Tax Strike Launched in Palestine; Haining Warns Force Will Be Used to Stem Violence

With calm restored after a day of stormy demonstrations, Palestine Jewry today embarked upon the economic aspect of its campaign to defeat the newly-announced plan of the British Government. The first blow was which struck by the Association of Jewish Landlords, comprising rural and urban property owners, which proclaimed a complete tax strike until the Palestine White Paper is rescinded.

Meanwhile,Major-Gen. Robert H. Haining summoned Jewish leaders and warned them that a recurrence of yesterday’s attacks on the police would be met “with force. ” Addressing him self to members of the Jewish Agency Executive, the Jewish National Council and the Jerusalem Jewish Community Executive, Gen. Haining said:

“For three years the Jews have shown admirable restraint. I hope you will use your influence to maintain that restraint in the future. Yesterday the authorities withheld the troops and ordered the police to act with restraint, which was done until the Jews attacked the Government offices resulting in riot and murder. It is my duty to preserve order without discrimination. If there is a recurrence, it will be necessary to meet force.” Gen Haining, who is commander-in-a-chief of the British military forces in Palestine, ended the meeting without waiting for the Jewish leaders to reply.

British troops this morning arrested 300 Jewish illegal immigrants after they had been landed on the Palestine coast near Ashkalon.

Hebrew newspapers reported that a British police sergeant and two constables had been detained for disciplinary trial for carrying swastikas and shouting “Heil Hitler!” on a Tel Aviv street yesterday evening.

A British policeman died of wounds, 12 others were and 114 Jews were wounded in yesterday’s pitched battle with police in the heart of the city. This morning the Jaffa Road area, where demonstrators had stoned the Government District Offices and fought the police, presented a picture of destruction. Sidewalks and streets were an inch deep in broken glass from smashed street lamps, traffic signs and telephone booths.

British police, apparently in retaliation for the rioting, last night raided the offices of the Jerusalem Jewish Community, the rabbinate, headquarters of the Jewish super numeraries and the Jewish Community’s Education Department. They wrecked the offices of the extremist Zionist-Revisionist Party and its newspaper, Hamashkif, but departed empty-handed.

Meanwhile, in Tel Aviv, 28 persons were wounded, two of them gravely, when Revisionists demonstrated outside the offices where Jews were being registered for Zionist service. The Revisionists stoned the Civil Guard and tried to break into the Beth Brenner Building.

A resolution framed by the Jewish National Council was adopted at hundreds of meetings throughout the country. It declared that no sacrifice was too great to defeat the British Government’s “policy of treachery,” pledge that no Jew would help in establishment of the projected new Government institutions, asserted that Palestine Jewry refused to accept the illegal immigrants and expressed the Jewish people’s confidence that “the great British democracy” would helps them combat the Government policy. The meetings closed with mass recitation of the Biblical pledge (Isaiah, 62): “For the sake of Zion will I not be silent, and for the sake of Jerusalem will I not be quiet.”