In Palestine Britain Stabs the Jews in the back

In Palestine Britain Stabs the Jews in the back 

The program of the Nashishibi party now coincides exactly with British aspirations in the Near East. Today they are plumping for a reunited Arab Transjordan and Palestine, under the current British favorite, Abdullah of Transjordan. The Mufti clique rejects Abdullah and hopes for a renaissance of fanatic Mohammedan times in a great loose Muslim Federation, with the Church as the ruling power. In every country where

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influence counts, these rival groups lobby, not only against the Jews, but with still greater violence, against each other.

The part Whitehall has had in all this can be easily guessed from the constant open advice given by British officials, urging these warring parties to "get together" in their fight against the Jews. Colonial Office organ Great Britain and the East was full of these admonitions; nor could even the High Commissioner refrain in his Annual Report from expressing his "regrets" over this inability of Arabs to create a truly 'united front.' 68

Under the patronage of the Government, Arab leaders representing all the various groups have long been joined in a super-body called the Arab Executive,* most members of which are directly on the Government payroll. A sample of this body's policies is contained in a proclamation issued February 21, 1931, which calls on the entire Muslim world to massacre Jews wherever they may be found.

CLAIMS, OBJECTIVES AND METHODS

The Arab politicians and the anti-Semitic officials of London and Jerusalem who spur them on, always paint the Arab as an under-privileged creature who is unable to get a hearing in Britain because the Jews control the press there and by inference hold the mass of M. P.'s efficiently under their thumbs. This, of course, is nothing but an extension of that lively humbug, the Elders of Zion story. Says Wedgwood, dryly disposing of this contention: "These officials claim that the Arab case is not put

before Parliament. The Arab case cannot be put in a British House simply because their case is anti-British." 69

The pro-Arab case in its entirety is a post-war product. During the War "there were no pro-Arab sympathies [in Palestine - Israel] as [there] were in parts of Arabia . . . and the question of a Palestinian nationality had never entered their heads." 70 The

great Near East negotiator Sir Mark Sykes dismissed them with the deprecatory remark that they had "long had the knack of falling in with the plans of a successful

* The Arab High Committee, has, since 1936, superseded the Arab Executive,

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conqueror." The British Peace Handbook No. 60 observes crisply: "With the Arab movement centered at Damascus, Zionism in Palestine - Israel would be a help rather than a hindrance to it; for that movement would only suffer from the attempt to absorb a district ethnologically and otherwise so different from countries in which the Arab element stands alone or is distinctly predominant''

Despite these facts and the solemn agreements signed by the House of Hussein with the Zionists, the pan-Arabs, backed by their powerful sympathizers, continue to harp on the 'promises' made to Hussein by McMahon.* Time after time, Mc-Mahon himself denied this claim with considerable show of irritation, 71 but it makes no difference. The British-Arab clique held on to this bone with all their teeth. Discredited or not, we find even Lord Peel repeating it as a fact in his official report

in 1937.

Looked at over a period of years the Arab story strikes an amusingly self -contradictory note. In 1925 it rests its case entirely on the alleged failure of Zionist colonization. The Arab Executive speaks in sepulchral tones of "the economic retrogression" of the country. It groans dolorously that "the figures are growing darker every day" and that "Palestine's general wealth has been reduced by £16,604,594 during the last four years alone." 72 In March 1927, after a year's slump had slowed up Jewish immigration till it was only a dribble, the Arab Executive

asserts triumphantly that "the decrease in Jewish immigration confirms our contention that the Government's policy in Palestine was wrong."

When this line of argument became silly on the face of it, the Arabs suddenly swung over to the discovery that Palestine, virtually ignored in Muslim religious tradition, was "a Holy Land for Muslims also." 73 It was on this concept that the horrible events of 1929 pivoted.

It is at least a curious accident that all these inconsistencies of Arab viewpoint correspond exactly with whatever happens to be agitating Whitehall most at the moment. When the British switched to a policy aiming at the consolidation of

* See Appendix B, p. 580.

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Arabia into a confederacy under their control, the character of Arab demands shifted accommodatingly. At a conference in Jerusalem, the Arab leaders took a pledge under oath "to uphold the integrity of Arabia as a nation and to recognize no divisions

therein." 74 Yet when it became apparent to the British Foreign Office that it would have to go slow on such a program, the Arab agenda shifted obligingly once more. Now the demand was for sectional independence, a concept regarded as nothing less

than traitorous a few months earlier.

Present-day demands are for a complete stoppage of Jewish immigration and a cessation of land sales. The claim is that Palestine is an Arab land and that the Jews, entering on Arab sufferance, can only hope to attain the status of paying guests.

Some leaders go so far as to propose the confiscation of Jewish property; others are satisfied with political domination only. The Mufti's gang would force them all to become Muslims; while the followers of Awny Bey would drive them into the

sea altogether.