PALESTINE: In Blood & Fire

At 4:15, in the cool Jerusalem dawn of a Jewish Sabbath, the British struck. Tommies seized the three-storied, pink stone headquarters of the Jewish Agency on King George Road, toted away its files. The British slapped a curfew on much of Palestine; truckloads of raiding parties in full war kit rounded up more than a thousand Jews, including the Agency leaders. Except for the armored cars and truckloads of British troops, Jerusalem was a ghost town. Jewish children had a hilarious time taunting guards into chasing them. Many a Tommy obliged. But the day passed with little violence. The official casualty list was one Tommy, four Jews killed.

“The object,” said Lieut. General Sir Alan G. Cunningham, High Commissioner of Palestine, “is to restore those conditions of order without which no progress can be made toward a solution of the problem of Palestine.” In fact, the object was the broadly based Jewish underground Haganah, responsible for illegal immigration of Jews, which has worked closely with the Jewish Agency. Haganah has insisted that its wellarmed, well-organized secret army exists only for self-defense against possible Arab attack.

Haganah has denounced extremists of the Stern gang and the Irgun Zvai Leumi, which the British have long fought. Last week 31 young Jews (ages 19 to 28), members of the Irgun, were convicted of carrying firearms and sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment. (One, 19-year-old Benjamin Kaplan, was sentenced to life imprisonment for “discharging a firearm at His Majesty’s forces.”) In a turbulent three-day trial they shouted anti-British slogans from the dock, quoted Scripture (Let God arise, let His enemies be scattered . . .), chanted in unison “In blood and fire Judah fell; in blood and fire it will rise again,” before they were shackled and led off to prison.

Now the British charged that the Jewish Agency and Haganah, as well as the extremist gangs, were responsible for violence and disorder in Palestine. In other words, the British were now in open and direct conflict with the main Zionist movement.