The Evening Star (December 7, 1945)
WE CANNOT HAVE BOTH: IMPERIALISM AND PEACE
The choice is between democratic peace based on justice or a terrible war waged by atomic power
International law and human decency are being tested now in Palestine
Certain events whose ultimate effect on the future of the American people may be very great, are now taking place in the Near and Middle East.
On the surface, these occurrences would seem to be the result of a quarrel between Arabs and Hebrews for possession of the remote land of Palestine. The appearance is of powerful Arab states united in an Arab League, and determined in their opposition to Jewish entry into Palestine to the point of threatening war.
In this difficult situation also appears to be involved an apparent dilemma on the part of Great Britain, the Mandatory for Palestine. The net impression is left that Britain, though piously seeking to do so, is unable to fulfill its obligations to the Jewish people under the Mandate because of her fear of the Arabs.
Careful study of the circumstances operating behind this surface screen reveals quite a different situation. It leads us to the conviction that the Arabs are but a pawn in this struggle, and that the real antagonists are the Hebrews, who are seeking to return to Palestine, and the British Colonial officials who are attempting by every possible means to keep them out. We also believe that a powerful effort is being made by official Britain to utilize this and related situations for the purpose of bringing American troops, planes and warships into the Middle East, where their presence would serve as a bulwark to British policy against the threat to British interests which undeniably exists there. Already we note the presence of an American Military Mission in Saudi Arabia, as well as the granting of Lease-Lend supplies to this strongly anti-Christian state, which did not fight on our side during the war.
The Near and Middle East is. in terms of Imperial rivalry, one of the red-hot corners of the world. If we are to be in volved there, it is important to us that it be only by reference to the future security needs of the world, and not to back up the imperial policy of states which do not participate in such ideals.
The situation is serious in the extreme if the action of powerful nations are to be guided only by their own selfish interests, and by an utter cynicism in regard to the rights of others. The present world impasse can of right be described as being more than anything else a moral crisis. If no credence can be placed upon the pledged word of a nation, or if the methods it adopts to secure its ends will not bear examination, then the entire basis for international law disappears. The world then becomes a mere jungle in which the great predatory national units compete with each other for power and pre-eminence.
In this kind of world, in which the rival states will be equipped with atom bombs and even more horribly destructive devices, civilization has no chance of survival.
In the existing world crisis, the closest natural relationship of the American people would appear to be with the people of Great Britain, but if the British government is to prove itself guided only by a policy of shortsighted self-interest, and by a willful disregard for the welfare of others, including our own, then we must re-examine our international commitments.
The test and proof of this policy with which we charge the British government, unfortunately is contained in the relationship of Great Britain to the harassed Hebrews seeking to return to Palestine.
Arab-Hebrew animosity – a British invention
It is valuable first to dispose of the question of Arab opposition to Hebrew colonization. The record shows that they were heartily in favor of the Hebrew return to Palestine. It meant to them economic development of their own territories, and a friendly and powerful neighbor who could save them from exploitation by European imperialism.
Shortly after the signing of the Balfour Declaration, an agreement was signed between the Zionists and King Hussein of the Hejaz, then regarded as the undisputed leader of the Arab world Article IV of this agreement stipulated that “all necessary measures shall be taken to encourage and stimulate immigration of Jews into Palestine on a large scale,” and also that the Arabs “shall be assisted in founding their economic development.” When the Mandate was accepted by the League of Nations, Hussein’s son, Feisal. later to become King of Iraq, wrote the Zionists a cordial letter in which he “wished the Jews a hearty welcome home.”
And even new. in spite of all the incitements and provocations, and regardless of all the efforts of British propaganda to show the tremendous difficulties experienced by the British in reconciling Arabs and Hebrews, the fact remains that there is no innate animosity between the two peoples. For example, recently a conference of Arab and Jewish workers issued a manifesto declaring that "if the country is properly developed, both peoples can live here in peace, and a Jewish National Home can be built in cooperation with Arab workers on the basis of equality in a common homeland.” On almost the same date, the combined Jewish and Arab orange growers were making representations to London against official discrimination affecting their mutual interests.
Fear of industrial competition
Yet, immediately after Great Britain took control over Palestine, it became apparent to the Arabs that British officialdom in the Near and Middle East was violently anti-Jewish and would utilize any means at its disposal to collapse the Hebrew colonization in Palestine.
The reasons behind this attitude are not difficult to discover. It was the overmastering fear of the Hebrews, centering around the question of trade.
The erection of factories in Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem greatly alarmed the British, who believed that they were allowing the creation of a strong competitor who would take away from British industry many valuable markets in the Near and Middle East, and in North Africa. They also believed that since the Hebrews are a people capable of modern technical organization, they might constitute a point of democratic leadership in this area, fatal to the barbaric tribal regimes on which the policy of Great Britain now depends. And so the trouble began.
Palestine an occupied country – ruled by anti-Semitic laws
There is no difficulty, however, in judging the truth of the conditions prevailing in Palestine, since they are blatantly on the record. These involve an active and implacable anti-Semitism on the part of government, and make it clear that Palestine is the only country in the world which maintains discriminatory anti-Jewish laws on its statute books. Jews are restricted to a narrow strip of territory, as in the old Tsarist Pale, and are forbidden to buy or lease land or build houses elsewhere. As a result, Jews, though a full third of the population and the most land-hungry of all peoples, own less than two percent of the total land contained under the original Mandate, and less than six and a half percent of the land of the shrunken National Home of Western Palestine.
In Eastern Palestine, which is now called Transjordan, no Jew may live at all, or own land. It is the only area in the world which is totally “Judenrein.” Transjordan, incidentally, is still under the Mandate for Palestine, and its costs are defrayed out of the Palestine treasury, though it operates under a separate Administration. The British deliberately imported an Arab tribe from the Hejaz to rule this country under Prince Abdullah, the present Emir. When Abdullah, attracted by the prospect of profit, sought to sell large acreage of land to Hebrew settlers, the British had to intervene and to threaten to depose him.
In the matter of immigration, though Great Britain has found it necessary to send airplanes, battleships and mechanized troops to Palestine to prevent Jews, desperately needing a sanctuary, from entering, anyone else can come in freely. Moslems and Christians come in freely from everywhere. In fact, a favorite method adopted by Jews entering illegally is to come in disguised as Arabs, though they are usually detected because they cannot speak Arabic.
Large-scale manhunts regularly take place for these unfortunate so-called “illegal” Jews, in which illegal non-Jewish newcomers gleefully participate.
In almost every other respect, Hebrews in the Holy Land are actuated against. A highly placed official once informed Horace Samuel, with evident relish, that “Jew-baiting is the sport of kings.” Hebrew industry is hamstrung by every plausible devise which can be invented by hostile central authority. By a carefully maneuvered tax system the Jews are forced to pay the great bulk of the taxes, but receive only a fraction of the benefits. Even in those places such as Haifa and Jerusalem, where they are overwhelmingly in the majority, they are deprived of electoral rights and forced to accept hostile Arab mayors appointed by the government.
Husbands and fathers are seized on the streets, savagely beaten, jailed and exiled to isolated African penal camps, all without hearing and even without charge.
Careful efforts are made to disarm the colonists even in the most isolated outposts, and little Hebrew children have been given brutal prison sentences for the alleged possession of weapons.
Arabs, however, may possess weapons. There have been a number of anti-Jewish riots in Palestine which the British themselves have been accused of instigating. During these riots, styled by the British as “rebellions,” foreign desperadoes were allowed to enter and infest the country, where they not only burned, raped and pillaged the Hebrew inhabitants, but terrorized “non-cooperative Arabs” as well.
What the situation is like can be seen in the case of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, one of the most vicious of all war criminals, and an important henchman of Hitler who organized the Nazi Arab Legion (Thousands of these mercenaries are now behind barbed wire in American prisoner-of-war camps). The British have yet to declare this gentleman a war criminal, and have resisted the effort of the Yugoslavs (who suffered desperately from the Nazi Arab Legion’s depredations) to do so. In the past, the Mufti had been directly subsidized by the Palestine government, as the records will show, and it is reported that he is to be given back his post as an official of the government.
This conspiracy by a great empire against a small and martyred people is shrouded by a rapid censorship and blackout of news. While anti-Jewish propaganda is blatantly broadcast over the government-owned radio, American correspondents determined to tell the truth are expelled. According to a recent statement in Editor and Publisher by the American correspondent, Victor Bienstock, “the Palestine Administration censorship is something dreamed up out of a correspondent’s book of horrors.” The censor he described as a young man named Christopher Holmes who “is pained by the mention of the word Jew… and refers to the inhabitants of Palestine as ‘the Arabs and the others.’”
The Hebrew is the enemy!
All of this is exemplified in all its ugliness by the current unofficial order to all members of the British 6th Airborne Division, which has been spread throughout Palestine to reinforce police posts, forbidding them from fraternizing with the Jews. These British soldiers, according to the dispatch, have been “advised” to abstain from any contact with Jews. In short, it now is all right to fraternize with Germans, Japs and Arabs, but not with Hebrews. The inference is clear: It is the Hebrew who is the enemy.
And not only in Palestine. Even more abhorrent is the treatment by British officials of the concentration camp victims. Officially appointed to defend the Nazi monster who ran the massacre camps in Oswiechen and Bergen Belsen, British Major T. Winwood extenuated them by asserting that “after all the Nazis only got rid of the dregs of the Ghetto.”
At Belsen, in the British Zone in Germany, a protest against British policy in Palestine, on the part of Jewish leaders, resulted in their arrest. Men, women and children, people who survived the Nazis, were indiscriminately beaten by police with rubber truncheons, and the blue and white Hebrew flag contemptuously thrown into a heap of garbage.
The recent “anti-Jewish” riots in Egypt were allowed to have their head until they turned from their first objective to an anti-Christian demonstration. Churches were burnt and Christians murdered. Then the police under their British commandant clamped down and order was suddenly and miraculously restored.
In Tripoli, an Italian colony now under British military rule British troops maintained a benevolent “neutrality” during the Invasion of the Jewish quarter by hoodlums promised loot and money. When after two days of unrestrained excesses these riots, too, turned anti-Christian as well, they were suddenly terminated, with practically no opposition, by British troops.
Decent Britishers outraged
The above situation in and around Palestine has been noted with intense revulsion by decent Englishmen. The late Lord Wedgwood declared bitterly in Parliament: “Let us be frank: The whole British administration in Palestine is against the Jews there… they don’t like the Jews and there are enough anti-Semites and crypto-Fascists still in Great Britain to back up that policy and spirit.”
The distinguished British soldier, hero of World War I, Col. J. H. Patterson, writes: “I was present in Palestine and saw it all, and could hardly believe my eyes that England had fallen so low. There was practically no limit to the inhumanity and injustices perpetrated by the British bureaucrats in that country. They stopped at nothing…”
An English soldier of this war, Douglas Duff, in his book, SWORD FOR HIRE, declares: “We had to be seemingly harsh and unfriendly towards them (the returning Hebrews in Palestine), it did not pay for one’s seniors to think that one had any undue sympathy for them…”
Does Great Britain fear the Arabs?
The absurdity of the claim that Great Britain has to be afraid of the military might of the Arab states, though last on Americans not familiar with the situation, is perfectly clear to the British. They know better. They know that modern war is not fought by tribesmen sitting on camels, but by mechanically minded men capable of running modern industry. A modern fighting force of a few thousand men equipped with airplanes could subdue all the states of the Arab League in a couple of days.
The British are well aware of these facts. They know that the present leadership in all Arab countries was placed in power as a result of British intervention and is kept there by the same means.
They know that all the Arab countries, including Egypt (which, incidentally, did not raise a single hand in defense of the United Nations even when its own territories were invaded), and those on the Peninsula of Arabia are ruled by a few squadrons of British airplanes. British armies are located in Iraq, Syria, Tripoli, Transjordan and Palestine. No move of any kind can be made without the consent and approval of the British political “advisers” located there.
They know that when Iraq, under Premier Al-Qailiani, actively entered the war on the side of the Axis, the entire Iraqi Army was routed and the country subdued by a handful of British Colonials and Hebrew shock troops – totaling hardly more than one battalion in all.
(Now that country happens to be the most vociferously threatening against America for its alleged pro-Zionist sympathies. Now, if Iraq can make such representations, why cannot Germany?)
They know that in all the Arab forces recruited to help the United Nations, there were not more than 9,000 men and these gave an indifferent account of themselves.
(The Hebrews of Palestine, on the other hand [not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Jews who fought in European armies, many of whom now seek to migrate to the Holy Land], turned out almost to a man in the Allied cause. At one time, 40 percent of Alexander’s effectives in North Africa were Palestinian Hebrew soldiers – and it is acknowledged by all those willing to give an honest account of the situation that the participation of these men, and Hebrew industry in Palestine, actually turned the tide of victory.)
They know that even as far as the “mighty” Saudi Arabia is concerned, the deficits bf this desert kingdom have, for years, been underwritten by Great Britain. Its ruler, this brutal tyrant Ibn Saud is efficiently coached by a British official named Philby.
In view of all these facts, is it the least surprising that all of the protestations about Hebrew immigration to Palestine are coming only from Moslem countries under British rule that is, from Syria, the Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, Tripoli, Saudi Arabia and India.
Arab League – synthetic creation by Great Britain
One is drawn irresistibly to the conclusion that the so-called Arab League is a synthetic creation loitered by Great Britain, and that its members are but instruments of British foreign policy, who speak only when they are told to speak. We are convinced that all statements by the so-called Arab League or any of its members must be evaluated in this light and are not a genuine reflection of the sentiment of the Arab people themselves.
United Arab world – a myth
Actually, the Arab world is sadly divided. The states are ruled by absolute monarchs possessed of strong dynastic ambitions and a vindictive hatred toward each other. Religious differences far greater than those which once tore Protestant and Catholic Europe apart in the medieval days, separate them, as do also family hatreds. The contentions between the various sects, tribes, sheiks, imams and princely families is literally beyond description. Moreover, since these are theocratic states, it is well to remark that Islam recognizes only Moslem universalism. Nationalism is an utterly foreign concept to the Orthodox Moslem mind.
The fiction of Moslem unity does not bear scrutiny. It is a piece of prime falsification of the issues for the benefit of purely British interests. For example, Ibn Saud himself owes his present power to the fact that he was permitted to invade Mecca and to force the Emir, a direct descendant of the Prophet, to flee for his life. In Saud’s kingdom, not only may no Christian or Jew live, but neither may any other Mohammedan who believes contrary to the Orthodox Wahabi sect.
As another example, the Shias, who are the majority of the Moslems of Iraq, protested regularly and vigorously to the League of Nations against what they termed the persecution by the ruling Sunni sect, kept in power by the British.
At the moment, the British are using airplanes and tanks to subdue the 45 million people of Java, who are mostly Mohammedans. These unfortunate and victimized people have proclaimed the allegedly much-feared Holy War against Great Britain. However, not a single Mohammedan in India or Arabia stirred as a result.
When American and British troops landed in Tunis, the ruling Bey, who combined in his person both the political and religious authority of this theocratic state, was forcibly removed, and a new ruler substituted, together with new policies more acceptable to the Anglo-Americans. Still there was no reaction from other Arabs or Moslems anywhere. The same was true in Iran, when the pro-German Shah was removed.
Arab unity in reverse
As far as Arab unity is concerned, it appears to work in reverse where British interests are involved. We note, for instance, the move for independence from Egypt on the part of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, which has British tacit approval. Describing this new nationalism, with its slogan, “The Sudan for the Sudanese,” the London Economist of August 11, 1945, says blandly that, “In Egypt it was not, of course, well received. The Egyptians could not believe that there was anything genuine in it; they regarded it as a British invention calculated to pry the Sudan away from Egypt, ostensibly towards independence but in truth towards an exclusive association with Britain.”
In summing up, it may be surmised that actually all Arab propaganda, in this country and outside of it, is covertly directed and financed from official British sources.
(Some picture of this situation can be gained from Pierre van Paassen’s DAYS OF OUR YEARS and THE FORGOTTEN ALLY, William B. Ziff’s RAPE OF PALESTINE, and Douglas Duff’s SWORD FOR HIRE and GALILEE GALLOPER, and Leon Dennen’s TROUBLE ZONE.)