Fire & Blood

Dov Gruner, 33, a Jew with a bullet-crushed jaw and the corundum-hard eyes of an Irgun Zvai Leumi triggerman, stood before a Jerusalem Military Court. He was charged with taking part in a raid against a British police station last April. Asked to testify, he defiantly refused: "I am a soldier fighting for Zionism; I should be treated as a prisoner of war." Gruner was sentenced to death as a murderer. But what happened in Palestine last week looked more like war than common murder:

P: In Jerusalem, Irgunists attacked a British jeep with flamethrowers, tossed three hand grenades into the compound of the Syrian Orphanage, three others into the R.A.F. billet on the Street of the Prophets.

P: In Tel-Aviv, underground terrorists, from a nearby rooftop, machine-gunned and grenaded Citrus House, British Military Headquarters. Casualties: one British soldier, one Arab, one Jewish girl canteen worker, and a Jewish passerby, all injured.

P: In Tiberias, terrorists attacked a British Army parking lot with homemade flamethrowers.

P: At Hedera, terrorists bombed the British Army fire station. Casualties: one Arab constable, injured.

P: Near Haifa, a British Bren gun carrier struck a road mine, turned over. Casualties: one British officer, three enlisted men, all killed.

P:In Tel-Aviv, "Red Devils" of the British 6th Airborne Division rounded up 20,000 slum-dwelling Yemenite Jews, and hunted for members of the "Black Squad" which had kidnaped and whipped a British Army major and three sergeants (in retaliation for the caning of a convicted Jewish terrorist in Jerusalem's jail).

Two Conferences. Britain's dilemma was currently in the lap of Colonial Minister Arthur Creech Jones, who last week held two important conferences in London. The first was with David Ben-Gurion, chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive, who came to outline the grounds on which Jews would join the London Conference on Palestine Jan. 21. Ben-Gurion left the interview apparently well pleased with what he had been told.

Creech Jones's second talk was with Lieut. General Sir Alan Cunningham, Palestine High Commissioner, who came to obtain permission for Britain's Palestine garrison (reinforced last week by hundreds of tanned desert veterans from Egypt) to launch an all-out offensive against Jewish extremists.

In the U.S., Zionism was absorbed in its own internal conflict. Massive, 72-year-old Rabbi Stephen Samuel Wise, who founded the Zionist Organization of America in 1898, announced: "I do not, I cannot withdraw from Zionism, but I withdraw from . . . the Zionist Organization of America." Dr. Wise's grievances were threefold: last month's World Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, had been a "collection of personal hatreds and rancors and private ambitions"; it had immoderately rebuked both Britain and the U.S.; it had ousted Dr. Wise's good friend Dr. Chaim Weizman from the presidency of the W.Z.O.

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