The Struggle for Independence 155
subsequently tended to speak plainly to the Arabs as a whole. At a
May-Day rally in 1946 the labour-leader Mrs. Golda Meyerson,
now head of the Jewish Agency's Political Department, 'told the
Arab labourers and fellahin that no force would swerve the Jewish
people from their goal'. Three months later the Zionist Labour
party Mapai, the strongest Jewish party in Palestine, passed a
resolution at its annual conference 'appealing to the Arab people
and assuring them that the Jewish people were ready to co-
operate as equals for the peaceful development of Palestine. At the
same time, all measures intended to destroy the Zionist programme
would be fought.'1 The Zionists may be perfectly right in sup-
posing that the only language the Arabs understood is the
language of force. They are behaving as colonists have always be-
haved towards an indigenous population less well equipped with
material and intellectual resources. But the fact remains that this
is the language of force, not the language of conciliation; and it
contrasts curiously with Dr. "Weizmann's habitual gesture of
'stretching out his hands to the Arabs in friendship*.2
Finding that the Arab masses still preferred to follow their own
ruling-class rather than their Zionist mentors, and that their efforts
to divide the Arab community met with little success, the more
moderate Zionists criticized the Palestine Government for not
suppressing the Arab extremists.3 The extreme Zionists, however,
reacted by creating a myth, which they still ventilate with assiduity
and versatility, that there is at bottom no clash of interests between
Arab and Jew, and that the discord between them is entirely a
product of British machinations. While Zionist allegations of
British hostility to their aims have been levelled principally at the
Administration in Palestine, military and civil alike,4 they have
more recently, since Britain's official policy became less favourable
and their own demands more extreme, attacked official circles at
home also. The London correspondent of the Palestine Post has
pilloried the 'official caste, deeply committed to policies which
treat the East as an area hitherto unspoilt by the hideousness of the
twentieth century, and if possible to be kept in a state of pristine
purity for the benefit of all that is most decorative in. Arab and most
1 Palestine Post, 10 September, 1946.
2 e.g. Palestine Post, 19 June, 1946.
3 Kisch, op. cit., 19, and Index, s.v. Officials, Attitude of British.
4 Storrs, op. cit., 362, makes a frank appreciation of anti-Zionist sentiments in
the Military Administration.