Tegart's Wall

As my four year blogoversary is coming up, I'm hoping to find interesting old postings of mine from when my readership was much smaller.

One such posting was from going through old Palestine Post archives, about how the British tried to stop terror attacks in 1938 - by building a fence:



Nowadays, of course, building a fence is considered a terrible crime by many of the descendants of these British. Funny how one's perspective gets changed when one is the target of the terror.

Notice the last line in the first column: in 1925 and 1926, there was a problem of Arab troublemakers moving from Syria into Palestine and Jordan. These people's progeny, today, are called "Palestinian."

Similarly, a Time magazine article at the time stated:

Britain's most ingenious solution for handling terrorism in Palestine was revealed in Geneva last week to the League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission by His Majesty's Government's Deputy Permanent Under-Secretary for Colonies, Sir John Shuckburgh. Following a suggestion of mail-fisted Sir Charles Tegart, now adviser to the Palestine Government on the suppression of terrorism, a barbed wire barrier to keep out terrorists is being strung along the entire Palestine frontier at a cost of $450,000. This includes a nine-foot barbed wire fence between Palestine and French-mandated Lebanon and Syria, which border Palestine on the north and northeast. A lot of Palestine's tougher Arabs come from those two mandates. The fence will be completed in August, announced Sir John. Almost as he spoke, a band of Arab terrorists swooped down on a section of the fence, dubbed Tegart's Wall, ripped it up and carted it across the frontier into Lebanon.

Again, the grandchildren of these Syrians and Lebanese Arabs who came to Palestine in 1938 to join the "great revolt" are now known as..."Palestinians."