THE NATIONS: Battle of Jericho

The President of the U.S. got his modern history wrong. The King of Saudi Arabia flunked ancient history, ethnology and arithmetic. The Prime Minister of Great Britain was annoyed. Arabs and Zionists were furious.

The Palestine issue was on the boil again.

Pledge to a King. President Truman had said that there was no record at the White House of a Roosevelt pledge on Palestine to King Ibn Saud. Truman was right only in the technical sense that the file was next door at the State Department.

The British had been raging since Truman put Prime Minister Attlee on the spot with a public demand that 100,000 Jews be admitted immediately to Palestine. Now the British intimated that if the record was not published by the U.S., they —or Ibn Saud—would publish it.

This hint stirred the State Department to action. The Department last week released some correspondence between Roosevelt and Ibn Saud, written after their Suez meeting last February. In his letter Roosevelt said: “Your Majesty will recall that on previous occasions I . . . made clear our desire that no decision be taken with respect to the basic situation in that country [Palestine] without full consultation with both Arabs and Jews.

“Your Majesty will also doubtless recall that during our recent conversation I assured you that I would take no action, in my capacity as Chief of the Executive Branch of this Government, which might prove hostile to the Arab people. It gives me pleasure to renew . . . the assurances.”

This letter, by confirming Arab claims that Roosevelt had promised to let them in on any new deal for Palestine, threw pro-Zionists on Capitol Hill and elsewhere into confusion. The letter from Ibn Saud, published at the same time, made them hopping mad.

Back to Joshua. Ibn Saud traced the Arab title to Palestine back to the Canaanites, from whom the Jews took the country. He flatly called the Canaanites “arab” because they came from the Arabian Peninsula. A critic pointed out that the Jews may have come from there, too, although Ibn Saud would scarcely call them “Arab.” Nor would scholars check Ibn Saud’s calculation that the Jews had ruled Palestine for less than four centuries. Westerners who added up Ibn Saud’s own disputable figures got 627 years; the King got 380.

Ibn Saud’s letter included an indictment of Joshua as a war criminal. His version of what happened at the siege of Jericho differed from standard Biblical texts. Ibn Saud had Joshua commanding: “Burn ye all that is in the city and slay with the edge of the sword both man and woman, young and old, and ox and sheep, and burn the city with fire and all that is therein.”

At week’s end the problem was still in Attlee’s lap. President Truman, not visibly embarrassed, thought Attlee would agree to admit more than 1800 Jews monthly to Palestine.