Everyone knew what was happening in Nazi Germany. Everyone saw the vile Jew-hatred coming from Europe. (In the same edition of the Palestine Post was an article about how cities in Germany were stripping Jews of their citizenship, even before Hitler's national law disenfranchising Jews took effect.) While they may not have imagined genocide, it was very clear that for the foreseeable future Jews would be heavily persecuted in Europe.
Britain could have saved millions of the Jews by just allowing them to go to Palestine (and Cyprus and Trans-Jordan.) So why didn't they?
The reason is simple. They didn't want to upset the Arabs.
And the Palestinian Arab leaders had no qualms about playing up their "fears" that Jews would destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque, that they would "endanger the Arabs existence" - any convenient lie would do.
As can be seen in the Post on June 28, 1936:
Do these complaints sound familiar? They are the same complaints we have heard for the past 70 years. And they are just as absurd as they were then.
And the British weren't stupid. They knew that the Arabs were liars (also the same issue):
But lies are insidious. When someone hears a lie, even if they know it is false, it still affects them. A little bit of us tends to think, "What if it is true?" Or, more commonly, "Both sides are very passionate and I don't know all the facts - probably the truth is somewhere in between."
Couple that with the fact that the Western mind has a very hard time accepting that someone would lie to our faces. Hitler did it in the 30s, and the "relief" that could be felt in the West whenever he claimed that he was finished his expansionism was palpable. And they were always lies.
The Arabs learned very well from Hitler's playbook. A lie, repeated often enough, tends to be believed. And in this case the Arab lies about their "fears" of their future (rather than the Jew-hatred that was truly the source of their being against Jewish immigration) made the British pause and think that perhaps this year isn't the best time to allow Jews to save their lives - maybe next year, maybe after negotiations, maybe when the Arabs stop rioting and things calm down - maybe then we will do the right thing. But until then, it is easier to close our eyes and believe some of the lies coming out of the mouths of vile bigots.
Westerners are fans of fair play, of the adage that "there are two sides to every story." It is very hard to accept that one side is right and that the other side is lying.
Arab lies and British (and world) apathy helped combine to the destruction of European Jewry. And the Arabs have never stopped their campaign of getting rid of any Jews in positions of power in the Middle East, partially through their incessant repitition of anti-Semitic lies to their own people and to the apathetic West.
Each lie affects us all until they are called out and exposed for what they are. It is a moral responsibility to expose each Arab lie about Israel and Jews and show the liars to be the bigoted scum they are.
And it is the height of stupidity to believe the promises of liars.