UNO and Palestine
The United Nations Palestine Commission has returned to its complaints against the British Government. In the main they arc no more than one aspect in the game of " passing the buck " which has been played with a good deal of assiduity at Lake Success during recent weeks—a game in which member States thrust responsibility into the lap of the United Nations in its corporate capacity, and it then deals the responsibility back again piecemeal to the member States. On one point, at any rate, the British Government would have been wiser to have yielded to earlier criticism. If the whole United Nations Commission had been allowed to enter Palestine before May 1st, instead of only its advance guard, there would have been less ground for the other complaints which now accompany the Commission's reiteration of this grievance. Not that it would have been able to accomplish anything, but its failure might have exonerated us from some of the recrimination to which we are still subjected. In any case, it is worth recalling that the British decision to end the mandate this May was announced five months ago, and that this in its turn was no more than an official acceptance of the first recommendation of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, which had reported two months before that. It is still not clear whether the United Nations Palestine Commission will proceed to Palestine at the end of this month or not. If it does it will find nothing to build on, and it is without the moral or military, force to create a new basis of order. It is something, none the less, that the Palestine Commission should have decided on Wednesday to constitute immediately a United Nations Police Force for Jerusalem, with a nucleus of 200 British members of the present force as volunteers. But there is still no United Nations Governor of Jerusalem.
