The Arab and Jewish Ordeal in Palestine

From ‘Man!: A Journal of the Anarchist Ideal and Movement‘, San Francisco, July 1936

The bitter feuds that once more are ravaging the “holy” land have already resulted in scores of deaths on the side of the Arabs who are the “majority’’ of the population, as well as on the side of the Jews who are the ‘‘minority.” The number of those jailed and sentenced is not definitely known.

There are those who readily blame the fascist government of Italy as the instigators of the race feuds. Others blame the Nazi government of Germany along the same line. The first, it is being asserted, aiming to hurt the British government, and the latter to avenge themselves on the more than 100,000 Jews who have escaped from their clutches. The truth lies though somewhere else. The whole blame for every life lost, injured or now suffering imprisonment are none other than the rulers of Britain as well as those chauvinistic nationalist Jews who made it their goal to once more turn the “holy” land into a Jewish land.

Palestine is no more, at present, a land belonging to the Arabs than it could ever become a land of the Jews. It is a mere colony ruled over by British exploiters and rulers. The only ones who are reaping direct benefits are the British rulers and exploiters. It has ever been thus: the wrong-doers of mankind have at all times shrewdly manipulated and made use of race and color has a cloak under which to strengthen their reign. The Czar did that in Russia. Hitler is doing it in Germany. Great Britain is nursing it in Palestine. The whites are doing it in the southern states of America against the Negroes. And so it goes on all along the line.

The issue of race and color, that regretfully enough makes often its inroad even into radical and revolutionary circles, cannot be solved as long as social justice has not dawned upon mankind. That fact alone, the only realistic one that should be kept in mind at all times, must be borne in mind by the Jewish race. It must cease to allow itself in falling prey to those Zionist mis-leaders who urge them to migrate to Palestine where nothing but disillusion, if not worse fate, awaits them.

The ordeals that the Jew and the Negro is forced to undergo as a result of the unjust society we now live under everywhere makes it that more imperative, needful and justifiable for both the Jew and Negro to throw their lot in with those revolutionary forces that are striving and struggling for the complete obliteration from the face of the earth of that kind of a social system that thrives on national demarcation lines, territorial boundaries, race and color hatred, and human exploitation.