THE MACMAHON CORRESPONDENCE [To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR] SIR, — For
obvious reasons I do not wish to open a lengthy discussion on the Near Eastern Question while the matter is still in a critical stage of discussion, but you have raised one point in your last issue (in your "News of the Week " para- graph on the Palestine Conference) which seems to me to invite some misunderstanding.
Referring to the forthcoming publication of the MacMahon correspondence, you say: "historical interpretation is not likely to assist in solving the Palestine problem at this late date." I submit, confident that more able students of this matter will agree with me, that to ignore, or even belittle, the historical aspect of the problem would cause a disastrous and unjust incompatibility between the Arab and our point of view. Even in the most Europeanised parts of the Arab world history plays a vital part in the life of the people, and informs the common outlook, in a way which to us has become unfamiliar. This is largely due to the fact that the tradition of memorising famous sayings and pieces of knowledge has survived in spite of the spread of modern education. Arab horse-dealers, to take a trivial example, have no stud-book to consult, and yet they can recite the breeding of a well-bred horse as accurately as a Newmarket trainer the pedigree of a Derby favourite.
In the political sphere this traditional aptitude to preserve knowledge by repetition and learning by heart is of maximum importance. Many Englishmen have been surprised in recent years at hearing phrases from the MacMahon correspondence, and from such important documents as "The Declaration to the Seven " and the Anglo-French Declaration of 1918, chanted at them by Arab chauffeurs or travelling companions or chance- met peasants. Many documents which are thus widely known among Arabs have never been published in England, and, in consequence, Englishmen such as I have referred to have had much difficulty in understanding what was being said to them, probably putting their interlocutors down as odd rogues. Now that the most important of these documents, so well known in Palestine and so little known here, is at last to be officially published, it would be a matter for much regret if the English reader should be led to suppose that time has exhausted them of any significance, or that they mean much only to a few.— '0 Wilfred Street, S.W. 1.
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