MANDATES FAIL

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 2, 28 September 1937, Page 10

MANDATES FAIL

Partition of Palestine NATIONAL HOMES CREATED The proposed partition of Palestine is one of those confessions of failure which at best are wounding to our national pride, says Scrutator, in the "Sunday Times.” It condemns us to go to Geneva, to admit that we have not done what the League commissioned us to do 15 years ago, and what we undertook to do, to ask its leave to tear up the old Mandate and to make a new one which will confirm us in the strategic advantages of the old Mandate while absolving us from the obligations that were attached to them. The report which recommends partitions as the best, and, indeed the only, way out of the present trouble is au elaborate State Paper which reflects very great credit on its authors. Little as we may like its conclusions, it argues them honestly and exhibits the facts unusually impartially and always without a trace of malice. As between Jews and Arabs, its sympathies are quite obviously with the Jews on the merits of the dispute. Unlike the local Palestine Government in some of its reports, it lays no blame on the Jews for being killed by Arabs; it praises the wonderful work that they have done in Palestine: it finds that Arab national feeling is infected with the poison of terrorism; and it agrees that the last two risings have been directed not against the Jews, who were their victims, but against the British. Its whole case for partition is that it is impossible to reconcile Arab Nationalism with Zionism, and that the Mandate which bids us to do so is self-contradictory and therefore unworkable.

Two distinct lines of inquiry present themselves: Who is responsible for a failure so damaging to our prestige in the world? Why were we so slow to find out that we had an impossible task set us, and, the impossibility assumed, was it there from the first or lias it been created and grown unmanageable by our own mistakes? Secondly, what are the guarantees that conditions will be better when the Irish solution of partition is applied to Palestine as the Commission proposes? Let us follow the second inquiry first as the less vexatious. Previous Partitions.

This proposed partition is the second partition of Palestine, for in 1922 the whole of Transjordania, which is more than half the total area of Palestine, and contains some of the best lands, was detached and given to Abdullah, a son of Hussein, as a separate emirate. Our affection for the House of Hussein has amounted almost to an obsession. Does Ibn Saud dethrone it in the Hedjaz, and the French eject Feisal from the throne of Damascus? We console Feisal with a throne in Irak and make over half Palestine to another brother.

Now, for the sake of peace and quietness, it is proposed to give two-thirds of what remains of Palestine, to join it up with Transjordania, from which it was detached, and to make an independent Arab State. Abdullah is lucky. But it should, in fairness to him, be added at once that he is not unfriendly to the Jews, and very unfriendly to the Mufti of Jerusalem, their arch enemy and ours in the last two risings. Broadly, to the Jews are assigned all Galilee, all the plain of Esdraelon, except at the eastern end, and about half the length and perhaps two-thirds of the breadth of the plain from Haifa to the Egyptian frontier. To the Arabs go all Samaria, all the Shephelah hills between the Judean hills and the coastal plain, all the Negeb, as the desert shelf of Judean plateau is called, and Judea, excepting Jerusalem and a corridor running down from it to an Arab enclave at the port of Jaffa. No one can suppose that this will be the final form of the partition. Zionism without Zion loses most of its contact for Jewry, and unless we wish to split Zionism from top to bottom as au international force and to dry up half the inspiration which has made Telaviv and the Jewish settlements more modern and progressive alike in material prosperity and in culture than anything else on the Mediterranean. great changes will have to be made in the proposed frontiers. The Jews are now a majority of the ■population of Jerusalem, and if the British corridor can go down to an Arab enclave and port at one end. there is no reason why it should not go up to a Jewish enclave at the other end in the new and exclusively Jewish western suburb of Jerusalem.

The port of Akabah at the head of the gulf of that name leading up from the Red Sea is w’isely retained in our hands, but on military grounds it would be as dangerous to leave the Negeb ns Akabah in Arab hands. The Negeb should go to the Jews, who will probably find water in it ard make cultivation possible in what otherwise will remain a stony desert, peopled only by w-andering Bedouins; and if it does not go to the Jews it should be British by reason of its proximity to Egypt. National Homes. We shall have created three national homes for Arabs, first in Irak, then in Transjordania, and now in Palestine, and this ample domain will stretch from Damascus to the Persian Gulf and from Egypt to Mosul; the National Home for Jews is now to be reduced to a strangely shaped area about the size of Devonshire. It is only a Naboth’s vineyard. But, as it is, it will be the Jews’ own, and they will be free to develop it as they please. Recriminations serve no useful purpose; but it is a British interest that we should understand how it has all happened and avoid similar mistakes again. The first cause of the failure was in the delays between the victory and the settlement. There is no doubt that Balfour, when he made his promise of a Jewish National Home, envisaged in the future a Jewish State or, at any rate, a Palestinian State of mixed Jew and Arab nationality in which Jews should be the leaven of the lump. The Commission thinks that such a settlement. if made after the victory, might well have been accepted by the Arabs. When the Mandate began to be worked the reaction had set in. After the first Arab riots we began to whittle down the Mandate. The Jewish National Home by the White Paper of 1922 had nothing to do with politics; it was a purely economic and cultural conception. The Arabs began to suspect that the local Government was not in earnest with the National Home, and that they had only to use force to persuade us to drop it. That suspicion became a certainty in their minds when, after the rising >f 1929, the Government proposed to make Arabs preference and debenture-holders in Palestine and the Jewish ordinary shareholders, to be paid when all others had been satisfied. That was so clear a violation of the plain meaning of the Mandate that all the Elder Statesmen at home intervened to stop it, and for a time progress

was resumed at an accelerated pace. But meanwhile the very success of the Zionists had begun to tell against them; while formerly all the Arab national hopes had been centred in Syria, now that the immense potentialities of Palestine had been revealed they fastened on Palestine.- Then followed the last big rising, the despatch of a British division, its withdrawal before order had been restored, continued Insecurity for life and property, and finally the appointment of the Royal Commission which has swept away the old pretence tlu.t the trouble was due to economic causes.

It is now diagnosed as an irreconcilable clash between two rival nationalisms which can only be cured by partition. It may well become the only cure; but whereas Jewish Nationalism was the basis and motive of the Mandate, Arab Nationalism in Palestine was largely made by our own weakness.

Such in outline is the story of Palestine under the Mandate. It is the story of Ireland over again. Nothing worth doing is ever done in politics without imagination, promptness in action, and some willingness to take risks where duty lies.