"For Front Line Demolition"

Last week, the Palestine story began in New Jersey.

At Pier F in Jersey City, dock workers were loading 26 big cases, marked "Used Industrial Machinery," into the American Export Lines' Executor. The twelfth case slipped from the loading fork, crashed six feet to the concrete floor, and split open. Trying to repair the case, cooper Raymond Grimm found inside a package holding 50 one-lb. tins of TNT. They were labeled "U.S. Corps of Engineers--TNT--For Front Line Demolition Only." Customs men opened 25 other cases, found a total of 65,000 lbs. of TNT. Later in a warehouse in The Bronx, New York City police found stencils which matched the addresses on the TNT cases: "Haboreg, Ltd., Tel Aviv."

This was the first clear case of violation of the U.S. arms embargo (imposed after the United Nations voted to partition Palestine). But undoubtedly it was not the first time Zionists had been drawing on hidden U.S. sources for arms and ammunition. Britain, which has been supplying some Arab states with arms for their national armies, has vainly tried to prevent their diversion to Palestine guerrillas.

The story continued in the land to which New Jersey's cargo was addressed. In Jerusalem's sacred Old Walled City, violent fighting broke out. Arabs claimed that the Jews started it, retaliated with "Molotov cocktails" (bottles filled with gasoline and ignited). At week's end, Jewish terrorists blasted Arab headquarters in Jaffa and Jerusalem, killed 34, wounded 100. At sunrise one morning, on the Mount of Olives, the Jews of Jerusalem buried their own dead of the last week's fighting, while British soldiers stood guard against Arab snipers. The living, among both Jews and Arabs, prepared for full-fledged war after the British withdraw.

The story wound up with a typical touch. As in crucial days of their ancient history, the Jews started to quarrel among themselves. The issue was, essentially, the same that divided the whole world--the issue of East v. West.

Zionists, who needed not only arms but men, were split on methods of getting able-bodied new immigrants. Dr. Moshe Sneh, Polish-born member of the Jewish Agency Executive and leader of the Zionist underground Haganah during most of World War II, urged a speedup of immigration, including refugees from Communist-dominated Eastern Europe. Last week, two ships sailed from a Bulgarian port for Palestine with 15,000 Jewish refugees (including, said a London "authoritative source," Communist fifth columnists). The Jewish Agency, to avoid trouble, tried to stop the sailing. Promptly leftist Sneh resigned. Cried he: "The infamous Anglo-American intervention . . . plans to betray and subjugate us. I disagree with my colleagues."

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