Page 82 - Personal Column (Charles Belgrave)_Neat

Government and BAPCO had raised the rates of pay. This was the prin­
Jews against the Arabs in Palestine. But the uneducated Bahrain labourers
stration in Manama by schoolboys and youths who walked in procession
They were joined by a number of Persian boatmen from the harbour,
who had no idea what the fuss was about, beating their chests and chant­
cipal cause of the labour unrest which occurred throughout 1947, mainly
among oil company workers, and which caused many Bahrain Arabs
to seek employment outside the country. The unrest was encouraged by
some of the town Arabs, who had no direct connection with BAPCO;
they took the opportunity to attack the company on the grounds that it
was an American organization and the Americans were supporting the
took very little interest in the happenings in Palestine either at that time
or later.
There was a Jewish community in Bahrain of between three and
four hundred persons who lived in Manama. There were Jewish settle­
ments in the Persian Gulf before the days of Islam and it is possible that
the aboriginal inhabitants of Bahrain, the Bahama, are descended from
them. The present-day Jews were families who had come mostly from
Iraq, though there were among them some Persian Jews and a few In­
dian Jews. They were quiet, law-abiding, timorous people and in the past
there had been no friction between them and the Moslems; an indication
of this was the fact that for many years there was a Jewish member on the
Manama Municipal Council. They owned a few shops in which they
sold piece-goods, several of them were money-changers and a few of the
young men were employed as clerks in offices. Many of the Jewish
women worked as hawkers, taking goods for sale to the Arab ladies, who,
because they were in purdah, could not visit the shops themselves. When
we were first in Bahrain, before Marjorie learned to speak Arabic, she
used to take a Jewish woman with her as an interpretress when she paid
calls on the Arab ladies and there was never the slightest objection to this.
Although two or three of the Jews were prosperous merchants they were
not a rich community and some of them, especially the Persian Jews,
lived a hand-to-mouth existence. They did not inhabit any particular
part of the town, their houses were widely scattered in different
districts.
On December 2nd, after the news of the decision of the United
Nations to divide Palestine had reached Bahrain, there was a demon­
through the town shouting anti-American slogans. They threw a few
stones at one of the banks where some Jews were employed and shouted
abuse at a well-known American Missionary doctor, who they happened
to meet, calling him a Communist—an entirely unjustified accusation.
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ing the verses which they normally repeat during the Muharram proces­
sion, the Persians probably chinking that it was a Sliia religious occasion.
Next day an orderly procession, escorted by police, went to the Municipal
Building, where the Shaikh was sitting on the veranda. They cheered the
Shaikh and the British and then dispersed. On the following morning all
was normal and the town appeared to be quiet but in the middle of the
morning. I was suddenly called out of my office to deal with a situation
in the bazaar.
A mob of tough Persian boatmen, some Omanis and a crowd of
bazaar scallywags, who were probably responsible for what followed
because only they knew which houses were occupied by Jews, had broken
into the building which the Jews used for their religious observances. By
the time I got there most of the men had made off, some had been
arrested and a crowd of women from the brothel area, which was close
by, were removing what they could find from the building, in which
there seemed to be very little. Simultaneously I had a report that other
Jewish houses in different parts of the town were being attacked. The
police were split up and parties of them went to different districts. I and
Jim Hyde, one of the British police officers, and my police driver, ran to
a house on the edge of the bazaar where we heard a din which indicated
trouble.
The living quarters were above a shop, up a precipitous flight of
stairs. We raced up the stairs and found the place full of Persians and
Omanis who were smashing the doors and shutters and throwing the
contents of the house into the street. Some terrified women and children
were huddled in a corner shrieking for help. The sight of us scared the
looters and some of them got away, but a crowd of men from the street
were pushing their way up the stairs. The three of us stood at the top
and as each man arrived we picked him up and threw hnn down the
stairs on to the heads and shoulders of his friends till, after a while, they
gave up trying to get in. The men who were in the house, finding that
they could not escape, showed fight. We tackled them with our fists
and soon a number of them were on the floor; there was some rope in
the room so we trussed them up, to be called for later. We went on to
another house where we were joined by some police; they helped us to
clear the raiders, who had retired on to the roof. We had a tough scrap and
I used my knuckles to such effect that they u'ere quite raw. I was glad that
I had learned to box when I was at school but it was many years since I
had used my fists.
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