Four young Jewish boys, none older than fifteen, who this week attempted to slip across the Palestine border from Syria to join the British army, were rewarded by a flogging at the hands of the British authorities, it was disclosed today.
The four youths, Charles Antebi, Raymont Levi, Moshe Kuvranski and Joseph Kisti, all students in the Jewish school at Beirut, stole away from home one morning, leaving letters for their parents stating that they were off to Palestine to become soldiers, and begging their parents not to order them brought back. They took a taxi to Sidon near the Syrian-Palestine border, where, with the assistance of the local authorities, they succeeded in crossing the mountains and reaching the border.
There, however, they were arrested by the British border patrol as “illegal immigrants” and were taken before a magistrate in Safed. Accepting their plea that they were motivated by pro-British sentiments when they tried to enter Palestine, the magistrate sentenced them to only one stroke each.
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