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From The Militant, Vol. X No. 34, 24 August 1946, p. 1.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The Allied powers wrote another shameful postscript to the Atlantic Charter last week in Palestine. Bullets from British tommy-guns brought “freedom from fear” to new victims whose only “crime” was to demonstrate in behalf of refugees from Allied rule in Europe seeking to enter Palestine. Among these victims on August 13 was a girl 18 years of age, and a boy 14.
Three days later a British drum-head court condemned 18 Jewish youth to death and sentenced four girls to life imprisonment. They had resisted Britain’s dictatorial rule in Palestine.
On August 13, the British despots transferred some 1,300 immigrants to floating prisons. Men, women and children, sobbing hysterically, were herded into wire cages deep in the holds of converted Liberty ships. British imperialist troops battered in the faces of those who made the slightest show of resistance.
Then the grim ships, with their bleeding human cargo,, set sail for the island of Cyprus. There the helpless families were driven at bayonet point into concentration camps.
Jews who had survived Hitler’s barbed wire camps shouted to correspondents of the capitalist press and pointed to the serial numbers tattooed on their arms as identification marks by the Nazis, “Tell what you see there!” they shouted.
Two children died the first day in the camp.
As the 1,300 milled in the Allied stockade, the British patrolled surrounding roads in tanks and armored cars to hunt down any who tried escaping.
Angry protest demonstrations swept Palestine, violent outbreaks were predicted by all observers. Zionists who supported the Allies during the Second World War on the promise of a Jewish homeland are becoming increasingly bitter and disillusioned.
But the only answer of the British to these demonstrations was intensification of the blockade on ports where more Jewish immigrants are scheduled to arrive.
Britain insists on a stranglehold on the oil fields of the Middle East. Britain insists on a military base in Palestine as an anchor to shipping lanes running through the Mediterranean. Britain insists on these imperialist objectives even though it means concentration camps for the Jewish survivors of Nazi terror and ruthless oppression for the Arab people of The Middle East.
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