A wave of violence that swept Palestine in the wake of Britain’s proposal to establish an independent state took the lives of 50 Arabs in the past 24 hours. Thirty-one were victims of bombings and sniping while 19 were killed in clashes between terrorist bands and British troops.
Sixteen bandsmen were slain in an engagement with troops near Acre. Three were killed near Ramallah when a band engaged a military patrol. One British soldier was killed and two others were fatally wounded in another clash between a military patrol and an Arab band near the southern village of Qaddis.
Two bomb explosions in an Arab market in Haifa resulted in the death of 24 Arabs and the injuring of 39 others. Two Jewish special policemen were also wounded in the blast. The entire city was immediately placed under curfew by the military authorities. Three Arabs were killed and six were wounded in the boundary area between Tel Aviv and Jaffa. Another Arab was shot dead near a market in the Machine Yehuda quarter of Jerusalem.
Jews were officially held responsible for the Machine Yehuda shooting, the violence in the Jaffa boundary area and for sniping at an Arab bus near the Mea Shearim quarter of Jerusalem which resulted in no casualties.
British police searched patrons of some Jewish restaurants in Jerusalem, without result. Eight Jews were arrested including seven members of the extremist Zionist-Revisionist Party, among them Dr. Ephraim Washitz, Jerusalem Revisionist leader, and also Aaron Nathaniel, president of the Jerusalem Maccabi and member of the Maccabi World Executive Committee, who is not a Revisionist.
The Histadruth, Palestine Jewish labor federation, was scheduled to hold a special meeting tonight to discuss the latest developments.
At a special session of the Tel Aviv Municipal Council, Mayor Israel Rokach eulogized the three Jews salain in yesterday’s disorders. “The Arabs are mingling their joy with our blood,” he declared The council cabled its unanimous protest to the Colonial Office in London against the proposal to establish an independent state.
A J.T.A. correspondent who interviewed Jews in the streets of Jerusalem at random regarding the plan to establish a Palestine state found that ten did not believe an Arab stat would actually be realized, 13 expressed distrust of Britain, three were convinced that in the long run British policy would be favorable to Zionism, one feared that liquidation of Jewish effort in Palestine was imminent, and five predicted that the Palestine Jews would forcibly oppose subjection to the Arabs.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
