"Those Good Jews, Who Have Brought To The Muslim Arabs Civilization & Peace ... The Muslims Have Declared Holy War Against Them"

In Palestine, the Arab Riots broke out that same year

Wow!!!  What a discovery!  Elder of Ziyon has posted a truly remarkable document, a letter (as translated from the Arabic by Dr Mordechai Kedar) written against this background by the then leader of the Alawites (Bashir Assad's grandfather) to French prime minister Léon Blum in 1936.  Here is a taste, but the letter really must be read in full on Elder's blog:

"The spirit of fanaticism and narrow-mindedness, whose roots are deep in the heart of the Arab Muslims toward all those who are not Muslim, is the spirit that continually feeds the Islamic religion, and therefore there is no hope that the situation will change. If the Mandate is cancelled, the danger of death and destruction will be a threat upon the minorities in Syria, even if the cancellation [of the Mandate] will decree freedom of thought and freedom of religion. Why, even today we see how the Muslim residents of Damascus force the Jews who live under their auspices to sign a document in which they are forbidden to send food to their Jewish brothers who are suffering from the disaster in Palestine [in the days of the great Arab rebellion], the situation of the Jews in Palestine being the strongest and most concrete proof of the importance of the religious problem among the Muslim Arabs toward anyone who does not belong to Islam. Those good Jews, who have brought to the Muslim Arabs civilization and peace, and have spread wealth and prosperity to the land of Palestine, have not hurt anyone and have not taken anything by force, and nevertheless the Muslims have declared holy war against them and have not hesitated to slaughter their children and their women despite the fact that England is in Palestine and France is in Syria. Therefore a black future awaits the Jews and the other minorities if the Mandate is cancelled and Muslim Syria is unified with Muslim Palestine. This union is the ultimate goal of the Muslim Arabs."

“We Who Have Urged Patience on the Jews ... Have No Right To Do So Any Longer, Least of All For What the Gangster Terrorist May Think Or Say”: Remembering the English MP who recommended rebellion against Britain to the Jews of Palestine

The deteriorating situation in Palestine since the Arab Riots of 1936, and the British Government’s appeasement of the Arabs by its dilution of its commitment to the Balfour Declaration, led the president and office-bearers of an organisation calling itself the Jewish Former Army Officers’ Association of Tel Aviv to write on 10 May 1938 to a non-Jewish British MP celebrated for his dedication to the Jewish cause.

Colonel Josiah Wedgwood (1872-1943), came from the famous Staffordshire pottery family, and was a naval architect by training. From 1906-19 he sat as a Liberal MP, and from 1919-42, when he received a barony, as a Labour MP. In contrast to, say, nineteenth-century prime minister W. E. Gladstone, who once described himself as “anti-anti-semitism”, Wedgwood was a genuine philosemite, who wrote: "The Anglo-Saxon, more than any other race, wants to sympathise with the Jews. . . no doubt we understand the Jew better than can those to whom the Old Testament is not familiar from infancy. To the foreigner the word Jew is a hissing in the street; to us the word suggests Solomon and Moses, and a thousand cradle stories. So often have we used their names for our own children that they seem now to be our fathers, especially our Puritan forefathers. . . Towards such a people one has a feeling almost of awe. . ."

While serving in a military capacity in South Africa during the Boer War he had befriended a Jewish storekeeper whose premises were destroyed. He lent the man money to rebuild, and discussed Jewish issues with him. In Parliament he first evinced his sympathy with Jews in a speech in 1909. During the First World War, in Gallipoli, he came into contact with members of the Zion Mule Corps and became one of the strongest exponents of the Zionist cause in Parliament. He helped to influence the British government’s issuance of the Balfour Declaration, and visited Palestine in 1926 and 1934. He published a collection of his speeches supporting Zionism as Palestine: The Fight for Jewish Freedom and Honour (1926). In his book The Seventh Dominion (1928) he advocated an independent Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan as an integral part of the British Commonwealth. And he came to admire Jabotinsky.


His reply to the Jewish army officers, written from the House of Commons on 30 May 1938, was a rousing, subversive, noteworthy document:

“Your letter of May 10th has given me much thought. I know all that you say is correct. But how to improve the situation troubles me. I am afraid that merely asking for justice, or asking my help, is useless. In my experience, especially in times of difficulty, Governments give way only to actions. Demands backed by nothing but a sense of justice play little part in modern history. The Czechs would be under Nazi rule today if they had not decided to fight and die. So would the Spaniards. The Arabs or those who are troublesome get their way in Palestine because they act instead of petition. I do not think reprisals in the form of murdering innocent Arabs is morally justifiable. When ordinary law breaks down, lynch law generally takes its place. That is better than murdering innocent people; but I cannot advocate that, nor can I judge of its necessity.

But I think you are morally entitled to arm yourselves and your outlying colonies, and to erect such defences as possible. This, I have no doubt, you have done. There remains some such passive resistance as Gandhi put into practice in South Africa and India. Such action needs solidarity and the will to suffer by going to prison. I think it needs also the social boycott and the giving up of normal relations with the Government. You cannot dine and denounce.”

Then came his recommendations for their response to British policy in Palestine – civil disobedience in the form of passive resistance, and facilitating illegal immigration:

“Passive resistance takes several forms: 1. The occupation of land and refusal to leave except by the forms of law – going to prison. 2. Refusal to pay taxes, breaking the law –  going to prison. 3. Refusal to plead in the Courts, and to recognise their jurisdiction –  going to prison. 4. Attending demonstrations which have been declared illegal. 5. Distribution of illegal literature. 6. Assisting of illegal immigration. 7. Picketing and boycotting the disloyal. [NB: The text of the letter reproduced in the London Jewish Chronicle on 27 July 1938 includes Point Six as given here, whereas The Times version, which carried it a fortnight earlier, omits it and has Point 7 here as the 6th and final point.]

Last year, some Jewish illegal immigrants were marched in chains to Acre gaol. I think that if you had freed them on that march, even by violence, British public opinion would have supported you and it would never have occurred again.

Now Jews are sent to concentration camps or gaol without trial or charge, and no protest or demonstration is made by the 450,000 in Palestine. You expect me to protest in Parlament. I am not going to do so any more. It is for the Jews in Palestine to stop that sort of thing. The same applies to Jews arrested for carrying arms. The Bastille was pulled down for less than this.

You do not even "sit-down" strike outside the gaol gates when they hunger-strike. Naturally they think they can do anything to Jews, or to some Jews. If there is no solidarity among the Jews;  if some Jews go to the Government and apologise for other Jews; in that case you will get nowhere. The Trades Union of the Hisdatruth set you a powerful example. They strike and get their way against the Tel-Aviv Council or against the orange-growers. Why should government be sacrosanct? United you stand, divided you will always fall. You must have a willingness to suffer as well as a united willingness to help the sufferers.

If I were a British official in Palestine, I, too, should get “fed up” with your complaints, and should respect you much more if you curse “them” behind their backs; try cursing them to their faces, not you only but the Press also. If you dare not, then you are not worthy of your country. If you do, and not till then, they will think you worthy of arms to use in defence of the Empire and Democracy.

Like you, I want to see a free, manly people like the Maccabees in Palestine again. I want to see an army of 40,000 Jews fit to defend all that you and I hold dear. With reluctance I have come to the conclusion that only by the hard road laid down above can we arrive.

You have my free permission to show this letter to the High Commissioner [Sir Harold MacMichael], to General [Robert] Haining [the Commander-in-Chief], and to Mr Shertock [sic; i.e. Moshe Shertok], the head of the New Zionist Organization. All those will agree, but none of them will dare to say so. I know my countrymen, and a good deal better than you do. You ask me to imagine myself in your place with my own kith and kin attacked and my hands “tied”. I can imagine nothing of the sort. And Englishmen’s hands would not remain tied; and you are only tied by unworthy fear.

I cannot possibly give you any clear idea of what to do anywhere at any time. I can only suggest that when anything unpleasant occurs consider what action British colonists would take under the circumstances, and if you do about the half, you will not ever need to again."

Predictably, the Mandate Government forbade reproduction throughout Palestine of the MP’s letter, in whole or in part, in any language. But its recipients were soon circulating it in the form of a pamphlet entitled Colonel Wedgwood calls Jewish Youth to Revolt. The pamphlet ended: “Jewish Youth, we present here a letter from Colonel Wedgwood, the friend of Zionism and an MP, will you awake after all and read in this letter the pathway to revolution and success? (Signed) Young Zealots.”

Wedgwood’s letter was reported in The Times (16 July 1938), and a prompt denunciation by Sir Laurie Hammond [who had been on the Peel Commission] was immediately forthcoming; it appeared in the paper’s correspondence columns on 19 July. Wedgwood was unrepentant –  and scathing. In a letter written from the House of Commons that same day, printed on 21 July, he replied:

“Sir Laurie Hammond advocates patience for the Jews in Palestine. It is two years since the murder of Jews and the destruction of their property have gone unpunished under British rule....

The violence and anarchy today is worse than ever, because the policy of conciliation is still continued, and untrustworthy Arab supernumerary police are armed for no reason save to balance the arming of Jewish supernumeraries. The Administration continues strictly impartial between murderers and murdered. What we can urge is that passive resistance and active protest are more effective and more moral than retaliating on the wrong people and so dividing the Jewish people into two hostile camps. I do not believe any Jew has thrown any bombs. The other side have the bombs, and have shown as little reluctance to kill Arabs as to kill Jews or Englishmen. But impartiality which arrests both gangsters and victims is more calculated to exasperate than to pacify the victims’ friends and relations.”

Referring to Britain’s treatment of “illegal” arrivals in Palestine, Colonel Wedgwood (who during the late 1940s had a Jewish immigrant vessel named in his honour) inveighed:

 “Let those who have seen the film Ben Hur see also these men and women led chained through Nazareth, not because they are dangerous but to exhibit to the Arabs the “impartiality” of the British Administration. Then let them translate the scene of action from Palestine to Kenya and imagine English men and women exhibited in chains to the Arabs of Mombasa. Some faint idea of how Jews feel towards the impartial Administration in Palestine may then be appreciated, and I shall not receive so much impertinent criticism from retired civil servants [a dig at Hammond] and sympathizers with the Nazi concept of Jews. Jews are not conceived yet, here at least, as devoid both of human rights and of human feelings.”

Wedgwood died in 1943, when wartime paper shortages meant that even well-known Jewish communal figures received truncated obituaries in the London Jewish Chronicle, or were denied obituaries altogether. Not so Baron Wedgwood (as he had become). Despite the paper shortage, the Jewish Chronicle (30 July 1943) carried a suitably fulsome tribute to that “staunch and steadfast” friend of “the Jewish cause in its widest sense”. 

Not for nothing did his niece, the distinguished historian Dame [Cicely] Veronica Wedgwood, call her biography of him The Last of the Radicals.  But he was by no means the last - nor the first - of noteworthy British champions of the Jewish people and of Israel's cause.  I wish more contemporaries would bear that in mind, instead of describing Britain as an inherently antisemitic country, which –  as a student of philosemitism –  I know is simply untrue.

Murder, Mayhem, and a Strange Case of Mandate Inertia

On the afternoon of 11 July 1938 Lily Tobias (née Shepherd, 1887-1984), from a Yiddish-speaking immigrant family in the Swansea valley, was at home in Mount Carmel putting the final touches to her novel The Samaritans. An aunt of the future famous Welsh-Jewish poet Dannie Abse and his flamboyant politician brother Leo, she was already a published writer. Her The Nationalists, and other Goluth Studies, a book of short stories, had appeared in 1921; her novel In My Mother’s House, which tells of a Welsh-born Jew who rejects, and then reclaims, his heritage, in 1931; her anti-war novel Eunice Fleet, about a conscientious objector, in 1933; and The Tube in 1935.

Lily had made aliyah in 1935, the year before the eruption of Arab disturbances in Palestine, with her husband Philip Vallentine Tobias, who was originally from South Africa, and her widowed father, a retired furniture dealer from Poland. Philip Tobias, who had been active in the Cardiff Jewish community before moving with Lily to London, where he was a founder and leading member of the Finchley Hebrew Congregation, ran a glass company in Palestine. And on that afternoon, as Lily was at work on her latest novel’s closing chapter, he was alone in his car en route to Haifa.

Philip knew that Palestine was in the grip of what an official report covering 1937 termed "a campaign of murder, intimidation, and sabotage conducted by Arab law breakers", a "terrorist campaign" which entailed "isolated murder and attempted murder; of sporadic cases of armed attacks on military, police and civilian road transport; on Jewish settlements and on both Arab and Jewish private property". He knew of such violent incidents as an assassination attempt on the Mayor of Haifa and another in Jerusalem on the Inspector-General of Police; of the brutal murders near and in Beisan of a young Jewish agriculturalist and a Jewish doctor; of the slaughter by marauding livestock-stealers of five Jewish shepherds in hill country to the south of Lake Tiberias, and of two others near Nazareth; of an unsuccessful attack on a crowded passanger train on the Lydda-Haifa line; of a series of attacks on Jews’ vehicles on the Jerusalem-Jaffa road in which one Jewish passenger lost his life. And so forth.

Nevertheless, alone on that drive, Philip Tobias had no firearm or other weapon. He seems to have been confident that, going about his lawful business in British-administered Palestine in broad daylight, he would personally encounter no danger. The assumption proved deadly. For, all of a sudden, in Haifa, his car was surrounded by a 30-strong mob of young Arab men in their teens and early twenties. They dragged Tobias from his car and stoned and stabbed him to death. According to a pressman, who accordingly described “the circumstances” of the murder as “intolerable”, the killing of Philip Tobias “it is reliably reported”, took place in plain view of “a police patrol led by an officer who witnessed the whole outrage but did not go to the rescue”.

By an eery coincidence, the book on which Lily was working when her husband met his end in cold blood was on a similar theme. Published the following year, The Samaritans proved to be her final book, although she continued to write articles for Jewish papers and to lecture on Israel and literary matters.

Tobias was the second British civilian killed in Palestine that year (the first was J. L. Starkey, director of the Marston-Wellcome Archæological Expedition to the Near East, murdered by Arabs on the evening of 10 January, when he was on his way from his camp at Tell Duweir to Jerusalem) and the first British Jew slain during Arab disturbances in Palestine since the murder of Levi Billig in 1936. Billig, born in London’s Whitechapel in 1897 to a cigar/cigarette maker and his wife, both from Russia, was a Cambridge graduate who in 1926 had been appointed Lecturer in Arabic Language and Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was at home at his desk working on a book based on his recent research, in Persia, into early Sh’ite texts, when an Arab gunman opened fire through the window and killed him. Ironically, Billig was an advocate of Jewish-Arab reconciliation. His An Arabic Reader (1931, reprinted 1963) remains a highly regarded introductory text. (Coincidentally, his co-compiler of that work, Avinoam Yellin MBE, of the Palestine Ministry of Education, was also a victim of Arab violence; shot near his Jerusalem office on 21 October 1937, he succumbed to his wounds two days later.)

The murder of Philip Tobias was symptomatic of a crisis that had gripped Haifa since the opening days of the month; in a report filed 15 July the Jewish Chronicle’s stringer wrote of the eruption nine days earlier of what was “the complete usurpation of authority by unruly elements and the virtual handing over to what amounts to mob rule in the Eastern Quarter, main artery to the Hospital and industrial zones of Haifa and principal lines of communication between Emek Zebulon and Emek Jezreel”. Noting that the authorities seemed “powerless in spite of increased forces at their disposal” and that police and marines landed from HMS Repulse seemed oddly inert in the face of Arab hooliganism, he contined:

“What is most surprising about this situation is that the numerous outrages day after day happen at almost the same hour and the same places, so much so, that the Haifa correspondent of a Palestinian newspaper for some days on end ordered a taxi at the same time to go the rounds and ascertain what was happening! On one occasion he helped to take an injured Jewish passer-by to hospital, having arrived on the scene within a couple of minutes of the assault. It seems strange, to say the least, that the authorities could not have been as far-sighted and placed heavier patrols in that area to break up the mobs and hooligans. Today’s issue of Davar, the Hebrew Labour daily of Tel-Aviv, declared that the continuing lawlessness in Haifa represented a riddle. There were hundreds of troops, marines, and supernumerary constables available, yet in a busy street, within a few yards of the Central Police Station, a man was battered to death in broad daylight; shots were fired and bombs thrown at vehicles; knives were thrust into the backs of passersby; shops were looted, and houses set on fire.”