Arab Case

The Arab cause in Palestine has no more expert pleader than polished scholarly George Antonius. An Arab Christian (110,000 of Palestine's 1,000,000 Arabs are Christians) educated at Cambridge, Mr. Antonius was, like Colonel T. E. Lawrence, a British official in Egypt during the World War. After the War he was a member of several British diplomatic missions and an assistant secretary in the Palestine Government until 1930. Mr. Antonius has been to many a foreign correspondent a sort of unofficial spokesman for the Arab High Committee.

Last week Mr. Antonius, after a short visit to the U. S.. sailed from Manhattan for London, where he is slated to be one of the Arab delegates in the forthcoming Arab-Jewish conference called by the British to ''solve'' the knotty Palestine problem. Not optimistic over the conference's outcome, Mr. Antonius was nevertheless hopeful that his new book. The Arab Awakening,* published last week, would win U. S. supporters for the Arab cause in Palestine.

Author Antonius' case for an Arab--as opposed to a Jewish--Palestine rests on two premises: 1) the British promised

Palestine to the Arabs in 1915, when they persuaded Sherif Hussein of Mecca to aid them against the Turks; 2) the Arabs already occupied Palestine, and the only way a Jewish State could be set up was by "forcibly displacing the Arabs."

Tracing Arab nationalism back to 1847, and attributing its early beginnings largely to the influence of U. S. missionaries in Syria, who brought printing presses and organized Arab clubs, Author Antonius insists that Arab nationalism has now become essentially a matter of self-preservation. Admitting that nothing but harm can come out of the terror now raging in Palestine, he insists that physical violence by the Arab is the "inevitable corollary of the moral violence" done the Arab, that Arab terrorism in Palestine does not need German or Italian propaganda to foster it.

The Zionist dream of making Palestine a Jewish State is doomed to failure, says Mr. Antonius, if for no other reason than that the Arab peasantry prefers death to giving up its land. Disgraceful as he considers the German treatment of Jews, the "cure for the eviction of Jews from Germany is not to be sought in the eviction of the Arabs from their homeland. ... No code of morals can justify the persecution of one people in an attempt to relieve the persecution of another." He denies emphatically that Jewish money in Palestine has helped the lot of the Arab masses.

Often has it been pointed out that the British made two sets of conflicting promises, one to the Arabs, another to the Jews, for Palestine. Author Antonius does not lay the conflicting promises as much to British duplicity as to the fact that the British left hand often was ignorant of what the right hand was doing. The Foreign Office, the India Office, the War Office, the Admiralty, the Arab Bureau in Cairo all had hands in the Arab negotiations. Moreover, says the author, "it behooves the Arabs to remember that war and rectitude are not natural companions." He asks only that Britain now finally make up its official mind about Palestine.

Besides poring over dusty old files of Arab newspapers and digging out much hitherto unpublished diplomatic correspondence, Author Antonius had long interviews with the leading figures of the Arab revolt. The late Hussein, having lost his Hejaz throne, recounted British promises bitterly, supplied several missing links. The late King Feisal of Iraq, Hussein's son, revealed that he had at first opposed the revolt against the Turks.

Most interesting, however, are the author's comments on Colonel T. E. Lawrence. No Lawrence-worshipper, Mr. Antonius says that the famed colonel's Arabic was far from perfect, would have deceived no one in Arabia. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom is full of misunderstandings, defects, errors. The Lawrence account of his almost singlehanded capture of Aqaba, Mr. Antonius suggests, is bragging. Auda Abu Tayeh, ally of Feisal, planned the attack and, with Feisal's approval, executed it, independent of outside help. The Lawrence chronicle of British-Arab negotiations is "confused and chronologically impossible," his understanding of the forces in the background of the Arab revolt "palpably defective."

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