WAR BY TERRORISM

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26349, 2 January 1947, Page 4

WAR BY TERRORISM

The Jewish terrorist organisations in Palestine have flung down the gage in earnest. The latest outrage by these gangster groups operating in the name of Zionism is the kidnapping and flogging of British soldiers, allegedly in retaliation for the birching of one of the thugs captured by the military forces. It is not in the nature of the British soldier, to indulge in vicious reprisals, but the Palestine gangs will have only themselves to blame if the British Army stationed there accepts the challenge to meet force with force. The British soldier in Palestine has carried out an extraordinarily difficult role with an impartiality which, in the circumstances, is little short of phenomenal. In an atmosphere of political uncertainty and civilian hostility he has performed his unenviable task with a restraint which even the brutal and inexcusable murder of lys comrades has failed to disturb to any marked degree. It may be that his antagonism to the Jews and Jewry is becoming more marked —a fact which was the subject of some complaint recently—but that is due to the circumstances in which he is placed, and the actions of the Jews themselves. As a correspondent pf The Times wrote recently: “The army is caught in an unenviable vicious circle of terrorism. Curfews, searches, arrests, interrogations, detention, deportation, complaints of oppression, and mutual hostility between the civilian and the soldier army are stretched round that circle, and nothing but a wise and determined political plan will break the sequence.” Although the latest outrages are reported to be the work of Irgun Zvai Leumi (the instrument of the extremist New Zionist Organisation) and the band of assassin's known as the Stern Gang, the remainder of organised Zionism in Palestine cannot escape suspicion of having condoned, if not participated in, the events. The Jewish Agency hds publicly deplored the outrages committed by terrorists, and recently it decided to put an end to their activities. Instead, outbursts ,of violence have occurred regularly. The Agency’s illegal army, Haganah, numbers —according to recent estimates —more than ten times the combined strength of Irgun Zvai Leumi and the Stem Gang, yet no effort appears to have been made by the Agency to fulfil its promise that Haganah would discipline the terrorists, and, if necessary, hand them over to the police. If the Jewish community as a whole abominates these acts of terrorism, as the Jewish Agency has declared it does, then it is morally bound to support its disclaimers with more positive action on behalf of law and order. Failure to do so will inevitably invite discredit of the cause of Jewry itself.