It is a black page in our history, and those responsible should not be allowed to escape just punishment.
To cover their own blunders the local Administration looked round for a scapegoat, and arrested Jabotinsky and some score members of the Jewish Self-Defence Corps.
Jabotinsky was tried on a ridiculous charge of "banditism, instigating the people of the Ottoman Empire to mutual hatred, pillage, rapine, devastation of the country, and homicide in divers places"—in fact the Ottoman penal code was ransacked to trump up these absurd charges against him. Jabotinsky had been guilty of nothing except that he had organised the Self-Defence Corps with the full knowledge of the authorities, many weeks before the outbreak, and it was owing to the existence of this Corps that the pogrom did not take much more serious dimensions. By far the greater part of the Jews, and practically all the Zionist Jews, dwell outside the old City in the modern part of Jerusalem, and it would naturally be upon these that the mob would have fallen, but not a Jewish house outside the City walls was raided, for the simple reason that the Jewish Self-Defence Corps was there and ready to act.
The Self-Defence Corps did nothing whatever against the British Authorities, and many members of it were in fact used by the Administration to police the environs of the City. Nevertheless, a British Military Court, which publicly stated that it would be bound by no rules of procedure, was found, which convicted Jabotinsky, and inflicted upon him the savagely vindictive sentence of FIFTEEN YEARS' PENAL SERVITUDE!
This trumping up of the preposterous charges mentioned is a disgrace to British Justice, and the whole history of this atrocious outrage is a foul stain on our fair fame.
It may be noted in passing that two Arabs caught raping Jewish girls during the pogrom received the same sentence as Jabotinsky, whose only crime was that he was a Jew.
Jabotinsky was cast into prison, clothed in prison garb, had his hair cropped, and was marched in company with the two Arabs convicted of rape through Jerusalem and Kantara, places where he was well known as a British officer. Even the worst Hun that we have read of could hardly have exceeded the savagery and tyranny shown by the Military Authorities of the E.E.F. towards Jabotinsky, an officer who fought stoutly for us and helped England and her cause in every possible way to the full extent of his power during the War.
Of course a storm of public indignation was aroused. In fact one of our leading Statesmen, on seeing the telegram announcing the barbarous sentence, was heard to remark:—
"The Military in Palestine must have gone mad."