LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
PERIL IN PALESTINE
SIR,—Brigadier Longrigg's article in your issue of August 31st gives, by means of selection and omission, a distorted view of the Palestine problem as well as of the obligations of this country. " We are in Palestine because in 1920 we accepted a mandate for it," the writer says, thus simplifying the issue, and then speaks of our dual obligations under the mandate. But he fails to see the essential difference between the status of the Arabs whose " civil and religious rights " are safeguarded by the mandate only if they are residents of Palestine, and that of the Jews, since the mandate clearly gives recognition to " the historical con- nection of the Jewish people with Palestine, and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country." After this, it is only a minor—though perhaps not unimportant—detail worth recalling to your readers that it was the Zionist Organisation who in their proposals to the Supreme Council of the Peace Conference asked that the mandate for Palestine should be entrusted to Great Britain.
Brigadier Longrigg says that no Jewish State was contemplated in 1917, but forgets to mention that the Royal Commission held a different view on the subject, nor does he refer to the evidence to the contrary by all the leading statesmen of the day. Far from intending to create a new, and explosive, minority problem, the National Home policy was to allow the Jewish people to rid themselves of their position as a homeless and stateless minority everywhere. Brigadier Longrigg seems to think, without quoting any authority for his statement, that Palestine could take only some to per cent. of the Jewish people. I wonder whether he realises that even this figure would give the Jews a majority in Palestine? That the development of parliamentary self-government in Palestine was subject to the overriding National Home obligation was recognised time and again, and as early as 1922 by Mr. Winston Churchill, then Colonial Secretary, when he informed the Palestine Arab Delegation that " it is quite clear that the creation at this stage of a national govern- ment would preclude the fulfilment of the pledge made by the British Government to the Jewish people."
The facts of the situation are as follows: (a) Palestine can, according to the best authorities, absorb some millions of additional settlers (see Palestine, Land of Promise, by W. C. Lowdermilk) ; (b) The Arab peoples have more than half a dozen States with vast under-populated and undeveloped territories. Thus their national self-determination is not being in any way endangered, whilst the Arabs of Palestine are assured of equal rights and prosperous development side by side with a Jewish majority. Their economic and social condition in the last twenty- five years has already been immeasurably improved ; (c) The Jewish people, like every other people, is entitled to self-determination and nationhood, and this it can only achieve in Palestine ; (d) Hundreds of thousands of Jews in Europe, and increasing numbers overseas, are looking to Palestine as their haven and home and are resolved to over- come all obstacles placed in their way to the land where they can rebuild their life without fearing assimilation, persecution or massacre.—
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