Historical Background and Interviews
III. A New Beginning A New Beginning
violence. Jews organized a self-defense force, the Haganah. Arab leaders incited a three-day riot against Jews and their property in Jerusalem. Britain continued to largely ignore Arab riots, but sen- tenced proponents of Jewish self-defense, such as Vladimir Jabo- tinsky and several colleagues, to long terms in prison. 1 In May 1921, after Arab actions left forty-seven Jews and forty-eight Arabs dead, Britain was faced with the need to maintain friendly relations with oil-producing Arab countries and therefore suspended all Jewish immigration to the Mandate. However, it lift- ed the ban in July. Arab attacks shut down seven kibbutzim, but in Jerusalem’s Old City, they were stopped by the new self-defense force, the Haganah. The following year, when the Mandate’s population was 750,000, including 83,000 Jews, Britain published a White Paper (the term for British regulations relating to its mandate in Palestine) that promised Arabs that it would never permit Jewish immigration to exceed the economic capacity of Palestine to absorb them. Britain continued its policy of imprisoning Jews who organized defense units and announced a strongly pro-Arab interpretation of the Bal- four Declaration. The British Colonial Secretary of the time, Win- ston Churchill, also decreased the size of the proposed Jewish home territory, promised that Jewish immigrants would never be allowed to become a burden on Arabs and that political undesirables would always be denied entry. The Jewish community reluctantly accepted the order, but it was rejected by the Arabs. Frequent outbreaks of vi - olent attacks on Jews continued, but Jewish action remained limited to self-defense. Over the next decade, while anti-Semitism spread in Europe, about 75,000 Jews managed to slip into Palestine and Arab leaders loudly proclaimed from the pulpit that Jews had sinister designs against Arabs and Arab holy places. The oratory was effective, and in August 1929, a four-day period of violence began in Jerusalem and spread to Haifa, Hebron, and elsewhere, with more than 133 Jewish civilians killed. The British did little or nothing to quell the
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