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The Jews in Palestine were working hard at weaving intrigues and stirring up strife among the Arabs. They had a special department for this in the “Jewish Agency,” for which enormous sums had been earmarked to spend toward this end. Foremost among their plans was to stir up sectarian animosities between Muslims and Christians in Palestine. Their efforts became widespread during the revolt: they used hired agents to distribute leaflets and awaken strife on every occasion, until they induced some hired agents to kill the engineer Michel Mitri, president of the Workers’ Association, with the aim of provoking sectarian strife. But Arab awareness in Palestine prevented them from achieving their aim, as some Muslim men engaged in the national jihad inflicted the harshest punishment on the attackers, thereby crushing the strife in its infancy.

It was no surprise that the Jews in Palestine should foment such strife and spread corruption in the land, for this was their habit and nature, and served their interests. But what we had not expected of the English was that they would work to form Muslim gangs to slaughter Christians and exploit this spilled blood to turn a purely national revolt into internal strife that would mar the beauty of the jihad movement and spread chaos and destruction in the country. This is what happened.

Early one day, a Palestinian officer working in British intelligence (information services) in Jaffa visited me secretly. He was trusted by his English superiors. After making me promise to conceal his name from everyone, he told me that he had come secretly to Beirut on the pretext of receiving treatment at the American University Hospital, then slipped out of the hospital to inform me of a dangerous English plan to destroy and discredit the revolt and turn it into blind sectarian strife. The details were that the English had hired a number of criminals, some of whom they had taken out of prison, placed them under the command of leading criminals, provided them with monthly salaries and weapons, formed them into armed gangs, and assigned them to attack Christian villages, kill their inhabitants and plunder their property. My informant added that he had personally, on British intelligence’s orders, armed one of these gangs, consisting of twenty men under the command of a man called (Abu Nujaym). Each member carried a paper in English indicating that he worked with the English, so that the English army would not harm him when it encountered him. He also said that several gangs had been formed in the hills of Ramallah to attack Christian villages such as al-Tayba, Bir Zeit, Jifna and others, and that the largest of these gangs had been formed from one hundred armed men in the Jerusalem and Bethlehem area under the command of a notorious criminal who had been sentenced to life imprisonment. The English released him after agreeing with him on a plan of