ZIONIST ASPIRATIONS

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVI, Issue 24, 28 July 1943, Page 4

ZIONIST ASPIRATIONS

Referring to recent Zionist statements "Panethnophile" writes that as! the propaganda "seems to receive approval in responsible Government quarters it seems necessary to restate facts which the Zionist speakers concerned have passed over all too lightly. (1) The Jews have no better historical claim to rule Palestine than the Italians have to rule the Roman colony of Britain; (2) the Balfour Declaration of 1917 promised a 'national home* for the Jews in Palestine, but not a home for all the Jewish nation.' Palestine is too small a country to house anything like half the Jews still alive in Europe; (3) during the last war the Imperial Government also made promises to the Arabs that are in direct conflict with any complete Jewish sovereignty in Palestine. If (as seems possible) we British have promised Palestine to two rival claimants, it is surely peculiar justice to grant the Jewish demands in full, as the Zionists iwish, but to wholly break faith with the Arabs; (4) for the past two years British policy in the Middle East has practically ignored Zionist claims and has been directed towards the formation of a pan-Arab Federation, in which Palestine would have a central geographical position. . . ; (5) the Zionist faction is outnumbered, even amongst practising Jews, by the less visionary supporters of a more spacious national home in some undeveloped colonial area with room for all the sixteen millions of Jews—in Uganda Madagascar, New Guinea, or elsewhere All that Jewry properly requires in Palestine is access to national monuments; what if is fairly entitled to elsewhere is the opportunity to cut itself a national home out of the bush."