Pierre Van Paassen - Journalistic Career

Journalistic Career

In addition to his popular storytelling in the frequently ephemeral human interest stories that the papers principally hired him to write, van Paassen's many other personal accounts from the field brought home to American readers the often harsh results of European internal turmoil and of the foreign adventures of the interwar European colonial powers.

From his earliest travels to Palestine in 1925, he saw and developed a regard for the work of the early Jewish immigrants to improve the area's agriculture and industry. Later he became one of the first non-Jews in America to write favorably about the campaign to establish a Jewish national home in Palestine, and remained a Zionist supporter afterwards. But fundamentally, Van Paassen was a Christian Democratic Socialist concerned, as he put it in his autobiographical Days of Our Years, with the enduring struggle for justice for ordinary individuals. He was a staunch opponent of fascism in Italy, Germany and France from the 1920s, reinforced by the ten days he spent as a prisoner in the Dachau Concentration Camp in late March 1933. His activities as a correspondent brought "expulsion from France by Pierre Laval, from Germany by Joseph Goebbels and from Eritrea by Count Ciano."

In 1933 Van Paassen traveled incognito to the Dome of the Rock, a famous Islamic shrine in Jerusalem. He was accompanied by a British Intelligence officer, and both smeared their faces and hands with burnt cork to give them an Arab appearance. They also wore long white garments to give them a "Hadjihs" appearance. Their evasiveness was a necessity, for nonbelievers were (and still are) not allowed in areas that are considered to be the holiest places in the world of Islam. The purpose of their venture was to get an inside look at the radical movement by listening to what the Mullahs were preaching in regards to the political turmoil that was taking place in then British controlled Palestine. Three years later The Great Uprising took form. This redoubled political violence was in part planned by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, whom Van Paassen had interviewed in 1929 about his incitement of the bloody uprising that year against the Jews in Palestine.