Dec 2, 1947: The day the Damn British gave the ok for Arabs to kill Jews

 On the anniversary of the December 2, 1947 Arab pogroms in Israel and throughout the Middle East, a long-ago question calls out to be asked:

Did the British purposely order their police and soldiers to stand aside on December 2 as the Arabs killed Jews in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and throughout the Middle East?A few days earlier, on November 29, the newly formed United Nations had voted to partition Israel into two states.

Unable to sway the UN with their threats that they would not give up one inch of land to the Jews, the Arabs instead did what has come naturally to them since the founding of Islam in 610. They rioted, looted, stabbed, raped, destroyed homes and shops, set fires and, with the greatest of enthusiasm, killed Jews.

Eventually the Arabs killed 184 Jews in Israel following the UN vote. Also, Aleppo, Syria saw 75 dead Jews, Aden in South Yemen reported 82 Jewish dead, Damascus saw 13 Jews killed, including eight children, and over 100 Jews were killed in Libya in December-January.

Researching the riot in Jerusalem 20 years later, which included interviewing Jewish and Arab witnesses, here is how Larry Collins and Dominique LaPierre described the killings of December 2 in their book O Jerusalem!

“The crowds began to assemble in the shuk at dawn December 2…..The city's Arab merchants shuttered their shops and whitewashed their store fronts with a crescent or a cross to shield them from the fury of the mob…….The Arab crowd, it's volatile emotions fired by the rumors deliberately spread on such occasions - this morning's claimed that two Arab women had been raped by the Jews at Jaffa gate - quickly escaped control. Picking up supporters as they rolled along, a stream of workers, drifters, peasants in black and white checkered kefias, excited adolescents, curious shopkeepers in business suits, howling women, flowed toward the Jewish areas like a rush of water bursting from a dyke.

“Watching them push up Prince Mary Avenue (today’s Shlom Tsiyon HaMalka Street), Zvi Sinai, a Haganah observer, thought that at any moment the British would step forward and bar their progress….Now, to his stupefication, the British stared at the advancing demonstrators as indifferently is if they were a few drunken undergraduates celebrating the Oxford-Cambridge boat race at Piccadilly Circus.

“Sensing the police's indifference, the mob swung into a sprawling marketplace full of Jewish shops, clubbing its terrified Jewish shopkeepers, smashing windows and ripping doors from their hinges, the rioters plunged into its stores tearing goods from the shelves by the armful.

“Kids scampered into confectionery shops stuffing their mouths…. Adults tossed the cheap merchandise aside to reach for the best goods they could find - bolts of cloth, hats, bedspreads, shoes, cases of canned food. Some British policeman even gave a helping hand by shooting the locks off doors or, on at least one occasion, smashing open an iron grill with one of their armored cars.

“With the shops half looted the burning began. Before long, tight black spirals of smoke drifted up from every section of the quarter, sending a mist of ashes over the new city.”

In another news story on December 3, 1947, the Palestine Post, forerunner of the Jerusalem Post, also reported that British police and soldiers stood aside to ensure that no one would prevent the Arabs from killing Jews.

According to the Post news story: “Troops nearby told one newspaper correspondent that they had been ordered "not to take any action until they received further orders.”

The Post also reported that while the British refused to arrest even one Arab rioter on December 2, they did arrest 16 Jews who arrived with the Haganah to try to save Jewish lives.

The Post news story additionally records that just once, when the mob threatened a police station on Mamilla Road, the British fired their guns into the air and the Arabs immediately dispersed. Clearly, the British knew how to quickly stop the rioting in the Jewish areas, but chose not to.

A columnist published in the 1947 Post named Roy Elston, writing under the pen name David Courtney, asked the question no one else would.

Did the British, acting on orders from London, knowingly allow the Arabs to kill Jews?

Courtney noted that for years the British had repeated that their departure from Israel would “set the region on fire.” The question then is, when British troops were ordered not to interfere with Arab rioters in the Middle East as they killed Jews, was this coordinated by the Foreign Office in London to further British efforts to convince the world that ‘fires’ were breaking out and only the British could maintain order in Israel and the greater region?

To this day, Courtney’s question borders on the unspeakable. This is the British who we believed brought civilization to the world. This is the British who we believed introduced rule of law to much of the world. But were the orders to stand down on December 2, 1947 a deliberate British action to encourage the Arabs to kill Jews? Was December 2 the perfect opportunity for the British to frighten the world, to set the region “on fire,” so the United Nations would insist that the British remain in Israel and the Middle East?

And could British officials order the Arabs to kill Jews with a wink and a nod to each other, without leaving a paper trail?

An even uglier question must also be asked.

Were the British encouraging Arab leaders to order their masses to riot?

London was certainly in daily contact with the Arab leadership. And we should not forget that it was the British who appointed the butcher Haj Amin Huseini as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.

In today’s world there is a practice among nations of using their “soft power,” as countries seek alternative methods to impact world events without using military force. Instead, powerful countries quietly cause currency fluctuations, changes in the price of oil, the altering of stock markets, provide support to protesting students or secretly fund opposition political parties.

And apparently in 1947 the British used their own soft power to influence events in the Middle East by standing aside as Arabs killed Jews.

Officials in London were never questioned about their actions on December 2. Still, all of these decades later we can hear the always so stiff-upper-lip British spokesman indignantly responding to such “an impertinent question” with, “How dare you, sir! We resent the implication that we were involved. His Majesty’s troops did their best to control rioting mobs of Jews and Arabs.”

Actually, it appears that the British did their best to encourage the Arabs to riot and kill, and not only refused to stop the rioting Arabs, but held the doors open and directed the screaming Arabs as they hunted down Jews.

The Lessons

There are many lessons we should learn following the British involvement in the killings of Jews in December 1947. Certainly we need to understand that the international community, including the Americans, will use all of their diplomatic insincerity, particularly lying and cheating, as they promise anything and sign any treaty they never plan to honor, in their eternal bid to weaken Israel.

The second lesson we Jews must remember is that there is no treaty, no piece of paper, that the Arabs of Hamas, Hezbollah or the Palestinian Authority will sign which they will then honor. It just is not in their nature.

Lastly, the anti-Jewish actions of the British, French and Joe Biden’s America after October 7 must remind Israelis that if we hope others might protect us, we are committing suicide.

Without delusions, we Jews must clearly see the world we live in. After agreeing to grant Israel just a sliver of the state they earlier promised the Jews, the world did their best to strangle the newborn state in 1948 with embargoes on arms for Israel, while selling the Arabs whatever they asked for.

And in 1967 as the Arabs declared their intentions to exterminate the Jews of Israel, again the world responded with arms embargoes on Israel.

Yet again, when the Americans sought to aid the Jews with desperately needed military supplies during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Britain, France, Spain, Germany, Turkey and Greece refused to allow American cargo aircraft bound for Israel to land on their territories for refueling.

So in remembrance of December 2, 1947, let us recommit ourselves to remaining very clear about who Israel’s enemies are and, above all, let us daily repeat that if we rely on any other country to protect us, we will die.

And of course, all of this leads us to 2025.

As we listen to the many insincere guarantees from the Americans and other countries about their lunatic fairy tales of eternal peace and prosperity with Gaza Arabs, as we see our enemies--the British, French, Turks, Qataris, Emeratis, Egyptians and Jordanians, along with the eternally Jew-hating European Union--making demands to participate in the future of Gaza, we Jews had damned well better remember the treachery of the blood-soaked British, who so willingly urged on the Arabs to kill hundreds of Jews 78 years ago on December 2, 1947.