The Jewish National Home A Zionist Federation meeting held in
London on Tuesday was notable for two striking speeches, one by Lord Rothschild and one by Dr. Chaim Weizmann. If Dr. Weizmann is rightly reported he made a statement—" we can consider no solution which would condemn the Jews to the position of a permanent minority in their national home "—which will considerably aggravate existing difficulties. It is not clear whether the Zionist leader is claiming for the Jews numerical equality or an actual majority, but the words " in their national home " imply that the Jews had been promised Palestine as a national home. That was never the case. They were promised a national home in Palestine, which is a quite different matter. Lord Rothschild, to whose uncle the Balfour Declaration was handed twenty-one years ago, is under no illusions about that, and his speech, in which he refused to allow his Jewish traditions to run counter to his loyalty to the British Govern- ment, revealed an attitude which, if it were more generally adopted, would do a great deal to smooth the way to a settle- ment by agreement on the basis of moderate claims. He recognised frankly that it was idle to expect Palestine to absorb the hundreds of thousands of actual and potential refugees in Central Europe ; to count on that, or anything like it, would be to obscure the necessity for seeking homes for most of them elsewhere.
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