Evening Post. SATURDAY, JULY 17, 1937. AN INTERNATIONAL HOME

Evening Post, Volume CXXIV, Issue 15, 17 July 1937, Page 8

Evening Post. SATURDAY, JULY 17, 1937. AN INTERNATIONAL HOME

In its proposed partition of Palestine between the Arabs and the Jews the Royal Commission had much to say by way of recommendation of this as the only feasible solution of a peculiarly difficult problem, but nothing at all, so far as our cable information goes, by way of explaining the choice of the particular boundary outlined between the Jewish and the Arab States. No reasons were given for allotting to the Jews the whole of Northern Palestine and only the coastal strip of the middle and southern portions. Were _ the motives of the Commission historical, geographical, or strategical in the choice it made? Was there anything in the nature of the Wilsonian selfdetermination about it? Is there anything predominantly Jewish about the land set aside for the Jews as their "national home," or anything exclusively Arab about the remainder? The Commission itself is silent on these points, but the parties concerned in the partition —the Jews and the Arabs—are both protesting; they like neither the idea of partition nor the site of the proposed party-wall between them. New Zealanders have a special interest in Palestine, because New Zealand mounted troops played a notable part in the conquest of Palestine from the Turks in the campaigns of 1916 to 1918 in the Great War. .With much of the country, at least as it was then, they will be familiar, and stirring memories will be recalled by the place-names mentioned in the Commission's report. Historically, Palestine is one of the oldest countries in the world, and yet it has never before been partitioned in the manner now proposed. It was already inhabited by various tribes ■when Abraham came over from Mesopotamia and settled there about 2000 B.C. It was conquered by the Israelites on their return from Egypt after years of hard fighting with the Philistines—who gave their name to Palestine—and the other tribes. Under David and Solomon, about a thousand years before Christ, the Kingdom of Israel reached its zenith. Then dissension came, and the kingdom was divided between Israel and Judah. The Kingdom of Israel was conquered by Shalmaneser about 720 8.C., and the Israelites led into captivity from which there is no record .of their ever returning. These are the "lost tribes" of Israel. Over a century later, in 588 8.C., Nebudchadnezzar, King of Babylon, stormed. Jerusalem, and carried off many of the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Judah to Babylon. These were restored about fifty years later, a new temple arose on the foundations of that built by Solomon, and for some centuries the Jews flourished, particularly under the Ptolemies, successors of Alexander the Great, who had passed through Palestine on his way to Egypt. Oppressed and outraged in their religious feelings by Antiochus Epiphanes the Jews in the second century before Christ rebelled and under the Maccabees established their independence for a century. Civil war led to the intervention of the Romans. Jerusalem was captured by Pompey in 63 B.C. Then followed the rule of Herod and his successors with Roman supervision, but the Romans were unable to manage the Jews peacefully for long, and open rebellion led to the siege and destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, 70 A.D. Further struggles succeeded until in 135 A.D. the whole of Judaea was devastated, towns and villages razed to the ground} and the name of Jerusalem itself changed to Aelia Capitolina, from entering which Jews were debarred. From that time forward Palestine was not really a Jewish country. After the conversion of Constantine the Great, the history of Palestine for nearly three centuries is largely Christian and ecclesiastical. In 614 A.D. King Chosroes of Persia, accompanied by many Jcw3 anxious to return from exile, invaded Palestine and devastated the country. In 636 A.D. the Caliph Omar and his Moslems took Jerusalem and occupied the rest of the country, and thenceforth, with the exception of the brief period of the Kingdom of the Crusaders in Jerusalem, to the conquest by the British Imperial forces under General Allenby in 1917-18, Palestine was Moslem. Under Turkish rule there were centuries of comparative peace, but it was the peace of death. There is nothing in the history of Palestine to suggest that the basis of the proposed partition is historical. Jew, Christian, and Moslem alike have been concerned with the whole country. Geographically there is this fact that each party in the new diviiV.'V is placed in contact with the lan-is of at least its recent origin, the Arabs adjoining to the east and south the desert regions of Arabia, and the Jews, to the west at least, the sea over which the post-War migration passed. Northern Palestine, from the headland, Ras en Nakura, on the Mediterranean, to the Upper Jordan, at the Waters of Merom and Lake Huleh, down the Jordan to the Sea of Galilee and beyond, along the Lower Jordan to near Beisan and back westward across- the {Vale of Jezreel and the

Plain of Esdraelon to Mount Carmel, is the richest part of the country and the most picturesque. These northern highlands, including Nazareth, were in the time of Christ the most fertile and densely populated provinces. Nowhere else in a land of ruins, where excavation almost anywhere yields (races of former occupation, are there so many evidences of bygone civilisation. Under the Turks everything declined almost to the stage of barbarism, but with tillage and irrigation the land might well bloom again. Here also are some of ihe oldest Jewish colonies established before the War. The land of the Upper Jordan and on the western shores of Lake Galilee was formerly a garden and the prospect of restoration is excellent. The Vale of Jezreel with the Plain of Esdraelon, scene of warfare over the ages, is immensely fertile with a splendid outlet in the much-improved port of Haifa.

The coastal strip beginning in Mount Carmcl and ending in the far south at Gaza is in formation remarkably like the alluvial plain stretching from Paekakariki hill to tho Manawatu. The hills are not so high and the rivers are not so large, but there is the same broad belt of sand dunes fringing a fertile plain. This is the famous Plain of Sharon, renowned in antiquity for its productiveness, and today still the chosen land with its orange groves and fields of corn. Here and in Northern Palestine are the principal Jewish colonies today, but not by any means all that exist in Palestine. It may be therefore that in drafting its hypothetical frontier the Palestine Commission studied, as it were, the line of least resistance. It gave the Jews the richer lands, if the far fewer acres, because it knew that they would make a better use of them than the Arabs have done or would be likely to do. If there is any land "flowing with milk and honey" in Palestine it is the part given to the Jews. In the best days of Palestine it must have carried a population double or treble what it carries today. But so intertwined is the whole of Palestine and its story with the Jewish race, with the Arabs, and with the Christian races, too, that there is no room for national homes for all. If any country is >an international home and worthy of rule as such, it is Palestine.