy was continued to the actual point of an acute flour

shortage, notwithstanding the fact that it represented a `discrimination'

against members of the League of Nations anxious to

dump their excess produce into the Holy Land .22

BRICKS WITHOUT STRAW

293

HEADS, I WIN -TAILS, YOU LOSE'

Though Palestine is under the direct control of the British

Colonial Office, London takes the stand that to grant it Imperial

preference would be in some obscure fashion immoral . Palestinian

exports to Britain are hence taxed for all the tariff will bear .

It is significant that Imperial preference has been accorded all

other mandated territories assigned to Great Britain, without too

much fuss being made about it . In the cases of Togo, Cameroon

and Tanganyika, it was decreed by Order in Council, October

13, 1928, that these areas should be considered part of the British

Empire for tariff purposes under Article VIII of the Finance

Act of I9I9. International precedent is also offered in the preferential

tariff granted by France to the protectorate of Tunis .

The United States did the same for the benefit of Hawaii before

its annexation ; and in 1903 allowed Cuba a customs reduction of

twenty percent on the basis of "moral obligations existing ."

All authorities on international law agree that the Covenant

and the Mandate were devised for the protection of the mandated

areas, and not for the benefit of foreign powers . Even the open

door, in principle, is primarily intended to prevent the exploitation

of these territories . That economic isolation was certainly

not meant by the Powers is proven in the Mandates Commission's

demand that Mandatory rulers and all other States "which have

concluded special treaties or conventions with the Mandatory

Powers . . . extend the benefits of such treaties or conventions

to the Mandated territories ." 23

Britain does just the reverse . In no case where she has commercial

treaties embodying the most-favored-nation clause has

she bothered to arrange that the benefits be extended to Palestine .

At the same time, the National Home is bound by all the obligations

of existing trade agreements between England and other

countries. When a speaker in Commons demanded that duties

be imposed on German and Japanese imports into Palestine, the

Colonial Secretary replied that "this was impossible as long as

Palestine remained a party to the Empire commercial treaties with

Germany and Japan ." 24 Despite this contention, the British Gov294

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

ernment has not applied the Anglo-German payments agreement,

in which Palestine is legally included, to the balance of payments

between Germany and Palestine .

The shrewd hypocrisy of London's position is emphasized by

the voluntary action of Stockholm, which removed all import

duties on Holy Land grapefruit to "promote trade relations between

Palestine and Sweden." 26 In the same friendly gesture,

the Dominion of Canada allows free entry to Palestine citrus during

the principal season of export from December to May of each

year. Yet Britain itself doggedly maintains prohibitive tolls on

everything that comes from the Holy Land .

At the same time London insists on being credited with the

amount of Palestine imports in its trade deals with the various

countries, as in the Commercial Agreement signed with Poland

on February 27, 1930. In the Anglo-Lithuanian Treaty, signed

to maintain a balance of trade between the two countries, the

same business was repeated. Here, too, the British claimed credit

for all Lithuanian goods sold in the Holy Land.26

ON AIR AND SEA

The irresistible force which drew the city-bound Jew to the

hard, challenging soil, also beckons him to the sea . Zionist thinkers

saw in advance what the Asiatic hinterland is rapidly discovering

- that the sea borders of Palestine form the gateway to international

traffic . Strategically located at the sea cross-roads of

three continents, the land of Israel must inevitably become a prosperous

maritime country .

The Nationalist leader Jabotinsky was among the first to grasp

the full significance of this situation . There has long been a

Revisionist marine school at Civitavecchia, Italy, where shipbuilding,

fishery and navigation are taught to eager students from

the recesses of European ghettos . The Palestine Histadruth has

its own society called Nachshon, Ltd ., and in Haifa there is a

non-partisan group, the rapidly developing Zebulun Society,27

where enthusiastic youths acquire nautical training and a love for

the sea.

BRICKS WITHOUT STRAW

295

In 1934, goods to the value of C 17,000,000 were transported

to and from Palestine by water, and nearly three hundred thousand

travelers came or left. Jews alone spend for shipping an

estimated C 3,500,000 each year. Yet for all the revenue Palestine

derives from its own fishing and shipping industries, it might

just as well be tucked away in the middle of Africa .

Several Jewish companies have made determined efforts to

capture a part of this sea traffic for the Jewish people. When the

first Hebrew steamer, the Atid, made its maiden voyage in 193 3,

manned by a Hebrew-speaking crew, observers commented wonderingly

that "there was an air of unreality about this venture ."

Today there are three Jewish shipping corporations in Palestine,

with half a score of vessels plying between the ports of the Mediterranean.

For the most part these craft are of low tonnage but

the new Jew looks at them with pride.

The difficulties faced by Jewish shipping are far greater than

those usually connected with an attempt to establish a new merchant

marine . It must compete unaided against the subsidized

shipping industries of other nations . More, it suffers from the

actual animus of its own home government . It does not even

get preference in port clearance and wharf facilities . It is handicapped

by its inability to get itself included in the pacts between

shipping companies, so that a balanced payload of merchandise

could be arranged for its vessels between their various ports of

call . Since the amount of shipping originating in Palestine is

considerable, a simple expression of interest by the Palestine Government

to foreign lines which touch at its ports would easily

bring about this desirable result . Far from betraying such an

interest in the country's merchant marine, the Authorities actually

prompted Egypt to forbid entry into her waters of Palestine

steam vessels (specified so as not to interfere with Arab

sailing skiffs) of less than one thousand tons . This, of course, hit

the Jews alone. Similar difficulties were encountered in Britishowned

Cyprus ; and Syria, too, was prevailed on to take discriminatory

action against the struggling Hebrew companies.

The Administration has declared Sundays and Christian holidays

the only days of rest in Palestine ports . On those days cus296

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

toms is closed and the work carried on at port extremely limited .

Employees engaged in it must be paid `overtime .' The Jewish

Sabbath and holidays are not recognized . This obviously places

Jewish shipping under costly duress, causing it to lose patronage

and cargoes.

In 1936 the largest of the Jewish steamers, the S .S. Tel Aviv,

finally had to throw up the sponge due to State-subsidized competition

of foreign companies, and the ship was sold to a corporation

in Japan.

A growing number of Jewish vessels are engaged in deep-sea

fishing, though local fisheries are discouraged by special legislation

prohibiting trawling, and by the granting of "exclusive licenses

to fish." The High Commissioner dictates the industry

personally, with powers to issue licenses as he sees fit . It is noteworthy

that foreign fishermen are subject to none of these disabilities

when operating in Palestine waters .

No appropriation exists for the fisheries service, even though

Palestine imports a great amount of seafood every year . Iraq

finds it profitable to transport large quantities of fish all the way

across the scorching desert route . This export of fish from the

Tigris to the markets of Palestine's coastal towns is as ironical as

bringing the proverbial coal to Newcastle . Practically the only

experimentation has been that done by private Jewish enterprise .

Dr. Sklover, former official in the Fisheries Department of the

German Government has proven, for instance, that the yearly

cycle of sardines takes them all the way from South Palestine to

the Syrian coast. Were the Government's attitude not a factor,

a great export of sardines, packed in native olive oil, could easily

materialize .

This uncompromising indifference to the fate of its entire

maritime industry on the part of a Government, is, to say the

least, unique . Not even in the section of the coast around Jaffa

Harbor is there an official sea-chart . Apathy extends in every

possible direction . The ports themselves are pathetically inadequate

to care for the enormous growth of shipping. Facilities

are so badly jammed that shippers who can possibly avoid Palestine,

do so. For years the Jaffa customs area has been so badly

BRICKS WITHOUT STRAW

297

overcrowded that arriving steamers often have to stand by for

a week or more before they can unload . Sometimes in the height

of the orange season the situation becomes so impossible that the

whole import and tourist traffic has to be rerouted through Haifa .

Storage facilities are so poor that port authorities have had repeatedly

to proclaim a respite week, during which no merchandise

is accepted from incoming ships and no products loaded on

outgoing steamers . What all this jockeying means to anxious

growers whose perishable product is decaying in the sheds and

rail-terminals need hardly be explained .

Haifa Harbor has been modernized to make it suitable as a

military-naval base . From time to time it is substantially rumored

that all civil shipping is to be discontinued, and beautiful

Haifa Bay turned into a purely military preserve. Here oil,

which pays no taxes, is the fair-haired boy of the Administration,

and its transportation takes precedence over all else except the

cardinal business of His Britannic Majesty's great gray sea dogs.

With superb unconcern, the Authorities watch everything connected

with private shipping pile into a hopeless jumble at these

two ports, a mess which grows crazier with each passing year .

The ideal spot for a harbor which would relieve this congestion

is Jaffa-Tel Aviv, with a combined population of well over

two hundred thousand and the great bulk of Palestine's citrus

groves within easy reach. For twenty years the irritated Jews

have remonstrated with the Administration over the neglect of

Jaffa Harbor. Not even a breakwater exists. Jagged rocks line

the shore, making it necessary for ships to load and unload from

lighters manned by ruffian Arab crews whose mood is always unpredictable.

Steamers must anchor at least a mile out, and in

bad weather have to stand by and pray for calm .

Unable to enlist Government support, the city of Tel Aviv had

a brilliant idea : it would build a harbor itself, at its own expense.

The juncture of the River Yarkon and the sea lent itself admirably

to such an enterprise .28 Its success seemed guaranteed by

its location at the very nerve center of the country's commerce.

The Government's answer was a flat `no.' It is doubtful whether

in the history of responsible government, the right of a city

298

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

situated on the seashore to build its own harbor at its own expense

has ever been contested ; but Palestine officialdom was willing to

set this amazing precedent . Its views were that such an improvement

on the coast of the all-Jewish city would constitute an encroachment

on the vested rights o f Ja ffa Arabs.

For years the Jews tried to secure at least unloading rights, and

for years their petitions were ignored . In 1936, after four weeks

of violence and isolation had sealed up Jaffa Port, the Authorities

finally granted the city of Tel Aviv a limited right to unload.

What the Government agreed to, in view of the emergency,

was that the Jews be allowed to build a temporary jetty

one hundred yards long with money raised by private subscription.

29 It not only refused to participate in the financing of

the `port' but also expressly forbade the Municipality of Tel

Aviv to do so . With fine meticulousness it limited the cargo

which could be discharged to eleven categories of merchandise .

Vessels with anything else to unload, be it only as big as a dime,

had to steam up the coast to Haifa or to one of the Syrian ports .

With usual exuberance, the Zionist press over the world hailed

the moment as historic and the `port' as a great concession .

However, what exists at the present day is a board pier with a

couple of wooden shacks serving as customs houses, and a big

sign, "No Admittance to Port Area ." 30 Certainly present omens

are at least dubious. One appeared on the jubilant `Sea Day'

which Tel Aviv arranged to celebrate the triumphant opening

of its `port' in June of 1936 . The great event of the day centered

on three Jewish steamers which were to sail proudly into

harbor as living evidence of Jewish might on the sea . Jerusalem,

however, ordered these vessels out of the vicinity, announcing

that anchoring in Tel Aviv waters was "permitted only to ships

unloading cargoes, not for display purposes ."

Actually there is no deep-water harbor in Tel Aviv, nor has

the Government granted any permission to construct one . The

`port' has none of the rights which are granted even such minor

places as Acre and Gaza .31 Officially it has no independent existence.

Ships calling at Tel Aviv must receive their quarantine

certificate from Jaffa . More ironic still, though the Jews of

BRICKS WITHOUT STRAW 299

Tel Aviv put up all the money to construct its wharves and

quays, the Government takes all the income from wharfage and

storage fees in addition to the revenue derived from customs

duties . The Mandatory's attitude is well covered in the Report

of the Royal Commission of /937 . It comments in regard to

the projected harbor that "this would undoubtedly be disastrous

to the prosperity of Jaffa, and, in justice to the Arabs, the Administration

has been unable to consent to such a proposal ." 32

In that more modern type of navigation, over the air lanes, the

story is much the same . Private flying is practically forbidden .

When a young Jewish aviator who had been a former executive

in the Fokker Airplane Works attempted to lay out a field he

was all but ordered out of the country.

There are three important air bases, at Haifa, Gaza and Lydda .

The Sea of Galilee is also being used as a permanent landing base

for Imperial Airways flying to and from India and Australia .

Palestine is on the schedule of the Royal Dutch Airlines' East

and West service as well as the Italian Ala Littoria and the Polish

`Lot,' connecting it up with the most important airports of

Europe, Asia and Africa .

A number of years ago, Tel Aviv with usual enterprise suggested

that a piece of ground could be acquired at the northern

end of the city for a commercial airport. It brought forward

the fact that the existing civil airport, located at the extreme

southern tip of the country in the Arab town of Gaza, was far

from all business centers and thoroughly unsuited to serve commercial

interests. Leading officers of the Royal Air Force were

induced to survey the site and they agreed that it was the best

in the country for the purpose. As expected, the Government

made no response . Tel Aviv then made another proposition,

offering to share the expense of purchasing and maintaining the

port. The Government now replied immediately with an icy

refusal, stating categorically that it would neither participate in

the construction of this air field nor allow the City of Tel Aviv

to build it at its own expense .

It must be noted, however, that recently a company in which

Jewish as well as prominent English figures are interested has

300

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

been allowed to use the airport at Lydda for civil aviation purposes.

33

ROADS AND RAILROADS

The question of roads, touched on briefly before, is well

worth additional examination .

The major part of Jewish investment is made in the coastal

plain and in the valleys around Haifa and Tel Aviv . Scores of

Jewish settlements are located here . This district is the backbone

of Hebrew colonization.

Despite the frequent pleading, practically no roadways have

been built to relieve these colonies of their isolation . Colonel

Wedgwood called the turn in Commons . Replying to his

"honourable friend Mr. . Isaac Foot" who thought "the roads were

beautiful," he observed that "if he goes there and looks again

he will see that the roads which he mentions are all roads leading

to Arab villages and that it is very difficult to get to the Jewish

villages." In January 1930, S . Ettingen, lecturer on road and

railway engineering at Jewish Technical College in Haifa, directly

accused Jerusalem of mapping the roads deliberately so

that they would not pass through Jewish settlements. This

charge is substantiated in the single experience of the colony of

Hedera, largest and wealthiest in the country and center of the

orange-growing section . Not only did the Administration refuse

to construct a road but the colonists themselves were denied

permission to build one at their own expense . Only after interminable,

heart-breaking delays, and determined pressure from

the Jewish Agency in London, was this permission reluctantly

granted. Considering even this miserable concession a great

stroke of luck, the sturdy men and women of the settlement

turned out under the broiling sun to do the road construction

themselves, stopping all other work .

In striking contrast are the beautiful highways existing in all

parts of Palestine, leading to obscure Arab villages or isolated

military stations . An example of official competence, which

speaks for itself, is the beautiful automobile highway built in

BRICKS WITHOUT STRAW

301

1936 at breakneck speed from Gaza to the Red Sea over a

sparsely settled region where any kind of wheeled vehicle is a

rarity . Another is the really brilliant engineering feat involved

in the great broad artery constructed in 1937 to serve British

military needs along the thinly settled northern border .

At the same time that Jewish towns were wallowing in surrounding

mud, Imperial self-benefaction announces that two

main roads are to be extended from Palestine through Transjordan

and on to Baghdad, at an estimated cost to the Palestine

tax-payers of r3,000,000 . The principal function of these

highways is political, guaranteeing the communications of England

with her Indian Empire and protecting that all-but-sacred

instrument, the pipe line to the oil fields of Mosul. Their sole

commercial value will be to give Iraq a convenient artery for the

export and import of its merchandise through Haifa.

Military necessities have also given the Jews a left-handed

benefit, through the construction during 1937-38 of the coastal

road between Tel Aviv-Jaffa and Haifa . For two decades

Jewish colonists pleaded to deaf ears, issuing volumes of protest

memoranda that would fill a library. In 1936 Mussolini inadvertently

became the Jew's good angel . The Government realized

that the need for facilitating speedy movement of troops

was more pressing than its strictures against Jews . Without

further ado, the highway was completed with such dispatch as

to come under the head of an engineering miracle . Jewish

growers will now be able to transport their fruit and vegetables

overnight to Haifa port. They will be relieved of making their

meandering way in heavy mud to the railroad which hauls their

produce by a circuitous route to the docks . Hardly less important,

since it passes mostly through Jewish territory, the new

road will be safe for travelers.

The Palestine railways are reminiscent of nothing so much

as Fontaine Fox's old comic, the Toonerville Trolley . Today

they remain in almost the same disreputable condition as they

were when Palestine was nothing but a decrepit Turkish province.

The main line is largely a war-time product, and exhibits all

302

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

the short-comings of its improvised military origin . Instead of

continuing on a straight course down the coast, the line loops

suddenly inland at the very point where the barren stretches of

the south give way to the economically important citrus belt

with its great urban centers of Tel Aviv and Jaffa .84 Just how

many miles of line the Palestine Government operates is an open

question . The Royal Commission of 1937 estimates a little over

iooo kilometers, of which 203 kilometers are in Sinai Peninsula,

323 kilometers in Transjordan, and 477 kilometers in Palestine

itself. A part of this system is the Hejaz Railway, a Moslem

religious property used largely to transport pilgrims to the

desert shrines. Most of it lies outside of Palestine territory, and

the only section which pays for itself is that which serves the

Jewish colonies of the Emek . Its annual deficit comes to about

,C45,000, which Palestine shoulders as one of the shackles hung

around its neck by the Administration . The Young Turks of

Kemal Pasha would have sold it as scrap iron long ago .

One of the characteristics of these railways is their varying

gauges, requiring a multiplicity of reloading operations to reach

different parts of the same lilliputian country . The personnel

consists of inept political appointees of the Government, who

treat this business with all the sporadic glee that a spoiled child

does a mechanical toy. The management does not bother to

coordinate and adapt its services, so that shipment by rail is

liable at any point to turn into a comedy of errors .

An analysis of revenue demonstrates that Jewish freight and

passengers supply at least two-thirds of the income of these

roads.

Since these lines were constructed they have always been in

bad shape . The Mandatory's 1920 report to the League of Nations

describes them as "entirely unballasted, scantily bridged,

needing repairs to earthworks, drains, fences and ditches . . .

and liable to be closed to traffic by washouts." For their length

the Palestine Railways are the most expensive in the world .

From year to year the losses of these hungry white elephants increase,

aggravated by the growing preference for highway transportation

where Jews are relieved of Governmental incomBRICKS

WITHOUT STRAW

303

petence and obstructiveness . The railway deficit charged to,

Government expenditure in the fiscal year 1935-36 was £ 124,-

159, as compared with £33,805 in 1934-35.

When the roads were taken over, more than £500,000 was

paid to the Jerusalem-Jaffa Line concessionaires alone. The

Palestine tax-payer was asked to refund an additional £ z,ooo,-

ooo to the British Treasury for railway expenditures of the

Military Administration . This makes the initial cost £ 2,500,-

ooo, apart from subsequent capital expenditure of C785,000

and an increasing list of deficits . The charge on the Palestine

tax-payer per kilometer of line is conservatively estimated at

£ 10,000 .35 The cost of constructing a modern railway system

with full equipment, in other countries with similar traffic, does

not average over £4500-

To reduce effective competition, the Government puts every

possible obstacle in the way of motor traffic . Some of these

have already been mentioned. Others are a drastic restriction

on driving licenses, and such curious devices as an ordinance

which allows only one person to ride in the front seat of a touring

car.

To cap the strange state of affairs, Tel Aviv, the most important

metropolis in the country, does not have a railway

terminal . It has only a little way-station, a small, ramshackle

wooden shack suited to some obscure Arab village . To catch

a train its people must go by motor to the little Arab town of

Ludd. Nowhere in the whole British Empire is there a town

half of Tel Aviv's size which has to contend with such a condition.

And nowhere in known creation is there another public

utility which could deliberately avoid the chief commercial city

of the country without having its management made the subject

of a lunacy commission .

CHAPTER VII

DUAL OBLIGATION TO TWO PEOPLES

THE TAX MONEYS

Before the Zionists threw themselves into the picture, Palestine

was a millstone around the neck of every nation that governed

it. It was always in the red, produced nothing of any

value, and was considered an all-around liability . On a cost

accounting basis the new British acquisition seemed a pretty dismal

proposition . A great economic collapse had settled like a

bleak fog over exhausted Europe . The British Exchequer itself

was being bled white by incessant demands from every

possible quarter.

Soon Jewish money began to gravitate toward the National

Home. This was one part of the Zionist adventure the London

politicians could approve wholeheartedly . The prospect of having

someone to tax in Palestine was a pleasing one . We find

Colonial Secretary Amery begging the Zionists, in January 1928,

not to withdraw their financial support since "it would be very

unfortunate if that support were not forthcoming just because

there is a temporary depression ." Great Britain and the East

speaks of the Zionist Organization as a "hen that lays golden

eggs." It was evident that in the Mandate for Palestine the

British had fallen into one of the best paying businesses they had

ever encountered .

Despite generous squandering, the public moneys flowed in

like a golden river . Nothing like it has ever been seen in the

modern world. A deficit of £41,000 in 1931, converted itself

into a surplus of £6,267,81o in 1935 . By the beginning of 1936

this accumulated hoard was already equal to more than two years'

normal expenditure and was piling up rapidly .

This was far and away the most respectable surplus that any

Government in existence could show ; but nothing daunted, the

Palestine Administration went about the business of both expend-

Page 304 Book

DUAL OBLIGATION TO TWO PEOPLES 305

iture and taxation as if it were skating on the thin ice of bankruptcy.

In 1934, though the Treasury was already groaning

under the weight of a huge accumulated reserve, with income

gaining over expenditures with every passing month, the Administration

attempted to put through an income tax, and was only deterred

from this measure when it was discovered that the Arabs

refused to keep books . ,

Now began a performance which Lord Strabolgi sarcastically

described as "the policy and economics of bedlam ." The Palestine

Government, its pockets already bursting with unused

money, commenced to borrow huge sums in London at high

interest rates, using its own money surplus as security for the

loans ! Completely rounding out this strange condition, the

Administration placed all but £ 10,000 of its surplus into lowinterest

English stocks and bonds, for funding British Colonial

development in such places as Ceylon, Natal, Uganda and

Guiana, an investment whose collectibility is more than doubtful,

if only in view of the defaulted amounts Great Britain owes the

United States .

It is interesting to examine one of these loans to discover just

what purposes the Palestine Administration had in mind . A

typical borrowing was made in 1934 for £ 2,000,000. Included

among its items were £ 133,000 for Arab schools (no provision

at all for Jewish schools), £ 250,000 for the resettlement of `displaced'

Arabs ; and £200,000 for agricultural credits (Arab) .

£210,000 is asked for a berth and reclamation scheme at Haifa

(for the benefit of the Iraq Petroleum Company) . £933,000 is

sequestered for water and drainage development schemes. Of

this amount, the provision made for Water Resources Survey (a

life and death matter in view of the claim that Jewish immigration

must be restricted for lack of water) was only £6o,ooo . (Two

years later only £7ooo had been used, wasted in bureaucratic

functions, the balance spent almost entirely for Arab villages and

British administrative necessities .) The only benefit the Jews

received from the entire water and drainage project came inadvertently

from improvements made in the mixed towns of

Jerusalem and Haifa .

306 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

The final item in this loan was 0407,000 for public buildings

and post offices. In the application of this provision the Jews

were again ignored . Tel Aviv, bearing by far the heaviest part

of the country's tax burden, was not given a farthing out of the

total loan and went along as best it could with its antiquated telephone,

postal, sewage and drainage facilities.

Analysis of the Government's expenditures for any period

shows a good deal of marauding in the interests of the Mandatory

itself. The League's Council had ruled that "while a mandated

territory may be expected to pay its own way, it may not be

burdened with obligations not directly connected with its own

administration ." We have already seen surreptitious violations

of this principle in the amazing deals made with Iraq and the

British petroleum companies. But the English were prepared to

go much further : they dipped their fingers directly into the till

without bothering too much about ceremony . They compelled

Palestine to pay over to the British treasury JJ 1,ooo,ooo as a refund

for a military railroad built during the War through Sinai

Peninsula . At a time when London itself defaulted on war debts,

it collected in full from Palestine, treating it as conquered Turkish

territory. In addition to these reparations paid direct to the

British treasury, the share of the old Ottoman public debt fastened

on Palestine by the Treaty of Lausanne is regularly paid, though

all other countries affected by this provision ignore it, regarding it

as a dead letter .2

The great bulk of all expenditures made by the Palestine Government

are conditioned directly on the military needs of the

Empire. Says Broadhurst without mincing words, "Troops

have to be kept somewhere, and although it costs more to keep

them in Palestine than in Egypt, India, or other British possessions,

the Palestine Government pays the extra money, and the expense

does not fall on the British taxpayer ." 3 According to the Shaw

Report thirty percent of all public expenditures were made on

the military and armed forces of Great Britain .

In addition to sums handed directly to London, are other expenditures,

designed for the same purpose but buried in the jumbled

double-ledger bookkeeping followed by the Administration.

DUAL OBLIGATION TO TWO PEOPLES 307

One has only to compare the disproportionate figure of 042,-

487 for military and police during 1935, with £313,597 allowed

the combined Departments of Health and Agriculture, the latter

amount itself hiding such expenditures as those for military roads .

Just as Jewish money was used to build the best military harbor

in the Mediterranean at Haifa to protect Britain's way to India,

under the pretext of `riots' Jews are now expected to pay Britain's

huge military costs in safeguarding that same highway from the

menace of the Italians . It was decided by the Palestine Government

in July 1936 that "in principle" it shall be liable for the

whole cost of army troops stationed in Palestine, plus the capital

cost of works services there .3a According to a statement published

in March 1936 in the official Palestine Gazette, the expenditures

on the military garrison alone during the year came to

10,333,000 .

An inkling of where this sweet flood of golden rain comes from

was given by the Colonial Secretary in Commons on March 24,

1936. The fat Palestine surplus, he acknowledged, "in itself is

a magnificent tribute to Jewish enterprise - in the main it is

Jewish money." Official figures of the Palestine Administration

show the Jewish share in Government revenue to exceed seventy

percent of all collections of direct and indirect taxes . On the

basis of these estimates the per capita burden of taxation amounts

to about £ 13 a year for Jews, and £ 2 a year for non-Jews. As

far back as 1930, the economist, Hoofien, proved by careful

computation that Jews contributed per head directly to the Government,

£q per annum, against a revenue from non-Jews of

£ 1 .75 per annum .

The figures from Jerusalem give a fair comparative index into

the situation throughout the country . In 1936 the municipality

had a budget of £ 1 oo,ooo. Of this, £ 8o,ooo was received in

rates and fees, of which £70,000 came from Jews . A great

share of the balance arose from the wealthy Greek and Armenian

Patriarchates, and such foreign-owned enterprises as the giant

King David Hotel .

308

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

PUBLIC EXPENDITURES

"I think," said Colonel Wedgwood, his stern blue eyes snapping,

"the feeling is that the Jews ought to look after the Jews

and the Government ought to look after the Arabs . . . Under

this bill we are providing for a post office in Jerusalem . We have

already put up with national money, not municipal money, a

magnificent post office in Jaffa . . . We were told the other day

that if the people of Tel Aviv wished they could raise a loan and

build a post office . Of course they could, but it is not just that

the Government should provide post offices for Arab towns and

leave the Jews to provide the public buildings in their own

towns."

In thus referring to the postal situation as a symbolic example,

Wedgwood did not overstate the case . Jews contribute seventyfour

percent of all postal revenues, most of it from Tel Aviv .

When the palatial new post office was erected in Jaffa, Tel Aviv

was already posting eight letters to Jaffa's one . With this disproportion

vastly enlarged in recent years, the Tel Aviv Post

Office is still housed in a rented, ramshackle building, staffed with

only two officials compared to Jaffa's ten . Broadhurst informs

us that "a visit to the post office at Tel Aviv will show a queue as

long as that at a Labor Exchange, waiting for stamps ." 4

It takes three days for a letter to travel the thirty-five miles

from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv . Parcels are not delivered at all but

must be called for . In the villages this applies even to letters .

And should a business man attempt to be smart and send his letter

by bus-driver, a warrant is promptly issued for his arrest for

contravening the Postal Regulations .

All public services can be measured by the same yardstick.

The work of drainage and reforestation, so vital to the needs of

an enlightened European community, has been dumped into the

lap of the Jews themselves . Expenditures on health, education

and agriculture are limited mainly to administration costs with the

exception of small subsidies to the Arabs to keep them quiet . If

the Jews themselves had not drained the malarial swamps, the

land would still be subject to pestilence and disease . One of the

DUAL OBLIGATION TO TWO PEOPLES 309

learned reproaches of the Jewish Agency informs the Government

that "in most countries the protection of public health, the

promotion of education, the construction of highways and drainage

of large areas, are regarded as governmental functions ." s

Considering the fact that in Palestine the Jews had to undertake

all these functions on their own, with funds begged from scattered

Israel the world over, this quaint remonstrance is no less

bizarre than the circumstances which gave rise to it .

There is little in Palestine, as we shall discover, which is not

controlled by the Authorities with an iron hand . They have

their fingers in many of the country's most important business activities

and have taken over even such minor functions as are

generally conceded to the Municipalities by the most highly socialized

States. Despite this, they maintain no offices in the chief

commercial city of the country . Citizens of Tel Aviv in need

of Government services are compelled to go to Jaffa . During

the riots, when it meant death for any Jew to venture into the

Arab town, the Government opened up a few temporary services

in Tel Aviv ; but transactions not involving a contribution to the

Exchequer had still to be carried out in Jaffa ! Fretful at being

compelled to go to Tel Aviv to collect its taxes, the Administration

plastered an increased assessment on the Jews for this `convenience

.' In the temporary Customs Clearing Office, for example,

an additional sur-charge of two hundred and fifty mils was

levied, apparently, as one observer remarked, "for the privilege of

not having to penetrate into the closed port area of Jaffa at the

cost of a broken head ."

CHEATING CHILDREN WITH COCKLES 6

Since the educational system is generally considered to be the

foundation of the State, it is important to see just how this public

institution operates in Palestine .

Official reports for 1935 show the number of Jewish school pupils

as 52,030 ; Moslem, 45,894 ; and Christian, 18,175 . This unexpected

proportion is due to the peculiar age brackets of the

Jewish immigration, as well as the aversion of Moslems to educa310

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

tion, which they consider destructive to the true faith . If it were

left up to the British alone, the Jewish National Home would be

the most illiterate spot on the globe . Only 6.2 % of the Government's

budget goes into education, and of this small sum, the

great bulk is deflected into Arab channels . The attitude toward

Jewish schooling is something like that found in some of our

Southern States toward Negroes . Roughly, the State allots

$5 .45 for the education of every Jewish child, and $26.68 for

every non-Jewish child .? Of the £9oo,ooo spent from 1921 to

1929, less than £ 6o,ooo went to the Jewish school system . For

the school year 1935-36 the expenditures of the DepaiUiient of

Education ran to f237,000, of which £ 37,916 was allocated

to Jewish schools . These comparative figures are even more

striking than they appear, since they do not contain other amounts

which must be credited to the Arab side such as expenditures of

the Public Works Department in building of schools, and general

administrative overhead .

With no exception, the Government School System is purely

Arab in character. The language of instruction is Arabic . Hebrew

is not even taught as a foreign tongue . When in 1937 a

rumor circulated that the study of Hebrew was to be introduced,

it only evoked incredulity and rendered the Government's hasty

denial superfluous. "Apart from scientific subjects," the Peel

Commission acknowledges, "the curriculum is almost wholly devoted

to the literature, history and tradition of the Arabs ; and

all the school masters from the humblest village teacher to the

head of the Government Arab college, are Arabs ." e Arab

school masters in Palestine appear to have been recruited from

the ranks of the most exaggerated pan-Arab agitators. The result,

as Lord Peel candidly admits, is to turn the children out as

violent "Arab patriots ." "The schools," he tells us, "have become

seminaries of Arab nationalism ." s

During the whole period of British occupation there has never

been a single Jewish school built in Palestine out o f the public

funds. The only consideration shown Jewish children is in the

form of the usual face-saving maintenance grants . As early as

1926 the Vaad Leumi was complaining that though Jews pay

DUAL OBLIGATION TO TWO PEOPLES 3 11

taxes for the maintenance of national institutions, "the entire

burden of the education of the Jewish children is laid on the

shoulders of the Jews themselves ." 10 In the year 1933, which

may be taken as an example, the Jewish educational budget was

£250,000 . The Government's grant was the ludicrous sum of

£23,626. The balance of the money had to be provided by

opulent Americans, and by the many poor European Jews who

were cajoled into donating their meager possessions to the various

Zionist funds. The Administration nevertheless does not

hesitate to impose its will on the Jewish-supported system even

in small matters . An instance, more than amusing under the

circumstances, occurred in February 1933, when it informed the

Vaad Leumi that it considered the salaries paid to Jewish teachers

excessive and demanded an immediate reduction .

These marauding operations show even more cruelly in the

handling of the Kadoorie legacy . Kadoorie was a Baghdad Jew

who died in China, leaving a million dollars to the Government

of Palestine for the establishment of an agricultural school . He

died in the serene belief that a Jewish State was in the process of

erection. Says Wedgwood, describing what ensued : "The bequest

was, of course, made for Jewish education ; but it was divided,

and half was spent on building an Arab school and the

other half has not yet been spent at all . And when the Arab

school was opened they avoided even mentioning the Baghdadi

Jew's bequest." The Jewish school was built some years later,

after the Government had been prompted into action by the

glare of publicity this remarkable arrangement elicited . In accommodation

and size it was, as may be imagined, vastly inferior

to the Arab institution .

HEALTH AND SANITATION

The attitude toward public health is substantially that man

must not presume to interfere with the inscrutable will of Allah .

Only inadequate attention has been given to the needs of the

Arabs, and none at all to those of the Jews . Determined to build

their land so that civilized human beings could live in it, the

312

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

Zionists have diverted tremendous sums, desperately needed for

other purposes, to sanitation work, meeting as they went along

not the gratitude of officialdom but its undisguised resentment .

Though it bars the municipal corporations from acting on their

own, the Government has not made the slightest effort to develop

adequate sewage systems in the cities . There is no serious

milk and dairy inspection ; and nothing but the sketchiest

provisions for controlling epidemics or isolating contagious disease.

No provision is made for tubercular patients and little

more for the insane. The single small Government hospital for

mental diseases is reserved for Arabs . Broadhurst mentions that

lunatics "wandered loose about the streets, ignored by the passers-

by . If they frightened people, or attacked them, the nearest

policeman was called" 11 and the lunatic was jailed in great cells

containing thirty or more, together with illegal immigrants, and

criminals of all descriptions . Even lepers are not segregated .

Says Duff, "I can show you a half dozen any day in the Suq"

(the general market place) .12

We find the Jewish Agency remonstrating with the Government

in 193o because it was "steadily reducing its expenditures

for health" despite the great growth in population and revenue.

13 Again, in 1936 the Hadassah Report bitterly informed

the Peel Commission that appropriations for public health,

meager as they were, had declined materially since 1922.

Taking the initiative, the Jews have done a magnificent job .

"Next to the great sanitation work carried out in Panama by

American genius," wrote Senator Copeland, "there has been no

greater achievement in the field of public health anywhere in

the world than the sanitation program put into effect in Palestine

by American Jews ." 14 In 1927 the Zionist medical budget

was already double that of the Government for the entire country.

For years expenditures of the Hadassah institutions alone

exceeded those of the Health Department . 15 Hadassah keeps a

whole system of hospitals, clinics and infant-welfare stations,

open to Arabs as well as Jews. Unpublicized, still other voluntary

bodies play a brave part in this terrible struggle to redeem

the National Home from the morbid infirmities of the Near East .

DUAL OBLIGATION TO TWO PEOPLES 313

As a result of their effort, infant mortality in Tel Aviv fell to

74.75 per thousand, compared with 209 per thousand in neighboring

Jaffa and 242 per thousand in Gaza. For all this, officialdom

has artfully usurped credit, though in his 1935 report the

High Commissioner is not ashamed to list the munificent sum of

£ 1038 as the Government's grant for infant welfare work .

Out of the anemic amounts which constitute the country's

health budget, a scarce ten percent has been spent on Jews .

The Government's preventive medical services are carried on

exclusively for Arabs . All hospitals it has built or supports are

in Arab centers. In Jerusalem itself, where Arabs are far in the

minority, less than five percent of the in-patients treated in Central

Government Hospital were Jews . These are generally refused

admittance and told to go to the Jewish hospitals . The

grimmest efforts of the Vaad Leumi finally succeeded during

1935-36 in securing grants for Jewish medical services totaling

the ridiculous sum of C 17,703 . At the same time the Government

contributes lavishly to hospitalization in Transjordan, as in

February 1938 when it announced a gift of C56,ooo to the projected

hospital at Amman.

The matter of national health is one of the innumerable crises

with which the Yishub is faced. Despite the great achievements

of voluntary health work, unsettling world conditions have diminished

the funds once so willingly donated by Diaspora Jewry.

As these shrink, the old perils revive in proportion . Such enterprises

as the draining of Esdraelon's great swamps rid Palestine

of the major part of its dysentery and malaria ; but similar work

cannot be continued for want of money . Malaria has consequently

assumed epidemic proportions in parts of the country,

and dysentery is considered such an acute danger that housewives

use permanganate of potash on all uncooked fruits and

vegetables as a precaution .

Even in sickness and death the malice of officialdom pursues

the belabored Jews . Jerusalem Hadassah Hospital, largest health

institution in the city, is charged for water at the same exorbitant

rate as if it were an ordinary industrial undertaking, the Administration

admittedly taking a hundred percent profit ; while Arab

314

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

hospitals, built and subsidized by the Government itself, do not

pay for water at all . A sorrier state of affairs was recited in

Commons on July 11, 1935 by Captain Strickland, referring to

the condition of Municipal Hospital in Tel Aviv. The only institution

serving the two hundred and fifty thousand Jewish inhabitants

of this district, it had barely one-fifth of the accommodations

normally demanded in civilized communities . With

a long list of patients on the waiting list, it was so overcrowded

that beds had to be put in the corridors . Facing the Colonial

Secretary, Captain Strickland asked the astonishing question,

"Has the Government yet decided to allow the Municipal Authorities

o f Tel Aviv to provide necessary additional hospital accommodations?"

The reply of the King's Officer was the usual skillful evasion -

"It would be very unwise for me to forward ex parte statements

to the High Commissioner, who as the House knows, gives most

careful consideration to these matters ." Here we have something

approaching the ultimate in human enormity : though the

Government's Department of Health contributed almost nothing

to the support of Jewish hospitals, the Municipality of Tel Aviv

is forbidden to provide improved hospitalization even at its own

expense.

In matters of health, too, the British relentlessly squeeze this

little country for profits. When the Municipality of Haifa

came to an arrangement to buy its sewage pipes from a reliable

Tel Aviv factory in July 1931, the Government stepped in and

squashed the agreement, demanding that it purchase them in

England instead . As a result of this kind of exploitation it was

shown in 1935 that over seventy percent of the pipes in Jerusalem's

newly laid water system were so defective that they all

had to be torn up again. After a decade of mysterious engineering,

Jerusalem is still so strictly rationed on water that a bath is a

rare luxury and its people are often reduced to cleaning their

teeth with soda water.'° It has been reliably estimated that the

entire reserve supply would not last three weeks in emergency

and that most of it is totally unfit for drinking purposes .17

A perverse pleasure seems to be taken in keeping all abominaDUAL

OBLIGATION TO TWO PEOPLES 315

tions intact. One of these is an open sewer which runs from

North Jerusalem down the whole valley, poisoning the air with

a nauseating stink . This plague-spot has been in existence for

at least fourteen years . Despite protests, not the faintest attempt

has ever been made to cover it. However, on occasion the Administration

can take an aggressive interest in `sanitary' measures .

One of these, announced in July 1930, was a drainage project for

Jerusalem - unaccountably routed so that it cut directly through

the Sephardic cemetery, crossing the last resting place of Shimon

Ha'Zadid, whom orthodox Jews regard as a saint .18

LAWS, BENEFITS AND PUBLIC SERVICES

There are more useless officials quartered on the back of this

unfortunate country than can be found in any other administrated

area on earth . Officials crawl over the land like flies.

In 1925, when they were not nearly so numerous, an Arab Congress

did not hesitate to declare that "the Turkish regime administered

Palestine with no more than one-eighth of the present

Administration and, from several points, more effectively

and satisfactorily ." 19 Some of these men are capable and efficient

. Most are thoroughly unfitted by both experience and

psychology for their posts. With few exceptions all of them

avoid work as much as is decently possible .20 In their train is

an assisting horde of native politicos who need no introduction

to the somnambulant venality of the East .

It is a normal experience to go to one of the Government

offices day after day seeking some small service, such as having

the water turned on in a newly leased apartment, only to be told

that the only person who can attend to your matter, is `out .'

To get anything done at all, it is the common practice to hand

one of the native politicos an inducing sum on the side, which

invariably helps. Duff's admirable book Galilee Galloper, barred

in Palestine, gives a relentless description of the greed and corruption

of these men . Their hand is everlastingly out, and

nothing can be moved without the passing of a proper bribe .

Despite its hostility to Marxism, the Government of Palestine

316

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

has put into effect a practical socialism of its own . It owns railroads,

telephones and other public utilities, and keeps a close

control over every kind of major enterprise . The attitude was

explained in a sentence by Mr. Johnson, the Palestine Treasurer,

when he was asked directly why it was so difficult for Jews to

obtain any concessions . Johnson replied tersely : "What do

you s'pose we're 'ere for !" Meaning that if any of the proposed

concessions were any good, `they' would operate them for

themselves with the public moneys, creating more jobs for

worthy Englishmen out of work . This procedure is, however,

held in check by lack of experience and the enervating climate .

Ordinarily things touched by officialdom wither - or proceed

at a snail's pace .

Very little that is lucrative escapes their attention . Jewish

firms rendering a public service sooner or later find Englishmen

in control of their businesses ; or their charters are canceled outright.

The Jewish Hasolel Company, first to generate electricity

in Jerusalem, may be given as a case in point . Its rights

to operate were challenged and the concession was finally taken

away from this firm by a simple maneuver. An obscure Greek

named Mavromatis with an ancient `charter' from the Sultan,

was dug up and his claims were shrewdly advanced at the Hague

Tribunal. Mavromatis, whose support hinged on an undercover

agreement to sell to British interests, got the concession ;

and in September 1928 the powerful London Power Security

Company 21 owned the business so bravely started by the little

Hasolel Corporation . Scarcely half a year later, a boycott was

being threatened against the new owner for its policy in refusing

to employ Jews .

All public utilities seem to operate on the theory that in one

way or another life must be made miserable for the Jews . The

phone service is a case in point . Jews are the great majority of

all subscribers . According to Hoofien's estimate, they are more

than seventy percent of the subscribers even in Arab Jaffa . In

a rapidly industrializing country, telephone communications are

an urgent necessity . Nevertheless, applicants for new phones

were informed that these could not be installed under three

DUAL OBLIGATION TO TWO PEOPLES 317

years' notice . The expressed reason for this delay was that the

Government did not like the existing telephone building and,

apparently, had been spending all these years trying to decide

on an acceptable location for a new one . The ownership of a

phone in Palestine is now worth a substantial sum of money,

often changing hands like a seat on the stock exchange .

Though Tel Aviv is the commercial center of the country,

trunk calls to and from that city have to pass through the Jaffa

Exchange. If a subscriber wants to put in a call during business

hours from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem or Haifa, it will take him

from two to three hours to get through .22 Even this is sometimes

an improvement over the local service . Jerusalem's main

post office has two call-boxes, one for local and one for trunk

purposes . "If the local box is occupied," says an English political

writer, "the wise man calls a friend in Haifa, delivers a

message, which he asks to be put through to the required number

in Jerusalem, and steps out of the trunk-box elated over the

comparative perfection of the long distance service, while his

neighbor in the local box is still trying to extricate himself from

wrong numbers." 23

All communications of any kind are in the hands of the Government.

Wires must be brought to the Central Post Office in

person and must be called for in the same way . The Government

fixes the charge, no matter which cable or wireless company

is to handle the message . The press rate for sending a

cable from Jerusalem to London is 21 mils a word, and it takes

an average of two hours in transit . From Cairo, Egypt, where

the distance to London is almost the same, the rate is i x mils

per word, and the time in transit is a half-hour .

All but a negligible proportion of telegrams are forwarded by

Jews. The revenue of this Department in an ordinary year

amounts to around C 300,000, against an average expenditure of

£ 198,000 .

Until very recently, messages were accepted only in English

and Arabic . A stream of violent protests from Jewish telegraph

users bombarded Geneva in protest . Replying to the League's

question the Government asserted that its lawyers had made a

318

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

careful search of the Mandate and were unable to find any specific

provision for the sending o f telegraphic messages in Hebrew.

24 After a protracted struggle, this farce was ended when

the Permanent Mandates Commission ordered that the discrimination

cease . The Government then installed Hebrew telegraphy

in only a few cities, so that its use became, in effect, impossible.

The Mandate for Palestine guarantees the rights of the Hebrew

language, though these are constantly infringed in State

institutions and in public life . Throughout the Government

Service an accurate knowledge of Arabic is demanded, but no

understanding of Hebrew is expected from either Arab or Englishman.

Commander Oliver Locker-Lampson brought out on

December 3, 1937 that only two percent of the Senior Officers

in Palestine had even a passing knowledge of Hebrew . Even

in Jerusalem itself, regulations were issued by the Commandant

of Police requiring a working knowledge of English and Arabic

of all officers and constables in order to be eligible for promotion.

No mention of Hebrew was made at all . This discrimination

against Jews in a Jewish city received such worldwide

publicity that a knowledge of Hebrew was hastily included

; but in practice the original force and purpose of the

regulation remained intact.

Identical strictures operate against the showing of the Jewish

flag . Its public use is treated as a virtual encroachment on public

morals. This was demonstrated convincingly during the

celebration of the Maimonides Octocentenary in April 1935.25

Spain, the great philosopher's birthplace, declared the occasion

a public holiday . Other powers, including the Vatican, joined

in honoring his memory. In Palestine the thousands of Jewish

pilgrims to his tomb were greeted by police with batons, who

busied themselves, among other activities, in tearing down all

Jewish flags they could find .

The present flag of the National Home is the Union Jack

with the word `Palestine' inscribed in a small circle in the lower

right hand corner. Its adoption was precipitated late in 1 934,

when a Japanese sea captain gave the Zionists their cue (which

DUAL OBLIGATION TO TWO PEOPLES 319

with customary ineptness they ignored) by refusing to fly British

colors when in Palestine port, maintaining that the National

Home was an independent country under League Mandate .

Quite in keeping is the Government Broadcasting Service,

launched with much fanfare at the beginning of 1936. After

operating but a few days, officials forced the Hebrew speakers

to eliminate the name 5K-w4 Y-18 (Eretz Yisroel) when referring

to Palestine, and to substitute the phrase's initials, ,-t; (Aleph

Yud), a childish piece of malice which is even carried over to the

country's postage stamps .

Several typical incidents will show the uses this public service

is being put to . During the last week of September 1936, a

famous Arabic legend was being retold . The story revolves

around the classic loyalty of the Jewish poet-hero, Ishmuel (Samuel)

Adaya HaCohen, who had protected a valuable shield entrusted

to him by the Arab hero Alkis, even when his little son

was being tortured to death to force him to yield . To this day

HaCohen remains so traditional a symbol of absolute honesty that

an Arab when speaking of outstanding loyalty and trust will

say, "faithful as Ishmuel." As told over the Government broadcasting

station by the announcer, a public official, the explanation

was added that "Samuel behaved as he did from love of wealth,

as the shield that Alkis had left was a pledge for money Samuel

had loaned him." Thus the speaker demonstrated that so great

is the avarice of the crafty Jew that he would even sacrifice his own

child to it . On another occasion, in February 1937, a visiting

English M .P. named McGovern had his scheduled talk over the

Palestine Broadcasting Service cavalierly canceled at the last moment.

The acknowledged reason was that McGovern had made

the mistake of lauding Jewish accomplishments in a newspaper

interview the day before .

Radios practically come within the contraband class . The

tourist is astounded to discover that he must make a special journey

to Jerusalem and cut his way through a swathing of red

tape to get his radio out of quarantine, where it is impounded on

sight. Though Jews require a special permit even to possess one,

hundreds of sets have been supplied without cost by the Gov320

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

ernment to Arab villages so that they might listen to the propaganda

sent out from London and Jerusalem . (The English have

been lately horrified to find that the Arabs have been tuning in

instead on the anti-English incitement broadcast from Italian

Bari.)

Even the priceless antiquities of the Holy Land are not sacred

to the ruling caste and may be exported unhindered ; though

such `backward' nations as Honduras prohibit similar ravishment

as an offense against the nation . Much connivance goes on to

enrich individual pocketbooks . In one representative instance,

certain of these priceless objects were disposed of to a `speculator'

for £Soo, who promptly `resold' them to a Chicago museum

for C2ooo, a price in itself far below their real value .26

In other respects the regulation of life is minute and drastic .

The most revolutionary enactments decorate the statute books,

often promulgated without notice or publicity . One of these

empowers a police officer to stop a touring car and order the

driver to do such a thing as transport a live cow to the municipal

slaughter house .27 Another entitles the Authorities to shut off

the water supply at any Jerusalem address where a resident has

contravened any municipal law . Still another of these edicts

empowers the Government to revoke the citizenship of anyone

whose utterances might be displeasing to it, without explanation

and without recourse. Here one is reminded of the story of

the Berlin Jew, Horowitz, who wrote to a friend in America

saying that everything was fine with him under the Hitler Government,

putting at the end of his letter the following P.S. :

"Abe Cohen, who complained in a letter to his brother that

things were not so well here, was shot yesterday ." No one

needs to explain to the Government of Palestine what it means

for a Jew to be without a country and without a passport in the

present world .

'NO JEWS NEED APPLY'

Had the Government seriously wished to pursue the policy

of the Mandate, it would have engaged itself in training Jews

DUAL OBLIGATION TO TWO PEOPLES 321

for its administrative and executive departments against the day

when the manifest purposes of that document had been fulfilled .

Simple logic would have recommended the appointment to high

position of only those Arabs who could be relied on to carry

out the policy to which the Mandatory was pledged . But the

official cabal had quite other ideas . Hence we discover, among

the other `benefits' conferred on Jews in Palestine, their derogation

to a sub-human species who at all costs must be kept out of

the Government itself.

As in Nazi Germany, virtually the only Jews who can get

Government positions are the old soldiers - and their lives are

made so miserable that they prefer anything else if they can get

it. Though European Zionists proclaimed their happy relationship

with Britain, local Jewry suffered from no such illusion .

The Vaad Leuini Memorandum to the League of June 15, 1931,

referring to the exclusion of Jewish workers on all governmental

projects, declared pointblank that "this exclusion, which is in

effect a boycott, provides additional evidence of a Government

policy calculated to ignore the interests of the Jewish community

in all its needs . . ."

When Samuel came after the 1920 pogrom which almost lost

the Mandate for England, a number of high-ranking Jewish officials

had been appointed with him as evidence of London's good

faith . The most important of these was Norman Bentwich, the

Attorney-General. As was true of Samuel, Bentwich leaned

over backward so far that he favored the Arabs like the other

officials . But this did not save him and he was retired by `comrade'

Passfield because he was a Jew, eight years before his

pensionable age.28

The resignation in 1932 of A. M. Hyamson, Director of the

Department of Immigration, eliminated the last Jew who served

as a department head in Palestine. Hyamson had managed

to hold on to his job by outdoing even the English in severity

to Jews. This did not save him either. The Administration

simply did not want anyone remotely suspected of being a Jew

in a position of authority . The Jews, who had come to detest

this man, were also glad to see him leave . Said the Hebrew press

322

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

politely at the time : "Mr. Hyamson's departure from Palestine

will not be viewed with regret ." 29

British policy has turned Palestine into a paradise for petty

Arab officials, who have been encouraged into bold disloyalty to

the very Mandate which feeds them . To understand all the

implications contained in this shoddy situation, the character and

training of the average Arab must be borne in mind . Like the

Igorrote of Luzon, he is still in the tribal stage of development .

He still lives in the atmosphere of the Ghazzu, the night raid .

Lawrence, and everyone else who has had any experience with

him, was quick to grasp his hopeless inadequacy for any kind of

modern organization. In all of Palestine but 73,000 Moslems

are able to read and write . To these may be added 43,000

Christians, making z i 6,ooo non-Jews who can sign their own

names.

Against this miserable showing, almost one hundred percent

of the Jews in Palestine are literate . They not only possess a

heavy majority of the trained and educated population but have

in their midst some of the greatest minds in the world . Included

in their ranks is a vast amount of ability that has fled from

oppression, a concentration of so many scholars, engineers, economists,

thinkers and distinguished figures generally, that they

probably represent the highest group level of culture and ability

in existence. Here was apparently the perfect source to draw

on, in this land inexperienced in self-rule, for the purposes of

efficient government .

Actually, we find bias against these people so great that they

are allowed to serve only where their appointment could hardly

be prevented - as in the case of translators, or in the municipal

Jewish institutions . The Government's Works and Plans Department

provides an excellent illustration . Some of the ablest

engineers in the world now live permanently in Palestine but are

studiously ignored. Whenever competent engineers or architects

are needed, advertisements for the purpose are inserted

solely in the London papers . That `Aryans only' need apply,

goes without saying .

In the whole Government service, Jews, who constitute one

DUAL OBLIGATION TO TWO PEOPLES 323

third of the population and contribute the bulk of the State's

revenues, hold less than 5% of the public jobs. Even this fraction

is in the nature of a sop, thrown irritably to keep them

quiet as one does a bone to a yelping dog . A bird's-eye view of

these complaints tells a vivid story . A wild cry from the Jewish

Agency reveals that the percentage of Jewish labor employed

on public enterprises was i %2 % in 1925, as compared with 6%

in 1922 .30 In the five-year period ending March 31, 1927, the

average was less than 3% . The Agency avers that in Haifa

where Jews were half the population, and at Jaffa where their

numbers were considerable, extensive public works programs

were undertaken without employing a single Jewish workman

or clerk . It declares that less than q.% of those employed on

public works in Jerusalem are Jews.

As early as 1926, various departments of the Government had

already been made Judenrein (free of Jews) . A list of official appointments

published October 11 of that year, shows the railroads,

post office and police departments to be practically without

Jews, though a few were appointed in ensuing years to keep

a decent face . No Jews at all were named to the strategic Land

Courts or to the Frontier Force . In 1930 a Customs Department

investigation disclosed that in the head Government office,

of thirty-five officials, one was Jewish . In the Haifa office, of

thirty-two officials, there were two Jews . Since these offices

were all in strong Jewish areas, it does not require saying that

in the Arab sectors there were no Jews at all .

By 1935 the condition was hardly improved . In April of

that year the Hebrew press was complaining that Jewish officials

in Government offices averaged less than one-half of one percent.

Not a single Jew was employed in the vast Haifa Harbor

extension and improvement works . There were only ten

in the Government works in Jerusalem, including the Printing

Press, Post Office and Police School, and only five on Jerusalem

municipality enterprises. Thousands of illegal Arab newcomers

were being used on these projects, but no Jews were wanted .

Evidence presented to the Peel Commission in 1937, proved

that though they contribute directly sixty-five percent of the

324

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

railway revenue, out of the 4300 employees in the Government

railway system only 365 were Jews. The annual budget of

£ 130,000 for road maintenance and public works was spent almost

in its entirety with Arabs .

Though Jews are responsible for seventy percent of customs

receipts, they are virtually excluded from labor in the ports . At

Jaffa the porters are all in direct Government employ . Lighter

men and stevedores must be licensed by the Authorities, who

flatly refused to issue licenses to Jews. At Haifa a considerable

proportion of the porters work for private firms, which hire Jews .

Of the three thousand laborers regularly working in the two

ports, at the beginning of 1936 only three hundred were Jews,

all of whom were in the employ of Jewish importers .31

Where a proportion of Jews is used the difference in treatment

is impressive. Even the Peel Commission was compelled

to remark that Jewish scavengers in Jerusalem were not supplied

with winter clothes as Arab scavengers had been .32

Partisanship of the most indefensible kind is always in evidence.

Tel Aviv, with one hundred and fifty thousand people,

is allowed only twenty-six postmen, who work twelve hours a

day for £5 a month . Side by side with these Jewish mailcarriers

are imported Englishmen who are paid four or five times

this amount. The Executive Committee of the Palestine Arab

Congress comments that "salaries of Government servants are a

matter of wonder and ridicule . . . A customs cashier in Jerusalem

station, for instance, gets £E25 per mensem.33 He is

transferred and his successor is given only £E1 z, though he is

held equally responsible . A clerk in a department gets more

sometimes than his chief who is even responsible for his own

work ; as for example is the case in the Werko Department of

Jerusalem where the director of that section gets £E16 and one

of his clerks gets £E22, though the former is his senior in age

and service, and though other clerks who carry on the same

work get between £ E 1 o and 15 ." 34

Sometimes official bias goes to such lengths that it backs up

against itself. An amusing instance concerned a contract for a

£6o,ooo British military camp near the Jewish settlement of

DUAL OBLIGATION TO TWO PEOPLES 325

Nathania, assigned to a firm in Egypt . Unable to handle it, they

promptly sublet the job at a profit to Jewish contractors in

Palestine.

Still others took their cue from the Government and refused

to employ Jews . One of them was the already mentioned Jerusalem

Electric Company . Another was the important Shell Oil

group, beneficiary of the tax-free Iraq Oil Company agreement .

A particularly flagrant case concerned the famous King David

Hotel, one of the largest enterprises in the country and a favorite

rendezvous of Government officials . On September 23,

1 934 it became entirely Judenrein, the last remnant of a oncelarge

Jewish staff having been dismissed to be replaced by imported

foreign labor. Bellowed the manager : "We want no

Jews in this hotel . We shall keep it clean ." 35

AN ANGLO-SAXON SYSTEM OF JURISPRUDENCE

The average Englishman believes religiously in the incorruptible

quality of "British Justice." He will tell you that the Englishman

takes his whole system of equity with him wherever he

goes, and that it is a great, moral, cleansing influence in the lives

of the backward peoples who inhabit the far reaches of the Empire.

But whatever it may be elsewhere, the British system of

jurisprudence in the Holy Land has little to recommend it .

The men sent down from London to rule this martyred country

proceeded at once to put into effect a number of kinds of

justice for a number of kinds of people . Lowest in the categories

of caste by which equity was meted out were the Jews .

The Arabs followed, a few notches ahead in favoritism . Perched

on top of the heap were the English, who were practically a law

unto themselves .

Widespread corruption degrades every department of the

Judiciary . Graft, baksheesh and rake-off are constantly in the

background as in the worst days of the Roman yoke . Everything

connected with either the police or the courts is for sale .

Even the black-list of persons to be kept under particular police

surveillance at the time of the 1929 outbreak (a document so

326

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

confidential that it was even kept secret from the Parliamentary

Commissions sent down later to investigate), appeared in Photostat,

with admitted accuracy, in the columns of the New York

Vorwdrts and in other papers throughout the world . Thoroughly

disgusted, Detective Chief Broadhurst came to the conclusion

"that to put anything on paper at all was simply `to blow

the whole gaff .' 11 36 He candidly concedes that it would be

impossible to operate a jury system in Palestine . Bribery and

corruption infest all processes of law to such a degree that to introduce

it would mean a complete end to even the bare pretense

of legal justice .37

The great bulk of appointments to the Magistracy has been

drawn from clerks and interpreters, some of them semi-literates .

The Government benevolently allows these incompetents ten

years to pass an examination, meanwhile authorizing them to

serve in a judicial capacity . "There was only one man on the

High Court Bench who had any real conception of criminal

law," states Broadhurst laconically, "and he was in a district

where his knowledge was only of use locally ." 38

To the outsider it is incredible that Tel Aviv has no Court .

All matters involving more than J 15o have to be heard in Jaffa .

A court sits in such Arab villages as Jenin, Tulkarm and Acre,

but the largest city in the country has no court . And if you

speak anything but Arabic to the notary of clerks in the Jaffa

District Court, you will be stared at as if you were some strange

animal . The record of proceedings in almost all courts is kept

in Arabic. Basic law is still the old reactionary Ottoman code,

long ago discarded as obsolete in Turkey itself .

The prosecution of crime is almost wholly in Arab hands .

The Government Advocate is an Arab . His assistant at headquarters

is an Arab . With the exception of one Jew, who does

only office work, all the junior Government Advocates are

Arabs.39

The Criminal Investigation Department is so desultory in its

service that it can hardly be said to exist in practice. Here, too,

official perjury is an expected occurrence and influence and

baksheesh are part of the formula of justice. It is notorious

DUAL OBLIGATION TO TWO PEOPLES 327

that the police `investigators' who compose the original `report'

before cases come to the examining magistrate, will prepare these

documents in any way that is wanted if a proper payment is

made. As for the courts, "it was possible," says Broadhurst, "to

obtain a habeas corpus for a few piastres in order to shortcircuit

proceedings ." 40 The style of British officialdom itself

can be convincingly grasped in the trial of a Georgian Jew

named Turshoili, for arson, in November 1932 . Declared States

Attorney Elliot for the Government, before the highest tribunal

in Palestine : "Jews are necessarily arsonists ."

The police are merciless to prisoners who meet their displeasure.

Their tone may be judged from the reappointment to high

position in the Police Force of Kheir El Din Effendi Besesso after

he had been found guilty by the High Court, on August 9, 1928,

of kidnaping a witness for the defense on the eve of a criminal

trial. Says Duff who should know : "Torquemada, or the Court

of Star Chamber can have had little fresh to impart to your

Palestine policeman determined to extract a confession ." The

arrest of two Jewish children, Simon Mizrachi, aged 9, and

Haham Jacob, aged 10, on March 7, 1931, provides a ghastly example.

Without their parents having been informed of the

offense, the `criminals,' charged with throwing stones at an

Arab's house, were flogged so unmercifully that one was reported

near death .41 The brutal medieval custom of whipping

is actively followed in the jails, a matter which received some

airing in Commons in June 1928, where the Colonial Secretary

learnedly backed this cruel usage with the opinion that "flogging

was a proper punishment ."

Not even the concentration camps of Germany can surpass

in pure horror prison life in Palestine . The jail at Acre is a

good example. It is the principal prison of Palestine, a massive,

forbidding structure inherited from the Turks . Its foul dungeons,

in which light and air rarely enter, are a relic of ages past .

The prison food is supplied by a concessionaire, the lowest

bidder receiving the concession . It is of the poorest kind and

consists of a small amount of rice, rough bread and a handful of

green olives . A great many of the prisoners are growing boys

328

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

in their teens (especially those held as illegal immigrants), and

very often remain crippled for life after a year or two of this

diet. "General weakness, stoppage of growth, ulcerated stomach,

anemia and chronic dysentery are prevalent among the

younger Acre prisoners," writes Malkah Raymist .42 There is

no distinction made between petty offenders, illegal immigrants,

tourists who overstay their leave, murderers, prostitutes or the

insane ; all of whom are crowded into the same filthy cells, where

at times it is almost impossible to breathe . The prisoners have

no beds and must sleep directly on the earth floor . Until early

in 1938 they were not even entitled to blankets .

There is no adequate medical service and no dental service at

all. All of the prisoners (including those awaiting trial) are put

on hard labor and regularly kicked and beaten if they are unable

to do the heavy work demanded of them . At the slightest

sign of disobedience they are severely thrashed or thrown into

a tiny windowless cell called the 'sensane,' a foul cubicle where

a man can neither lie nor stand, but only crouch . Sanitary

conditions are nil and the stench is described as unimaginable.

Clothes are seldom issued and often prisoners have to go about

in rags. Cigarettes are not allowed . Inmates may write or receive

letters only once a month, so that they are virtually cut off

from the world .

Under these terrible conditions unfortunates of all kinds may

be kept for years awaiting trial, and must then serve their sentences

in addition.

Suicide and attempted suicide are a common occurrence, particularly

among the illegal immigrants held here . Often the

prisoners collapse in fainting spells or develop fits of wild hysteria,

screaming, tearing their hair and knocking their heads

against the stone walls. Those who have been kept here for

any considerable period invariably emerge physical wrecks.

Palestine is the only country where the old law of imprisonment

for debt still holds . Another novelty of Palestine court

procedure permits witnesses to give testimony behind a screen

so that the accused cannot see them .43 An even more startling

introduction is contained in the Laws of Evidence (AmendDUAL

OBLIGATION TO TWO PEOPLES 329

ments) Ordinance, introduced in 1936, which "abolishes the

necessity for corroboration in criminal cases generally." 44

Fully as abhorrent to any civilized mind is the practice of

levying collective fines on whole villages for the misdeeds of

a single culprit ; or still more horrible, of blowing up entire

blocks of houses with dynamite on suspicion that a yet-untried

law-breaker made his home in one o f them .

What was taking place under good British Government may

be aptly judged from the fact that in an ordinary year there

were three hundred and sixty reported murders in Palestine, with

only eight offenders hanged . Hundreds of additional homicides

were not reported at all, "while highway robberies and cattle

thefts were higher even than they had been in the laxest years

of the Ottoman regime." 45

Duff gives a graphic account of the officially condoned reign

of terror against the Jews in the sector where he was ruling

police officer. "It was a most trying situation for me," he writes .

"I dare not do much against the Arabs, even though I knew they

were guilty, as Jerusalem frowned on anything that would annoy

the `Nationalists,' as these self-seeking, cynical effendis

called themselves ." In his district a hurricane of outrages battered

the Jewish settlers, ranging from wanton destruction of

trees and animals, to murder and assault - yet, he writes, "in no

single instance was I able, through the restrictions placed upon

me, to bring the offenders to trial, though I knew who the guilty

persons were, and they knew I did ." 46 It was a contemplation

of this sort of thing which caused Wedgwood to cry out in

Commons that "the Government at the present time is and-

Semitic and is a disgrace to England ."

It appears to be a principle of common equity here that thieves

and vandals may not be injured when they are caught redhanded

at their work. Hundreds of Jewish watchmen have

been imprisoned for doing bodily harm to Arabs who came to

steal or commit other depredations . A simple example is the

case of an 18-year-old watchman named Solomon Jacobson who

was badly injured during a raid by a gang of Arab thugs organized

for purposes of theft . In an effort to discharge his duty

330

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

and defend his life he mortally wounded one of the invaders .

For this `crime' he was sentenced on May 2, 1935 to seven and

one half years at hard labor . Another typical case occurred February

24, 1 933, when a group of thirty Bedouins attacked a

small Jewish colony, killing an ex-Legionnaire and wounding

several others . Police who stood watching a short distance

away did not attempt to interfere ; but four of the raiders were

captured by members of the colony. At the Nablus Court, a

few months later, the Bedouins were acquitted for `lack of evidence,'

an item which appears with tiresome repetition on Palestine

court records .

The amazing legal principle making these decisions possible

is indicated in the case of Naftali Rubenstein, a watchman of the

Bath Galim settlement, who was sentenced to prison at Haifa

for "attempted murder" (the wounding of an Arab) . The judge,

in pronouncing his verdict, stated that it was intentionally light

because "there were extenuating circumstances" in that the Jews

of Bath Galim were being assaulted by Arabs at the time ! 47

An even more revolutionary precedent is written in the case

of Achmed Said, an Arab burglar who had killed a watchman

of the Jewish colony at Petach Tikvah . The Jerusalem Court

sentenced the man to six months, justifying this nominal punishment

on the score that "the crime had been unpremeditated," in

that the thief had killed the watchman only to escape being

caught .4S However, when an Englishman is killed, also "without

premeditation," the death penalty is unhesitatingly invoked .

This double application of the law is nowhere better shown than

in the trial of one Sadik Altamini, indicted for inciting a Hebron

crowd with the cry : "Kill Police Inspector Cafferatta and the

Jews !" For inciting to kill Cafferatta, the man was sentenced

to four years at hard labor . At the same time, the second charge,

that of inciting to kill Jews, was dropped "for lack of evidence

!" 4s

Offenses against womanhood are regarded almost casually .

"Young girls no longer may venture forth safely alone on the

streets," writes the correspondent for the National Catholic WelDUAL

OBLIGATION TO TWO PEOPLES 33 1

fare Council.80 The Government's attitude speaks for itself in

the dismissal of a Jewish sub-inspector of police named Ben-

Yehuda for "communicating to the press and some friends"

the fact that an American girl had been violated on the streets

of Jerusalem.51 Cases of unpunished criminal assault reached

such proportions that the American Consul General in Jerusalem

was forced to make strong representations on behalf of the

United States Government.52 As if by magic, three assailants

of an American girl were promptly apprehended and sentenced

to fifteen years at hard labor - the heaviest and practically the

only punishment imposed for such crimes up to that time .

In addition to the deluge of rape cases against women were

many degenerate attacks on boys and men . The Palestine penal

law does not prohibit homosexuality and its practice involves

little social stigma among Moslems.

The official attitude is brought home in revolting detail in the

case of a Jewish boy and girl named Stahl and Zohar who disappeared

in the Winter of 1931 while out for a stroll . A series

of earlier outrages had excited the Jewish community to a fever

pitch of feeling ; and since the Authorities would do nothing,

private investigators were hired and a big reward posted. This

initiative brought accusing witnesses from Bedouin villages near

Herzlia, who led investigators to a shallow grave where the

bodies of the unlucky youngsters were found . The boy had

been stabbed to death defending his companion . The girl, according

to witnesses, had been violated by five Bedouins .

Though the culprits were thus openly named, the police made

no effort to arrest them . Here a new factor entered. The

murdered pair were nationals of Germany and Poland and their

consulates insisted on at least a show of justice . Under these

representations, the Government took the five accused into custody,

where three were promptly discharged and the other two

held on the familiar charge of "unpremeditated murder" - the

fact that the killing had been incidental to an attempt at rape

apparently being considered a mitigating circumstance. To

make the police less eager for private rewards in future, an officer

337

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

named Kabra was given three years for having lodged "false

information" against the Arabs who had been released, though

they had been identified by a score of people of their own tribe .

Now followed galling, interminable delay . Finally, after

angry representations from the Polish and German Consuls, the

Bedouins were committed to trial . Though the case against each

of them was identical, only one was found guilty and he was

sentenced to fifteen years. The same Court which made this

decision sentenced an Arab named Mustafa Jeebawi to death for

the murder of Mrs . Thomas Miller, wife of an English engineer,

while bent on rape .53 Apparently 'unpremeditation' did not apply

when it came down to typical Arab crimes against the families

of British officials.

It has been shown time and again that culprits arrested for

physical attacks on Jews were rescued by the public prosecutors

themselves. Apparently this corrosion reaches into the highest

places, as was clearly demonstrated in the case of an Arab (a suspected

murderer) caught in flagrante delicto with four rifles and

some bombs, early in 1937 . The prosecuting attorney immediately

asked that the case be thrown out of court . Guilelessly,

the presiding magistrate asked why it should not at least be

pressed according to normal regulations on illegal possession of

arms. "I am acting on instructions," snapped back the Government

attorney.54

In addition to the civil and criminal courts are an unending

multiplicity of ecclesiastical tribunals whose jurisdiction is legally

recognized . These perform civil functions ordinarily considered

to be the prerogative of the State alone . The judges who

sit in the Moslem Shavia Courts are considered servants of the

Administration, which pays their salaries - yet the courts themselves

are completely removed from any supervision by the Government's

Legal Department . In the usual contrast, Jewish

courts must pay all their own expenses by a voluntary tax on the

Jewish community. The privileges of the various non-British

Christian communities are intermediate between those of Jews

and Moslems. However, Christians are allowed certain unique,

DUAL OBLIGATION TO TWO PEOPLES 333

overall privileges in compensation . One is the right of monks,

European or native, to serve sentences of imprisonment in the

spiritual seclusion of their own monasteries instead of in the

squalid promiscuity of a Palestine lockup .55

THE WOLF NAMED SHERIFF TO THE LAMBS

One may well pity a people who are placed at the mercy of

an alien police . The Irish, with centuries of wretchedness behind

them, could tell you something about that . Jews who remember

the Kishineff massacres in Russia, when uniformed gendarmes

led the howling hooligans over the barricades, could tell

you more. From their experience in Palestine they could add

terrible pages to that record.

Shocked by the course events have taken in the National

Home, Colonel Patterson grimly referred to it as a "National

Death Trap ." Echoing the same disgust and revulsion, former

Colonial Secretary Amery sarcastically informed his Government

that the Home could not be regarded as a Home "unless

those living there were allowed to play a part in its defense ." 56

Since the disbanding of the Jewish Legion it has been known

that Jews were not wanted in the Palestine military or police

force. Part of the strategy in this high game of dissimulation

was to make it impossible for the Jews to protect themselves, and

then, by encouraging attacks upon them, pose as the faithful,

disquieted custodian who was being badgered from all corners

for his good offices . Thus the Jew is placed in the traditional

role of a craven interloper foisted on an innocent people, who

too cowardly to defend himself, calls on the harassed Briton to

do this for him while he slinks out of harm's way. It is this

interpretation that London has so painstakingly palmed off on

puzzled world opinion.

The modern Jew has proven himself to be a good soldier . In

the World War he won his full share of citations in all countries .

The present French Foreign Legion, so famous for its exploits

in North Africa, has so many Jews in its ranks that whole sec334

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

tions of it can almost be designated as a Hebrew force. The

same is true of the plucky International Brigade of Spain which

held up Franco's advance for so long .

In Palestine the Jews were at all times prepared to defend

themselves and were perfectly capable of doing so, had they

not been rendered impotent by the Government . The Hebrew

in his National Home is far from a milksop . The military of

Palestine would be literally swamped with Jewish recruits, were

they accepted . Before the British came, the Jewish colonies

were considered the safest places in the Near East. Their gendarmerie,

a force of hard-riding, reckless horsemen known as the

Shomrim, had long since won a reputation for everything that

was fearless and gallant . The Turks freely acknowledged it to

be the most skilled police force in the Near East. In those days

Arabs did not attack Jewish colonies, preferring to pay their nightriding

respects to other Arab tribes and villages where they would

get off with a whole skin.

One of the first British acts was to quietly disband this efficient

constabulary, and to organize one of their own from which Jews

were excluded . They were disarmed as if they had been a conquered

enemy, and were not even allowed to possess the small

arms and dirks habitually carried by all Bedouins . A lurid light

is thrown on this circumstance in an anecdote concerning an irreproachable

physician who had been attacked by an Arab assassin.

When the police called to inquire, the doctor informed

them in a sad voice : "I was afraid you had come to arrest me ."

"Arrest you ?" said the officer . "Why ?"

"Well, because it is known that I carry a weapon ."

"A weapon? Where do you have it?"

"Here," answered the doctor, turning around, "it is a knife,

stuck in my back ." 57

The expenditure for military and police in the Holy Land

amounts to more than a third of the total revenues. The immense

constabulary this infers is hardly required for the policing

of Jews, who foot its bills . The trial of Jews for crimes of

violence is practically unknown . Even on such minor charges

as drunkenness, only 52 Jews were among the 724 convicted

DUAL OBLIGATION TO TWO PEOPLES 335

during 1 935 ; and out of 415 sentenced in 1936 for the same

offense, 27 were Jews. Commenting in Commons, Wedgwood

cried : "You say that the money spent on the police force is

spent to protect the Jews . . . If you go to any police station,

you will find that the crimes of violence, and the crimes against

which the police are provided . . . are committed by Arabs and

not by Jews . . . So far as the police and the defense of Palestine

are concerned, if you gave the Jews arms and allowed them

to defend themselves, it would not need so much defense, even

from the excellent British police ." 68

The present percentage of Jews on the police force is just

large enough to be reasonably circumspect . One is surprised to

discover that Tel Aviv itself has few Jewish policemen . The

surface excuse is that Jews do not care for this type of work .

The hidden stratagem which makes this condition possible lies

in the amazing scale of salaries . There are few Jewish men who

are able to live on the £ 7 a month the Administration is willing

to pay a Jewish policeman . At the same time, imported Englishmen

are given £3S a month for precisely the same police

work. Even common labor averages £ 24 a month .

The Frontier Force is no better . When it was formed in

1926 the Authorities decided to exclude Jews from it on principle,

as well as from the Border Patrol Force . All sections of

Palestine Jewry rose in furious protest . The Zionist Executive

itself was passive, Weitzman going so far as to declare that

"from the political standpoint it is unimportant whether in Palestine

a bigger or smaller number of Jewish gendarmes would

be employed ." This pedantic outlook did not deter local Jewish

opinion, which finally forced the Colonial Office to voice the

empty assurance that "Jews would not be excluded by principle."

69 In 1930 the Jewish Agency was again remonstrating

that the Frontier Force "was to all intents and purposes an Arab

Force." 80 In 1937, out of a total of 1039 men there were only

35 Jews.

While Jews were thus practically forbidden to join this national

legion which their tax money keeps, Arabs, who are both

poor and unwilling soldiers, have not responded in sufficient

336

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

numbers. The Arab likes fighting but he detests drilling and

routine. So it became necessary to draw on outlanders from

everywhere. The London Daily Telegraph describes the result,

calling the Force "a veritable Foreign Legion of the Near

East," containing among others, Britons, Austrians, Germans, .

Armenians, Circassians, Chechans, Druses, Hejazis, Kurds, Russians,

Serbians, Sudanese and Syrians.81 According to the Peel

Commission's Report in 1937, the Force contained more Sudanese

than Jews and almost six times as many Circassians alone .

It is thus apparent that almost anyone is welcome in this defense

force except the Jews whose National Home it ostensibly exists.

to protect.

It must be perfectly plain that this hot-blooded gendarmerie

is a poor guarantee of security . The police themselves are described

by Broadhurst as a queer, unruly lot . "Annual meetings

of officers," he writes, "generally resolved themselves into

discussions on the best methods of entering police horses for the

local races . . ." 82

In each of the previous pogroms it was the police themselves

who were found to be the leaders of the mob . What may be

expected of them in the future can easily be guessed from a few

passing incidents. One was the storm raised in Parliament in

June 1934 over the report that police detailed to cover the

Levant Fair in Tel Aviv wore swastikas on their arms . It is no

secret that the recent rebellion itself was started with arms and

ammunition stolen by the Palestine gendarmerie from the Central

Government Arsenal in Jerusalem. Whatever clarity the

position lacked was provided in June 1936, when the police

stood in ceremonial silence, on public parade, in honor of the

desperadoes whose rifles had touched off the revolt .63

NUMERUS CLAUSUS AND CENSORSHIP

In Jerusalem where there are not more than one thousand Germans,

there is an avowedly Nazi daily newspaper. It seems

fair to ask under whose auspices this pogrom-inciting literature

is published . And how can it be issued in a Jewish city, and in

DUAL OBLIGATION TO TWO PEOPLES 337

a country ruled by an all-powerful autocrat with complete powers

of censorship which he does not hesitate to use whenever it

pleases him ?

In Jerusalem also, Nazi handbills of the most scurrilous type

are openly distributed without interference by the police .114

How can this be done in the capital city of the Jewish National

Home ? At a moment when England itself is expressing violent

indignation over Nazi excesses, a Jewish youth is arrested and

sentenced to the degradation o f a public whipping for picketing

a Jewish shop which was selling German goods. Why

should this be a commendable expression of spirit in England,

but a crime in the National Home?

The Jerusalem Y.M.C.A. is a favorite retreat of the High

Commissioner himself and its Board is certainly dominated by

Government officials. Yet its General Secretary, an American

named Waldo Heinrichs, was summarily discharged when he

attempted to exclude Hitler's Jew-baiting Voelkischer Beobachter

from the general reading room . Why is this so ?

There is a book published in England called The Brown Book

o f the Hitler Terror. It is a factual history of the first months

of the Nazi inquisition in Germany . No one has ever challenged

its accuracy . Yet when it comes to Palestine it is banned,

together with other anti-Hitler literature . But Hitler's Mein

Kampf, a venomous collection of canards against the Jew, is not

banned.65

Everyone who has ever been in the Near East knows what British

censorship in Palestine is . Newspapers may be forbidden to

mention the very name of a notorious murderer on trial for his

life. The control is so strict that a story which doesn't sit well

with the Administration, just isn't cabled . Nor is the reporter

informed about it. His first hint that anything is wrong is generally

in the form of a communication from his home office, inquiring

into his silence. When the Government wants to clamp

down, relates a foreign correspondent, "it just shuts off telephone,

telegraph and cable service completely ." B 6

Sometimes foreign Jewish newspapers are proscribed, as they

are in Germany and Iraq . In 1934,, for example, the Moment

338

THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

of Kaunas, Lithuania, was barred for a year and Unzerzeit of

Kishineff (now part of Rumania) was outlawed permanently .

Even such publications as the New York Times are occasionally

confiscated when they contain articles favorable to the Jews .

Local Hebrew papers are consistently harassed and closed,

though they exercise admirable restraint, foment no civil war

and circulate no inflammatory manifestoes urging civil disobedience.

Where they are not ordered stopped entirely, they often

go to press with huge white spaces in their columns, representing

material ordered deleted by the Government censor . Perfectly

representative of the Government's style is the suspension of the

Hebrew papers Doar Hayom and Haboker in July 1936 for the

remarkable reason that they urged the Authorities to put a halt

to the rioting and murder . Yet at the same time the censors

permitted the radical Arab Journal A-Di ff a to publish a poem by

Ali Mansour which read : "We Arabs are all Abu Jildas [a notorious

cutthroat and terrorist] ; we shall drive Cohen [a name

for the Jew, Mansour acquired from the Nazis] out of the country."

Confident of its immunity, the Arab press kept the sledges

of hate pounding in a clamor of extravagant invective only limited

by the imaginations of its authors . In few other countries,

concedes the Peel Report, would such a campaign of vilification

and incitement have been tolerated for a moment .

It is no exaggeration to state that everything pro-Jewish is

either directly forbidden or discreetly frowned upon . Duff's

books debunking the Arab terrorists are permanently banned

in the Palestine he loved and served so long . Even Colonel Patterson,

commander of the very legions which conquered this

area, is made to suffer for his pro-Zionist views . During a visit

in 1937 .he was filmed in Tel Aviv inspecting some Jewish institutions

. This bit of news-film, titled Colonel Patterson in

Palestine, was banned by the Film Censorship Board on the

single score that the film could not be shown with that title !

This singular custodian of Jewish aspirations, the Palestine

Government, has introduced still other innovations, modeled

after the notorious European numerus clausus . Feeling his way

in December 1933, Government Officer Harkness announced

DUAL OBLIGATION TO TWO PEOPLES 339

that the Administration was viewing with concern the preponderance

of Jews, especially in the medical and dental callings ;

and that it was considering the introduction of numerus clausus

in the professions . This was followed by the Medical Practitioners

Ordinance. Thinly disguising its anti-Jewish bias, it

placed a severe limit on the number of physicians who could be

licensed in future. 67 Thus is laid the groundwork for a whole

new plague of repressions against the Jews returning to their

Home.

Page 340 Book