Letter to the Editor of the Wall Street Journal, in reference to “Palestine 1936 Review_ The Storm Before the Storm” (short version), George Blumenthal.

In Dominic Green’s review of Palestine 1936 (Wall Street Journal, February 11, 2023), he presents two concepts of the book that are inherently flawed. First, his assertion that Jewish-Arab tensions arose after 1936, and second, his portrayal of the British as being “patrons” of the Jews. 

The author argues that the Arab Revolt of 1936, led by Haj Amin al-Husseini, Mufti of Jerusalem, “cast the mold of the Jewish-Arab encounter ever since.” However, this claim is challenging, as the Mufti (later a Nazi collaborator), encouraged by a British Colonel, incited massacres of Palestinian Jews in 1920, the Nebi Musa riots (8 killed), in 1921, the Jaffa riots (47 killed) and in 1929, riots across Palestine (133 killed), the most horrific of which was in Hebron (67 killed). Medical officers reported that the dead in Jaffa and Hebron had been mutilated. 

The author’s picture of the British as Jewish “enablers” is far from reality. British anti-Jewish sentiment and undermining of the Balfour Declaration are documented from 1920, culminating in the White Paper of 1939. In 1921, Winston Churchill reduced the land initially earmarked for the Jewish homeland by 75%, and in his 1922 White Paper, he created the notion of “economic absorptive capacity” as a means of limiting Jewish immigration into Palestine. 

With the White Paper of 1939, following a directive from King George VI, Jewish immigration into Palestine was cut to a total of 75,000 from 1939 to 1944. Arguably, hundreds of thousands of Jews could have been saved from Hilter. 

See also:

Islam Says NO to the Jewish Homeland