THE PARTITION OF PALESTINE
THE unanimity of the report of the Royal Commission on Palestine, followed by the prompt acceptance of the report by the Government, has assured its almost unanimous approval by the British Press. This united front has clearly impressed , both the parties primarily concerned. Expressions of disappointment and bitterness there have been on both sides, but neither Jewish nor Arab opinion has been marshalled against the report as a whole. The present inclination is to accept with regret—a regret which is shared by the Royal Com- mission and will be shared by nearly everyone in this country—the necessity for partition, and to concentrate the fire of criticism on the details of the line proposed in the report.
The conclusion is unavoidable. It is possible to blame the War-time Government of Great Britain for having allowed its right hand not to know what its left hand was doing or—in one critic's pungent phrase— for having sold the same pup twice. It is possible, though not altogether convincing, to argue that if the dream of a great Arab State embracing all Syria and Mesopotamia had been allowed to materialise, the Arabs might have been content to leave in Jewish hands the relatively restricted territory of Palestine. It is possible, though still less convincing, to maintain that a firmer policy of insistence on the claims of the Jewish National Home might, if applied from the outset, have reconciled the Arabs to toleration of a fait accompli they could not hope to reverse. But these considerations are scarcely relevant today. The question is : Are the British Government and the British people here and now prepared to keep in Palestine for an indefinite period a number of British troops sufficient to break the resistance of a majority of the population to the existing regime? Once the answer to this question is given in the negative, acceptance of the repOrt inevitably follows.
It is worth while pausing to reflect on some of the reasons why this answer has been so emphatically and overwhelmingly negative. Great Britain has shown elsewhere neither incapacity nor reluctance to rule over subject peoples. The economic development of Palestine makes the country more capable of bearing the costs of British occupation and administration than many British dependencies. It is a maritime country easily accessible to a naval Power, and recent events in the Mediterranean have thrown into relief its potential strategic importance. Yet it is precisely here that Great Britain has shown the greatest eagerness to restrict her responsibilities. The elements which have gone to make this decision are complex and various. There is the feeling that, where conflicting claims cannot be reconciled, those of the tillers of the soil have the first claim to be heard. This principle, though often violated by British imperialism in the past, is being more and more accepted as the sine qua non of an enlightened colonial administration ; and it is difficult to reconcile British opinion to its violation even in the interests of a Jewish National Home. There is the feeling that the deadlock, far from being resolved by time, was becoming each year more acute. The progress towards devolution and self- government, which we now like to think of as character istic, in however feeble a measure, of our oversea empire, was less than non-existent. Palestine was in this respect moving steadily backwards, and nobody was more insistent than the Jews on the impossibility of introducing the faintest vestige of self-government. Finally, there is a feeling that you cannot yoke unequally together under the same administration a European and an Asiatic civilisatior —iwo peoples so utterly divergent in cultural and economic development as the Palestinian Arab and the European Jew. The partiality. towards the Arab, of which the Palestine Government has been so persistently accused, seems to have been due to a desire, however mistaken, to hold even the scales in an essentially unequal partnership.
But even though the inevitability of the partition may be generally accepted, it would be a mistake to minimise the difficulties which still confront the British Govern:- ment. We can, indeed, discount the hint dropped _in certain quarters that the American Government may be induced by American Jewry to bring pressure to bear against the adoption of the report. But the Mandates Commission of the League of Nations, to whom the report is being urgently submitted, will exercise its undoubted right and duty to scrutinise proposals for so radical an alteration in the character of the mandate ; and the experience of previous debates about Palestine suggests that the practical difficulties of administration on the spot carry less instantaneous conviction with a commission sitting in Geneva than with the government responsible for the administration. The interest of a rapid decision will be obvious to everybody. But the utmost dispatch, as well as goodwill on the part of all concerned, will be required if the question is to be dis-, posed by the session of the League Council which meets simultaneously with the Assembly in September.
In the meanwhile, a Zionist Congress will have been held at Zurich in August. In default of any representa- tive body of comparable importance on the Arab side,. this will be by far the most striking organised expression of opinion by either party on the report ; and much depends on _the statesmanship of Dr. Weizmann, who has more than once before shouldered the heavy and ungrateful burden of counselling moderation. But what- ever happens at Zurich, the issue at Geneva is likely to turn, not on the principle of partition, but on the details of its application. Is any substantial modifica7 tion possible in the boundary line proposed by the Royal Commission ? One may, for instance, feel regret that the new Jewish quarter of Jerusalem containing the headquarters of the Jewish Agency and the Jewish University cannot be included in the new Jewish State. But reasons of geography clearly preclude this. One may feel that the Commissioners, in drawing the new boundaries, have not taken sufficiently into account the magnitude of the terrible problem of the exodus of Jews from Germany or of the 3,000,000 Jews in Poland, whose personal situation is little better than that of the Jews in Germany, and whose economic plight, though less widely advertised, is far worse. But this was, after all, not the business of the Commissioners ; and a fact which is ever present to the mind of the Jew not un- naturally seems irrelevant to the Arab. It has hitherto been the unhappy fate of the JeWish migration to Palestine to palliate one tiny fraction of an immense problem by creating another problem, perhaps less extensive, but certainly not less insoluble. It is vital that the same should not be said in the future of the new settlement now to be made.
Nor can -the authorities with whom the ultimate decision will rest afford altogether to ignore Arab objections to some of the features of the report. The principle Les absents ont toujours tort is not the basis of political wisdom. One of the disasters of the Palestinian question in the past has been the contrast between the admirably organised marshalling of the Jewish argument in the world Press, at Geneva and elsewhere, and the contemptible presentation of the Arab case ; for experi- ence shows that the strength of Arab feeling cannot be gauged by its incapacity, for financial and other reasons, to express itself in forms comprehensible to Western Europe. The test of any solution is in the last resort whether it will work. The British Govern- ment, which will be in direct control of the Jerusalem- Jaffa enclave and bound by ties of alliance and interest to both the new States, cannot wash its hands of the consequences of the settlement, whatever they may be ; and it is therefore the British Government which must bear the final responsibility for seeing that the foundations of the edifice are well and truly laid.
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