No Refuge

As Jerusalem echoed with the shattering thud of mines and the staccato gibberish of machine-gun fire, the overwhelming majority of Palestine's 600,000 Jews last week turned definitely and bitterly against the terrorism of Zionist extremists. They had gone too far.

A bomb was placed in the central railway station. Grenades were thrown at the heavily guarded Mustashfa police station.

A policeman caught outside ran into a burst of searing machine-gun fire which hit him in the stomach. From rooftops all over the city, Stern Gangsters opened fire on troops and police.

High Commissioner Sir Alan Cunningham's patience had reached the breaking point. For the fourth time in five days he summoned 62-year-old Isaac Ben Zvi, acting head of the Jewish Agency. In the thickly carpeted lounge of Government House on the Hill of Evil Counsel, Cunningham gave the bespectacled Jewish leader a frank warning that the British troops might be hard to control. The Jewish Agency would have to take positive action.

Next day the Hebrew press in a body attacked the terrorists.

Moderate Zionists prepared to combat the terrorists in part by terror. Some even planned to kidnap leaders of the extremist bands, hold them until the fanatics ceased their activities.

In one instance, poetic justice did not wait for the moderates. One night last week in the Street of the Prophet, a gang of terrorists were literally hoisted on their own petard. Their car, a 1941 Plymouth, swerving under the impact of a British machine-gun burst, hit a traffic island. Then, with door open and amatol mines falling out, it swerved and hit a child, crumpled into a tree, and exploded, blowing the two occupants into tattered shreds. Several houses on both sides of the street collapsed as the mines went off. All that remained of one Arab-style villa was a wall with a torn picture of Dr. Theodor Herzl, founder of Zionism.

The Question. Fifty years ago Herzl, after presiding at the first Zionist Congress, wrote in his diary that within 50 years the world would have heard of his dream of a Jewish state. Last week delegates to the 22nd World Zionist Congress, meeting in Basel, Switzerland, where Herzl's group had met, knew with pride and some disquiet that his prophecy had been fulfilled.

Among the delegates were tanned, freckled farmers from the Holy Land, businessmen from the U.S., Britons with Oxford accents, worn, pale graduates of Europe's D.P. camps, Jews from Finland and Aden, Dutch Guiana and China. All had come to Basel to answer the question: "Shall the Congress approve the Jewish Agency's formula for the partition of Palestine into separate and independent Arab and Jewish states as a bargaining basis with Britain?" On this question depended Jewry's attitude toward the London conference in January.

The Congress' answer would show itself largely in the election of a new president to succeed aged, ailing Chaim Weizman, distrusted as pro-British in spite of a lifetime given to Zionism. Two candidates were angling for his job. One was dynamic David Ben-Gurion, chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive. His opponent was a Cleveland rabbi, Dr. Abba Hillel Silver. Sad-eyed, smooth-talking Dr. Silver, who led some U.S. Jews in opposition to the British loan, opposes Ben-Gurion on the ground that the Agency's offer on partition was a tactical blunder which gave ground too readily to the British.

The partitionists had already been given the go-ahead by U.S. Secretary of State Byrnes. As the Congress got under way, they received unexpected impetus from another all-important direction. Despite fierce Arab opposition, Ernest Bevin was reliably reported as having adopted "some form of partition" as Britain's official policy.

With this head start, the Congress in Basel might well find a means to end the nightly warfare in Jerusalem. If they did not, Palestine in 1947 would surely be, as one Jerusalem newspaper called it last week, "no refuge for the wanderer."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.