Perpetual peace was pledged to-day between the Jewish colony of Motza, near Jerusalem, and the Arabs of the adjoining village of Colonia, from which care the rioters who razed Motza to the ground in the disturbances of August 1929, burning alive the members of the Jewish family Macleff.
Prompted by the colonist Broza, who was himself charged with the murder of an Arab but was subsequently acquitted, the Jewish Agency appointed Sheik Sultan Abughosh and Mr. Abraham Shapiro of Petach Tikvah as negotiators, with the assistance of Mr. Charles Passman, of the American Zion Commonwealth, who is now the Administrator of the Palestine Emergency Fund.
The peace pact was concluded in the traditional Oriental manner of slaughtering a sheep in order to wipe out the blood feud still existing because the murderers of the Macleff family have not been punished. Colonel Kisch, member of the Jewish Agency Executive, witnessed the ceremony, and Dr. Weizmann paid a visit to Motza a little later on his way from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv.
Mr. Abraham Shapiro was responsible also for the conclusion of the famous peace pact concluded between Petach Tikvah and the adjoining Arab village Yahudia, after the severe anti-Jewish outbreak of May 1921, since when Petach Tikvah has never again been attacked.
Mr. Abraham Shapiro, who is a leading farmer in the Jewish colony of Petach Tikvah, where he has been settled for half a century, appeared as a witness before the Shaw Enquiry Commission after the August outbreak. Several days before August 23rd., the day when the outbreak started, he said, the Arab labourers employed in Petach Tikvah, numbering 600, had left the orange groves when rumours had reached them that all Arabs were being called to Jerusalem to defend the Moslem Holy Places threatened by the Jews. The same thing, he said, had happened on the eve of the 1921 riots. On August 25th. he headed a deputation to the friendly Arab villages with whom Petach Tikvah had signed a peace pact in 1922. In the midst of their parley, Mukhtars arrived from other villages with a message that the Jaffa streets were running with Moslem blood and the people of the Yahudia lands, which adjoin Petach Tikvan, must come to defend their Moslem brethren. The villagers remembering, however, the friendliness of the Jews and the heavy collective fines which they had to pay after the 1921 raid which they carried out on Petach Tikvah, disregarded the call. Descriting, in answer to questions put to him by Viscount Erleigh, the Peace Covenant which the colonists of Petach Tikvah had made with the tribe of the Sheik Abu Kishk, which had carried out the 1921 raid on Petach Tikvah, Mr. Shapiro said: We have had perfect peace since and we hope no man will be able to disturb it.
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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.
