Political report of the Executive of the Jewish Agency submitted to the ... Zionist Congress and the ... session of the Council of the Jewish Agency · 1937-08-01 · 8.1937 · p. Seite 25

25 tion had been supplied by the Palestine Government to the Colonial Office in London on the strength of which the Colonial Secretary gave the House of Commons on April 23rd an account of the initial outbreak to which the Jewish Agency could not but take the strongest possible exception. The statement made by the Secretary of State described the stabbing and clubbing to death by Arabs of defenceless Jews in various parts of Jaffa town as "clashes" which "occurred between Arabs and Jews on the border between Jaffa and Tel Aviv involving a number of casualties on both sides." It failed to make clear that the casualties on the Arab side were the result not of Jewish, but exclusively of police action. In prefacing the account of the Jaffa outbreak by an utterly defective narrative of the events which had preceded it, it loaded the dice heavily against the Jews and mitigated the revolting character of the Jaffa outrages and the responsibility of their instigation. It made no mention of the fact that the Jews shot at the hold-up near Tulkarm on April 15th had been deliberately selected to be murdered becaus they were Jews. It contained the unsubstantiated allegation that the Jewish crowd present at the funeral in Tel Aviv of one of the victims of the Tulkarm hold-up "attempted to penetrate into Jaffa." It magnified beyond all proportion the part played by a few cases of minor molestation of Arabs by irresponsible youngsters in Tel Aviv. 29. The Jewish Agency lodged a strong protest against the presentation to Parliament of so distorted an account and the suppression of the official communique published in Jerusalem. It was only as a result of numerous representations made both in Jerusalem and in London that the Jerusalem statement was finally communicated to the House of Commons. But the mischief resulting from the first statement had already been done, and it wa3 greatly aggravated by the fact that representatives of news agencies of world-wide circulation had received from the Palestine Administration and published the same distorted version of the course of events as had been supplied to the Colonial Office. 30. The official communques which from April 19th on were published daily throughout the course of the disturbances occupied the constant attention of the Political Department and formed the subject of numerous representations. On a number of occasions