2. Mr. James de Rothschild, House of Commons, November 17, 1930: "During the War, in 1918, I was detailed by Lord Allenby to recruit the Jewish Battalion in Palestine. There were then, in that part of Palestine which had been conquered by the British Army, about 18,000 to 20,000 Jews. They were mostly in Jerusalem, and a few of them in the surrounding colonies, but the greater number had already been deported to the north, to Syria, Damascus, and Konia, by the Turks. In just over a fortnight, out of this population of 20,000, a great number over age, and a great number tired out by the fatigues and the hardships of a long famine during the War, a thousand men came forward, solid good soldiers, who were enrolled in the 40th Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers."

ARAB SELF-GOVERNMENT AND TREATMENT OF MINORITIES

(Supplementary documented note submitted by Dr. Emanuel Neumann) Whatever may have been the attitude of Moslem Powers toward minorities under the Ottoman Regime-a complex question which requires analysis—Arab nationalism since the last war has assumed an extreme character. In countries where the Moslems are the majority, there is definite evidence of intolerance toward minorities, both in case of religious and national minorities. Arab nationalism became increasingly truculent after the rise of the Nazis to power in Europe. The Royal Institute of International Affairs states in its Survey for 1936: "In the Arab world, a triplex blend of fascism-anti-French, anti-British and anti-Jewish-was running like wildfire across North Africa, South West Asia, from Morocco and Algeria and Tunisia through Egypt and Palestine and Syria to Iraq." 1

Iraq which was the first of the mandated Arab countries to receive independence under a treaty with Britain (1932) has a black record as far as the treatment of minorities is concerned. The Permanent Mandates Commission expressed serious doubts as to whether Iraq had advanced far enough for self-government, and acquiesced in the granting of independence to Iraq only because Great Britain urged this and took the moral responsibility. As a result of the pressure of the League of Nations, the declaration made by the Kingdom of Iraq on the occasion of the termination of the mandatory regime included special articles designed to safeguard the equality and rights of all religious groups and of the minority nationalities. But these provisions were not honored by the Iraqi Government.

Despite the fact that Christians and Jews had long occupied an important place in the business life and in the government service at Bagdad under the Ottoman Regime, as early as 1921 when the Iraqi Kingdom was established, opposition developed against the employment of any but Iraqis professing Islam in the Government, and this tendency grew stronger as time went on. In 1930, even before the admission of Iraq to the League of Nations, the Shiite (Moslem) community of Bagdad by threatening a disturbance of the public peace prevailed over King Feisal to issue an order evicting the Bahi Church from houses which they had occupied and used for religious purposes for a number of generations. Despite efforts of the British Government and the intercession of the Permanent Mandates Commission the property was never restored to the Bahais. A more serious problem presented itself in the case of the Kurds to whom autonomous minority rights had been granted by the Permanent Mandates Commission. The Iraqi Government did nothing to implement the minority provisions until the Kurds grew restive, rebelled and defeated the Iraqi army in an engagement. A column of the Iraqi army was saved from annihilation only when the British airplanes bombed the Kurdish tribesmen. After this revolt the British forced the Iraqi Government to implement the measures granting autonomy.

The worst case was the tragedy of the Assyrian Christian minority, the remnants of an old community of Nestorian Christians. The Royal Institute of International Affairs makes the following comment: "The newly fledged Iraqi-Arab nation applied * * * the Western principles of Gleichschaltung by Middle Eastern methods of barbarism."2 An exchange of shots had taken place 1936 Survey of International Affairs, p. 24.

Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1934 Survey, p. 97.

between Assyrians and the Iraqi army: the latter took matters into their own hands and carried out a methodical massacre of all men and boys whom they could find in nearby Assyrian villages. The Royal Institute of International Affairs says: "The blackness of this crime was deepened by the fact that the Assyrian population of the district had taken refuge at Simel from the villages round about in order to be under the protection of the local Iraqi police post.' According to the testimony of Bayard Dodge, President of the University of Beirut, later a member of the Assyrian Resettlement Board, no less than 600 persons were brutally slain. In a report subsequently submitted to the League of Nations by Mar Shimun, the patriarch of the Assyrian Christian community, it was stated that 62 villages, out of a total of 95, had been looted.

4

At Geneva, the Iraqi Delegation condemned the massacre as the irresponsible act of the military who had gotten out of hand. At home, the officers concerned were praised and promoted: there was a feeling of satisfaction that "the Assyrians were 'settled.'" 5* General Sidqi Baqir, who led the Iraqi forces in the massacre of the Assyrians, won great popularity. In 1936, he carried out a coup d'etat which resulted in a military dictatorship. King Feisal, who had attempted to restrain the extreme nationalists, was very much distressed by the Assyrian massacres, and it is thought that he intended to abdicate." He was ill and soon died in Switzerland.

Due to the work of American educators in Syria, many leading Christian Arabs have been imbued with the idea that their future depends on the development of Arab nationalism. As a result of a more modern type of education received in missionary schools, Arab Christians predominate in Government offices in Syria and Palestine, and many of them, no doubt, believe that the best course for them is to work along with the Moslem majority. Nevertheless, there are indications that the Christian Arabs are fearful that political power in the hands of the Moslem majority may lead to anti-Christian terrorism. Professor W. F. Albright (Head of the Oriental Seminary at Johns Hopkins University), who has lived in Palestine for many years and who has had intimate contact with many Christian Arabs, writes: "The Christians of Syria have no more confidence in their eventual future as a minority in a Moslem State than the Nestorians of Iraq or the Copts of Egypt, both of whom are hated and despised (quite unjustly) by the Moslems."7

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. The Problem of Minorities.-Comment of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (1934 Survey, p. 114) on the hesitation of the Permanent Mandates Commission in granting self-government to Iraq.

"The defence of a minority's rights against an aggressive majority's Nationalism, and not the defence of a subject nationality against an aggressive foreign Imperialism, was thus the cause which the Mandates Commission found itself called upon to champion; and this was a sign of the times in an age when, throughout a Westernized world, the totalitarian national state was taking the place of the multinational empire as the standard form of parochial political organ zation. The Assyrians in Iraq were the victims of the same turn of the political wheel as the Germans in Poland or the Jews in Germany; and from the humanitarian standpoint the change was not for the better; for the subject nationalities of the old regime had not been faced with that prospect of the total suppression of their national individuality which was the prospective doom, under the new regime, of the alien minorities. This particular change for the worse was world-wide; but it was aggravated, in non-Western countries like Iraq, by the fact that here Nationalism itself was not a native disease but an exotic infection whose ravages were the greater inasmuch as the patients had not been inoculated against the germ."

2. The Treatment of the Bahai Community.-Comment of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (1934 Survey, p. 122):

Bayard Dodge, "The Resettlement of the Assyrians on the Khabbur", Journal of the Central Asian Scy, 1940, p. 306. League of Nations Document, C. 625, 1933, I.

Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1934 Survey, p. 165.

Margret Boveri, Minaret and Pipeline, Oxford University Press, 1939, p. 365.

'W. F. Albright, "Japhet in the Tents of Shem" in Asia, December 1942.

"This affair was particularly deplorable in as much as the Bahais were a small and weak community which could not under any circumstances have menaced the security of the Iraqi state, even if its members had not been bound by their religious tenets to be good citizens. If the Bahais were the victims of so flagrant an injustice before Iraq was emancipated from British mandatory control, it seemed unlikely that the Chaldaeans, Armenians, Jews, and other weak minorities could depend upon either the moral courage or even the good will of a completely sovereign and independent Iraqui Government in the event of their becoming targets for the animus of one or another of the dominant communities in the country. In the case of the Bahais, the pressure of the Shiite Arab community in Iraq had prevailed upon the highest executive and judicial authorities in the kingdom to fly in the face of the British Government and of the League of Nations in persisting in a course of action which they must have known to be morally indefensible from first to last."

3. Christian-Arab Fear of Moslems.-W. F. Albright (Johns Hopkins University), "Japheth in the Tents of Shem," Asia and the Americas, December 1942: "I have had many experiences illustrating this state of tension which_always exists between Christian and Moslem Arabs. A number of years ago I was a frequent visitor at the home of a certain Christian Arab editor (since deceased). At the time of an anti-Jewish outbreak he called his little boy of five into the room and told him what he must do to a Jewish boy if he should get a chance. He even put cruel words into the little chap's mouth: 'I will take a knife and stab him; will take a pistol and shoot him!' Not long afterwards there was a rumor that an Arab state was about to be set up by the British. Calling on the same editor, I found him pale as death. He said to me, 'If the Moslems get control one of their first acts will be to massacre the Christians' * * * (p. 694).

46* * * There are many young idealists among both Christians and Moslems, particularly among graduates of the American University of Beirut, who are firmly convinced that the days when Moslem hated Christian and Christian plotted against Moslem with representatives of European powers, are over for good. Only one who has come into contact mainly with educated people in the cities can take so naive a view; one whose knowledge of the Arabs includes the peasants of southern Palestine and eastern Syria, or the Bedouins of Transjordan and the Syrian Desert, sees realities. Those who have seen the 'teetotal' peasants become intoxicated with blood lust at Nebi Musa and on other occasions, know how little is required to start an orgy of brutal murder almost anywhere in Syria or Palestine" (p. 694).

* * *

CONDITIONS IN THE NEAR EAST AND THE PROBLEM OF SELF-GOVERNMENT (Supplementary documented note submitted by Dr. Emanuel Neumann) The Arab peoples are by all accounts potentially as capable and as intelligent as any Western nation; but at the present time they are living in a transitional period. Modern democratic ideas and technical innovations introduced from the West have thus far had only a superficial effect on the life of the Near East. American students and writers agree that before Western ideas can take any root there must be more popular education, more public health, and the reduction of the widespread poverty of the masses. The Near East countries are characterized by the existence of a very small wealthy upper class of land owners and a very large class of illiterate peasants and tenant farmers living in an impoverished condition under a terrible burden of debt to the upper class. There is only a small middle class and this class is largely associated with the upper class. It is the conclusion of Western observers that unless the basic economic and social conditions are improved and a substantial middle class created, the slogans of selfgovernment may be exploited by reactionary forces aiming for dictatorship.

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. John Van Ess, Meet the Arab, John Day 1943. John Van Ess, an American missionary, has lived for forty years among the Arabs in Iraq, has a high opinion of their intelligence and abilities, and is sympathetic to their aspirations. Nevertheless, he has the following to say about the present situation in Iraq:

"A third weakness was the introduction of the electoral system in a country where even now less than twenty percent of the men and four percent of the women are literate. In a municipal election in Basrah a few years ago, each candidate received more votes than the total number of votes registered" (p. 175).

"A fourth, and to my mind most fatal defect, was the setting up of a vast machinery of government, court, parliament, army, and air force and an educational system which trained only for government jobs, all that before the country had become at all economically independent" (p. 175).

* * *

"Education in all the Arab states has been superficial, laying entire stress on learning facts, colored to be sure by passing ideologies, but not at all inculcating the dignity of manual labor. The boy has, therefore, found his home atmosphere uncongenial and has sought expansion in the cafes and clubs where he learned and practiced the patter of chauvinism. Indeed, such training seemed to be the surest guarantee of a government job, while, after all, all other doors, chiefly economic, were closed to him anyway” (p. 208).

44* * * You see, in Iraq we had a technique all our own. When a cabinet had become unpopular either on account of what it had or had not done, or generally because it had had its feet in the trough too long, we didn't bother with elections. We short circuited the process and shot up the opposition. Those who didn't get shot hopped a plane for Egypt or India. It saved a lot of time and got results of a kind" (pp. 176, 177).

"Rashid Ali, together with a group of four cronies called the Golden Square, had seized power. By the time the British General Staff had had their bath and tea, so to speak, they began to realize that the Iraqis weren't going to play cricket. Had it not been for the fact that Hitler was slowed up six weeks in Greece and Crete, the British would have been caught flat-footed both in Iraq and Iran. The British, after a month of hard fighting and severe losses, occupied Baghdad. * * * But the near disaster to the British forces in the rebellion of 1941 was the direct result of trying to play cricket with a crowd who were heavily bribed by the Axis and who cared not a whit for the good of their own country" (pp. 176, 177).

2. Philip Willard Ireland, Iraq, A Study in Political Development, Macmillan 1938. Ireland, of the Department of Government of Harvard University, is a noted authority on the Near East and has made a particularly thorough study of the Government of Iraq. Although well disposed toward Arab self-government, but sees its dark aspects and dangers. The following paragraphs from his concluding chapter gives an idea of the situation.

"It is a fact that although Iraqis universally proclaimed their familiarity with democratic institutions from the time of the Ottoman regime, and boldly asserted their competence to run them, conditions in Iraq were far from ideal for the introduction of such institutions. No adequate class existed from which responsible and public-spirited officials could be drawn, nor was there a substantial body of literate and informed citizens with which to work the democratic institutions as provided in the Constitution" (p. 424).

"An even greater obstacle was the lack of social consciousness embracing the State. Not yet had a sense of loyalty and duty to the nation arisen to surmount the differences between tribesmen and townsmen, between Sunni and Shiite, and between Muslims and minority communities or to replace personal opportunism. Patriotism still denoted independence without obligations to the State" (p. 425). "Examination of the statute books of Iraq, not only from 1925 to 1932 but also to the present date, seems to suggest that the deputies have not failed to make free use of their position. Many of the financial measures granting remission of arrears in revenue and of other financial legislation, while passed by the Chamber for the benefit of Iraq as a whole, particularly after the agricultural crisis of 1931, have especially favoured the land-owning class which has been predominant in Parliament. Other evidence seems to point to the exercise by the deputies of their influence outside of Parliament, either to secure preferential treatment from revenue officials or to obtain appointments for their proteges" (pp. 432, 433). 3. Wendell L. Willkie, One World, Simon and Schuster 1943. The above quotations deal with Iraq which was the first of the mandated territories to receive independence. Mr. Willkie found similar social and economic problems throughout the Near East as a whole. A few characteristic passages follow.

"Modern air lines, oil pipe lines, macadam streets, or even plumbing constitute a thin veneer on the surface of a life which in essence is as simple and as hard as it was before there was any West * * *"" (p. 14).

"But the major reason (for the general social backwardness) seemed to be the complete absence of a middle class. Throughout the Middle East there is a small percentage of wealthy landowners whose property is largely hereditary. I met a number of them and found them largely disinterested in any political movement, except as it affected the perpetuation of their own status. The great mass of the people, outside of the roaming tribes, are impoverished, own no

property, are hideously ruled by the practices of ancient priestcraft, and are living in conditions of squalor * (p. 15).

*

*

every

"Yet, strange as it may seem, one senses a ferment in these lands, a groping of the long-inert masses, a growing disregard of restrictive religious rites and practices. * * * Likewise I found in this part of the world, as * where, a growing spirit of fervid nationalism, a disturbing thing to one who believes that the only hope of the world lies in the opposite trend. I found much the same discontent, hunger, and impatience in Iraq, in the Lebanon, in Iran, and much the same time lag in official recognition of the problem, though the Prime and Foreign Ministers of those countries are knowing and able men." (p. 15).

STATEMENT OF JUDGE LOUIS E. LEVINTHAL

(Submitted by Dr. Emanuel Neumann)

Judge Louis E. Levinthal, of Philadelphia, Pa., President of the Zionist Organization of America from 1941 to 1943, attended the hearing before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs held Tuesday, February 15, 1944, prepared to testify in support of House Resolutions 418 and 419. His judicial duties necessitated his return to Philadelphia, and he respectfully requests of the Chairman and the members of the Committee the privilege to have this statement read into the record of the proceedings:

I respectfully urge the adoption of House Resolutions 418 and 419

(1) because they are in accord with the well-established policy of the United States (as expressed in the Joint Resolution of Congress of 1922 and in the Convention between the United States and Great Britain of 1924);

(2) because of the remarkable record of Jewish colonization and achievements in Palestine since the Mandate was promulgated;

(3) because the rights of the non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine have not been, and will not be, prejudiced by Jewish immigration and colonization and by the reconstitution of a Jewish commonwealth, which is to be free and democratic; (4) because the reaffirmation and clarification of the rights of the Jewish people with respect to Palestine will tend to improve Arab-Jewish relations and give hope and courage to the tragically afflicted Jewish victims of Hitler who look to Palestine as their sole refuge.

There seems to be no serious objection to the provisions of the Resolutions relating to the free entry of Jews into Palestine and for full opportunity for colonization, but some persons oppose the reference to the Jewish people reconstituting Palestine as a free and democratic Jewish commonwealth. It is respectfully submitted that the last mentioned provision is an essential and indispensable part of the Resolutions.

It is obvious that Palestine will in the future either have a majority of Jews and thus constitute a Jewish commonwealth, or it will have a majority of Arabs and thus constitute an Arab state. The Arabs already have numerous lands in which they constitute the majority, indeed almost the totality, of the population. The Jews, on the other hand constitute a minority of the population everywhere. Is it not fair and just that the Jews be given the opportunity to become the majority of one small country on the face of the earth-in that land made immortal by their ancestors-in the Land of Israel?

It was contended by one of the witnesses, who testified in opposition to the Resolution, that there is serious danger of violence on the part of the Arabs in the Near East if these Resolutions be approved by Congress. It is respectfully submitted that the Arab riots in the past have not only been instigated by the Axis powers but have also been the result of successive acts of capitulation by the Mandatory Power which constantly whittled down the provisions of the Mandate. It is my profound conviction that when an end will be put to the policy of appeasement, and when the nations of the world will make explicit what was implicit in the Balfour Declaration and in the Mandate, there will be a greater liklihood of a genuine Arab-Jewish rapprochement. It has been my experience as a practicing attorney for more than twenty years, and as a Judge for more than seven years, that animosity and acrimony persist between litigants who quibble about the interpretation of the provisions of a contract to which they are parties, just so long as the litigation, and the uncertainty as to the ultimate construction of the agreement, continues. Once a final decision by a competent tribunal is handed down interpreting the contract, invariably the parties accept the situation, and the bitterness and hostility come to an end. So, also, when the Arabs shall learn that