Rumors floated in Jerusalem during the weeks following the publication of the new Statement of Policy significantly illustrated to what somber thoughts a people’s fancies turn in a crisis. Although as has frequently happened before, the world knew earlier than Palestine what was to occur in regard to some of the country’s most fateful problems, fertile imaginations made up from the beginning for any lacunae in the necessarily brief messages from London.
First, there was the unfounded report from Arab sources that the White Paper and the Simpson Report meant immediate legislation definitely stopping the immigration of Jews for ten years, and explicitly providing for the prohibition of land sales for a similar period. So circumstantial were the accounts and so positive their purveyors, that many were induced reluctantly to believe that these two pieces of legislation would be enacted by a certain day.
Nothing of the sort happened on the given day, but people in the know wisely shook their heads and said — wait till the following Thursday; and watch the official Gazette. The following Thursday brought the official Gazette, but it only contained Sir John Hope Simpson’s recommendations reprinted for the “information of the public!”
BAITERS HARD AT WORK
Rumor hunting continued for weeks, and one is tempted to reproduce two stories which flowed into the Jerusalem J. T. A. office on a single morning, showing the baiters hard at work, the bait ready at hand and the number of baited growing daily more numerous.
Story number one was that Arab landowners, apprehending the foreshadowed legislation would give squatters and tenants certain rights over the lands they now work partly for themselves, partly for their landlords, began clearing the squatters off their lands. The story named the place where a fight had actually occurred between the police who had come to drive off the tenants, and the tenants who refused to leave. The story will want checking, and checking will most likely show it was either an invention or a highly embroidered account of a slight incident.
Even more sensational than the first story is the second persistent rumor, that many Arabs are asking Jews to accept fake titles of lands on the groundless theory that when the new legislation is enacted, Jews will be free to dispose of lands to Jews and Arabs to Arabs, but Arabs will not be permitted to sell to Jews. The rumored scheme accordingly is for Jews for the present to come into nominal possession of Arab lands which they may later sell on behalf of the real owners, Jews in such cases acting as “govim” in the traditional sham sale of “Khometz” on Passover eve.
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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.
