End of the Mandate
It can only be with a sense of profound melancholy that this country records the termination of its mandate over Palestine. All that was good in the quarter-century of British rule is being swept away in the chaos of our departure. We leave a vacuum more com- plete than did the Turks, and there is no Allenby to take over from us. At the last minute we have done our best to sponsor the idea of a continuing authority which would preserve the minimum threads of government in the hope that, some day, they might be taken up by the United Nations. But even this idea has still to be accepted. In its absence there is no authority to dispose of the financial assets of the country, or of those records which have been rescued from destruction. In Palestine itself the hope of a truce for Jerusalem is jeopardised by the indiscipline of the Jewish and Arab bands, which find the strategic gain offered by possession of the capital city too tempting to have much sympathy for the idea of compromise. It is these armed bands which dictate events, and the politicians whose voices are heard at Lake Success can do nothing except put into political terms the claims for which their communities are fighting. May 15th is the date for the presentation of their most extreme political claims by either side ; it will also be the date for the intensi- fication of their military efforts. The former will only be of interest in so far as they give an indication of how the latter are to be pursued. In particular, it will be of interest to see whether official
Zionism is content, for the time being, to confine its claims to the area of Palestine allowed them under the partition plan, or whether they revert to their Biltmore programme for a Jewish State in the whole of Palestine, or even concede the Irgun claims for a State to include Transjordan as well. The degree of their claim may well affect the unity of Arab resistance.
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