Homecoming

When Jamal al Husseini alighted at the Damascus Gate, cheering Arab crowds pelted him with flowers. A firebrand of Arab anti-Zionism had come home from eight years of exile. Whirling dervishes and fierce-looking Arabs on prancing horses escorted him through the city. Jamal looked older, graver, but seemed to have lost none of his flaming nationalism. The British had brought him back on the eve of the Arab-Jewish showdown. Gratefully, the Arabs welcomed Jamal. Within a few hours of his homecoming the chairman of the Palestine Arab Party, cousin of the still-exiled Grand Mufti, was deep in eager political talks.

The Jews were bitter. Publicly they protested the return of the "terrorist leader" who had instigated the bloody prewar riots of 1936-1939. That night Jews marked his homecoming with another of those terrorist gestures that punctuate Palestine's current history.

Near Tel-Aviv, Jews in battledress attacked an army camp with hand grenades, killed a British officer and a Negro sentry. The British had no time to call out their club-&-shield-toting police pickets (see cut). With a bellow of rage, African native soldiers burst out after the attackers. Storming into the nearby Jewish village of Holon, they sprayed it with bullets, hit anything that moved. Before their officers could round up the berserk blacks, an old man had been riddled with bullets, a boy ripped with bayonets.

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