In 1933, the Palestinian Arabs wanted to pressure the British not to allow Jews to immigrate to the area. They chose to use mass demonstrations, as a follow-up to the 1929 riots. The British didn't want to see a repeat of 1929 and made such demonstrations illegal. The Arabs held them anyway, in Jerusalem and Jaffa, and there were a number of injuries that were greatly exaggerated by Arab newspapers.

Anyway, as the following article shows, a month later the Arabs used Islam as an excuse to have the demonstrations. They claimed that Britain, by making their anti-Jewish demonstrations illegal, was infringing on their religious freedom! And they were using Western standards of "freedom of religion" to push their own purely political (and, incidently, bigoted) agenda!

This is perhaps one of the first times that Arabs who despise Western ideals used those same ideals as weapons against the West.

Things have not changed much since 1933.

The Mufti and the Arab refugees

I've been looking through the pages of the Palestine Post to find contemporaneous information about the Arab refugees from Palestine. There are many articles about the issue, I touched upon it specifically for the Arabs of Haifa over here.

Among Zionists, it is an article of faith that the Arab leaders encouraged Palestinian Arabs to leave, and far more left from the urging and rumors caused by Arabs than from anything the Jews did. In the future I hope to put together an article of the number of times that Jews encouraged Palestinian Arabs to stay where they were.

It becomes apparent upon researching the issue that there were a specific set of Arab leaders who consistently encouraged the Palestinian Arabs to flee, but not the entire Arab world - especially not the leaders of Arab countries who were expected to host these thousands of undesirables. It was, in fact, the members of the Arab Higher Committee, which was led by the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem, who consistently led the Palestinian Arabs to ruin because of their own narrow political goals. And the Arabs at the time, especially the Palestinian Arabs, knew this quite well.

First, here are the players' positions on the refugee issue in August, 1948:


Now, here is a good analysis of the Mufti's position and motives:


So the Mufti and the Arab Higher Committee once again showed that their interests lied not in their people but only in their own power. Today's Palestinian leadership, from Arafat to Abbas, has shown remarkably similar characteristics. Reading the vitriol from the Mufti in the 40's it is striking how similar it is to the same idiocy spewed out today, and how little it has to do with bettering the lives of actual Palestinian Arabs.

Which was well-known even in 1941 when the Mufti was partying with his pal Adolf: (December 31, 1941)