April/May 1992, Page 31, 32, 92

Seeing the Light

Holy Land, August 1929

By Vincent Sheean

Conclusion

I come now to a curious incident. How curious (and, indeed, how horrible) will appear later on in the story. . .

On the afternoon of Wednesday, August 14, I was writing in my room in the Austrian Hospice when one of our ever breathless Tyrolean servants broke in to say that a lady was downstairs to see me. I threw on a voluminous dressing gown and clattered down the great stone staircase to the door. There, to my surprise, I saw a compatriot of mine whom I knew very slightly-a Jewish-American I had met in Zionist circles. . . What she had to say to me, and what followed that evening are related baldly in my diary. I shall quote the entry written the next day (August 15, in the morning), calling the young lady Miss X.

Thursday, August 15. Yesterday was the Eve of Tisha b'Av (the ninth of the Av), which the Jews of the Galut call Tishabov. Today is the actual fast itself: commemoration of the destruction of the Temple. The day is particularly associated with the Wailing Wall; and with the new Jewish Agency just formed, all the Wailing Wall propaganda going full tilt, the Arabs in a rare state of anxiety, the situation was ripe for anything. Trouble, trouble, and more trouble. There will be plenty. I knew nothing about it at all-didn't even know Tishabov was so near-when Miss X arrived at the Hospice at three in the afternoon, after yesterday's entry in this book was already written. Said she had to go to the Wailing Wall and write a telegram about it for the Times. . . would I go with her and help? I couldn't understand why, but she said there was going to be a "bust up." She had come up from Tel Aviv especially for this. . . She said the word had been passed round and hundreds of Haluzim were coming in during the afternoon and evening from the colonies and Tel Aviv, ready to fight.

I simply couldn't believe all this. She said the Haluzim would be armed-"three-quarters of them"-and it would be a good thing if there was a row at the Wall, to "show them that we are here." I didn't believe a damned word of it: too fantastic; but I told her I'd be ready to go along at five o'clock if she would come back. She said there wouldn't be any trouble until sundown, and five o' clock would do. I went along with her when she came back. She was inconceivably cynical and flippant about the whole thing; said a row would be a very good thing for the Zionist cause, arouse world Jews and increase contributions to the new Agency. Before we reached the Wall it was evident that the police were well prepared. There were little clumps of policemen, British and Palestinian, at every turning in the road, and a force of about 20 of them on duty at the Wall itself, half in front of the Grand Mufti's house and half at the other end. There was no excitement whatever, only about a half a dozen religious Jews and Jewesses (Oriental) praying and weeping against the Wall. Towards six, a little before, we went away to the Hotel St. John for a glass of beer, sat there a bit; I couldn't understand her point of view at all, and tried to find out.

When we returned to the Wall, a little before seven, everything had changed. There was a dense crowd made up chiefly of Haluzim, in the little area in front of the Wall. A Yemenite Jew was chanting the lamentations, from the Book, while four other Yemenites sat around him, weeping and rocking themselves back and forth. These seemed to me to be the most sincerely religious manifestants present-they paid no attention to their surroundings, but only to their lament. The rest of that crowd was spoiling for a fight. The crowd I was in, that is. Farther off, at the end of the Wall before the Grand Mufti's house, the service was being read by a Cantor (Sephardic, I believe) who stopped and looked around angrily at the slightest noise. Since noises were continually being made, he was continually stopping, but always had to begin again, as he discovered that the sounds came from zealous but irreverent Haluzim. The number of Jews taking part in this Sephardic group was not more than 16. I counted them as well as I could from where I stood, and am pretty sure of the number. This was at the Mufti's house; the other group was at the other end, opposite the Wall itself, sitting on the steps that go down to one of the Moghrabi houses. All the people who choked the area seemed to be either people like myself, who had come out of curiosity or interest, and Haluzim, who were-as Miss X said-"rarin' to go. . ."

Evidence of Preparation

Both the Arabs and the police must have been warned of this invasion from the colonies, for there was evidence of preparation. For instance, the Arabs remained invisible; the Mufti's windows were closed and shuttered at about 7:30 so that he wouldn't have to look at the mob milling around; the police were in force and vigilant. The behavior of this crowd at the wall of the mosque was, I consider, damned insulting. If I were an Arab I should be angry, very angry, and I don't for a minute think this thing is over.

X was incredibly cynical. I don't believe she's ever seen anybody wounded, or ever seen a street fight; she can't understand the awfulness of the things she said last night. We left the Wall at about nine o'clock. . . We went up to the Bristol Gardens for dinner. X was indescribable-apparently enjoyed the impression of horror she was making on me. Said there was bound to be trouble; if not tonight, tomorrow; "we have to show we are here"; and "it won't do a bit of harm if a couple of people get hurt." I tried to tell her, sitting there under a lemon tree, what this kind of thing meant, what it could lead to. God knows I've seen enough of it in my time. She only laughed. I think she though I was crazy to take it so hard. According to her, it can't do any harm and will only bring in the shekels. I told her she had definitely killed any remnant of sympathy I had for the Zionist movement. . .

Later in the same day I added another entry to this:

. . . Jews parading again today. Extreme provocation, but the Arabs are doing nothing. Small army of Haluzim-these precious Maccabees-passed half an hour ago, on their way to the Wall, with a flag, the Zionist national flag, I suppose, but I couldn't see it: it was furled. Shouts and cheers come from down there; the whole thing makes me very nervous. . . What an exhibition of imbicility the whole thing is! And if it weren't for the British police I think there would be terrible pogroms. My affection for Zionism has certainly reached the zero point. If this keeps up it will soon go below that and turn into an active antagonism.

This long entry (August 15, 1929) is one of the most puzzling in all the fat volumes of my diary. What did it mean? What could it mean? No sensible human being can believe that the responsible Zionists, like Sacher or Kisch, could have ordered their adherents to make such a show of force at the wall of the Haram Al-Sharif: such a thing would be madness. And yet who did tell the young men to come in from all over the country? I saw them, felt their temperature, knew that they were out for trouble. I had seen mobs and street fights from Chicago to Hankow and back again; I knew the electricity that hatred sets up in the air. And I had seen all the bloodshed I ever wanted to see in my life-all I wanted for a dozen lives, innumerable incarnations. The sight of these angry young men with their Haluz energy worked up to such a pitch filled me with alarm. I did not know what I could do about it, but it seemed to me. . . that we were in for some kind of horror far worse than the young fools could have anticipated. If Miss X was in any way typical, they did not have the slightest conception of the gravity of these issues to the Muslims.

Who did tell the young men to come in from all over the country?

The Jews of Jerusalem outnumbered the Arabs two to one. It was a matter of common knowledge that the Jews possessed firearms; the Arabs did not. Under these conditions, it seemed likely that the Jewish superiority in numbers and equipment, as well as their organization and centralization, would enable them to do great damage among the Arabs for a day or two if they so desired, and from what I had seen and heard the previous week I thought this was probably the wish of a good many among them.

Therefore, on the first day of these troubles the word "massacre" not only didn't occur in conversation, but never even crossed one's mind. The first casualties, we were told, had been Arabs killed by Jews; the Jews were an armed majority in the city; the Arabs were a minority armed only with sticks and knives. What it looked like, at about two o' clock on Friday afternoon, was an outbreak of murderous hatred between the two parts of the population-an outbreak that I, at least, had expected for some days; an outbreak caused by the long, exasperating controvery over the Wailing Wall, and precipitated, made inevitable, by the raising of the Jewish national flag at the wall of the Mosque of Omar. I expected the Jews and Arabs to behave more or less as Germans, Chinese, Frenchmen, Moroccans or Americans would behave under similar circumstances, only worse. In short, I though we were in for a fight-a peculiarly revolting form of fight, in which the Jews would win in Jerusalem, Haifa and Tel Aviv, and the Arabs would probably get the upper hand elsewhere, and in which neither side would respect the rules of Western civilized murder.

I did what almost any newspaper man or ex-newspaper man would have done: went straight to the post office to send a cablegram to my old office in New York. . .

The answer I recieved from New York was: "How much do you want for articles? Can't you send them by mail?" At the moment I recieved the cablegram the terrible murders at Hebron, in which 64 Jews, including some American youths, lost their lives, were actually taking place; a crisis of the first magnitude was in progress; troops and ships were on the move; the "story," considered simply from a newspaper point of view, as an event of interest, was the most important in the world. But I was asked to "send it by mail. . ."

For three days I worked again as a correspondent. Even as it was, with all these delays and difficulties, mine were still the earliest full accounts of the trouble to reach the English and American newspapers. This was partly due to the difficulties under which my Jewish colleagues labored-few of them dared circulate in the city, and at the beginning none of them went to the government for information-but also to the severity of the censorship established at the beginning of the outbreak.

I cannot remember clearly the details of those terrible days. I scarcely slept at all; I was up at all hours and in all parts of the city, trying to follow the course of events for professional purposes. I went from Arab quarters to Jewish quarters and back again, through police lines and about the unguarded parts of the city. . . On all previous occasions of this kind I had been fully aware of the perils that threatened the curious bystander, and from the time I had first heard a bullet whiz past in the air, years before, I had retained a salutary fear of death. But in Jerusalem the intensity of nervous excitement produced, after the first day or two, a kind of daze in which I lost awareness of my own identity; I could not have been more unconscious of personal dangers if I had been invisible. Here again I had ceased to be a rational newspaper man: I was roaming the streets of Jerusalem at all hours, overworking fanatically, sleeping scarcely at all, out of sheer nervous horror. Sometimes I noticed my own existence and was surprised at it: for example, when an anxious city Arab would attach himself to me and walk through the streets, as if in protection. This happened several times as I was on my way through the Arab city. I never knew who the self-appointed bodyguards were-they were never twice the same-but I suppose they must have been some of the men the Supreme Moslem Council had sent out to try to keep order. In the Jewish quarters I neither needed nor received such escorts, for there I was usually taken to be British; but as I passed the barricades in those stricken streets I did get many a frown and a curse, for the British were by no means popular among the Jewish population during those days.

The disorders of Friday resulted in many deaths among both Jews and Arabs (the Arabs including Christians as well as Moslems), and the impulse of murder continued for a week. At the end of the terror the official roll for Jerusalem was: 29 Jews and 38 Arabs killed, 43 Jews and 51 Arabs wounded. Here, as in Haifa, the Arabs got considerably the worst of it, but it seems clear (and seemed clear even at the time) that the casualties inflicted by Jews were chiefly in self-defense. The government had undertaken to disarm the Jewish police and the Jewish special constables, to avoid giving the Arabs a chance to say that they were being murdered by Jews with official approval; but no government could have disarmed the Jewish population. What surprised me in the roll of the dead and wounded was not that Arabs outnumbered Jews, but that they did not outnumber them a great deal more.

The horrors of Friday in Jerusalem were followed by something much worse: the ghastly outbreak at Hebron, where 64 Jews of the old-fashioned religious community were slaughtered and 54 of them wounded. Hebron was one of the four holy cities of Judaism, and had had a small, constant Jewish population since medieval days. These were not Zionists at all; a more innocent and harmless group of people could not have been found in Palestine; many of them were Oriental Jews, and all were religious. They had had nothing to do with the Zionist excesses, and had lived in amity with their Arab neighbors up to that day. But when the Arabs of Hebron-an unruly lot, at best-heard that Arabs were being killed by Jews in Jerusalem, and that the Mosque of Omar was in danger, they went mad. . .

I cannot, at this late date, go through all the story of that week; it has been told over and over again. The horrors of Hebron were not repeated elsewhere, but an Arab mob attack on the religious Jews of Safad, on the following Thursday, was sufficiently terrible to be classified as another massacre. In Haifa, where the Jews were predominantly of the modern Zionist type and occupied an excellent strategic position at the top of the hill, the Arabs had much the worst of it. The same was true in some of the colonies; others were almost wiped out. At the end of the disturbances, the official British casualty lists showed 207 dead and 379 wounded among the population of Palestine, of which the dead included 87 Arabs (Christian and Moslem) and 120 Jews, the wounded 181 Arabs and 198 Jews.

The effort to be an efficient, unemotional newspaper correspondent was difficult to the point of impossibility. Living as I did, without sleep and without rest, eating little, and that at the weirdest hours, I should probably have collapsed in time simply from physical exhaustion. But there was a great deal more in it than that. . . Although I had spent a good part of my life amid scenes of violence and was no stranger to the sight of blood and dying men, I had never overcome my loathing for the spectacle even when it seemed, as in some of the conflicts I had witnessed, compelled by historical necessity. But here, in this miserable little country no bigger, in relation to the rest of the world, than the tip of your finger in relation to your body, I could see no historical necessity whatever. The country was tiny and was already inhabited: why couldn't the Zionists leave it alone? It would never hold enough Jews to make even a beginning towards the solution of the Jewish problem; it would always be prey to such ghastly horrors as those I saw every day and every night: religion, the eternal intransigence of religion, ensured that the problem could never be solved. The Holy Land seemed as near an approximation of hell on earth as I had ever seen. . .

The factors of physical strain, sleeplessness, excitement and indignation, reached a climax on Tuesday (August 27). . . When I got back to the Austrian Hospice that night (it was a little after two o'clock in the morning, I remember-earlier than usual) I knew that I was finished; I could not go on. My nerves had fallen to pieces altogether, so that I could not hit the right keys on the typewriter and indeed could scarcely pick up a pencil. I had seen too many dead and wounded Arabs being carried silently through the street in front of the Hospice; my ears were ringing with the sounds I had heard in the Jewish hospitals. Worst of all, I could never get out of my head that awful conversation with the lady I have called Miss X, who had told me how desirable "incidents" would be for the new Jewish agency. I was half crazy with nervous horror and indignation-indignation at the Zionists for bringing on such a catastrophe, at the Arabs for behaving with such ferocity, at the government for its general helplessness. All these things produced a mental derangement unlike anything else I have ever known. I sat at my typewriter all night long, making up cablegrams explaining things to the N.A.N.A. in New York and asking them to release me from further work. Towards seven o'clock in the morning (as I know only by the evidence of my next-door neighbor, the auditor of the government; for my own memory of that night vanished) I stopped trying to write on the typewriter and tumbled into bed. I did not get up again for four days. . .

The Commission of Enquiry

I saw the Arab leaders frequently after the troubles, as I was working on a magazine article about the Haram Al-Sharif. . .

I stayed on in Jerusalem-stayed for weeks longer than I really wanted to stay-chiefly because of the Parliamentary Commission of Enquiry into the Palestine Disturbances. . . Its purpose was to find out what had caused the outbreak of August 23rd and to make recommendations for the future. . .

I saw the Arab leaders frequently after the troubles, as I was working on a magazine article about the Haram Al-Sharif. . .

I stayed on in Jerusalem-stayed for weeks longer than I really wanted to stay-chiefly because of the Parliamentary Commission of Enquiry into the Palestine Disturbances. . . Its purpose was to find out what had caused the outbreak of August 23rd and to make recommendations for the future. . .

The Zionist case before the Commission of Enquiry was prepared with the utmost care. Every available typewriter in Jerusalem was in use for weeks in the preparation of their documents as I found out to my discomfort (I had to give up the machine I had rented for the period). . .

The Arabs were in a position of great inferiority before the Commission. Their counsel-chosen on the advice of some of those self-appointed "friends of the Arabs" in London-were not at best the equals of Sir Boyd Merriman in ability, and were further handicapped by incompetent, dilatory, haphazard preparation. I knew something of the way they went to work, for they lived in the Austrian Hospice, and I saw them frequently. . .

The Arab inferiority was indeed so bad that many Arabs wished to boycott the Commission altogether. But the Grand Mufti kept his head; the better I knew him the more I realized that he was a man of remarkable character, extraordinary inner calm and certainty. He never got excited, he was always open to reason, and he never rejected an argument or a suggestion without examining it carefully. His knowledge of Western methods was limited, but he said from the beginning that if the Commission of Enquiry were really interested in getting the truth they would get it no matter what the various barristers did: and he was right. . .

I had agreed to testify to one thing only: the business of Miss X and the gathering at Tishabov. But I had never tried to offer evidence in a court before, and did not realize that it was impossible to say your one thing and get out. . .

Naiveté and Denial

What with one thing and another I was a sorry witness, but on the whole I suppose most members of the Commission must have supposed that the central fact (the point I had come there to make) did refer to something. At any rate, they called on Miss X immediately afterwards-and she denied the whole thing! I was told that it was stupidly naive of me not to expect this, but the fact is that I didn't. Miss X confirmed only those parts of my testimony that could have been confirmed by other witnesses (times, movements, the stretchers at Hadassah Hospital) and denied all the essential parts, those concerned with what she had told me. She further said that she was not a Zionist, saw few people at Tel Aviv, knew nothing about the Tishabov gatherings, and had not come to Jerusalem on that account at all. Her last and most surprising statement was that when she went to the Wailing Wall, she "generally felt pretty quiet" and did not speak much.

I did not know the details of this evidence for years afterwards. That evening in Jerusalem I only knew that Miss X had denied my evidence under oath, and I had to assume that this disposed of the matter. I had tried to put a rather important point, and if the Commission of Enquiry, did not believe me it could not be helped. And in any case it made no great difference to me or to anybody else, for the Commission of Enquiry, whatever it made out of the mass of conflicting evidence before it, could not change the regime in Palestine. The regime, under which an Arab majority had to be governed without representation until such time as a Jewish majority could be pumped into the country from abroad, was regulated by the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate. And with this regime the disturbances of August 1929 were sure to be repeated from time to time whenever the Zionist policy grew so obviously aggressive as to arouse popular indignation. I was weary of the whole thing, which had never brought anything but trouble and difficulty to me; and it was with the profoundest feelings of relief that I left that wretched little country-the "Holy Land"-behind.

Vincent Sheean was an international correspondent in the 1920s and 1930s and the author of numerous articles and books, including Anatomy of Virtue and New Persia. The above is an excerpt from his 1934 memoir, Personal History © 1934, 1935, 1940, © 1969 by Vincent Sheean. Published by arrangement with Carol Publishing Group. A Citadel Press book.

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