THE STORY OF THE HEBRON MASSACRE 1929, from archives
Jerusalem Posts
-> Introduction to the Arab/Israel Conflict
Author: Nannette,
Posted: Tue Jun 19, 2007 11:54 pm Post subject: THE STORY OF THE HEBRON MASSACRE 1929, from archives
Jewry v. Islam
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,737743,00.html
Religious warfare starting in Jerusalem when Arabs attacked the sacred Jewish shrine of the Wailing Wall (TIME, Aug. 26) grew more intense last week. Hallowed to both religions is the small area marked by the ruins of King Solomon's temple. In it Mohammedans can view with pious awe a golden urn containing two hairs from the beard of the true Prophet. Nearby is the coffin of Mohammed, adorned with 17 golden nails of which the written word says when they fall out all things will come to an end. Of the many relics sanctified to Jews, holiest is the Wailing Wall. For generations they have gone there to lament ". . . for the Temple that is destroyed . . . for our Majesty that is departed ... for our Great Men who lie dead. . . ."
Title to the actual possession of this area belongs to the Moslems, but the right has been given to the Jews to use the wall for mourning. Continual charges that the Arabs infringe upon this liberty are made by the Jews, while the Arabs regularly accuse the Jews of exceeding the privilege accorded to them. Each sect claims the British Government is unfair.
Last week the Zionist Executive Council and the National Council of Palestine Jews issued in vain a call to "National discipline and calm behavior." Jew-baiting by Arabs and raucous rabbles grew worse daily. While Jews banded together to defend themselves against a mighty pogrom, events occurred with wartime rapidity.
• A Jewish youth playing ball was fatally stabbed by Arabs. Police attempting to deter his funeral procession from the Moslem quarter clubbed 28 Jews.
Aged Jewish worshippers at the Wailing Wall were stoned by Arabs.
Communists seized the opportunity to urge "an overthrow of British Imperialism."
Sword-swashing Arabs poured from the Mosque Omar, swooped on the Jewish quarter. Nine Jews and three Arabs were killed, no persons injured.
• Martial law was enforced. Six o'clock curfew was ordered, armored cars guarded the streets and airplanes watched from above. Censorship was rigid.
Fierce rioting broke out as the British apparently lost control of the situation. Dagger-armed Arabs systematically raided all parts of Jerusalem and many suburbs.
• Fifty infantrymen with machine guns were despatched from Egypt by airplane. The British War Office ordered the tracks between Cairo and Alexandria cleared of traffic to facilitate troop movements.
A super-dreadnought, a light cruiser and an aircraft carrier were despatched from Malta to Palestine. Other ships awaited orders.
• Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald called a special meeting of the Cabinet. Albert Victor Alexander, First Sea Lord of the British Admiralty, was recalled from leave.
•The chief Rabbi at Jerusalem telegraphed to the chief Rabbi of the British Empire: PALESTINE JEWRY IN GREATEST DANGER RUSH HELP.
• Old rumors that the Arabs had hidden large ammunition stores plundered from retreating Turks ten years ago were given credence as heavy shooting increased.
Fully armed, with bands playing, a battalion of the South Wales border regiment marched through Jerusalem. The city quieted but heavy fighting was reported in country districts. Airplanes searched for marauding Arabs, swept them with machine-gun fire. Lifta, an Arab village said to be headquarters of the attack, was bombed.
Twelve U. S. students were killed, 15 wounded when Arabs attacked the Slobodka Rabbinical College at Hebron, a city of 20,000. Thirty-two other Jews were slain in this raid.
The Palestine Government warned the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem he would be held responsible for further violence, summoned Sheiks of surrounding towns to conference.
• Far reaching were the effects of the Palestine fighting. To British advocates of a big navy it furnishes a potent argument in the fact that Prime Minister MacDonald, advocate of a smaller fleet, rushed to the Admiralty in the emergency. Empire-men consider gravely the possibility of a Holy War which might spread through Islam from Mesopotamia to Singapore.
Islam v. Israel
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,737818,00.html
The fighting that began between Jews and Arabs at Jerusalem's Wailing Wall (TIME, Aug. 26) spread last week throughout Palestine, then inflamed fierce tribesmen of the Moslem countries which face the Holy Land (see map).
Sacked and burned by fleet-riding Arabs was the ancient town of Safed, for centuries a seat of mystical Jewish learning. The Moslem version of the affray could not be learned, but Jews told of fleeing headlong through the streets, dodging into houses, making what resistance they could while the Arabs battered down doors, put bullets indiscriminately among the Jews and ended by igniting the town. As at Hebron, where eight U. S. Rabbinical students were killed (TIME, Sept. 2), reports from Safed stressed such accusations as "pillage," "butchery," "rape." Most of the Jews involved were again claimed to have had "no weapons except their household furniture." The Royal Dutch Shell Petroleum plant at Safed was reported burnt out, gutted. Despatches estimated Jewish dead at 22, mentioned no Moslem casualties.
Sporadic clashes continuing at Haifa, Hebron and in Jerusalem itself, rolled up an estimated total of 196 dead for all Palestine. A known total of 305 wounded lay in hospitals. Speeding from England in a battleship the British High Commissioner to Palestine, handsome, brusque Sir John Chancellor, landed at Haifa, hurried to Jerusalem and sought to calm the general alarm by announcing that His Majesty's Government were rushing more troops by sea from Malta and by land from Egypt, would soon control the situation.
Before the week was out 5,000 British troops commanded by Brigadier General William George Shedden Dobbie were in Palestine, mightfully striving to restore order and protect not only the large cities but such strategic towns as El Abadiyeh and Jur-el-Mujami (see map), twin sites of the chief generating stations of the Palestine Power Trust, founded and managed by famed, dynamic Zionist Pincus Rutenberg (TIME, Mar. 4). Neither bristling, florid, militant General Dobbie nor the cold, curt High Commissioner made the smallest vestige of an answer to the week's most vital question: Why were not adequate British forces rushed to Palestine three weeks ago when the Wailing Wall riots unmistakably threatened the nationwide Jew-Arab clashes which inevitably followed?
Tycoons Rush Help. Moslems outnumber Jews 13 to 1. That is, there are more than 209 million Mohammedans on earth and slightly less than 16 million Children of Israel. In Palestine there are 591,000 Moslems and only 150,000 Jews, of whom some 2,000 are from the U. S. Last week Jews all over the world rallied to aid their outnumbered brethren in the Holy Land.
In London potent Baron Melchett (Alfred Moritz Mond), one of the foremost British industrial tycoons, pledged £5000 ($25,000) to feed and succor the hundreds of Palestine Jews burnt out of their homes or left orphaned, widowed, destitute. London Bankers James A. de Rothschild quickly followed with a like sum. So did Manhattan's Felix Warburg, who was in London. A fourth $25,000 was pledged by Chicago's Julius Rosenwald, and a fifth by Manhattan's Nathan Straus. Before the week was out, Mr. Straus had doubled his $25,000 pledge and lesser contributions from world Jewry poured in at such a rate that officials of the Palestine Emergency Fund said that they would be able to forward a quarter-million dollars weekly to the Holy Land "as long as the need for immediate relief exists."
Borah on Zion. Most potent of Jewish demonstrations last week was a meeting of 25,000 (including many a Gentile) who jammed Manhattan's Madison Square Garden and roared approval of a tactful telegram read on behalf of President Herbert Hoover (see p. 11). Slouching forward to keynote from the platform came famed Friend-of-Oppressed-Peoples William Edgar Borah, Chairman of the U. S. Senate's Foreign Relations Committee. Said he:
"This catastrophe was the result of carelessness or stupidity or both. Whose carelessness and whose stupidity time alone will reveal. . . . Knowing the Premier of Great Britain as so many of us do, we know that it would be impossible for him to be indifferent or careless where human life was involved. . . .
"We know now, and with a little reflection we could have known in the beginning that the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine is a task calling not only for the highest of statesmanship, but calling also for eternal vigilance and vast sacrifices.
"The Arabs are a virile people, resourceful in character, indefatigable in purpose and imbued with a national spirit which, at times, partakes of fanaticism. To deal with such a situation, there must be an understanding, there must be some definite arrangement, some definite program."
Without dreaming of saying so, Senator Borah seemed to imply that Zionists may have proceeded too rapidly in colonizing Palestine without first achieving a sufficiently "definite arrangement" with the British for adequate protection. Jewish speakers who followed the Senator of course squarely blamed the whole crisis on the laxity of the British administration in Palestine. Meanwhile in London the World Zionist Organization was actively negotiating with the new British Labor Cabinet. In the London press the issue of whether it is worth while for the Empire to retain Palestine as a mandate was sensationally aired.
Imperial Reaction. "Let Us Get Out of Palestine!" blared last week the potent London news organs of Baron Beaverbrook, famed "Hearst of England." Above his own signature the blatant Baron declared:
"The money that Chancellor of the Exchequer Snowden has just gained at The Hague after weeks of anxious toil (see p. 25) has been thrown away in a few days on the sands of Palestine, from which we shall never receive a penny in return either in cash, trade, prestige or political advantage. . . . Let us get out now!"
Small though the likelihood is that such a short-sighted view should ever be forced upon British statesmen-who know the strategic value of the land of Palestine quite apart from that of the people-the issue of whether a great deal more money should be spent at once to protect Palestine Jews was sharply raised in London by-hard-featured, scrubby-bearded Dr. Chaim Weizmann, shrewd president of the World Zionist Organization. After an interview with Minister of Colonies and Mandates Baron Passfield (famed in his former style as Economist Sidney Webb), Dr. Weizmann gave correspondents to understand that the Cabinet would continue sternest measures to restore peace in Palestine, and might even dismiss Acting High Commissioner Harry Charles Luke, whom Zionists regard as chiefly responsible for allowing the situation to get out of hand. Subsequent intimations by Lord Passfield that Mr. Luke would not be dismissed did not alter the fact that the Acting High Commissioner had been superseded in authority by the return to Jerusalem last week of High Commissioner Sir John Chancellor. That Sir John presently received instructions to take an unmistakably pro-Jewish line was strongly suggested by the tone of his next proclamation at Jerusalem: "I have learned with horror of atrocious acts committed by bodies of ruthless and blood-thirsty evildoers, of savage murders perpetrated upon the defenseless members of the Jewish population regardless of age and sex, accompanied, as at Hebron, by acts of unspeakable savagery. . . . My first duties are to restore order in the country and inflict stern punishment upon those found guilty of the acts of violence. I charge all inhabitants of Palestine to assist me."
Holy War? Moslems mass-met and demonstrated violently against Jews last week in Syria, Transjordania, Irak and Arabia (see map). They shouted "Palestine for the Arabs!," jabbered of Holy War and of the booty to be got by plundering expeditions into Palestine. Syria is a protectorate of France but her civilized soldiers have never been able to quell the wild, rebellious Sultan El Atrash who lives in a mud palace high in the remote mountains and sallies forth on sporadic raids at the head of his hard-riding, fanatical Druse tribesmen. Last week the dread Atrash was reputed to be rampaging toward Palestine with 800 of his own horsemen and 2,000 Bedouins who recently joined his plundering banner.
Utterly different from bold Sultan El Atrash is the mild spoken little Amir Abdullah of Transjordania, a contented British puppet whose chief delight is in breeding priceless Arab steeds. Last week the Amir dutifully hastened across the River Jordan by means of Allenby Bridge, successfully dissuaded some 300 of his subjects who had set out minded to wage plunder in Palestine.
Another British puppet, paradoxically more potent than his elder brother Amir Abdullah, is King Feisul of Irak, inventor of a special headdress named after him. Of all the Arab lands in the Near East, melancholy King Feisul's seemed the least perturbed about Jews, though one band of Iraki tribesmen were said to be making their way secretly to Palestine.
London editors thought last week that Arabia was the only really likely kindling place for a Holy War. There tall, sagacious, tortoise-spectacled Ibn Saud is Sultan, and King of the Hejaz to boot. He alone has sufficient prestige to galvanize and weld Moslem tribesmen of the Near East into mass enthusiasm for an Islamic pogrom. Last week despatches from Damascus (French Syria) told that 20,000 Arabs had paraded through the bazars shouting: "Long live the unity of Arab peoples under the Sultanship of Ibn Saud!"
"To ignore these signs," wrote the editor of London's Daily News, "would be to blind ourselves to the existence of combustible elements in the Arab nature, and to the possibility that a senseless and bloody 'Holy War' may emerge from the racial conflict in Palestine."
Egypt. Every afternoon last week fat King Fuad of Egypt took his usual garden ride on one or the other of his two favorite mules. Unperturbed, His Majesty read that Jews in Cairo had set upon and beaten an Arab "nearly to death"—the only racial disturbance reported in his realm.
Solomon's Temple. Many a commentator on the Jew-Arab crisis of last week loosely assumed that the "Wailing Wall," where all the trouble started, is part of the famed Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, built by the Louis XIV of Jewry circa 1000 B.C. and today utterly in ruins though the outlines of the Temple remain. Actually Jews wail for the lost glories of their race at a superimposed and much later wall built by detested King Herod. The lower courses of masonry alone are supposed to contain stones originally part of the Temple.
Sheiks & Strikes
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,752281,00.html
In Jerusalem last week the British Crown tried to prosecute an Arab, potent Sheik Taleb Maraka, for instigating the "Hebron Massacre" of Jews (TIME, Sept. 9) August upon the Bench in beehive wigs and flowing gowns sat Mr. Justice Corrie and Mr. Justice Defreitas. This was going to be an exemplary trial. The Arab prisoner would be grilled by an Arab prosecutor. There were plenty of prosecution witnesses, already lamenting and smiting their breasts in the corridor. With an easy sauntering stride and a smile of contempt for the witnesses Prisoner Sheik Taleb Maraka entered, was escorted to the dock by an armed policeman.
Sixty-six Jews were butchered at Hebron. The Arab prosecutor did not seem to want to probe into that. To simple peasant witnesses he addressed questions remarkably prolix and abstruse, double questions, contradictory questions. Even so the witnesses managed to testify that they had seen Sheik Taleb Maraka publicly inciting Arabs to massacre, shouting that the faithful could settle any debts they might owe to Jews by slaughtering their creditors. One witness who thus testified was Superintendent Cafferata of the local British Police. When the Arab prosecutor sought to question Mr. Cafferata only on irrelevant topics, Mr. Justices Corrie and Defreitas became incensed, ordered another Arab to prosecute for the Crown on the morrow.
"Tell me, Sheik Taleb Maraka." began the second Arab prosecutor, "are you an enemy of the Jews?"
"As a matter of fact," smiled the prisoner blandly, "I am their friend."
"Did you incite the massacre of any Jews?"
"Never!" shouted the Sheik, smacking his fist on the dock. "Never in all my life have I led or addressed a crowd. ... I did not even learn of what happened until I read the police reports."
Exploded Mr. Justice Defreitas: "I refuse to believe that you, as a member of the Arab Executive Committee, did not know what was going on!" "I refuse to believe," coolly observed Sheik Taleb Maraka soon afterward, "that the respectable Moslems of Hebron are capable of committing atrocities."
Since the Crown seemed unable to get an Arab to prosecute and dared not incense Moslems by calling in a Jew, the trial dragged on in farcical doldrums. Meanwhile the most potent Moslem in Palestine, the young and vigorous Grand Mufti Haj Amin El-Husseini, President of the Supreme Moslem Council, ordered a general strike of Arabs, in protest against the British Government's determination to bring to justice suspected authors of the Palestine Massacres (TIME, Sept. 16).
Strikers Spanked.
Among the first and most enthusiastic strikers were Arab schoolboys at Nablus, 30 miles north of Jerusalem. Several were nabbed by Assistant Director of Education Parrel and soundly spanked. Screaming they rushed home to their parents. Within an hour the "General Strike," previously ineffective in Nablus, halted every Arab activity. Strikers militating in numerous Palestine towns and cities provoked demonstrations which British troops were able to keep under control last week, but an ugly situation loomed.
Einstein v. Mufti.
As Jews in foreign lands grew anxious, fearing afresh for their Palestine brethren, the Grand Mufti was attacked from far away Berlin by Israel's aloof delver into relativity riddles, Albert Einstein. Wrote he for the Manchester Guardian, in an effort to arouse Englishmen: "Does public opinion in Great Britain realize that the Grand Mufti in Jerusalem, who is the center of all the trouble and speaks so loudly in the name of all the Moslems, is a young political adventurer not much more, I understand, than 30 years old, who, in 1920, was sentenced to several years' imprisonment for his complicity in the riots then, but was pardoned under the terms of amnesty? The mentality of this man may be gauged from a recent statement he gave to an interviewer, accusing me, of all men, of having demanded the rebuilding of the [Jewish] Temple [of Solomon] on the site of the [Moslem] Mosque of Omar."
Mufti's Demands.
In frequent statements to Jews and others the Grand Mufti has declared that Palestine can only have peace when ruled by a Government responsible to a local Palestine Parliament in which Jews and Arabs would be proportionately represented. This demand could be met by making Palestine a dominion like Canada. But since Palestine Arabs outnumber Palestine Jews five to one, the British Government fears to make an experiment in democracy which would give Palestine a Parliament almost totally Arabian.
Author: RufusG,
Posted: Sat Jun 30, 2007 5:14 pm Post subject: Eye-witness Reports from Pierre van Paassen
Who benefits from the Conflict in Israel ?
The document below gives a first-hand report of some of the events in Palestine early in the last century, with some very perceptive comments.
They come from:
Days of our Years ( by Pierre van Paassen, Hillman-Curl Inc, 1939 )
He was a Dutch Canadian, who lived from 1895-1968. He travelled widely in Europe and North Africa, and was in Palestine many times from 1921 onwards. He met many famous people of the day and wrote about them in newspapers and books. The nearest comparison that I can find today is John Simpson of the BBC.
In the book he describes the Arab up-risings during 1921-1939, some of which are so similar to the events of today
He makes some interesting comments about who was really behind those events.
- Did the British benefit from perpetual conflict between Arab and Jew ?
( maybe the French, Russians & the British still do ! )
It is well worth reading this Chapter before trying to understand if and how the problems in Israel can ever be solved. Here are the titles that I have given to the sections:
0 van Paassen family history in Flanders
1 Return to Palestine 1921-26
2 Visiting the holy places
3 The New Jerusalem
4 The Palestinian Problem
5 Husseini - Grand Mufti of Jerusalem
6 Massacres of 1929
7 British Administration
8 Jewish Settlements
9 Journalist becomes the news
10 Lessons from the sixteenth century
11 A visit to Cairo scholars
12 A view from 1936
13 Who is really causing the trouble ?
CHAPTER EIGHT 347
After Seven Centuries
It was the hour when the waters are asleep. A strip of yellow gold on the edge of the world marked the spot where the sun had fallen off. The flowers had lost their courage with the coming of autumn and the meadows now lay a tarnished green in the fading light of day. The smell of oak and of fallen leaves hung in the air, mingled with the pungent odor of burning peat. Like a wisp of incense a haze had come up from the darkened stream. In tufts of whitish wool it clung to the naked branches of the willow trees. A flock of crows, tracing a wide curve against the fading blue, flapped their way, eerily cawing, from the Forest of the Eight Beatitudes towards their nocturnal home in the stunted village tower. With a nervous flutter of wings they nestled in the sloping louvers of the sound holes. From the chimneys of the straw-thatched hut the smoke rose in thin candle-straight pillars. Hushed in the evening stillness, a windmill traced the sign of the cross over the clustered dwellings at its feet. The silence which follows the "Ave Maria" in the Flemish land brooded over the hamlet of Paeszdaele.
Shadow pockets were deepening from grey to mauve under the caves of the seigneurial mansion when a man, dressed in the somber robe of a penitential friar, bareheaded, with unshod feet and leaning on a heavy cudgel, was seen to make his way slowly between the two rows of poplars which led to the drawbridge of the manor. He paused by the moat, placed his mendicant's bag and his staff on the ground, and, cooping his hands in the form of a trumpet, called out in a voice that reverberated against the battlements: "Deus le veult! Deus le veult! God wills it!"
That call shattered the peace of descending night. The metallic grating of unbarring and heavy wooden doors swinging on rusty
348 DAYS OF OUR YEARS
hinges could be heard on all sides. Yellow-haired peasants, pulling on their sheepskins, tramped out on the frostbitten road, followed by a horde of half-naked children who stared openmouthedly at the unfamiliar sight of a flaming torch moving about on the castle walls. While the figures of helmeted men could be seen busying tbemselves in lowering the bridge, the priestly stranger was wielding his cudgcl against a snarling pack of curs which were attempting to rip his cassock to shreds. With a sound like the swift crackle of flintlocks, the chains of the drawbridge suddenly rattled through their hawsers. A moment later the friar walked through the gate of honor where he was saluted by the armed men of the watch.
An ancient chronicle, written in medieval Latin, and preserved to this day in the library of St. Jerome's of Bruges, affirms that the monk, one Jean d'Hennemont, surnamed the Ass of Balaam, was the bearer of letters-patent from our holy father, the Pope Innocent, and from Baldwin, the Count of Flanders, calling upon his faithful liege, the lord of Paeszdaele, to lend his assistance in clearing a path to the Sepulcher of Jesus Christ, held by the infidel Saracen.
Before greeting his host the papal messenger was asked to sit by the log fire in the low-ceilinged refectory, and there the chronicle relates, partook of "some light refreshment" consisting of "a few egg cakes, a portion of eels stewed in vinegar, a slice of ham on baked sausage, a leg of hare cooked in black sauce, a portion of calf's kidneys, pig knuckles, le cul d'un poulet, a fried woodcock or two, and a pudding," the whole washed down, no doubt, by an equally "light" assortment of Burgundy wines, "famed for their power of reviving drooping spirits." Then Jean d'Hennemont picked up his pilgrim's staff and his sack and stumbled up the stairway to convey the Pope's and the Count's desires to Peter Paesz, lord of the manor. The time was anno Domini 1198.
Peter. Paesz was then in his fifty-ninth year, a man of middle height, with a deep scar across his forehead. A crude drawing of him by an unknown artist still exists in the priory of St. Michael's of Zoutezeele. It depicts him as a man of considerable weight, with a double chin and lively eyes, and holding a beaker in. his right hand. The chronicle holds that he was a knight of great valor, but pious withal, who married three wives in rapid succession and died in the sure hope of the resurrection. He had two sons, Hadriaen and Hugues, the latter a canon of the chapter of Ypres. Hugues must have been somewhat of a scholar, for he advanced the theory, since
AFTER SEVEN CENTURIES 349
grown into popular dogma, that the angels of heaven changed their speech from Hebrew to Flemish after the crucifixion of Our Lord.
The monk's recital of Christendom's woes brought tears to the eyes of the chatelain. Jerusalem, the capital of the Latin Kingdom, suffered under the domination of the Sultan whose horses were trampling the sepulcher of the world's Saviour. The Eastern Emperor, Isaac Angelus, with treasonable design, had allied himself with Saladin, whose aim was "to purge the air of the air breathed by the demons of the Cross." The castles and fortresses erected by earlier Crusaders in Syria and Asia Minor were falling one by one before the savage onslaught of the unbelievers while heaps of bleached bones along the road to the East testified to the sad defeat of the Christian arms. So grievous and desperate indeed was the extent of the disaster that the Pope had caused the words -"from the furor of the heathen, good Lord, deliver us"- to be inserted in the Latin litany. Jean d'Hennemont's appeal, which ended with the divine message he had sounded before the gates of Paeszdaele, left the good seigneur trembling with indignation and sorrow. But it was a promise of forgiveness of sins and eternal salvation, as well as d'Hennemont's alluring description of the beauty of Greek women which decided him to ride forth with his bondsmen and serfs, under the Count of Flanders, to fight for the liberation of the holy places.
The peasants were called in and the glad news of mankind's "new path to heaven" communicated to them. Upon learning that their servitude would end in that hour when they should depart with their master for the Orient, their joy, says the old chronicle, knew no bounds. They danced around the lord of the manor while the women., falling on their knees, kissed the garments of him who had been the harbinger of such good tidings. The bagpipes were brought in, more torches were lit, and fat lumps of meat brought up from the kitchen. Soon the tables were covered with earthen tankards. Tin jugs were filled to the brim, and salvers laden with sides of pork were taken down from the inside of the broad chimney. The pots were set a-boiling until a thick steam of fat enveloped the Virgin Mother whose marble statue, in prayerful attitude, stood still and forgotten upon the mantel shelf. Casks of beer were rolled into the refectory, the dudelsacks started their absonant caterwauling as peasants and seigneur stamped about on the wooden floor bellowing in raucous chorus: "Deus le veult! Deus le veult!"
Towards dawn, when the last girl had been kissed and the seigneur
350 DAYS OF OUR YEARS
of Pacszdaele had been lifted to his couch, the drunken peasants, as the chronicle relates, were pelting Balaam's Ass with chewed-off ribs of beef and smearing his cassock with liver paste and mustard.
In the spring of the year 1199, Peter rode off with his small lifeguard of halberdiers and archers to join similar groups of Crusaders at Liege, whence the pilgrimage to Palestine got under way by summer. Led by Guy de Lusignan, they stormed the walls of Byzantium, planted their standards on the dome of Constantine, locked the reigning prince in a cloister, and proclaimed their own leader-Baldwin-Emperor of Constantinople. Before proceeding southward to Jerusalem they looted the city of Edessa and put the Moslem and Jewish inhabitants to the sword. At one time, it appears, they considered continuing their victorious march to India and Cathay. They spent months in festive deliberation on that project until an epistle from the Pope, reminding them of "their holy task," caused them to. "turn their faces regretfully" towards Jerusalem. But Peter rode back home. The King of France, Philip Augustus, who participated in the Crusade, had secretly returned to Paris, feigning illness, but in reality to seize the Flemish land which was denuded of its defenders.
Two hundred and fifty years later, a descendant of the squire of Paeszdaele, Simon, who had killed the canon of St. Gilles at Ypres in a brawl over cards "in a pothouse by the eastern gate," set out to do penance on the tomb of Our Lord in Jerusalem. He reached Constantinople about Easter, 1453, but was slain in the basilica of Aya Sophia when Mohammed the Great invaded the imperial city, and, wading up to the altar through the blood of the fallen, spat upon the image of the crucified Galilean.
Since that day no member of our family had attempted to reach the Holy City, until in 1925 the New York Evening World sent me to "cover" the Druse revolt in Syria.
Seven centuries had elapsed since Peter set forth from our ancestral home.
AFTER SEVEN CENTURIES 351
1
In a blistering heat on the rocky goat paths between Jaffa and Jerusalem, struggling with his obstinate pack mules, beset by a cloud of venomous mosquitoes, his caravan trailed from afar by a pack of jackals in hourly dread lest his military escort prove inadequate to ward off an attack by bands of robbers whose scouts he could see prowling on the horizon, the Vicomte de Chateaubriand looked upon the dreadful solitude of the Judean hills and noted the following in his diary: "This desert is mute with terror since the Voice of God has reverberated through the waste places. These valleys have been turned into an arid barren plain. Here the wilderness has conquered. Never will this land lift its voice again."
On my first visit to Palestine in 1926 I raced over the splendid asphalt road which links the Mediterranean with Jerusalem, and covered in less than two hours what took Chateaubriand nearly a week of travel. That road was built by Jewish pioneers. It is part of a system of modern highways that cover the Holy Land like a net-all of it the work of the last fifteen years! In the country where Mark Twain saw nothing but sackcloth and ashes, and where in 1907 the Prime Minister of Holland, Dr. Abraham Kuyper wept over the poverty and the godforsaken loneliness of the landscape, there stands today a living monument to the revival of Judaism a land of pleasant gardens interspersed with cities teeming with every branch of modern human endeavor.
The transformation of Palestine is one of the wonders of our age. The all-engulfing desert has been pushed back: the wastelands have been reclaimed, and the sick soil has been nourished back to health. It is a miracle of creative love. For with that rare selfless devotion to which man has risen in great moments of history, bands of Jewish boys and girls from the squalid ghettos of eastern Europe have redeemed for the coming generations of their people what had been lost for centuries. Theirs was essentially a religious zeal. For whatever task renders a man capable of sacrifice, veneration and a pure heart, that is his religion. No immediate prospect of well-being spurred the efforts of the Chalutzim (pioneers). There was nothing to relieve the monotony of the unfamiliar work, no pay day in the offing, no restful comfort at the conclusion of the day's hard toil. They had nothing but the bare earth beneath them and a pitiless sun above their heads. Yet with their bare hands they set about digging up the stones which encumbered the soil. On their frail shoulders they lugged the building materials for the foundations of a new civilization. Because the machinery which would have speeded the sanitation work was lacking, they succumbed by the score in the malarial
352 DAYS OF OUR YEARS
pestholes of the plain of Esdraelon. The flower of European Jewish youth, the intellectuals, the teachers, the idealists who were destined to be the leaders in Israel's renascent national life perished by the hundreds in making the country habitable. But in response to their call the land did lift its voice again.
When I landed, dynamos were zooming their deep basso on the spot where Jonah took ship in Jaffa. An entire city, Tel Aviv, spotless and white, had sprouted from the barren sand dunes to the north. In the seaboard region I walked through an endless array of orange groves whose perfume in springtime mingled with that of the rose fields of Sharon. On every side was heard the clatter of hammers and the grating sound of saws ripping through the board. Factories, buildings, schools and homes were rising from the ground. Everywhere the plow was turning up the fields of festering weeds which had for centuries poisoned the Arab goatherds and sent them to a premature grave. Swamps were being drained. Olive-skinned Jewish boys were dragging baskets of earth up the mountain slopes and restoring the vine terraces and the hanging gardens of Solomon. Motor trucks with building material roared through evangelic Bethany of Martha and Mary. A hydraulic pump plunked out its rhythmic singsong at that ford on the Yarmuk River where, the legend says, the majestic figure of Abraham entered history. There were wheat fields on Armageddon, a dairy farm in the bogs below Gilboa where disaster overtook Saul and Jonathan, prospectors at work in the blood-drenched land of the Philistines, surveyors setting up their instruments in Ramoth Gilead, telephone wires being strung out to Jericho, a hydroelectric station rearing its steel towers where the Baptist met Jesus. There was talk of a real-estate boom in Sodom. Costly machinery was being installed on the shores of the Dead Sea to extract the sixteen-billion-dollar treasure of asbestos in the accursed lake.
That was the Palestine I saw. . . .
Travel in the Holy Land does not mean the same thing to everybody. In our time, when man has lost so much of what once gave his life direction and filled it with meaning and content, when lie has allowed the struggle of life to replace the spiritual traditions that once enveloped him with their beneficent warmth with a set of exterior occupations, so that lie has become as restless as a hunted animal, seeking happiness everywhere, yet finding it nowhere, the prey of violently changing moods, sudden unreasoning fears and
AFTER SEVEN CENTURIES 353
of a desperate loneliness in a universe he no longer understands, in such times it is difficult, if not impossible, to feel that there is a tie which hinds all of us Westerners to that little notch of land on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean.
Yet, it was in this insignificant country, from the heart of an insignificant tribe of nomads, that there sprang the impulse which gave humanity a new hope and a new vision, annihilating the ancients' gruesome wheel of fate and put in its place the conception of the oneness, tile holiness and the absoluteness of God, which is the final condition of the oneness of man and the vital source of history wherein grows the root of freedom and humanity.
It was not Palestine's natural beauty which attracted me: the amazing white light of the sun, the magic nights when the stars swayed to and fro like lightships dancing on the swell of a darkened sea and heaven seemed so near that you felt like reaching out and touching it with your fingers. It was the mystery of it all-the mystery of Israel, the mystery of that people whose history is a series of gesta Dei per Hebraeos: ". . . a people," as Denis de Rougemont said, "like no other in that it has sacrificed philosophy, fine arts, science, industry, all culture, in fact, for the accomplishments of one thing, a spiritual vocation!"
Also present in Palestine were those intangibles which enkindle the "spiritual sensibility" of a Protestant even more than his familiarity with the place names, the legends and the mythology of the Old Testament which Ramuz called the real antiquity of the peoples of Protestant Europe; I mean the Calvinist tradition of my fathers who considered themselves the spiritual kinsmen of Israel, in that their church, like the people of the Jews, was a Congregation of the Living God, concerned only with the highest good, a search for the supreme sense of life, "predestined to persecution and revilement because of its testimony of the coming Kingdom in an unbelieving and unregenerate world."
If Palestine is the Jews' national home, it is my spiritual home. I could well understand Allenby's gesture in 1917 when he and his officers walked bareheaded through the gates of Jerusalem. . . .
The Alps are undoubtedly more impressive than Hermon and the Lebanon. The Jordan cannot be compared with the majesty of the Danube, the Mississippi, or the Rhine. By the side of Baalbek and the Acropolis, the Holy Land's ruins are lowly heaps of dust. I met tourists, among them Jews, to whom a visit to Palestine seemed a
354 DAYS OF OUR YEARS
waste of time and money. They found that there was little to please the eye. And yet -
"Rome,' said Kuyper, one of the last great Calvinists, "in all its glory cannot compare to the world-historical significance of Jerusalem. Babylon may have searched the heavens, Athens given man his highest literary and esthetic values-Jerusalem was and remains the city of cities, the Holy City, the heart and soul of humanity. Deeper than any other motif, that of religion has been woven into the texture of mankind's evolution."
That motif came from Jerusalem!
2
I went the rounds of the holy places like any other pilgrim. Their gaudiness dismayed me. The commercialization of sacred shrines of dubious authenticity made me think of Luther's denunciation of Johann Tetzel. A Franciscan monk led me, half-a-dollar taper in hand, up a stairway in the basilica of the Tomb and said we stood on Calvary. I saw a goat nibbling grass next to the chapel erected on the spot where once, my guide explained, stood the veritable cross. An Abyssinian priest, surprised in his morning ablutions on the roof, grinned in a friendly fashion and dressed hastily to collect a few coppers.
Through the thorns and weeds of Gethsemane's garden, I waded to a cave said to be "the real grave" prepared by Joseph of Arimathea. I put my hand, for half a shilling, on an imprint in a wall on the Via Dolorosa where Christ supported himself on the way to Golgotha. I saw Greek and Latin monks chase each other around with brooms in the holiest shrine of Christendom. I sat with a local English official who explained his presence in the basilica as the end of a search for the coolest place in town; I attended a Mass celebrated by the Latin Patriarch and heard the Greek clergy, before the Patriarch had intoned the "Ite, missa est," start a racket with bells, and gongs because the Latin service had that day impinged for half a minute on the time allotted the Eastern rite. I stuck it out to the bitter end and viewed the basin "made in Germany," in which Jesus was said to have washed the feet of his disciples at the Last Supper; I beheld the saddle-yes, the saddle-on which He rode into Jerusalem
AFTER SEVEN CENTURIES 355
on Palm Sunday, and I came away with the coin (sold to me by a sly Arab for ten piasters) lost by the woman in the parable. When I scraped the dirt off it later, I saw the rubicund effigy of King Carlos of Portugal and the date 1898!
That was the Old City, the Jerusalem of the past, of moldering ruins and sacred sites, of fakirs and beggars, pilgrims and tourists, crumbling synagogues and silent monasteries, of the Wailing Wall and the multitudinous bazaars. There, in a perpetual twilight, in the stables of Solomon," brown men and black men, men with green turbans and dirty headcloths, men with red fezzes and men with fuzzy bonnets of rabbitskin-all push and stumble their way forward, over the slippery cobblestones in a labyrinthine maze of alleys, rubbing elbows with English soldiers in tropical uniform, Greek priests with parasols and cylindrical hats, Protestant pastors with Roman collars, Dominican monks with Bombay hats, veiled women in soiled clothes that drag in the filth, half-naked camel drivers Bedouin peasants, Chasidic rabbis, Mohammedan ulemas, blind mendicants rattling tin cups, ice-cream vendors rattling brass cups, lemonade merchants jingling silver bells, hashish peddlers, Levantine guides, Russian nuns, Syrian money-changers, Ethiopian manuscript writers, Turkish dragomans, Arabian sheiks, Greek tourist agents, Armenian prelates and Egyptians porters.
Ever second hole in the wall is a refreshment parlor with a gramaphone going full blast. From an early hour the bazaar roars with the shouting and bellowing of merchants, hucksters and beggars. Each guild or confraternity has its own distinctive call. A camel driver's demand for passage is an unearthly screeching yell, a blind man announces his approach with the monotonous singsong call of the hoot owl, while the porters, bent low under staggering loads emit growls like wild beasts if they do not simply rely on bumping their way through. Every transaction before the vegetable stalls makes you think of preliminary sparring in a prize fight. Instead of the American rule that the customer is always right, the bazaar's fundamental principle seems to require a demonstration of blazing enmity towards a prospective client. During the first dickerings in a business transaction the parties involved eye each other through narrow slits of suspicion. Soon their voices rise to a crescendo, hands begin to fly out, and the faces of the customers and salesmen become red and swollen with the heat of an argument carried on in hoarse guttural expletives. The antagonists look each other straight in the
356 DAYS OF OUR YEARS
eye, fists are clenched, the veins in their necks protrude, their bodies grow taut with the pent-up tension of boiling kettles. You pause in expectation of the first blow. They are almost spitting into each other's faces. Then with a roar both burst into laughter. Half a minute later the debate resumes.
Of cleanliness there is not a trace: the blood of slaughtered animals gushes into the streets; a million flies zoom over the heaps of refuse and offal into which little brown children dig for overripe figs or cucumbers. Here is a donkey taking advantage of a traffic jam to relieve itself. The urine spatters over a row of crackling flat loaves of bread that a baker's assistant has spread out on the edge of the roadway to cool off. The baker, viewing the scene from his cellar through an opening just level with the street, emits a stream of vile names addressed at the mother of the donkey's owner. This gentleman, until then calmly sucking a pomegranate, suddenly purses his lips, spits out the pips, and hits the baker smack in the eye. A gale of laughter greets this performance. Business is suspended. There are explanations to passers-by who have missed the show. A policeman elbows his way through the crowd and traffic begins to move again. Life goes on: "Moslem, Believers, beloved of Allah, take a look at these gifts from God. They can be had for the asking. Brighten the eyes of your spouses. Take a pound of grapes from my stores! "
Under the high vault of the Jaffa Gate, a coal-black storyteller hunches down, puts his begging bowl in front of him on the flagstones and waits for some customers to collect. Presently a group of strolling Bedouins, on a visit to Jerusalem, clink their coins in the box and squat down in a semicircle around the Nubian. He begins talking to them in a whisper so that they have to bend their heads forward to catch his words. The listeners' mouths are agape. He is making curves with his hands, casts his eyes to heaven, licks his lips with an. enormous blood-red tongue and places his long fingertips on his breasts. The audience grins obscenely and huddles closer in order to miss not a word of tile delectable yarn. That story will be retold tonight in the villages of the plain. Now the minstrel's features betray a growing anxiety. Terror leaps into his eyes. He cowers and trembles and his listeners bite their fingernails in bated suspense. Something gruesome must be happening to the houri he has just described so alluringly. The climax is coming. The Bedouins, their faces contorted with apprehension and fear, lean over to within a few
AFTER SEVEN CENTURIES 357
inches of the Nubian's face. At this moment, letting his eyes wander over the environment, he catches sight of me watching the scene a few paces away. He gives me a colossal wink and holds out the collection box with a smile which reveals a row of marvelous teeth. A policeman ambles up and, swinging his club in a casual metropolitan manner shoos audience and storyteller out of the way of pedestrian traffic.
On a quiet side street men and women are squatting in a circle to watch a cockfight. They laugh like happy children as one rooster picks out his opponent's left eye. The spectacle is interrupted by the arrival of an individual who is rolling over the ground. A boy calls out that we are in the presence of a holy man. He expects to roll all the way to Mecca. The holy roller bellows at the top of his voice that Allah is God and Mohammed God's prophet. He has accumulated so much dirt on his garment that he looks like an animated bale of dung. His wife brings up the rear guard, clinking the collection box and toting a sleeping baby on her back. The child is almost hidden under a quivering mass of verdigris-flies!
A sheik stands before a public letter writer's booth and watches intently while the scribe traces the flowering Arabic script from right to left across a piece of cheap paper. The cackle of quarrelling women before a silversmith's shop across the street disturbs this primitive idyl. The hags take down their veils and reveal their tattooed and toothless faces. A crowd of yokels gathers and egg the women on to fight; the silversmith cautiously puts up the shutters of his shop. When the females tear each other's clothes, and one of them bleeds from a scratch over her cheek, the sheik interrupts his dictation and stops the fight by walking over and kicking both women to the ground.
Just before sunset, when the muezzins sing out their ululating call to prayer, the bazaar suddenly grows silent as a tomb. In less than an hour all activity ceases, the shops are made invisible by the rows of shutters, and the only sound in the night is the echo of the slow step of the military watchmen in the vaulted passages. But before dawn the pious Jews are up. Long-caftaned shapes on slippered feet can be seen flitting ghostlike through the semiobscurity. The muffled sound of fists pounding on doors and shuttered windows can be heard: the call to prayer in the synagogue or before the Wailing Wall: "Steht auf fuer Shacharis!"
358 DAYS OF OUR YEARS
3
The new Jerusalem lies outside the walls. Spread out over a dozen hills, it has grown far beyond the limits of the city of both the Solomonian or the Hlerodian epoch. Brand-new suburbs encompass it. These are inhabited b the Jewish intelligentsia, the modern businessmen and officialdom. Jaffa Road, with its European cafe's, restaurants, movies, concert halls, bookshops, banking houses, art exhibits and shops, is the central artery where a cosmopolitan night life is developing. In daytime this district is teeming with activity. There the Occident is pushing the East out of the way. With the exception of Moscow, there was perhaps not a single spot in all of Europe where so much building was going on in 1926 as in Jerusalem and in the booming coast cities of Tel Aviv and Haifa on the Mediterranean shore. A distinctive Hebraic style of architecture had not yet made its appearance. The influence of Le Corbusier and Berlage was predominant in the suburbs, while in the more elaborate edifices variations of all the European and Near Eastern architectural styles could be detected. If this was to be regretted, one had to take into consideration that the new Palestine was still in the embryonic stage. There were more pressing problems than esthetics. Beautification was bound to follow as soon as life could be organized on a permanent basis, and the emerging Hebraic civilization put its stamp on every manifestation of life.
Building, making room, redeeming the soil, creating possibilities for the steady flow of newcomers, setting up new industries-these were the major objectives when first I visited the land in 1926. It was an amazing spectacle: tens of thousands of Jews building roads, mixing concrete, plowing the fields, milking cows, laying bricks, digging wells, driving trucks, raising chickens and livestock, wielding hammer and saw and spade and ax in a manner and with a determination of which the Western world had perhaps not thought them capable. A Turkish officer whom I encountered one day in Cook's office in Jerusalem and who had resided in the Holy Land before Allenby's conquest, in speaking of the changing scene, remarked that after an absence of only nine years he could not believe his own
AFTER SEVEN CENTURIES 359
eyes. "It is like a dream," he told me. I would not have thought it possible."
Every steamer was bringing new immigrants. The population of the city of Tel. Aviv had jumped to eighty thousand. One of the most brilliant theatrical companies in the world, the Habima, had transferred its home from Moscow to Tel Aviv. Houses could not be built fast enough to accommodate the new arrivals. Foreign money was being invested. Banks opened their doors. New agricultural settlements were started every month. Book publishing houses began to make their appearance. The country had half a dozen excellent newspapers. The number of schools had almost doubled every year since the beginning of the Zionist era.
The Jews were building hospitals and clinics. They were laying out new roads, exploring the waste places in the infernal heat south of the Dead Sea, harnessing the River Jordan with an ingenious hydroelectric system. The plain of Sharon was slowly being filled with orange groves and the immense valley of the Emek, which a few years before had been a deathtrap for the Arab tribes, was beginning to be filled with prosperous agricultural colonies. Forests were planted to stop soil erosion. Plans were being laid to make Haifa the largest port in the eastern Mediterranean. Work had been started on the pipe line from Mosul. . . .
The wandering Jew seemed to have reached the end of his age-long journey. He was building himself a home. The Judean night was filled with the song of liberation. Lovers whispered in the language of Amos on the darkened shore of the Old World Sea.
Then came disaster!
4
The general atmosphere here in Jerusalem is reminiscent of 1914 behind the lines in the cities of France and Belgium, I cabled to The Evening World a few days after my return to Jerusalem, three years later, in August, 1929. The school buildings are crowded with refugees from the danger areas and the hospitals filled with wounded. Small parties of prisoners are dribbling in under heavy escort. Fast observation planes and slow-moving bombers of the Royal Air Force are circling over the city, drowning out the incredible ca-
360 DAYS OF OUR YEARS
cophony of the bazaar. Infantry detachments are constantly patrolling the streets or marching out to relieve military outposts in the country districts. Sentinels with bayonets are guarding the approaches to the holy places: the Wailing Wall, the mosque of Omar and the Sepulcher basilica. English officers posted on David's Tower turn their telescopes on the crowd streaming in and out of Jaffa Gate. The walls are plastered with proclamations as in the northern towns of France during an enemy drive. In the evening the Angelus rings in the curfew. After this hour the city is as dead and deserted as a graveyard. But from the roof of the Hotel Allenby we can see the flames of burning villages in the night.
Upon receipt of Mr. Vincent Sheean's dispatch from Jerusalem, wherein a minor disturbance at the Wailing Wall was attributed to the provocative attitude of young "Jewish Fascists," the publisher of my paper, no doubt perturbed by the storm of indignation the story produced in American Jewish circles, instructed me to proceed posthaste from Paris to Palestine and investigate. The New York- Jewish community, which had for years been thoroughly informed on day-by-day events in the Holy Land by a corps of resident correspondents representing the three great Yiddish dailies, unanimously rejected Mr. Sheean's interpretation that a parade by a troop of Jewish boy scouts in the vicinity of the Wailing Wall had been responsible for the outbreak of the disturbances. That incident, these journals argued (and they were subsequently proved correct), had been a mere subterfuge on which the Arabs had seized to bring their long-smoldering revolt to a head. In fact, no person even superficially acquainted with Jewish aims in the Holy Land and with the eminently humane record the Jews had established in their dealings with the Arabs, could possibly believe that the Palestinian Jews in one moment deliberately destroyed what they had striven for long years to establish: a close collaboration with the Arab population as the sole basis for a successful restoration of the Jewish land.
Those who remembered what had happened eight years earlier realized at once that the party of Arab landlords, headed by the Mufti of Jerusalem who had been sentenced to ten years of labor in 1921 for incitement to riot and soon thereafter amnestied by a Jewish High Commissioner, had returned to the attack. The flag-waving incident at the Wall had been as good a device as any to throw sand in the eyes of public opinion. Clever propagandists easily - and did - magnify this intrinsically insignificant demonstra-
AFTER SEVEN CENTURIES 361
tion on the part of children into a challenge of Jewish chauvinists. The Mufti had carefully prepared the stage for what was to follow: early in the upheaval of 1929, foreign public opinion was provided with a false premise on which to judge later developments.
The riots of 1921 had given a first intimation that certain influential Palestinian Arabs were not in agreement with King Feisal of Iraq, who, as chief spokesman of the Arabic peoples at the Peace Conference in Paris, had expressed his entire satisfaction with the international plan to set aside Palestine as a National Home for the Jewish people. Feisal, who was unquestionably the ablest of the Arab chiefs, had welcomed the Jew back to the Near East, convinced that his return would prove a real blessing to the Arabs. Scarcely had Feisal spoken when the Palestinian Arabs rioted. However, that was nine years ago, in 1929. Time, the great healer, had produced a general prosperity in the country, and the oppositional elements to Jewish colonization were thought to have dwindled to an insignificant proportion. The Arab masses were thought to be reconciled to the Jew who had actually proved their benefactor. However, the year 1929 was to demonstrate that this sanguine expectation was ill-founded. The Arab landlord class reasserted its stranglehold on the Arab masses and launched them in a bloody assault against the Jewish community. In the late summer of that year, while delegates to the Zionist World Congress in Zurich were singing for joy when an influential section of non-Zionist Jewry decided to join in the building of the National Home, the Mufti of Jerusalem tried to drown the hopeful beginnings of the great Jewish experiment in a sea of blood.
Why were these bloody outbreaks against the Jews in Palestine occurring at almost regular intervals? Who was the Mufti? Why did England permit' this upstart madman, who was a government officeholder, to wreck a scheme that England had promised to bring to a successful issue? Were the Zionists trying to force something down the Arab's throat? Was the Jew pushing the Arab off the land? And if so, was the British overlord permitting that injustice to be perpetrated on the original inhabitants of the country, the people whose civic and religious rights he was pledged to protect under the very terms of the Balfour Declaration? What role was England playing in Palestine? And finally, was British power, which holds millions in India within bounds of law and order, insufficient to cope with a few thousand rioting Arabs in Palestine?
362 DAYS OF OUR YEARS
I had been sent to investigate these questions in 1929. I admit that I was sympathetic to the aims of the Jewish national movement of which the rebuilding of Palestine is the central motif. The idea of Palestine's redemption seemed a fascinating adventure to me. To behold the land of Jesus rise again from the dust was something to which I looked forward with anticipation. In order to wrest this land from the hands of the Moslem, all Christendom had once faced East. Of course, I was not looking forward to a new Crusade. I entertained no feeling of antipathy towards the Arabs. On the contrary, I commiserated deeply with their hard lot under Turkish domination and under a rapacious landlord class of feudal nobles. But I agreed with Lord Cecil, Smuts, and Lloyd George that Palestine's liberation from the Turkish yoke was one of the few really worthwhile things born out of the Great War. As the son of a Bible people, I looked forward with lively anticipation towards the fulfillment of the age-old dream of the Jewish people. But I was unwilling that the Hebraic Renaissance should come about at the expense of the Palestinian Arabs. If Jewish nationalism should have attempted to grow strong by discriminating against the Arabs, I would have been willing to champion the cause of the Arabs.
It will perhaps be argued that the objectivity of my approach to the Palestinian problem was vitiated by a pre-existent sympathy with the aims of the Jewish national movement. The Arab leaders took this view at once when they became aware of the nature of my published observations in the American press. The Mufti of Jerusalem led off with a vehement denunciation in the Arabic newspapers of Palestine, Syria and Egypt. I was called "a hireling of the Jews who had been sent to concoct anti-Arabic propaganda." The press campaign for my expulsion from the Holy Land was too clearly an attempt to divert public attention from, the implications of the murderous assault upon peaceful Jewish settlements to have merited a refutation. Not my journalistic activity in the Holy Land, but, rather, the Mufti's personal share of responsibility in the massacre was one of the things that required investigation. I would therefore not have paid the slightest notice to that personage's verbal fulminations, considering that I had merely done my duty in pointing to him, as the evil puppeteer in the bloody disturbance, if it were not that I began to receive telephone calls and anonymous letters threatening me with violence and even death. They were
AFTER SEVEN CENTURIES 363
not idle threats either. On two occasions I was fired on by Arab snipers. I owed my life to the presence of mind of my friend, Captain Marek Schwartz, and his chauffeur Menachem Katan, who had managed to circumvent one ambush which had been prepared in the neighborhood of Lifta and another one near Bethlehem. On both occasions we had come safely through the shower of bullets that beat down on our car. But when I reported the second attack to the commander of the British police post in Hebron, this gentleman, a certain Captain Saunders, remarked: "I should think that half the fun of being a journalist is to go about unarmed and still come through these scrapes unscathed. Moreover," he added, "why do these things happen to you? I have received no complaints from your colleagues of the press in Jerusalem."
Upon my return to Jerusalem that day something flew past my head as I was about to enter the hotel. I saw a dagger quivering in the doorpost. Had it not been that some boys of the Haganah, the Jewish Self-Defense Corps, voluntarily constituted themselves into a bodyguard, the intimation of the Palestine government (in the latter part of September) that my further presence in Palestine was undesirable would, I feel, have been quite unnecessary.
I believe my offense was that I took nothing for granted. I did not depend on press handouts from either the Jewish or the Arabic propaganda bureaus. I questioned everybody, from the Mufti down to the most destitute Arabic peasants in the country and the murderous hooligans in the jails of Hebron and Jerusalem who had been caught, their blood-dripping knives in hand. Only when I refused to accept the explanations of a "spontaneous" uprising against the Jews, with which the Mufti and his agents and spokesmen sought to impress foreign correspondents, in several instances quite successfully, did the Mufti denounce me as a hireling of the Jews and did I become persona, non grata at Government House. The coincidence was significant!
5
Ai Hameen el Husseini, "Grand" Mufti of Jerusalem proved to be an amiable young man with a silken red beard, a disarming smile and big blue saucer-eyes. Ein gemütlicher Viennese one might have
364 DAYS OF OUR YEARS
said, had he been dressed in a frock coat with striped trousers. Only he was not attired in the European style. He wore a gown of dark red silk and on his head a white cloth wrapped around a green fez, in token of an accomplished pilgrimage to Mecca. His strikingly Nordic features clothed in that Oriental costume made him look like a European dressed up for a masquerade ball. I had waited for ten minutes in an antechamber where a mixed crowd of ulemas, eunuchs, beggars and bodyguards was posted to impress the stranger with the importance of the man who was about to receive me in audience. Before being ushered into a high-ceilinged chamber overlooking the gardens of the mosque of Omar, I had also been prompted to address the "Grand" Mufti with the title of Eminence. The advice came from Jamal el Husseini, the "Grand" Mufti's cousin and chief secretary. Once in the great man's presence, I was informed by Jamal that His Eminence was a direct lineal descendant of Mohammed's only daughter, Fatima, and a prospective candidate for the office of Khalif-ul-Islam. When I opened my eyes rather incredulously at this startling announcement, the secretary went on to say that it was generally recognized in the Mohammedan world that since the apostasy of Kemal Pasha and his deposition of the Turkish Sultan, the office of supreme spiritual head of Islam should be laid in religion's second holy city: Jerusalem. And who could be more suitable for the position than - ? He bowed in the direction of his smiling cousin. I also bowed. I could see Ai Hameen liked the idea tremendously.
"But," I asked naively, "isn't His Majesty Ibn Saud of the Wahabites also a candidate?"
The King of the Hejaz was too much of a sectarian. He was not a man of the world but a regional puritan reformer, a man who did not have a sufficiently catholic view of Islam. Moreover, Ibn Saud was already Sherif of Mecca.
"But that is neither here nor there," the Mufti interrupted in a pompous Levantine French. He wanted to know where 1 was staying. He hoped that I had found comfortable quarters, for my stay in the Holy Land, he thought, was going to be a long one. We were in for quite a spell of restlessness-in fact, the disturbances, he brusquely announced, would not terminate till both the Jews and the English had evacuated Palestine. When 1 said that I was stopping at the Hotel Allenby, the two cousins threw up their hands, in consternation: "What, in a Jewish hotel? In that breeding nest of anti-
AFTER SEVEN CENTURIES 365
Arabic intrigue?" I told him that all the correspondents I knew were staying there and that we had had the Acting High Commissioner for dinner on the previous evening.
"Incredible!" came the reply.
"What seems more incredible to me." I said, "is that Your Eminence should think that the English are ever going to go home or that the Zionists will give up their plan for redeeming the land of Israel."
"There will be no peace in this country until they go," declared the Mufti. In the English we recognize our real enemies. It is the British government and not the Jews who have foisted the scandalous Balfour Declaration on us. It is Ramsay MacDonald who has misrepresented the situation in this Holy Land in his book Palestine. We have clearly shown the world our attitude in this issue and we are determined to fight it out to the end," he added. "The British will have to put a soldier with a bayonet in front of every Jewish home if they want peace without a wholesale exodus of the Jews. Our people are at the end of their patience. They cannot bear the sight of the Jews any longer."
"The outbreaks are to be taken then as an organized attempt on the part of the Arabs, under the leadership of Your Eminence, to thwart the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine?" I asked.
Hameen was on the point of replying to this question, when Jamal stayed him. The two cousins exchanged a few remarks in Arabic. At the end of their consultation Jamal informed me that His Eminence was going to furnish me with a written declaration at the close of the audience. I was now asked to honor him by accepting a cup of coffee.
The "Grand" Mufti was toying with a gold box of cigarettes. He eyed me from the side, but when I turned my head and looked him in the face he smiled-the same candid baby smile he had worn when I entered. He asked me to step over to the open window to take a look at the garden while a black servant in a white gown arranged the trays on the low table of carved ivory. . . .
The whole marvelous scene lay at my feet. In the clear light the immense garden seemed almost unreal, a frame on which God had embroidered the world. Ulemas were strolling around in the poplar lanes with their disciples or reposed in little groups in the shade of the palms. Believers were washing their hands and feet at the
366 DAYS OF OUR YEARS
fountains. The sun had imposed a golden luster on the ocher façades of the kiosks. Above the treetops, against the incense blue of the Judean hills, I could see the gleaming porcelain dome of the great Byzantine mosque with its challenging inscription: "Remember, Moslems, God has no son!"
"That is the sanctuary," said the "Grand" Mufti at my elbow, "the Jews want to tear down. Here they plan to rebuild the Temple' of Solomon."
"Do they?" I asked in-surprise. "I have never heard of that."
"Oh, but that is common knowledge," His Eminence nodded, and stepping over to a small Louis XVI secrétaire, he drew out a sheet of paper and read: "'Lord Melchett declared that he will consecrate the remainder of his life to rebuild the Jewish Temple.' And here is something else," added the "Grand" Mufti: 'Professor Einstein believes that Palestine without the Temple is to the Jews like a body without a head.' Do you see the real aims of the Jews? They want to destroy this mosque."
"I do not think so," I retorted. "That is really not the inference I would draw from those remarks. Lord Melchett and Professor Einstein's reference to a temple are most probably to be taken in an allegorical sense. They hope that the new social order that the Jews plan to institute here will be a temple of humanity, a model of justice in human relationships. I cannot see a man like Dr. Einstein advocating a restoration of the ancient sacrificial ceremonies with oxen and bullocks slaughtered, and all the rest of the primitive symbolism. The Jews have outgrown that bloody business centuries ago.
"Have they?" exclaimed His Eminence in turn. "Then read this." He handed me another clipping, this time an excerpt from an article by Professor Joseph Klausner. The words to which he drew my attention were the following: "We (the Jews) are not different in that respect. When you puncture a Jew's skin, blood issues. . - "
"You see," exclaimed the "Grand" Mufti triumphantly, "it is blood they want. The Jews are always thirsting for blood. Their whole history is soaked in blood."
I looked at the man in astonishment. Was he serious or did he think I was a fool? The Jews thirsting for blood! It was he, the Mufti, who had just been wallowing in Jewish blood. That was a little too much. I almost lost my composure. Jamal noticed my indignation. "Lest an erroneous interpretation be placed on His
AFTER SEVEN CENTURIES 367
Eminence's words, we would prefer you to be guided only by what is in the written declaration we will give you upon leaving," he said.
"What His Eminence says here is not for publication then?
"It is merely supplementary. His fundamental thoughts are outlined in the document you will receive."
His fundamental thoughts: All the trouble started at Zurich, where the Jews held a conference in August. There the rich Jews of America promised to support the rebuilding of the Jewish National home. This announcement had made the Jews in Palestine so arrogant that they thought they could start expelling the Arabs. The government of Palestine has formally acknowledged that the Arabs were provoked and that their cause was just.
"Please tell me, " resumed the "Grand" Mufti, when we had taken our seats again and he had lit a fresh cigaret, what is the general impression in the world on the present deplorable situation in Palestine? What is your personal view? You have been in Palestine before; I understand you live in Paris. Surely, you have formed an opinion? Who is held responsible for these horrible outbreaks? The French people do understand, I trust!
"It is my personal opinion," I said, "that these riots were an attempt to strike terror in the hearts of the Zionists at a moment when they had secured the co-operation of an influential section of Jewry to speed up Palestine's industrial and agricultural development. This bloodshed was intended to paralyze the process of building a Jewish National Home. Am I right?"
The Mufti did not reply. "Continuez, je vous prie," he said.
"As to the responsibility," I continued, "for what Your Eminence calls 'these horrible outbreaks,' public opinion in France and in America, I am sorry to say, points directly to yourself. And not only in those distant countries; the most influential newspaper in Egypt, La Bourse Egyptienne, in one of its latest issues to arrive here in Jerusalem, declares that "the murder of the Palestine Jews is an echo of the Mufti's inflammatory exhortations in the mosque."
At these words the grandson of the Prophet jumped up from the divan, threw his cigaret away, and quickly walked towards me, his eyes blazing with anger. Jamal casually uncovered his belt so that two silver-handled daggers came into view. The Mufti was striding up and down the room with quick nervous steps. His fury made him gnash his teeth.
368 DAYS OF OUR YEARS
"Your Eminence asked me a question," I said. "I answered truthfully. Why grow angry? I came here to find out to what extent the foreign public opinion is in error."
His Eminence calmed down at once. He lit a new cigaret. "Look at these hands," he said dramatically, stretching out his rose-perfumed palms, "There is no blood on these hands. I declare before God that I have no share in the shedding of Jewish blood. Moreover," he went on, "it is not true that foreign public opinion favors the Jews. We have distinct evidence to the contrary. We have telegrams from Moscow upholding our stand. Only this morning we had a wire from Henri Barbusse, president of the Anti-imperialist League in Paris, assuring us of the sympathy of the members of his organization in our struggle against the Balfour Declaration and Jewish usurpation. Why," he went on, "the whole Moslem world is solidly behind the Arab people of Palestine. Mass demonstrations of protest are held every day in the large Egyptian cities. I have a telegraphic offer from His Majesty, King Ibn Saud of the Hejaz, to send an army of a hundred thousand men across Trans-Jordan to chase the Jews out of Palestine.
"However, we do not need the King's aid," the Mufti went on. "We will win by means of an economic boycott. The Jewish industries in Palestine cannot exist without the market of the surrounding Arabic countries. We have proclaimed a world boycott against Jewish goods. That boycott is growing tighter every day. We will not rest till the Jewish industries are broken and the English, in pity, take their Jewish protégés away oil their battleships.
It is a horrible shame to put the responsibility of these riots at the feet of the Arabs. It is a crime. A dastardly ignominy. The Arab is a kind and loyal creature. The Jews, fortunately, cannot easily forget what Colonel Lawrence has said of the Arabs. We are not murderers or fiends, I would have you understand. Why do you say Arabs are responsible for this slaughter?"
"Did those Jewish women and children and old men in Hebron and Lifta and Safed commit suicide?" I asked.
"No," snapped the Mufti, "we were provoked. We were challenged in our holiest possessions. The Hebron Arabs learned that the Jews had decided to drive them out, to push them into the sea. The Jews are stealing our land. They want everything we have." The Mufti broke down and buried his head in his hands. "My
AFTER SEVEN CENTURIES 369
country is being ruined by the Jews," he turned up a dramatically tearful face. "My country, Palestine, just when we had shaken off the Turkish yoke and turned up the road of freedom!"
"The Turkish yoke? " I asked. "Did Your Eminence not serve as a volunteer in the Turkish army?"
At this question the Mufti looked straight at his cousin, said something in Arabic, and left the room.
"Could I see the telegram from Barbusse and from King Ibn Saud? " I asked Jamal.
"Copies will be attached to the document you will find at your hotel later in the day." he replied.
"One more question please," I said, turning to Jamal: "On that fateful Friday in August, when the rioting broke out in Jerusalem after the morning service in the mosque, where was His Eminence?"
'He was in Amman [capital of Trans-Jordan]. Why do you ask?"
"The Egyptian press avers that His Eminence applied for a visa to go to Syria to escape a possible accusation that his sermon that morning had incited the Moslems to draw the sword, but that he was refused by the French authorities."
"His Eminence was in Amman, I tell you. Why do you pay attention to the gossip column in an Egyptian newspaper? I thought you had come to find out the truth."
"Quite." I said, "that is what I have come for; but it is true, is it not, that a large number of out-of-town Moslems attended the service in the mosque that morning?"
"There were some, no doubt!"
"Peasants from the Mufti's family estates?"
'I cannot tell. Why do you ask?"
'I ask because the sentence of seven years at hard labor which the government of Palestine imposed upon His Eminence in 1920 was to punish him for a previous seditious sermon in which he called upon village leaders to bring their men into Jerusalem to exterminate the Jews."
"His Eminence never was in prison!"
'I know that: he fled to Damascus. It was Sir Herbert Samuel who amnestied him two years later."
"You ought to be careful," warned Jamal, as I went out, "that you do not get poisoned in that Jewish hotel."
"Or shot from ambush on the road to Bethlehem?" I retorted.
370 DAYS OF OUR YEARS
6
Falsified photographs showing the Omar mosque 'Of Jerusalem in ruins, with an inscription that the edifice had been bombed by the Zionists, were handed out to the Arabs of Hebron as they were leaving their place of worship on Friday evening, August the twenty third. A Jew passing by on his way to the synagogue was stabbed to death. When he learned of the murder, Rabbi Slonim, a man born and bred in the city and a friend of the Arab notables, notified the British police commander that the Arabs seemed to be strangely excited. He was told to mind his own business. An hour later the synagogue was attacked by a mob, and the Jews at prayer were slaughtered. On the Saturday morning following, the Yeshiva or theological seminary, which stands away from the center of the town on the road to Jerusalem, was put to the sack, and the students were slain. A delegation of Jewish citizens thereupon set out to visit the police station, but was met by the lynchers. The Jews returned and took refuge in the house of Rabbi Slonim where they, remained until evening, when the mob appeared before the door. Unable to batter it down, the Arabs climbed up the trees at the rear of the house and, dropping onto the balcony, entered through the windows on the first floor.
Mounted police-Arab troopers in the service of the government had appeared outside by this time, and some of the Jews ran down the stairs of Slonim's house and out into the roadway. They implored the policemen to dismount and protect their friends and relatives inside the house and clung around the necks of the horses. From, the upper windows came the terrifying screams of the old people, but the police galloped off, leaving the boys in the road to be cut down by Arabs arriving from all sides for the orgy of blood.
What occurred in the upper chambers of Slonim's house could be seen when we found the twelve-foot-high ceiling splashed with blood. Tile rooms looked like a slaughterhouse. When I visited the place in the company of Captain Marek Schwartz, a former Austrian artillery officer, Mr. Abraham Goldberg of New York, and Mr. Ernst Davies, correspondent of the old Berliner Tageblatt, the blood
AFTER SEVEN CENTURIES 371
stood in a huge pool on the slightly sagging stone floor of the house. Clocks crockery, tables and windows had been smashed to smithereens. Of the unlooted articles, not a single item had been left intact except a large black-and-white photograph of Dr. Theodore HerzI, the founder of political Zionism. Around the picture's frame the murderers had draped the blood-drenched underwear of a woman.
We stood silently contemplating the scene of slaughter when the door was flung open by a British soldier with fixed bayonet. In strolled Mr. Keith-Roach, governor of the Jaffa. district, followed by a colonel of the Green Howards battalion of the King's African Rifles. They took a hasty glance around that awful room, and Mr. Roach remarked to his companion, "Shall we have lunch now or drive to Jerusalem first?"
In Jerusalem the Government published a refutation of the rumors that the dead Jews of Hebron had been tortured before they had their throats slit. This made me rush back to that city accompanied by two medical men, Dr. Dantziger and Dr. Ticho. I intended to gather up the severed sexual organs and the cut-off women's breasts we had seen lying scattered over the floor and in the beds. But when we came to Hebron a telephone call from Jerusalem had ordered our access barred to the Slonim house. A heavy guard had been placed before the door. Only then did I recall that I had inadvertently told a fellow newspaperman in Jerusalem about our gruesome discoveries.
On the same day of the Hebron massacre, the Arabs had rioted in Jerusalem, crying: "Death to the Jews! The government is with us!" The fact that the attacks on Jewish communities in different parts of the country had occurred simultaneously was interpreted by the Mufti's newspaper Falastine as irrefutable evidence of the spontaneity of the outburst of Arab indignation. The Acting High Commissioner, Mr. H. C. Luke, had informed newspapermen that the government had been completely taken unawares. Yet a full ten days earlier it was he who had ordered the various hospitals, and especially the Rothschild clinic of which Dr. Dantziger was chief surgeon, to have a large number of beds in readiness in view of the government's expectation of a riotous outbreak.
The same scenes which occurred in Hebron had taken place in the Holy City. Upon the conclusion of the morning service in the mosque where an unusually large crowd had been in attendance
372 DAYS OF OUR YEARS
so that the congregation had overflown into the gardens, the Arabs, who had ordered their women to stay indoors that day, streamed into the city and began to attack any and every Jew they encountered. There were no street battles. There was never any question as to whether the first slain were Jews or Arabs. For the Jewish merchants in the Old City were indeed completely taken unawares. As always, the Jews were unarmed. Groups of them ran in the direction of Government House, pursued by Arabs brandishing their long knives and clubs. Mr. Luke and Mr. Keith-Roach saw the crowd running up and in all haste ordered the mounted police to close all the approaches to the building. The Jews were trapped. In order to return home, they had to break through the lines of the rioters. Many of them perished in the very shadow of the union jack.
For an hour or so it seemed as if the Arabs were going to attack the seat of government. Large numbers of rioters were assembling near the building. From their excited behavior, it could be deducted that a serious move was under consideration. Spies brought word that the crowd was still divided as to whether to march down the Jewish quarter first to put man, woman and child to the sword, or attack Government House. The majority finally seemed to favor the last course. When Mr. Luke learned of this, he realized that there was not a minute to lose: he ordered that arms be distributed to the Jews. The nearest British troops were somewhere on the high seas between Malta and the port of Haifa.
An hour later Jews manned the guard at Government House and Mr. Luke was safe. Order returned to the city. As had been the case in Hebron, after the damage was done, a few shots fired into the air dispersed the bloodthirsty mob.
Until the first contingent of military reinforcements arrived a few days later, the knowledge that Jews had been armed by the government maintained law and order. With the exception of attacks on outlying Jewish settlements in the country, the whole of Palestine remained quiet.
The Jews alone had saved British prestige in the Holy Land and in the entire Near East. But they did not take advantage of an opportunity afforded by circumstances to show the world the service they had rendered to the British cause. They should have occupied the post office and a few central buildings in the city (there was no one to stay them), hoisted the Zionist flag next to the
AFTER SEVEN CENTURIES 373
union jack, and announced that they were holding Jerusalem till the arrival of the destroyers carrying the British troops from Malta.
The Jews in the agricultural colonies stuck to their plows. There. was no panic or wild sauve-qui-peut for the comparative safety of the large cities. Everybody remained at his post. Rishon-le-Zion, the central winegrowing colony, harvested the largest crop in history. When two thousand Bedouin tribesmen massed on the outskirts of the city under the leadership of Sheik Abu Kishek, who had been the leader of the attack on the colony of Petach Tikvah in 1921, a handful of Jewish boys showed themselves with arms and the would-be assailants withdrew
Author: Nannette,
Posted: Sat Jun 30, 2007 5:50 pm Post subject:
The Arabs haven't changed... they're still propagating vicious lies about Jews, fabricating stories which will benefit them, and trying to whitewash their own massacres of Jews.
Husseini learnt very well from the Nazis and the lies he propagated them continue to this very day.
In essence, the Arabs of the time were jealous that the Jews worked hard, built an infrastructure for their country, made cities from swaps and wasteland, and they had nothing but what the Ottoman Empire left to them.
Jerusalem Posts
-> Introduction to the Arab/Israel Conflict
All times are GMT
Page 1 of 1