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From The Militant, Vol. X No. 30, 27 July 1946, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The Palestine pogrom, supplemented by the Kielce pogrom, depicts the true nature of Jewish “liberation” at the hands of the victorious Allies. Terror, decimation, and murder continue to be the lot of Jewry under decaying capitalism.
Forty-one Jews were killed in the bloody Kielce riots in Poland, equalling the worst pre-Hitler pogroms. Giving the lie to glib Allied military men who invariably dismiss the continued anti-Semitism in Europe as Jewish “inventions,” the Kielce bestialities are the latest and cruelest in a series of pogroms that have taken place in the past year in Poland and other European countries.
In Palestine, the British have recently unleashed a fascist-like terror against Jewry and its military arm, the Hagana. Despite the hermetic censorship immediately clamped on Palestine, shocking news has come of tortures, beatings and indiscriminate killings of women and children, as well as of the openly anti-Semitic conduct of the British troops.
“Enlightened” British colonial rule bared its true face in mass assaults on Jewish settlements, in mass arrests in the cities, where whole blocks were roped off, in bloody encounters with Jewish resisters, and finally, in the utilization of infamous concentration camps at Latrun and Athlit. Mounting waves of arrests and raids on cities and the agricultural communes reached their climax two years ago, when battle-equipped British military formations swooped down on the entire Jewish community, arresting several thousand Jews, political leaders, workers and underground fighters.
The “Jewish Homeland” today is a place of horror to the Jews, reminiscent of their life under Hitler. Every British bullet fired in defense of England’s imperialist aims in Palestine, explodes the Zionist myth of “this is our home and our refuge.” The Jews today are fighting not so much for “their” state, as for the very right to exist in Palestine.
Still another Zionist illusion exploded when the British acted against the Jewish Agency. The contention of the Zionists has been that the Jewish Agency is the “official” representative of world Jewry – a “signal achievement of Zionism.”
The British showed their appreciation of the Agency’s “importance” by raiding and sacking its offices, arresting several of its top leaders and denying visas ito Palestine to two of its U.S. leaders (American citizens no less!). England thus openly violated its own “holy” League of Nations mandate which created the Jewish Agency as Jewry’s “official representative.” This incident glaringly exposes the utter dependency and impotency of this Zionist tool of British imperialism.
Arrayed against the British is the Jewish resistance movement, under the leadership of the Hagana. Originally the military defense arm of the Jewish labor movement, the Hagana has expanded into an all-embracing, strictly disciplined, heavily armed and tightly, knit mass movement, numbering not less than 80,000 members.
With its branches and its ammunition depots in every Jewish communal settlement, with roots in every city block and every union, the Hagana represents the real striking force in Palestine today! Composed mainly of workers and commune farmers, Hagana nevertheless carried out in its program the chauvinist and class-collaboration policies of Zionism.
Hagana’s struggle up to now has not been anti-imperialist but rather a struggle for continued Jewish immigration. Its numerous raids on British military installations, munition depots, etc., were designed to harass the British efforts to keep illegal immigrants out. This is also evidenced by Hagana’s burning of government immigration and identification records.
Britain’s aims in Palestine are clearer than ever before. The British treaty offered to Egypt “grants” sham independence, which will continue Egypt’s economic subjugation. A partial withdrawal of British troops to appease the Egyptian nationalists is just so much window-dressing for Britain’s determination to hold on to Egypt, the key to the Suez Canal and hence to India.
The troops to be withdrawn from Egypt will be shifted to the other side of the Suez Canal – that is, to Palestine, which is the focal point in Britain’s “life line” to India. A veritable armed camp is being built up in Palestine and England’s military might is being concentrated there.
Never was the flimsiness of the Zionist project of an “independent” Palestinian “Jewish state” so fully revealed as it is in the light of British imperialist conduct in and plans for Palestine today.
(Next week: Another article on this subject)
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