Attacks by British Soldiers and Police in Palestine Continue; Arab Strike Quiet

Reports of attacks by British soldiers and police against Jews continue to come in from various parts of Palestine.

In Rehovoth last night three masked men in the uniform of the Sixth Airborne Division held up a restaurant, escaping with considerable cash. In Jerusalem policemen halted a number of Jewish pedestrians and searched them. The Jews were forced to undress and were kept standing half-naked for about 30 minutes. The attacks in Jerusalem are causing widespread fear and bitterness among the Jews of the city.

Meanwhile, barbed wire fences and armed guards were removed from around the American Consulate at the request of the consul. The precautions, which were taken after the King David explosion this summer, had originally been protested by the American authorities as unnecessary.

A military court here has sentenced two youths, Benjamin Nass, 21, and Eliezer Sudit, 22, to fifteen years imprisonment following their conviction on charges of attempting to rob a bank in Jaffa Sept. 13, and illegally bearing arms. The same court last week sentenced 17-year-old Benjamin Kumchin to 18 years and flogging on the same charges.

Nass and Sudit maintained that they were innocent bystanders during the hold-up and that they fled to a nearby factory to escape the exchange of gunfire between the robbers and the police. Several pistols were found in the factory after they were arrested, but both youths disclaimed any connection with the weapons. A police sergeant testified that he had seen them with the pistols in their hands.

The jurisdictional dispute in Petach Tikvah between members of the Histadruth and the National Workers, a trade union affiliated with the Revisionists, was settled when the disputants agreed to accept arbitration by the Jewish Agency. Several hundred persons clashed Friday and thirty were injured, two seriously.

A country-wide Arab general strike passed off quietly today. A resolution, adopted by the Palestine Arab Higher Committee during the two-hour strike, expressed “indignation against the situation created by the flood of Jewish immigration, by Jewish aggression against Arab land, and by Jewish attacks on the Arabs in their villages and homes.”