India and Israel Against Islamic Terror

HOME COMING 149
CH^
conditions aboard the refugees ships, the ”coffin-ships,” which
old and dilapidated, were crowded to the gunwales.” The
aim was to discourage immigration.”
All efforts by the East European countries to prevent the

exodus of the Jews failed miserably. The ships carrying these

unfortunates were deliberately sunk, sending mamy to their

watery graves. But they reckoned without Haganajah and the

Irgun and the resources of the Jewish Agency. The B ritish people

most hypocritically claimed to be helping the victims of ”Gas

Chambers” by making pious statements. However, they also

warned that many ”German spies” in the garb of Jewish settlers

were also migrating to Palestine. This was the excus^ to prevent

mass exodus of the Jews from Europe. Then there was the case

of ’Struma’ the ship which arrived off the coast of Eretz Israel

and was returned by the blocade authorities to its point of

departure in Romania. The ship sunk and all on board were

drowned. The cause was never discovered. Ther^ were also

”The Milos”, ”The Pacific” and the ”The Patria.” They too were

returned to their points of sail while ”The Patria” never sailed

again. Begin again:
”Dark night, the darkest of all nights, descended on the

Jewish people in Europe. One million five hundred thousand

Jewish children were transported in the death trains to the

gas-chambers. Millions of men and women w^re shot, or

drowned, or burned, or gassed or buried alive. When man

becomes a beast, the Jew ceases to be regarded as a human

being. There is no room here for self-delusion, it was not

only the Nazis and their friends who regarded the Jews as

germs to be destroyed. The whole world which calls itself

”enlightened” began to get used to the idea that perhaps the

Jew is not as other human beings. Just as ”the world” does

not pity the thousands of cattle led to the slaughter-pens in

the Chicago abattoirs, equally it did not pity- or else it got

used to the tens of thousands of human beings taken like

sheep to the slaughter in Treblinki. The world does not pity

the slaughtered. It only respects those who fight. For better

or for worse, that is the truth.
150 INDIA AND ISRAEL CHAPTER 11
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All the peoples of the world knew this grim truth except the

Jews. That is why our enemies were able to trap us and

shed our blood at will.
Britain enforced an economic blockade against the territories
occupied by the Germans: that was her war against Nazism
But she also enforced a political blockade against the jews
in German occupied territories, which was an aid to Nazism”
The jews too, mainly the Irgun and the Stern group, used
terrorist method to frighten the Arabs and the British to the state
where they could not effectively resist their entry into Erelz
Israel. While all this was happening on the high seas and the
shores of Palestine, the Arab attacks continued. The chronicle
goes.
”The historical facts of the Arab attacks are known: the

pogrom in the Old City of Jerusalem in 1920, the murderois

attack in Jaffa in 1921, the blood-bath of 1929, the incessant

campaign of violence from 1936 to 1939. The psychologies

consequences of these one-sided attacks were as disastrois

as their political aftermath.”
As a result of Jewish aggressiveness, the Arabs ^egan to take

the Jews seriously as a walad-al-maut -a child of death- and b

look forward to the great festival of ”bathel yahud”. or genenl

slaughter. Slowly and steadily the initiative passed from the hancs

of the Mandate authorities and the Arabs to the Jewisi

immigrants. The Irgun mounted triple attacks on the Police

Headquarters in Jerusalem, Haifa and Jaffa which had t>

reaching consequences. Thus terror was met with terror. Talkirg

of high intentions without action to follow, breeds contempt h

the minds of the adversaries. As Begin says:
”But great as may have been the influence of our literature,

it is certain that deeds had a greater effect. The fact that the

mighty British Government not only failed to put an end b

our struggle but, on the contrary, continued to be subjecteJ

to blows of ever-increasing severity, exercised a very health,’

influence on the Arabs.Their imagination did the rest.”
rHAPTER 11 THE STRUGGLE AND THE HOME COMING 151
The Jewish underground’ borrowed’ and looted T.N.T., other

explosives and weapons in an even-handed manner both from

,-he Arabs and the British. This legend of the Jewish strength

created by the underground operations of the Hebrew revolt

had a far-reaching effect both on the British before they left,

and the Arabs before and after the birth of the new state.

Undoubtedly, Hagannah played its historical role against the

Arab invaders along with the regular Israel army. The memory

of Hagannah dating back to the ”havlagah”, could hardly

encourage the Arabs for their new fight. To quote Begin again

on the open hostilities of the British:
”Reliance, or undue reliance, on the moral restraints of an

enemy, is no part of strategy. So, we did not depend on the

Government’s ’humanity.’ We had witnessed the wanton

behavior of the airborne troops in our towns and villages

and kibbutzim. We had read the internal literature distributed

among the British soldiers. Characteristic of the attitude of

some of the troops was the threat scribbled on a copy of

our underground newspaper Herat: ”Oh Gee, oh Gee, Hitler

killed 6,000,000 Jews. The Sixth Airborne will kill 60,000,000

if you don’t bloody well behave yourselves.”
Since the firing incident at Amritsar in Jallianwala Bagh on an

unarmed crowd the British became more careful about the

effect of their actions on international opinion. Reprisal killings

of the British by the Jews was one thing the British dreaded

most. They did not want to be killed. This was confirmed by

Colonel Patterson, Commander of the Jewish legion formed by

Vladimir Jabotinsky in the First World War, a British officer of

Irish extraction who went into exile and denounced the British

Government’s betrayal of the Jewish people. The British now

realised that Tel Aviv was not Amritsar nor Eretz Israel, Punjab.

The world could ignore happenings in distant British colony but

Eretz Israel was the center of world interest and the cockpit of

the Middle East.
The Arab opposition to Zionism, despite its intensity, was

fragmented due to their inter-tribal rivalries. However, there was

a consistency in the Muslim opposition to the Jews in the
152 INDIA AMD ISRAEL CHAPTER 1 ]
formation of Jerusalem Municipal Council, where alternatively

Jews and Arabs boycotted the Council meetings on the plea of

growing numerical strength of the rival parties. The flash point

of riots in Jerusalem after 1920 was the Jewish practice of making

seating arrangements by bringing chairs and benches for their

prayers at the Western wall of the Temple Mount. To the Arabs

these were ”offending objects” and an indirect way of claiming

squatter’s rights on the place where Mohammed’s famous horse,

al-Burq, took him on his heavenly journey. The Supreme Muslim

Council under Mufti Haj Amin al- Husseine prevented the lews

from bringing the ”offending objects” to the site of their prayers

in 1922, 1923 and 1925, starting a world-wide propaganda

that the Jews were keen to rebuild their third Temple at the

same location. Thereafter, broke Arab-Jewish riots with casualties

on both sides till in April 1936, a royal Commission (the Pee^

Commission) arrived to investigate the situation and suggest

corrective measures. The Peel Commission recommended the

partition of the country into two separate Arab and Jewish states,

setting aside the area of Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth tc

be kept under mandate administration.
Understandably, the Peel Commission report created a mixed

reaction. While some Jews, headed by Dr. Chaim Weizmann

favoured the proposal of the Royal Commission for a Jewish

state, with the power to control its immigration policies in spite

of the fact that Peel Commission recommended restrictions on

Jewish immigration during the period of the mandate. The

majority of the Jews, headed by the Jewish Agency, were of the

view that the Jewish Palestine without Jerusalem would be a

body without a soul. This connection between Jerusalem and

the Jewish people was to be emphasized with a consequence of

internationalisation of the Holy City. The dispute still continues.

The report was also resented by the Arab states of the Middle

East. It later took the form of Palestine Liberation Organisation

(PLO). Events overtook the Peel Commission as the World War II

broke out, distracting their attention. However, by May 1939,

a White Paper was issued imposing restrictions both on the

Jewish immigration and land purchased by them; in fact
•”•”””””en 11 IHE STRUGGLE AND THE HOME COMING 153
C-HA’
mitting only 75,000 Jewish immigrants in a five-year period

u6fore its final termination. As mentioned earlier, the jews

nosed the White Paper, treating it as a betrayal of the Baifour

Declaration, the sore point being restrictions on immigration.

Hounded out from a Hitler dominated Europe, the Jews had

nowhere to go. Despite the Jewish support to the British against

Hitler during the war-30,000 Palestinian Jews had enlisted in

the British Army up to 1942-the Jews decided to oppose the

White Paper and as brought out earlier, David Ben-Curion, the

Head of the Jewish Agency, solved the dilemma by announcing

that ”we shall fight Hitler as though there were no white paper

and fight the white paper as if there is no war”.
After a period of calm, during the World War II, the Jews

carried out their guerrilla operations to assist Jewish immigration

and fight the Mandate authorities. The rival claims over Palestine

by the Jews and Arabs have been analysed in fairly great detail

by Mark Tessler in his book Arab Israel Conflicts. The author has

given the following sound arguments for Jewish claim:
”The burden of much, if not most, of the grievance of the

Arab states which I’ve read or listened to against the State

of Israel, or Zionism, or, at its most forthright, against the

settlement of any Jews at all in this region, seems to rest on

the conviction that the Jews have been absent so many

hundreds of years that they have become foreigners in what

was once their land. The Arabs who were in the majority

from the seventh until the twentieth century except for the

brief Crusader Kingdom are seen as having established

themselves over a period so long that any other people, any

other government, is the vilest injustice.
”I suppose it is unfair to attempt to introduce logic or the

historical facts of life into what is essentially a violent exercise

in propaganda, but aside from the fact that the Jews founded

their State with the blessings of the United Nations, when

this was contested by force, they established themselves by

right of conquest, as had been done before them by the

Turks, the Crusaders, the Arabs, the Romans, the Greeks,

the Egyptians, the Hebrews, the Canaanites, the Syrians, the
154 INDIA AND ISRAEL CHART
ER11
Babylonians and the others going back to the dawn of history

and probably before.”
”With all of the migrations, the conquests and the colonies

which have accompanied them, there are as many pockets

of people, different races, religions and varieties of origin

very much alive in Israel today as one could possibly imagine

Even with the departure of the Bosnians there are some

twenty-six hundred Circassians, a handsome people from

the Caucasus once famous in the Middle eastern slave

markets, who remain in Israel and ten thousand of whose

fellows live across the valley in Jordan, serving as the traditional

bodyguard for King Hussein as they did for his grandfather

King Abdullah.
”Jews have lived uninterruptedly in Israel since they returned

from Egypt to the Promised Land more than two thousand

years ago, in spite of the wars and dispersion, sometimes

many, sometimes few, sometimes banned from Jerusalem,

sometimes masters there, but always living in this land. There

are Catholic and Protestant sects without reckoning, and

there are some schismatic Moslem sects, too, like the six’

hundred Ahmadia in Galilee. There are two hundred

members of the Bahai faith, a universalist religion which was

founded in Persia and with many members living in the

United States and England, but whose center is in Haifa.

There are Turcoman villages, settled by Uzbek and Kazakh

Moslems from what is now Soviet Central Asia, and in the

south of Israel there are Negro Bedouin, descendants of the

Africans, brought from Nubia and East Africa by Arab slave

traders.”
”There are many differences in the difficulties faced by the

two minorities, but just as the frustration and resentment of

the American Negro has become real bitterness and anger

no longer masked, and with an increasing readiness to lash

out against the barriers which confine him, or even at that

which he sees as symbolic of his second-class state, so the

Israeli Arab may feel many of these same inequities of

schooling and housing and the chance to earn a decent
•*• ER fi THE STRUGGLE AND THE HOME COMING