MY SAY: THE PASHAS OF THE BRITISH PARLIAMENT
Surprised by Great Britain? Why? Their Pashas (the word for General in the Arab Legion created by Great Britain) routinely enabled terrorist raids against the Jewish residents of Palestine until days before independence. Britain’s notorious White Paper of 1939 which cut off Jewish immigration to Palestine on the eve of the Holocaust was a death sentence for millions of European Jews trapped in Europe. After World War 11, British perfidy persisted and the 1939 White Paper remained the basis of British policy. Its cruel provisions kept wretched survivors of the Holocaust trapped and homeless in displaced persons’ camps in hostile European nations or behind barbed wire in detention camps in Cyprus.
Ancient and ramshackle ships were piloted by valiant volunteer crews that transported the wretched survivors of the Holocaust to Palestine in defiance of the perverse British blockade between 1946 and 1948. There were more than 140 voyages by about 70 ships bringing European survivors to Palestine. More than half were stopped by British navy patrols and sent to internment camps is Cyprus, or Atlit detention camp and some to Mauritius.
All but two of the ships were almost decrepit…four from pro World War 1, but among them they carried 60,000 refugees who had been at the brink of hell seeking succor in Palestine. When these ships reached the Palestine coast they were apprehended, boarded, and often rammed by the Royal Navy Pashas.They used tear gas, clubs and firearms against refugees who occasionally fought back with sticks and eating cutlery.The 4,530 passengers of the Exodus were threatened with return to Germany. An American volunteer William Bernstein was clubbed to death on the Exodus in 1947 . The ship was brought into Haifa port under British escort; there the Holocaust survivors were forcibly transferred to another ship and returned back to Germany via France.
Historian Martin Gilbert includes Abba Eban’s account of what happened there in Israel: A History (p. 145):
“[In Haifa] the four members watched a ‘gruesome operation.’ The Jewish refugees had decided ‘not to accept banishment with docility. If anyone had wanted to know what Churchill meant by a “squalid war,” he would have found out by watching British soldier using rifle butts, hose pipes and tear gas against the survivors of the death camps. Men, women and children were forcibly taken off to prison ships, locked in cages below decks and set out of Palestine waters.’
My native land Bolivia recognized Israel one day after Independence. England abstained.
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