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Says Hinkis’s Death Sentence is Calamity for Palestine

February 9, 1930
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“Where Shall We Get the Necessary Confidence?” is the caption of an editorial in Friday’s “Day” which deals with the death sentence imposed by a British court in Palestine on the Jewish policeman, Hinkis, who was accused of leading a group of Jews which killed an Arab family. Declaring that the evidence against Hinkis was at most circumstantial, the editorial says:

“And still the court issued a death sentence! Such sentences are a calamity for the population of a country, since they undermine confidence in that justice which rules over them. The famous Russian-Jewish lawyer, Gruzenberg, once said: ‘The real Jewish pogroms took place not in the streets and in the home where the criminals did their pogrom work, but in the Russian courts, whose duty it was to sentence the criminals.’

“Wherever courts have issued false verdicts, wherever they have freed the guilty and sentenced the innocent, there Jews have lost their last shred of confidence in the reigning power, their last ounce of belief in the existing justice. And then chaos began to reign among them.

“Does England want to bring the Jewish population in Palestine to such a terrible condition? We would wish that the Jewish population there should have the fullest confidence in the justice meted out by the British power in the country. But observing such sentences, where shall we get the necessary confidence?”

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