PALESTINE PERIL
rr HE Government has not yet declared its attitude towards the .1 recommendations of the recent Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry on the problems of European Jewry and Palestine. There is no reason for surprise or regret in that. The proposals of the committee are so disquieting that it can hardly be believed that any British Government would adopt them as they stand. On the other hand mere unqualified rejection is equally out of the question. The committee has placed the Government between two fires. To accede to the suggestion that ioo,000 Jews should be admitted to Palestine forthwith, or as rapidly as transport can be arranged, would set the whole Arab world ablaze at a moment when friendly relations with the Arab States are among this country's major interests. To reject the suggestions would stir new and bitter hostility in the United States, where Jewish influence is powerful and Arab influence non-existent. No wonder, there- fore, that the Government should ponder long before announcing its policy. Delays are often dangerous, but this is a case in which precipitate decision might well be more dangerous still.
Whatever may be said of the Palestine Committee's recom- mendations—not much good can in fact be said of them—the Committees report does one valuable service in depicting without extenuation or restraint the conditions of Palestine today. It is both a depressing and an alarming picture, but no one- can doubt that it is a true picture. A few random quotations from the report supply all the necessary outlines. "The objectives of all Arab parties in Palestine are the immediate stoppage of Jewish immi- gration, the immediate prohibition of the sale of land to Jews and the concession of independence to a State in which the Arab majority would be dominant." "The various Jewish parties, even though some criticise the idea of a Jewish State, are all united in their advocacy of unlimited immigration, of the abolition of restrictions on the sale of land and of the abrogation of the 1939 White Paper [which provided for an end of Jewish immigration within five years]." " The [Jewish] Agency is now generally believed to have unofficial, but none the less powerful, influence over Haganah—the so-called Jewish Army—the strength of which is estimated at over 6o,000." " Palestine is an armed camp." " We are clear in our minds that if British forces were withdrawn there would be immediate and prolonged bloodshed the end of which it is impossible to predict." Such is the condition of the land to whose inhabitants such a vista of hope was opened up by the victory of the Allied forces in 1918.
If explanation of this progressive degeneration at a time when all other Arab States—Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iraq, Syria—are enjoying the full independence then promised them is to be sought it is found in the deplorable breaches of faith with the Arab peoples by previous British Governments. That old unhappy story cannot be retraced in detail here, but it is a profound misfortune that owing to the fact that Jewish organisations have developed effective publicity agencies—quite legitimately—in this country, and the Arabs till eighteen months ago had none at all, the British people has never begun to appreciate the. strength of the Arab case. The plain fact is that since the first moves were made in 1915 to detach the Arab peoples from their Turkish suzerain they were promised again and again independence for all the lands inhabited by predominantly Arab peoples. They were promised it (apart from the present Syria) in the McMahon-Husain correspondence of 1915—for though Sir Henry McMahon claimed subsequently that his formula excluded Palestine from the independence area it is certain that King Husain never understood it so, nor could any reasonable and fair-minded man today put that interpretation on the words used ; they were promised it in a Foreign Office memorandum of June 1018 ; they were promised it in an Anglo- French declaration of January 1919. But meanwhile Britain and France had concluded in 1916 the Sykes-Picot agreement, which partitioned the Arab lands from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf in a way totally irreconcilable with the McMahon pledges of the previous year ; and in November 1917 was launched that most ill-starred of political proclamations, the Balfour declaration regarding the establishment of a National Home for the Jews in Arab Palestine.
In the light of those facts the persistent refusal of the Arabs of Palestine to acquiesce in extensive and externally-financed Jewish immigration—particularly in the light of the authoritative declaration that it was the Jews' intention to make Palestine as Jewish as England is English—is neither to be wondered at nor condemned. For that Palestine was a predominantly Arab country when war ended in 1918 is incontestable. The Committee of Enquiry itself states that even four years later, in 1922, there were only 84,000 Jews in Palestine out of a population of 750,000 (in 1944 there were 554,00o out of 1,765,000). Palestine, therefore, but for the Balfour declaration, could have counted on becoming rapidly an independent self-governing Arab country as Iraq has been for years and Syria is today. Instead life has been lived in Palestine for twenty-seven years on a thin surface covering the smouldering fires of civil war, and is today under a mixture of military and of Crown Colony government. Every kind of attempt to effect an agreed settlement between Jews and Arabs has failed. There have certainly been faults on both sides, but it is note- worthy that the Committee of Enquiry observes that " the Jewish community in Palestine has never, as a community, faced the problem of co-operation with the Arabs." At all events, of co- operation there has been none. Of assimilation there has been none. Enquiry after enquiry into the condition of Palestine has proved sterile. The Peel Commission in 1936 proposed the par- tition into three or more sections of this small country the size of Wales. The recommendation was accepted by the British Government, but the boundary commission sent out to delimit frontiers reported that the thing was impossible, and the project was dropped. In 1939 the Government, with a just sense of realities, issued a statement of policy to the effect that, with 600,000 Jews in the country, the ideal of a National Home for the Jews could be regarded as achieved, and that immigration should be restricted to 15,000 a year for the next five years and then cease altogether. Condemnation by the Jews was, of course, universal and fierce.
It is against that background that the Committee of Enquiry's disastrous proposal for the immediate immigration of ioo,00c Jewish victims of Nazi and Fascist persecution into Palestine must be considered. The proposal has already set the Arab world aflame, and no rational person can be surprised that it should. The proposal to accept I00,000 European Jews in this country, merged though they would be in a population of 45,000,000, would be singularly slow to commend itself. What must be the natural reaction of the inhabitants of a country of well under 2,000,000, the vast majority of them bitterly hostile, as the result of the policy of the last twenty-eight years (not before that), to Judaism generally? Having regard to all the fatal consequences of a mistake now it would be far better to relieve the European situation—for we cannot refuse to relieve it—by accepting the roo,000 here than by injecting them forcibly into Palestine. That, indeed, or some modification of it, may well be the one sound solution. " Or some modification of it," because this is not a burden which Britain should have to carry unassisted. The Committee of Enquiry was not British, but Anglo-American, and American help in the solution of the problem of Jewry both in Europe and in Palestine may be looked for with some confidence. We do not want American soldiers to help us to hold down Palestine by force ; we do not want primarily an American contribution to the financial burden which the admini- stration of Palestine imposes. But we might most reasonably propose to her that she should admit to her country one half of the ioo,000 from Central Europe if we admit the other half to ours. The advantage of that, quite apart from the effect it might have in stimulating some British Dominions, and perhaps France, to take similar action, would be far-reaching. It would assure the Arabs that this country was no party to the conversion of what should be an Arab State into a Jewish State. It would satisfy the Jews, so far as their solicitude for the unhappy victims in Europe is humani- tarian and not ultimately political, that this country is ready to show practical sympathy on a large scale. And it would unite Britain and America in a great, constructive and beneficent enterprise. The proposal may seem quixotic at first sight. In that case let it be viewed a second and a third time. If there is a better alternative to the Enquiry Committee's madly perilous proposition let it by all means be examined. If there is none, then this proposal is com- mended by recognition of the fatal consequences of either doing what the Committee suggest or of doing nothing.
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