Hundreds of Arab families in Safed, including women and children, are going to Jerusalem to see the High Commissioner, Sir John Chancellor and to appeal to him to pardon all the prisoners who are now serving sentences in connection with the outbreak of August 1929, as he pardoned four such Arab prisoners last week, the Arab Press here reports.
The three remaining Hebron Arabs detained on suspicion out of the group of twenty who were extradited last week from Egypt to face charges arising out of the Hebron massacre of August 1929, seventeen of them being released almost immediately, have now been released, because no proof could be found that they had taken part in the massacre.
EGYPTIAN GOVERNMENT HAS ALIENATED SYMPATHY OF PALESTINE ARABS BY HANDING OVER SUSPECTS SAYS “FELESTIN”
The Egyptian Government had not done enough to alienate the sympathy of the Palestine Arabs by its increased tariff, the Palestine Arab organ “Felestin” writes, so it has now committed an act towards the Palestinian Arabs which can neither be easily forgiven nor forgotten. More than a hundred Hebronite Arabs have been arrested in Egypt, because the Palestine Government had informed it that these Palestinians did not possess passports. An enquiry for passports does not take more than a few minutes. Seventy of those arrested are said to possess passports and are engaged in commercial pursuits. To arrest such men and prevent them from following their lawful pursuits could not have been tolerated by any Government. But, unhappily, in this case, the very Power which should have protected them from illegal acts of a foreign Government has turned spy against its own nationals. If the Egyptian Government had taken this step on its own initiative it would not have been so bad, but it is due to the Palestine Government. It is not difficult to see the reason, as was clearly suggested in “Al-Mukattam”. The Government wants to charge some of these Hebronites with having taken a criminal part in the August 29 outbreak, and as it was not sure that it could manage their extradition on these charges, it had recourse to this stratagem.
We learn, the “Felestin” proceeds, that twenty of them have been handed over to the Palestine Police. We would like to invite the attention of the Palestine Government to the wise remarks uttered on Tuesday by His Honour, Judge de Freitas, in the case of Naphtalah Rubinstein, a ghaffir, convicted of an attempt to murder. His Honour said: “The question of the sentence in this case is a difficult one. We have reached a time when we must forget the riots of 1929”.
The Palestine Government, the “Felestin” says, seems to hold a contrary opinion.
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