POLICY ATTACKED

Evening Post, Volume CXXIV, Issue 62, 10 September 1937, Page 16

POLICY ATTACKED

PALESTINE REPORT

LLOYD GEORGE FULMINA-

TIONS

(From "The Post's" Representative.) NEW YOKK, August 4.

Mr. Lloyd George has resumed writing for . the Hearst Press, telling its readers that the British Government has betrayed 16,000,000 Jews, leaving their national home in Palestine to be "mutilated and left to shamble along, a disfigured and shapeless cripple." It is presumed that he is being paid the same rate of remuneration he enjoyed for his former attacks on British foreign policy—£l per word.

"Ths Palestine report," he says, "is a lamentable admission that Britain, owing to the feebleness, vacillation, and pusillanimity of her administrators, failed to carry through the mission entrusted to her by the leading nations of the world. It must necessarily lower British prestige, coming as it does after the fiascos of Manchuria, Abyssinia, and Spanish non-intervention. Ths Zionists, to whom the promise of a national home was given, have to be satisfied with mutilated Canaan, without Zion, Bethlehem, or Judea; they are to be excluded from their holy cities, the site of the temple of their fathers, and the lands in which their immortal poets and prophets dwelled."

The Commission hastily assumed that two races, two languages, and two religions could not dwell in amity in the same country, he said. This was contrary to the.experience of the British Empire. Briton, French, Protestant, and Catholic lived side by side and jointly governed Canada. It was the sam j in South Africa. At the same time, he admitted that Jews and Arabs did not dwell in amity under the mandate; that the Arab revolted against a movement whose achievements in fifteen years were a condemnation of his centuries of ineptitude. Even if the partition were inevitable, Mr. Lloyd George believed the method employed was not intelligent, as it doomed large tracts of once fertile land in the north and south to desolation. These lands would have been restored by Jewish enterprise within a few years.

"The report handsomely acknowledges the triumph of Jewish colonisation," he says. "Their land settlements are models of intensive culture. They drained malarial swamps, converting them into gardens which maintain happy and prosperous little communities. They established flourishing industries on the barren sand dunes of the Mediterranean. They built Tel Aviv, a modern city of 150,000 inhabitants. They diffused prosperity through the whole land of Canaan. Trade leaped up, revenue increased fourfold, the wages of the Arab labourer have been trebled. Since the mandate the Jews poured £. 17,000,000 of capital into honest, productive development, drainage, reclamation, housing, electricity, and new industries. Yet, this success, from which Arabs, high and low, profited, has not induced gratitude in their breasts. On the contrary, it has incited jealousy, suspicion, fear, and downright hatred. Hence the trouble."