PALESTINE: Indignation

Had King Edward VIII and his advisers not decided to send an overwhelming expeditionary force to Palestine and bestowed the most extraordinary dictatorial powers of life & death upon Lieut. General John Greer Dill, when they ordered him to put an end to the Arab general strike (TIME, Oct. 5), the Arabs by now would quite possibly have slit most of the Jewish throats in that country.

Somewhat surprisingly, therefore, London’s New Zionist Organization, far from expressing gratitude to General Dill and the British Government in Palestine, last week launched the severest criticism of both.

Declared the New Zionists: “The fact that 80 Jews were murdered and hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of Jewish property destroyed under a British Administration should not be allowed to pass quietly. . . . British quarters have announced the stoppage of the strike through the medium of a declaration by General Dill in command of the troops in Palestine. The terms of this declaration are probably without precedent in British history. In fact they concede to the Arabs belligerent rights accorded to each other only by sovereign states at war with each other. General Dill has actually conceded to the Arabs the terms of an armistice in which the British forces are withdrawn from patrol in the affected areas for a given period, allowing the Arab bands to demobilize, conceal their arms and hide their identity in the villages.”

Having thus disposed of General Dill, the New Zionists next proceeded to belabor British Colonial Secretary Ormsby-Gore and his department: “The Palestine Government has chosen to permit the threat of outbreak and violence to remain poised over the heads of Palestine Jewry. With more than 20,000 British troops at its disposal in Palestine, it has treated with the leaders of the revolt, failed to disarm the Arab gangs, failed to establish a water-tight system of frontier-control. . . .”

Last but not least to be included in this Jewish denunciation was British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden whose diplomatic representatives, it was darkly declared, “have not been inactive at the courts of the Arab princes.”