Eruption

For weeks Jews and Arabs had uneasily bided their time, waiting on London's word. London, in turn, was waiting on Washington's word. Last week Jews and Arabs refused to wait any longer.

Both factions concentrated on the 28th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration (Nov. 2).* For both it was an unhappy milestone--for the Jews because of a promise made and unfulfilled, for the Arabs because the promise had been made at all. In advance, the Arabs had proclaimed a general strike throughout the Near East on that day. But the Jews struck first.

Two nights before the anniversary, explosions rocked Palestine from Dan to Beersheba. Armed bands, operating under a master plan of sabotage, crippled the country's railroads with dynamitings at 153 points. In Haifa harbor, where a British cruiser and four destroyers lay at anchor, police launches used for halting illegal immigrants were boarded and scuttled. At dawn six men were dead, eight wounded. Two of the dead were Jews. British authorities clamped a curfew on the whole coastal area.

Orgy in Egypt. Two days later the Arabs struck in Egypt, a country noted for its tolerance of minorities. In Cairo, Alexandria and other towns, anti-Zionist demonstrations ended as indiscriminate orgies of looting, rioting, burning. Cairo's one-day toll: several dead, 230 injured (including 90 Egyptian policemen). In Alexandria another 200 were hurt. In both cities scores of foreign stores were damaged. Egypt's firm, tight-lipped Premier, Mahmoud Fahmy El Nokrashy Pasha, and its British Acting Police Commandant, Major General T. W. Fitzpatrick, were angry but optimistic.

Both were wrong. Next day Cairo's crooked streets spawned more trouble. More stores, Arab as well as foreign, were looted, and synagogues in Cairo and Alexandria were set afire. Doughty Premier Nokrashy Pasha personally seized two pillagers by the scruff of the neck, had them arrested. By the second nightfall more than 1,000 persons had been jailed in Cairo alone, many of them for looting.

Gangsters in Palestine. Neither side had helped its cause. Speaking for Britain's normally pro-Jewish Labor Government, Colonial Secretary George Hall denounced "the dastardly series of outrages" in Palestine, carefully planned by a "very considerable organization among the Jewish community." Hall did not identify the organization. But two groups, both disavowed by the Jewish Agency, were almost certainly involved: the strongly militant underground Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization) and its still more aggressive offshoot, a gang of gunmen who called themselves "Israel's Freedom Fighters." Both were wellarmed, experienced guerrillas whose credo was: the time for talk is past.

Never before had so many Palestinian Jews sympathized with the guerrillas. Even the sober Palestine Post affirmed that Jews had gone over "from defensive to offensive action." But Britain was bitter. Secretary Hall bluntly warned Palestine's Jews that they could expect no help from London if violence was to be their policy. Hall also announced that Palestine's mild-mannered High Commissioner, Field Marshal Viscount Gort, had resigned because of "ill health." Gort actually was ill, but his resignation increased the tension.

Prime Minister Attlee, preparing to talk things over with President Truman (see INTERNATIONAL), knew that no decision would please everybody. Now he also knew that procrastination was as dangerous as decision.

*The Balfour Declaration was a note written in 1917 by Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour. In it, the British Government undertook to "use their best endeavors" to facilitate "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people ... it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine. . . ."

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