The Throne of David

Bevin Attempts to Annoint the Head of
Abdullah With Oil From a Jordan Pipeline

By OBSERVER

The Arab Legion of Abdullah and of Brigadier John Bagot Glubb shells Jerusalem, designated by the United Nations as an international city. The British intend to crown Abdullah in Jerusalem and thus to raise him over the Arab world. Then Abdullah, thus strengthened morally and materially, would demand Mecca, the holy city of the Moslem world, from which his father had been expelled by Ibn Saud. Together with Abdullah, the British would return to Arabia with its oil, at present the possession of Ibn Saud and the concession of the Americans.

King Abdullah rules over 350,000 semi-nomads, most of whom do not know how to read or write, or even, for the most part, to tell their right hand from their left. Yet he is a British-made king with a British supplied treasury and a British-made army. He is the chief of all the marionettes manipulated by Great Britain in the Middle East. The British tried to pull Transjordan, as another of their yes men, into the United Nations, but the membership was refused.

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King Abdullah dreams of a Greater Syria, but the Syrians do not want him as king. He dreams a dream of returning to Mecca, but Ibn Saud is still there. The first step toward these two achievements is the throne of Jerusalem, and he dreams of this throne. Launching his war against the Jews of Palestine, he has offered to accept them as his citizens, promising to “protect” them.

Lawrence of Arabia in his book “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom,” gives a picture of Abdullah with his “fits of arbitrariness,” exercising a “feeble tyranny disguised as whims.” This characterization is on the conscience of its British author. “The leaven of insincerity worked through all the fibers of his being.” “His indolence marred his scheming.” He “would spend much of the day and all the evening tormenting the court fool. . . Once Abdullah shot a coffee-pot off his head thrice from 20 yards.”

All this sounds so very attractive that one may himself desire to become a subject of King Abdullah, surrendering his American citizenship. Does Abdullah measure in moral stature to mankind’s conception of the king that is to sit on David’s throne?

Are we to believe that the people of the Haganah, of Irgun, and of the Stern group (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel) need only a pat on the back to make them turn into Abdullah’s patriots? That they would march under Arab banners and stand guard at Abdullah’s harem? And will Abdullah shoot pots from the heads of the professors at Hebrew University?

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King Abdullah probably sleeps in the bed of his predecessor, the giant King Og, who ruled in the same Rabbath Amman in the days when the Israelites under Moses came from Egypt.

Of him it is said in the Scriptures: “Behold his bedstead was a bedstead of iron; is it not in Rabbath of the children of Ammon? Nine cubits was the length thereof, and four cubits the breadth of it, after a cubit of a man!” (Deuteronomy 4). In a bed nine feet (cubit) long great dreams must be dreamed.

In the meantime, the vandalic assault on Jerusalem continues, destroying its population, its cultural establishments, and its historic shrines.

Every shell fired into Jerusalem by the Arab Legion and its British officers drives deeper the wedge between the British and the entire civilized world.