Unholy Crisis

The Holy Land was tight with unholy tension. Jews talked of a showdown, Arabs of a holy war. A division of British air borne troops patrolled streets and country roads. Two more divisions were on the way.

Police in armored cars cordoned off Jerusalem's central section, searched the crowds in public buildings. In the narrow area between the Jewish city of Tel Aviv and the Arab city of Jaffa, panic flickered among scores of jittery Jewish families. Plumbing signs marked on walls by sewer workers had been mistaken for Arab threats, and had raised visions of another St. Bartholomew's Eve. This week, Jews staged a general strike; Arabs planned to follow suit.

Right v. Right. As always, the fate of Jews and Arabs alike would be decided elsewhere.

The British Government was torn between its moral obligation to the Jews and its material dependence on the Arabs in the Middle and Near East. Observed the London Times: "[This is] a conflict not of right with wrong, but of right with right." Prodded by President Truman's blunt request for the immediate admission of 100,000 Jews to Palestine, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin conferred with Reuven Zaslani, chief of the Jewish Agency, and with the new Arab League's Secretary-General Abdel Rahman Azzam Bey. Afterward, both breathed fire. Said Zaslani: in the event of bloodshed, "the Jews in Palestine will regard it as their fight." Said Azzam Bey: "The time has come when we must fight if necessary to save ourselves from the Jews."

One of the Arab League's members, the Government of British-sponsored Iraq, filed a "friendly protest" in Washington, objecting that Palestine already had enough "strangers." The Arabs had some reason to be baffled. They had understood that President Roosevelt, at his post-Yalta meeting with Saudi Arabia's King Ibn Saud, had promised not to upset or seriously disturb the Arab position. Now the White House took the ground that since no written record of any such promise existed, the promise did not exist.

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