The Modern Amalekites

British Take On Role of Israel’s Biblical
Foe in Barring Him From Homeland

By OBSERVER

As one looks through the newspapers of this time a year ago, one wonders at the things that were possible in Palestine only 12 months back.

Dispatches then reported strict curfews imposed on cities and even entire areas of the country by means of which the population was placed under house arrest for weeks; sentences to the gallows and firing squads; exiles to Kenya without trial or even formal accusation; ships intercepted on the sea and rammed; and the High Commissioner’s or military chief’s summoning the heads of the Jewish Agency and speaking to them arrogantly.

Pictures in newspapers showed Jewish inhabitants of towns and farms corralled behind barbed wire. Today the jailer and the hangman are thrown out of the Holy Land. The barbed wire exists only on Cyprus.

A few days ago we read of the military parade in Tel-Aviv, when the city of 250,000 crowded the streets and the rooftops and thunderously cheered the Israeli fighters who came from the fronts of Negeb, and Saron, and Jerusalem, and Emek, and Galilee. A nation defended a little place under the sun.

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It is not correct to say that the nation was born. The nation never died.When the boys and girls of Kfar-Etzion in the wilderness of Hebron sacrificed their lives that the gates of Palestine might be opened to survivors from Dachau and Oswieczim, no kin of theirs, or to immigrants, unknown to them, from Romania and Galicia, then, by the Almighty, they in Kfar-Etzion and in Oswieczim are of one nation.

There will come a day when new chapters will be written in the Hebrew Bible, chapters that will record the history of the wandering of the Jews among nations and of their life as a persecuted minority everywhere, and of their return to their homeland after a long nightmare.

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The Hebrew Bible is the history of the Jewish people among the peoples of the world. The centuries of persecution for their faithfulness to their religion and to their past, their contributions to world civilization, their decimation in our day, and the return of “the remnants of Israel” to their homeland are biblical themes that await only the penmen to write them and a conclave to include them in the Scriptures.

When Israel went out from Egypt, from the furnace of affliction, the Amalekites met him on his way to Canaan and blocked his path. The Amalekites fell upon the wanderers in the wilderness, the weary survivors of Egyptian racial persecution.

The 25th Chapter of Deuteronomy reads:

“Remember what Amalek did unto thee by the way, when ye were come forth out of Egypt. How he met thee by the way, and smote the hindmost of thee, even all that were feeble behind thee, when thou wast faint and weary, and he feared not God.”

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In the cast of characters in the modern drama the Nazis with their death chambers played the role of Pharaoh and the Egyptians, but the role of the Amalekites belongs to the British. In the darkest hour of the long-suffering Israel the British kept the doors of Palestine closed, in spite of the fact that the White Paper of 1939 was pronounced an illegal document by the Permanent Mandate Commission of the League of Nation in its session of June 8-29, 1939.

The British branded those who tried to come to Palestine as “illegal immigrants,” though it was they and not the immigrants who acted illegally. The Royal Navy intercepted the Jews returning to the Promised Land on the desert of the sea and carried them into the barbed-wire enclosures of Cyprus.

Despite the indisputable decision of the Security Council of the United Nations that during the truce period on Palestine the age of the immigrants should not bar them from entering the State of Israel, and that only military personnel should not enter the land, a decision that was separately voted on and therefore cannot be misinterpreted, the British have condemned all males between 17 and 45 years of age, who were illegally seized and imprisoned on Cyprus—more than 10,000 persons—to further imprisonment.

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The British jailer loves his work and feels lost if he has no prisoners behind his walls. At the same time he has presented a fat bill for keeping the kidnaped immigrants in the prison of Cyprus.

The British are inscribing themselves in the annals of humankind as breakers of international law. Being modern Amalekites, they have chosen the same place—the approaches to the Holy Land—and the same people—the eternal nation of Israel—as the object of their historic crime.