Palestine Government Rushes Through New Ordinance to Meet Situation; Any Warlike Actions Punishable by Life Imprisonment

No Peace in Palestine While the Balfour Declaration Stands, Arab Message to Inquiry Commission

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Transcribed from the clipping

Jerusalem (J. T. A.)—With the Arab Executive conference deciding on resistance of taxation and continuation of the boycott agitation, a special ordinance for seditious offenses was rushed through to meet the present situation in the country. A Seditious Offenses Ordinance, based on English common law, was promulgated without the usual month’s notice.

The ordinance which replaces the Ottoman law dealing with sedition, incitement to mutiny and riots, was published in a special issue of the Official Gazette.

“The provisions of the Ottoman law with regard to seditious offenses, illegal societies and riots are confused and unsatisfactory; the present ordinance represents part of the draft of the new Palestine penal code, putting the law on a clear basis, and follows the principles enforced in other countries under British administration,” the ordinance declares.

Part Three of the ordinance, designed to meet the present circumstances in the country, deals with unlawful assemblies, riots and other offenses against public tranquillity. Three or more persons assembled with intent to cause persons to fear a breach of the peace or to terrorize the public will be considered as constituting a riot.

Anyone participating is liable to two years’ imprisonment.

How this transcription was made

Read from the scan at 3x to 7x. The clipping carries no masthead, no folio and no page number, and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency dateline is a place line only, “Jerusalem (J. T. A.)”, with no date; the newspaper and the date of 1 November 1929 rest on the hand-typed slide label. The label’s week is well corroborated by the page’s own internal dates, all read at magnification: a police letter quoted in the next story is headed 26 August 1929, a lodge meeting is reported as held on 23 October, and a death in Hamburg is given as 28 October — which puts the issue after 28 October 1929. The whole page is agency copy that ran in many Anglo-Jewish weeklies, so the text would be identical in any of them and the Buffalo attribution rests on the label alone. Across the top of the page, over all three stories, runs a banner reading “Palestine Situation Muddled by a Jumble of Investigations, Trials, Recriminations and Propaganda”; that is a page banner and not this story’s headline. A horizontal smear or fold crosses the full width of the sheet at about three-fifths depth and blurs four consecutive lines of the transcribed column, which are the weakest four lines in the excerpt. “Tranquillity” with two l’s and the American spelling of “offenses” inside the ordinance’s own title are as printed.

Cite this clipping

"Palestine Government Rushes Through New Ordinance to Meet Situation; Any Warlike Actions Punishable by Life Imprisonment," Buffalo Jewish Review, 1 November 1929. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1929-019. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1929-019