“There was an indiscriminate massacre by
Arabs last night at Tiberias, in which 19 Jews [21 in some sources] were
killed, including three women and 10 children, a slaughter unequalled since the
Arabs attacked the Jews of Hebron and Safed in 1929,” The Times of London reported on 4 October 1938, quoting its
correspondent writing on 3 October. The
attack was premeditated, well-planned, and merciless.
“At 9 p.m. a large band of armed Arabs,
after having cut all the telephone wires, made a concerted attack on Tiberias,”
the report went on.
“They entered the town in two detachments,
one from the north, the other from the south.
Five minutes later, when the invaders were in place, a whistle was heard
from the hills above the town and firing began.
It was directed chiefly at the district offices, the police station, and
the billets of the British police.
Simultaneously fires broke out in the district offices and the
synagogue, and six houses in the Akiva quarter, which lies on the hillside
above the Old Town, were entered, set on fire, and the inmates – men, women and
children – massacred. The police turned
out immediately, and within 25 minutes were reinforced by the Transjordan
Frontier Force, from Samakh, which fought its way past an ambush at a road
obstruction near the hot springs to the south of Tiberias. After the arrival of the troops fighting in
the town lasted for two hours before the raiders were driven out. A curfew was enforced about 11 p.m. Most of the Jewish casualties occurred in
three wooden houses.”
Killed in one of those houses were Joshua
and Shoshanah Ben-Arieh and their two little boys. The couple, with son Arieh, were stabbed and left
to burn to death; the other son, Moshe, an eighteen-month-old toddler, was shot
dead. Also stabbed and burned to death
at the house were three visiting children: Chaim Leimer aged twelve, his sister
Rivka, aged ten, and brother Ezra, aged eight.
Their mother Hanka, aged 37, was badly wounded.
In another of those houses an American
citizen, Menachem Kabni (as the American
Jewish Outlook, 7 October 1938 names him) – The Times report says merely “Mr Kalpin” – was stabbed and burned
to death along with his a female relative; another female relative
escaped. (According to The Times the female survivor was his
wife; according to the American Jewish
Outlook, his sister.)
And in the third house 26-year-old Rachel
Mizrachi was home alone with her five children – her husband Shimon Yochanan
Mizrachi was on guard duty elsewhere in Tiberias. She too was brutally murdered, together with
Ezra (aged twelve), Miriam (five), Yocheved (three), Samuel (two) and Hephzibah
(one).
Ezekiel Katz (or perhaps Saltz) , aged
forty-two, died when the synagogue of which he was gubbai was set ablaze. Two Jewish constables, Israel Bookman and Zvi
Chatzkelovitz, lost their lives, and also killed was Jacob Gross. Rahamin Halevy and Hanna Sabach were slightly
injured.
Next day, 5 October, The Times carried a report of Arab unrest and near anarchy in some
parts of Palestine, so much so that it seemed that Britain might have to fight
to conquer Palestine all over again.
“Rebel activities from a nuisance have become a threat to orderly
government,” it observed. “Rebel attacks
have for months so endangered traffic on the inter-urban roads that Government
has had to declare a night curfew on all roads outside the towns and villages….
The telephone and telegraph system has been so frequently sabotaged that
communication is uncertain, and even Jerusalem is cut off at times. The landing of airborne mails at Tiberias has
been given up because it is unsafe to carry mails from Galilee to Jerusalem. Outside the large towns it is almost
impossible to collect taxes except as collective fines…. Ordinary police
patrolling and crime detection have been given up… The administration of the
villages through the mukhtars
(headmen) has stopped because the mukhtars
obey orders of the [Arab] bands. The
schools may soon reopen, but this means little as the Government schoolmasters
are Arab propagandists and are subservient to the Arabs’ wishes… Because
issuing arms to the Arab police often means supplying arms to the bands, they
have been disarmed in many places, and may soon be entirely dismissed .…”
The following month, on 24 November in the
House of Commons, MacDonald made a speech which foreshadowed his White Paper of
1939, predicated on a fear of a full scale Arab rebellion necessitating huge
British military commitments in Palestine at a time of impending war in Europe,
and which, in attempting to appease the Arabs, was seen by Jewish and
non-Jewish Zionists as a betrayal.
In that speech (The Times, 25 November 1938) MacDonald maintained, inter alia:
“No one could justly say that Great Britain
had not been fulfilling her obligation to facilitate the migration of Jews to
Palestine. Since 1922 more than 250,000
Jews had entered Palestine and settled there.… The Jews were in Palestine not
on sufferance but by right and today, under the lash of persecution in Europe,
their eagerness to return to their own homeland was multiplied an
hundredfold. The tragedy of a people who
had no country had never been so deep as it was this week…. But he had hoped that
we were not going to allow our horror at the plight into which these people had
been thrown to warp our cool and just judgment on the difficult problem of
Palestine today…. When we promised to facilitate the establishment of a
national home for the Jews in Palestine we never anticipated this fierce
persecution in Europe….”
You may correctly anticipate the rest.
“In 1933 30,000 Jews came into Palestine;
in 1934 42, 000; and in 1935 … 61,000….
If he were an Arab he would be alarmed…. The House of Commons … ought to
recognise that many in the Palestinian Arab movement were motivated by a
genuine patriotism…. [T]hey were thinking … of their freedom, and they were
afraid that if this process went on at last they would have to surrender to the
political overlordship of the enterprising, hard-working, ever-increasing
citizens of the Jewish national home.
We, the British people, should be the last people in the world not to
understand the feelings of the Arabs in this matter because we, too, would
sacrifice our material advantages if we thought that our freedom was at stake.” (What he meant by “freedom” for the Arabs
seems puzzling, since Mandate Palestine was in effect a British colony and
since the Arabs were ruled by clan heads and had little concept of freedom in
the western sense.)
Nevertheless, MacDonald, aware that “a
great many people regarded this agitation as the mere protest of a gang of
bandits,” conceded that “many Arabs who had taken part most eagerly in the
troubles were cutthroats of the worst type.
Their massacre of the innocents at Tiberias, and on a score of other
miserable battlefields, had disgraced their cause. It was true also that many of those who were
associated with them had been terrorized into that association.”
Moreover, when the Balfour Declaration was
promulgated “there were already living between the Jordan and the Mediterranean
Sea more than 600,000 Arabs…. The Jews brought with them money, and development
work provided extra means of livelihood.
Modern health services, which were extended not only to Jews but to
Arabs, gave the individual a further lease and security of life. Since 1922 the Arab population in Palestine
had, scarcely at all by migration from outside and almost entirely by natural
increase, gone up from something over 600,000 to 990,000 persons. It was calculated that the total of 990,000
Arabs in Palestine today would have become 1,500,000 within 20 years…. The
Arabs could not say that the Jews were driving them out of the country. If not a single Jew had gone into Palestine
after 1918 he believed that the Arab population in Palestine today would still
have been about 600,000. It was not only
the Jews who had benefitted from the Balfour Declaration. They could deny it as much as they like, but,
materially, the Arabs had gained very greatly from the Balfour
Declaration. It was useless to present
that argument to most Arabs. They were
dead to the argument; they were blind to the spectacle of a gradually improving
spectacle of life for their people…”
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Wednesday, April 27, 2016
Elder of Ziyon
