The second anniversary of the anti-Jewish outbreak of August 1929 is to be commemorated by an Arab general strike on Sunday, August 23rd, (as was the first anniversary on the same date last year), the Palestine Arab Executive decided at its continued session held here today.
A preliminary demonstration will be held at Nablus on Thursday, August 20th, under the auspices of the Palestine Arab Executive.
On the day of the strike (on Sunday) the entire body of members of the Palestine Arab Executive, headed by the President, Moussa Kazim Pasha, will go on deputation to the retiring High Commissioner, Sir John Chancellor, and will submit to him resolutions of protest against the alleged arming of the Jewish colonists, and against the decision of the Government, (reported in the J.T.A. Bulletin of July 22nd) to legalise the stay in the country of Jews who entered illegally, since the last census held in 1922, estimated by the Palestine Arab Executive to number 25,000, (the Jewish estimate is about 10,000).
The “Jamea el Arabia”, the organ of the Grand Mufti and the Moslem Supreme Council, the first Arab paper to reappear after the one-week strike of the Arab press in protest against the Government’s order to “cease forthwith” the agitation against the policy of supplying sealed armouries in the isolated Jewish colonies, came out this evening with the resolutions adopted by the Palestine Arab Executive meeting as its principal feature.
Last year the Palestine Government confiscated the proclamation issued by the Arab Executive calling the general strike (the 23rd was a Saturday last year) and it also seized all copies of the “Jamea el Arabia”, explaining in a statement issued simultaneously that it was not the paper that had been seized, but the Arab Executive’s strike proclamation appearing in the paper.
A list of 46 names of Arabs who were claimed to have been killed in Jerusalem in the August outbreak was circulated by the Arab Executive, and the Arabs were asked to close their shops and to stay away from their work in memory of these “martyrs”.
Police were mobilised all over the country in readiness for any incidents that might occur. All newspapers and printing shops were warned not to publish any strike proclamations, and the Moslem priests were warned not to make any references to the strike in their sermons in the mosques on the preceeding Friday.
The day passed quietly, however, throughout the country. Only about half the Arab shops were closed in Jerusalem, and in Haifa and Jaffa they were all reopened in the afternoon.
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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.
