A miniature "totalitarian state" set up by Arabs in Safed with segregation and a boycott against Jews was described today by a leading Jewish citizen of the ancient North Palestinian city.
The Jewish community is confined in "a pale of settlement more rigidly circumscribed than any known in Czarist Russia," he said. "For a month we have been like prisoners in a concentration camp over whom hangs an indeterminate sentence.
"Isolation of the Jewish quarter has been ordered by the Arab National Committee, which rules the town. An anti-Jewish boycott is enforced. Arabs do not buy from or sell to Jews, who are unable to leave. The Jewish quarter is clamped in a vise of fear."
The Jewish leader said Safed was ruled by "a handful of desperadoes." The Government has held up its road-building program in the section as punishment for Safed’s misbehavior, he said, and the Jews are also suffering from this.
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