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 124

124 funeral) states : "The paper regrets the fact that a rumour spread in Jaffa that the Jews were going to attack Jaffa on Friday. Not only is the rumour false, but Jaffa never took it seriously..." The "Falastin" of the same date states : "A rumour having been heard to the effect that Jews intended to attack Jaffa, the editor sent a special messenger to Tel Aviv, where he ascertained that the rumour was devoid of foundation." Para. 20 (sub-para. 4 and para. 21 (sub-para. 1) 8. It is submitted that the record of events as alleged to have transpired in Tel Aviv on Friday evening, the 17th April, and on Saturday the 18th is grossly exaggerated. It is entirely misleading to state that the funeral of the Jewish victims of the Tulkarm murder was succeeded by "an anti-Arab labour campaign in Tel Aviv". Such a "campaign" could clearly not have taken place for the obvious reason that practically no Arab labour is employed in Tel Aviv. What actually happened was that a few street urchins molested Aralb gharry drivers, that in one case an Arab was slapped in the face and that a gew lads threw vegetables from an Arab greengrocer's shop into the street. Emphatic exception must be taken to the complete failure of the Report to discriminate between these few isolated instances of molestation, which were at once publicly condemned by the Tel Aviv Municipality and the entire Jewish press, and the acts of brutal, cold-blooded murder which were committed by Arabs against Jews on the 19th and the following days in the streets of Jaffa. Para. 21 (sub-para. 2). 9. In referring to the rumours which became current in Jaffa on the morning of April 19th that two Arabs had been killed in Tel Aviv by Jews, no mention is made of the fact that these rumours did not originate spontaneously but that a number of Arabs appear to have been most actively engaged in spreading these false rumours with the deliberate purpose of inciting the population to acts of aggression against the Jews. Para. 22 et seq. 10. The narrative of the events set out in Paras. 22 and 23 presents, as previously indicated, an utterly wrong view of the Jaffa outbreak. The impression conveyed throughout is that of mutual assaults by both sides against each other, when, in actual fact, the essential feature of the events of those days was the coldblooded murder of 16 Jews trapped in the streets of Jaffa by a mob which had been incited to fever heat by a set of agitators. How utterly inadequate the presentation of the events in this paragraph is, may be gauged from the fact that only five murders of Jews are specifically mentioned in the narrative, when in actual fact, 16 Jews were put to death in Jaffa during the outbreak, as recorded in the statistical table in para. 24. As in the preceding sections, every allegation of Jewish acts of aggression — such as