A PALESTINE PLAN
By G. R. DRIVER
MUCH has been written for and against the Zionist claim to Palestine, and there are now settled there some 5oo,000 Jews (as against t,000,000 Arabs) who can no more be evicted than the Arabs if justice is to prevail. These Jews have bought every acre that they own, often at enhanced prices, and they have greatly im- proved the land, and an Arab demand for retrospective legislation revoking these sales is as unreasonable as the Jewish claims to un- wind the scroll of history. Either course involves a degree of suffer- ing and injustice that cannot be contemplated.
The number of Jews now in Palestine is over twice that of the ancient Hebrews in the ideal age of the kingdoms. Prof. Kittel has estimated their numbers at 230,000 in the time of Hezekiah, and at the outside at 16o,000 in that of Zedekiah, and he thinks that they dwindled to 23,500 after the final deportation in 586 B.C. Dr. Baron puts the population of Palestine in A.D. 70 at 2,200,000 Jews, plus 300,000 Samaritans and Greeks ; but this figure seems excessive in view of the general rate of increase in the ancient world and in the modern East when unaffected by European science. Also, he bases it on an estimate of too,ono people in Jerusalem alone, which is hardly credible, and does not say exactly what he includes in Palestine. The present numbers, then, are enough to constitute " a " national home in Palestine, for no responsible person has ever promised to make it " the " national home, of the Jews. The time, then, has come when some compromise must be found if the Holy Land is not to be for ever filled with the envy, hatred and malice which political Zionism has brought to it, and the Zionist leaders have an opportunity that may never recur to show both moral courage and statesmanship by accepting what they have obtained with a good grace and looking elsewhere for a home for those of their race who cannot now find a place in Palestine itself. There is no logical connection between persecution in Europe and Zionism.
In Palestine partition, as the Peel Commission has declared, is the only solution in the'present circumstances, however imperfect it may . be ; but it may be remarked that Sir George Adam Smith has said that "the idea that it [Palestine] can ever belong to one nation, even though this were Jews, is contrary both to nature and to scripture." At the same time, there is no need for partition to last for ever. It ought to be fixed in the first instance for a limited period of time, possibly ten or twenty-five years, with the express provision that, if or when (whether before or after that term of years) Arabs and Jews agree to put forward a genqine settlement of their differences, and a reasonable constitution with adequate safe- guards for racial and religious minorities, it shall at once be deter- mined. The burden of agreement must rest with the parties con- cerned, in the hope that future generations will not inherit the passions of their ancestors, but that does not exclude external help and advice ; and pending agreement external control of the country must remain.
The Jews already hold the richest agricultural land in the country, the Maritime Plain and the Vale of Esdraelon, with an extension to Lake Huleh ; the Arabs have the poor hill-country of Galilee, once called Galilee of the Gentiles, and the " backbone " from Carmel and Beisan to Hebron, with an extension to Jaffa and Gaza. The Jews should be allowed to consolidate their holdings in the plains, and the 'Vain be encouraged to sell what they still hold there, being offered in return a guarantee that Jewish purchases in the hill-country shall henceforth be absolutely prohibited; and the Jews in the hills might be similarly encouraged to exchange their holdings for land in the plains. Such sales or exchanges should be controlled to prevent the peasants being turned off the land to become a landless proletariat (although the extent to which this has already happened is much exaggerated), and a fund should be established to facilitate resettlement of Jews in the plains, and of Arabs, e.g., in Transjordan.
The resulting Arab and Jewish districts are of awkward shape. The Arab areas are mainly two : Galilee and the "backbone." The former is best joined to the Lebanon, even though it is at the present time politically a foreign unit ; the latter, if joined to Trans- jordan, will be economically self-supporting on Arab standards of living. The Jewish district, forming a Z-shaped tract of country, is awkward both politically and economically. It will have abnormally
long frontiers, and no natural resources beyond agriculture ; but the Zionists must accept the disabilities consequent on their insistence on Palestine as their only home. When they are willing to reduce their standards of living to that of their environment, namely, an oriental level, they will require financial aid from outside ; and, in fact, they have only so maintained their standards hitherto (except for the artificial boom created by the war). This, however, is a question which may be left to the Jews of Palestine to settle with their fellow-Jews in the rest of the world ; they cannot expect the Gentile world to pour money into the country to maintain artificial and uneconomic standards of life. Their position, however, would be made easier if they were allowed to acquire certain as yet unallocated state-lands and the Negeb in the south, to make what they could of them by modem scientific methods ; and they might reason- ably expect external financial aid, whether by direct grant or by loan, in such a task. By such a scheme, with all its drawbacks, both parties would gain something beyond peace : the Arabs would have the advantage of union with larger political units, Lebanon and Transjordan, whose inhabitants are their own kinsfolk and speak the same language, while the Jews would have the prospect of developing a large as yet unexploited district. The wealth of the Dead Sea in potash, and perhaps also in oil, falls in Arab territory, but is being developed by Jewish skill and finance, and the advan- tages are thus roughly divided.
Certain districts must remain reserved areas under the control of the High Commissioner or of any body that may succeed him. First, Jerusalem (and perhaps Bethlehem and Nazareth, though not necessarily, as Arab-Jewish feelings are not involved in these two towns) must come under him, sitting possibly with an inter-nation advisory board (consisting of laymen, not theologians or clergy whose innate tendency to quarrel will almost certainly produce a perpetual stalemate). Second, the ports of Jaffa plus Tel Aviv and of Haifa must be made to serve both communities ; for Arabs as well as Jews require access to the sea. These places, too, have an im- portant part to play in Imperial communications. The suggestion may, therefore, be made that the Army should exchange its base in Cairo for one at Jaffa or Tel Aviv, whence it would still be within striking distance of the Suez Canal, and that the Navy should leave Alexandria for Haifa, where it would have the end of the pipe-line and the oil-refineries under its guns. Bases, too, for aerial com- munication must be maintained as hitherto at Tibtrias and Lydda. Such arrangements as these have the additional advantage of ensuring the policing of the country and its protection from aggression during the difficult period of transition and of bringing money and employ- ment into it on a considerable scale. Protection indeed is, and probably always will be, necessary; for history has shown that neither Hebrews nor Jews nor Arabs have ever (except once during the Crusades) succeeded in defending the country against attack from without or of expelling the invader when he has occupied it, and a divided country will certainly be unable to hold it against attack from the West. If, too, a canal were eventually dug from a point somewhere south of Tel Aviv to the head of the Gulf of Aqaba in view of the expected reversion of the Suez Canal to Egypt at no distant date, such protection of the country would be a.vital necessity of the Empire.
Meanwhile, the office of High Commissioner or something akin to it will have to be maintained. He will then have under his control foreign relations and such internal affairs as national (as distinct from local) taxation and police, main roads and railways, and the waters of the Jordan (which on any scheme flows through both Jewish and Arab territory) ; he will also have to ensure rights of transit across country and of access to ports and holy places to all without dis- tinction of race or creed. The constitution, however, of each com- munity can be left to the free choice of each, subject to the guidance of the High Commissioner. Then the Arab settlement may raise more difficulties than the Jewish, but may here be left at that ; it must not be allowed to imperil the ultimate goal. This can hardly be anything but a federation of Syria and Palestine, which are historically, economically and geographically a single unit, in a single block of four federated states : Syria in the narrower sense, Lebanon plus Galilee, Transjordan plus Arab Palestine, and Jewish Palestine as the land of Israel, each autonomous within itself. The scheme here outlined provides for some increase of Jewish immigration into the Jewish State, but much pioneering work, to which ordinary refugees are unsuited, will be required to prepare any extensive tracts of land for their reception ; and some of the additional land may not prove itself capable of supporting such numbers as its advocates expect or hope. In any case, all European Jewry could hardly be absorbed into Palestine if it wished to leave Europe, and other accommodation must be sought for it ; and there is no reason to suppose that millions of Jews will refuse anything but Palestine if a reasonable offer is made and is presented in a fair light. Only hysterical emotion, whipped up by extreme Zionists, lost Kenya to the Jews at the beginning of the century. Emotion must be guided into channels of common sense, and Zionist leaders must realise that if they refuse another Kenya, they will be re- sponsible for the victims of future pogroms in Europe.
Alaska and Mauritius and other places have been suggested, but rejected on various grounds ; Cyrenaica and Tripolitania, which have been proposed, must be turned down for they are open to the same opposition as Palestine from their Arab Moslem inhabitants. Two other places suggest themselves. The first is Madagascar, if the French would sell (not give) the island ; it has a mixed population of under 4,000,000 persons occupying 88,745 square miles, and is rich in potential forests and plains suitable for agriculture and stock- raising and it also yields some semi-precious stones. The second is Eritrea, which as an ex-Italian colony is awaiting disposal and will not require to be bought. It is a country of 6o,000 square miles supporting a population of 450,000 persons (whereas Palestine main- tains 1,5oo,000 persons on 10,400 square miles) with a maximal temperature in the shade of 120 degrees (against 130 degrees in parts of Palestine) ; its population is not a homogeneous nation but more or less nomadic African tribes, a fair number of Tigrinian immigrants, and Italian colonists, and, apart from the work of these colonists, the land is largely unexploited and its trade undeveloped. Where Italians have lived, there Jews can live, and their quarters are available at once for the first settlers, since many of them have already been repatriated and the rest can also be sent back to Italy.
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