British abuse of power in Palestine

British abuse of power in Palestine

British Central and East Africa may be taken for convenient comparison. The native races here are certainly as intelligent as those of Palestine, and infinitely more tractable. They outnumber the whites four hundred to one. Nevertheless, wherever representative institutions have been granted to English colonies and dependencies in these territories, the native peoples have not been allowed to participate either as voters or as members. The voting power and the right to be elected as members is vested mostly, if not always, in the British European immigrants. 15

Still more significant, there are large colonies of East Indians and Arabs settled in these places. They came long before the British immigrants and they play a vital part

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in the economic life of these communities. Notwithstanding, the constitutional power is invariably placed in the hands of British settlers.

It is worth tearing off the cover of this thing to get a look at some of its detail. We find Tanganyika, also a mandated territory, with a British population of 4000 submerged in some 5,022,000 natives. In addition there are 7,100 Arabs and 23,400

East Indians. Yet under the Constitution of 1926 a Legislative Council is constituted consisting of twenty British Europeans and three British Indians. Neither the native populations nor the 1,000 Arabs, who alone outnumber the British two to one, are represented at all. In Kenya Colony, in which much the same situation obtains, the best part of the agricultural land is sequestered for white settlers only. Into this restricted area neither the large native population nor the considerable proportion of Indians and Arabs may penetrate.

Zanzibar is another fair sample of this weave. In addition to its native population of 186,470, it has 33,400 Arabs, 14,000 British Indians, and only 300 Europeans. Yet of the fourteen members of the Legislative Council, ten are British Europeans.

Arabs apparently do not count here either.

In South Africa, which as a Dominion (not under the direction of the Colonial Office) invites no absolute comparison, Europeans are but 1,890,300 out of a total population of 8,370,000. Yet it is mandatory that members of both the Senate and House of Assembly be British subjects of European descent. Colored people (including Arabs and East Indians) are subjected to discriminology regulations of the most severe type. When the Hindu leader Gandhi visited there several years ago, he was not allowed to enter one of the great public buildings on this account.

A comparison from another angle is offered by British experience in the Island of Cyprus. To spike the Greeks, who hoped for enosis (reunion with Greece) , a Legislative Assembly similar to that proposed for Palestine, was formed. In it the

Turkish minority of twenty percent plus Government officials formed an actual

365 WHOOPING IT UP FOR DEMOCRACY 

voting majority. The result was economic stagnation and political chaos. Greek members refused to cooperate with the Government or the Turk minority. Bills in

the Legislature were jettisoned. National hatreds reached an explosive climax. The gulf of culture, hopes and physical differences between the two races was so fundamental as to contravene ordinary differences of opinion. As a result of this self-

generated combustion, the Island almost blew itself off the map

— and the British were glad enough finally to haul out from under. In November 1931 they withdrew the Constitution as "premature, excessive and unsuitable." From that time forward, Cypriots were not so much as allowed to discuss or hear a political speech. 16 The game had been played out in favor of the baldly stated conviction that if Britain is to stay there, she must rule there.

The British, with this experience immediately behind them, do not need to be told that the differences between Arab and Jew — in ideals, dreams, mentality, culture, and objectives — are far more exaggerated than anything they ever witnessed between Turk and Greek in Cyprus. But Whitehall had not confounded itself by turning evangelist. Its continually publicized efforts to establish a parliament in Palestine had a far more practical purpose. The Zionists had to be pried loose no matter what was forfeit. Towards this end it was desirable to encourage the Arabs to consider themselves the rightful rulers of the country, and to foster the belief that a decisive action on their part would sweep away the last tottering remnants of the Balfour Declaration and the Jewish National Home project.

BOOK THREE

CHAPTER I

"A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR” 77

DOES AN ARAB RACE EXIST?

The British, who were later to talk imposingly of 'Arab nationalism in Palestine,' were of a quite different view in 1918. British Peace Handbook No. 60 declares briskly that "the people west of the Jordan are not Arabs, but only Arab speaking. ... In the Gaza district they are mostly of Egyptian origin; elsewhere they are of the most mixed race." As late as 1921 the Administration was still officially claiming that the word

'Arab' as applied to Palestinians was a misnomer. 1

Actually there are no 'Arabs' anywhere. There is not even a fairly homogeneous mixed race. Throughout the Peninsula the Arab has ceased to exist. Those who have taken his place are a motley assortment of peoples, low in the scale of human

development, who speak the Arabic tongue. Even the courtly Saladin was no Arab, but a Kurd. Hussein of the Hejaz, himself, was mothered by a Circassian and had his official heirs by a woman of Turkish blood. 2

The countless cities, tribes and nations incorporated at sword's point into the swollen host of Allah, soon drowned the Arab out by the very suffocation of their numbers. An even more dreadful revenge was exacted by that cruel institution, the Harem. How enormous this practice was can be seen in Sykes' description of the empire of fabled Haroun-al-Raschid, with its tremendous seraglios stocked with women from every conceivable corner of the globe. 3 He marvels at the unending supply of female slaves, of every color and kind. Since purity of blood in the community of Mohammed always gives way to purity of line, where are the descendants of Qoraish 3a now ? Even in the very core of desert Arabia, the race has been steadily

adulterated by an incoming flow of slave girls, most of them, in recent centuries,

366 Pics

367 ”A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR"

from the Sudan and other places in Africa. The offspring of these stolen creatures are not slaves but free Muslims, since the moment a woman conceives she attains the

status of a legal wife.

Pilgrims from such faraway places as Java and Morocco, streaming like columns of magnetized ants toward the holy cities of the Hejaz, contributed liberally to this mélange. The Muslim habit of giving a slave girl to an overnight guest for his comfort, the frequent looting of visiting caravans of the devout, all sweetened the mixture. "If we make exception of the Sherifian families — the descendants of the Prophet — and some very few other people of undoubted Arab origin," writes the

great Turkish scholar, Dr. Riza-Tewfik, "all the population of Mecca is alien to the Semitic race." 4 The Syrian author, Rihani, describing the population of the Arabian coast, is even more emphatic. 5

History gives it as a fact that the Arabs never settled Palestine, merely taking control and providing the usual military and administrative caste. They imposed their religion on the native peoples but failed to exterminate them. Here, too, gradual racial suicide was the price of uncontrolled lust. As far back as the Latin Kingdom in Jerusalem, Edris comments on the vast number of captive females required to satisfy the wants of these amorous gentlemen. He reports slaves brought from all parts of Africa and the East, with good-looking Nubian girls most in demand. The Crusaders found a country peopled by a mixture of all the races of the Orient, intermarried with Greeks.

On the founding of the Kingdom they had to recognize the existence of five types of Muslims (each of different racial antecedents), as well as Jews, Druses, Samaritans, and others. 6 By 1120, when the Council of Nablus was held, the Latins themselves were already reported half absorbed in this churning stew of races.

Of even greater significance than the loose social habits of the Muslims was the physical position of this little land, which turned it into a bloody charnel house for unending centuries. Spoliation, destruction, rapine, extermination, claimed the land

368 THE RAPE OF PALESTINE

like an ever-recurring plague. The invasions which regularly smashed against its stricken borders were countless. It had been devastated by the Scythians from north of the Caucasus. The Romans populated it with vast settlements of Greeks and other

races from everywhere. It was scoured soon after by the wars of the Seleucids and Ptolemies. In 634 A.D. occurred the Arab conquest. By 868 A.D. an Egyptian invader named Mehmet Tulum had wrested the country from them in the usual blood

bath. Now for a period of centuries Turks, Egyptians, Crusaders, alternated in control, periodically baptizing the shuddering country in a bath of blood.

After the Twelfth Century, Palestine – Israel was invaded time and again by wild hordes from Asia who plundered, slew and violated without halt. In 1256 the Mongol, Hulagu Khan, sacked the stricken area and put the entire population to the sword. A

scarce hundred years later, Timur the Lame, a sanguinary destroyer who called himself 'The Wrath of God’ made this whole sector the scene of one of the crudest massacres of his blood-drenched career. Now for generations Palestine became an outspread altar on which human sacrifices were offered continually. In their savage unending struggles for mastery, Mongols, Mamelukes and the fierce Charismean tribes of Middle Asia butchered its people indiscriminately. Between 1260 and 1400 A.D. not a single city, town or village remained intact. When the next conquerors, the Ottoman Turks, came in, raping and slaughter had left an indelible mark in the character of the survivors. "In few parts of the world," says Lieutenant- olonel Stafford, "were there more different types." 7

It was always the foreign soldier who was the police power in Palestine. The Tulunides brought in Turks and Negroes. The Fatamids introduced Berbers, Slavs, Greeks, Kurds and mercenaries of all kinds. The Mamelukes imported legions of

Georgians and Circassians. Each monarch for his personal safety relied on great levies of slave warriors. Saladin, hard-pressed by the Crusaders, received one hundred and fifty thousand Persians who were given lands in Galilee and the Sidon

district for their services.

369 ”A PEOPLE IN DESPAIR”

Out of this human patch-work of Jews, Arabs, Armenians, Kalmucks, Persians, Crusaders, Tartars, Indians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Sudanese, Turks, Mongols, Romans, Kharmazians, Greeks, pilgrims, wanderers, ne'er-do-wells and adventurers, invaders, slaves and backwash of all corners of creation, was formed that hodge-podge of blood and mentality we call today 'Levantine’ As this wild medley of ungovernable, lawless men were killed off from time to time by incessant wars, raids and plagues, more from everywhere were constantly merged into the common melting pot. In the Fourteenth Century, drought caused the immigration into Palestine of eighteen thousand 'tents' of Yurate Tartars from the Euphrates. Soon followed twenty- thousand Ashiri under Gaza, and four thousand Mongols under Moulai, who occupied the Jordan Valley and settled from Jerusalem south. Kaisaite and Yemenite tribes followed in their trail. 8 In 1830 the Albanian conqueror Mehemet Ali colonized Jaffa, Nablus and Beisan with Egyptian soldiers and their Sudanese allies. Fourteen years later Lynch estimated the thirteen thousand inhabitants of Jaffa to be composed of eight thousand Turco-Egyptians, four thousand Greeks and Armenians, and one thousand Jews and Maronites. He did not consider that there were any Arabs at all in that city. Q

During the middle of the Nineteenth Century the entire territory of the National Home, east and west of the Jordan, is computed to have held no more than sixty thousand people all told. Of this number, non-Muslims, living under the bitterest

persecution, were still heavily in the majority. The huge population growth since that time has been due to large contingents of new arrivals. The Turks introduced Circassians around Amman. When North Africa passed under European authority,

the fanatic Moghrabiyeh Muslims moved out and settled in the Holy Land. (It was they who were responsible for the Safed butchery in 1929, and who supplied the continuous tension at the Wailing Wall.) So too, were introduced into the permanent

population of this little land, Bosnians, Turkoman nomads, and a stream of Levantines, mixed desert wanderers and Africans which continues to the present day.

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As for the Christian population, we are told by the learned Dr. Christie that it is made up of fragments of all the Levant races. The native Christians of Nazareth come from the Hauran and from Merj-Ayun; while the Christians of Safed are the children of immigrants from Hasbeiya who came in the second half of the last century.

In the Arabic language only the Bedouin is designated by the word 'Arab.' But here, too, unless the eyes cannot be trusted, there is little evidence of common descent. The Ghawarineh tribe of the Jordan Valley have strongly marked African features, fuzzy hair, black skin and guttural voices. A short distance away is the tribe of Ghazawiyeh, shrill-voiced, gaunt and large-featured. Nearby are the blue-eyed blondes of Bethlehem. Several tribes of alleged Jewish stock have even been described in Transjordan. 10

Until English political maneuvering recast their viewpoint for them, the townspeople were insulted if they were referred to as Arabs. They wanted to be known for what they were, Syrian Levantines. Count Sforza designates the inhabitants of this entire region as a medley of peoples "with not the slightest bond between them." 11 Mrs. Andrews remarks dryly that "in Jerusalem today there are two or three families that claim to be of the fine Arab stock which entered the country in the Seventh Century." 12 Dr. Christie doubts whether there is any Arab blood in the peasantry or villages at all. 13

As long as these masses have lived side by side, they have been at each other's throats. Tribe hated tribe, city man hated fellah, the Bedouin despised both, sect cursed sect, and even family disdained family as unworthy scions of an inferior race. That all this ill-assorted, explosive mixture can be organized into one autonomous nation may also be doubted for the future.

ARAB TYPES AND TRAITS