Page:The Truth about Palestine.djvu/15

 So far as public works are concerned, contracts are awarded by open tender under the authority of a Central Tenders Board, composed of British officials, on whose honour or efficiency the complaint that Jews are employed at higher wages than Arabs for half the work, is a gratuitous and baseless reflection.

Finally, it is not the case that contracts are almost invariably given to Jews. A glance at the list of contracts published periodically in the "Official Gazette" will show that this statement is untrue. Where contracts are, in fact, so awarded, there is not the smallest warrant for the offensive suggestion that it is for any but legitimate reasons.

For the rest, the Delegation confines its complaints to nebulous generalities which it is careful not to support by a single concrete illustration. The unspecified "laws and regulations aiming at checking the liberty of the Arab" correspond to nothing that can be found on the Statute Book, unless indeed they be the laws—for the most part not "enacted," but inherited from the Ottoman Code—which check the liberty of the Arab to murder, assault, and outrage his fellow-countrymen of other races. The "muzzling of the Press" has a meaning only if it refers either to the military censorship enforced under the military régime before the present High Commissioner took office, or to the very occasional application in extreme cases and with complete impartiality as between the Jewish and the Arab Press of the milder provisions of the Ottoman Press Law. The Delegation, whose own organ, "El Sabah," has regularly appeared with gross misstatements of fact, as well as with very violent expressions of opinion, has the best reason for knowing how infinitely freer the Press is to-day than it ever was under the former régime. The "patriotic Arabs who are arrested and imprisoned" are not specified, nor is it possible to identify them, unless they be such patriots as the Arab policemen, whose enthusiasm