RUSSIA PROPOSES DUAL STATE AS PALESTINE SOLUTION

Evening Star, Issue 26102, 16 May 1947, Page 5

RUSSIA PROPOSES DUAL STATE AS PALESTINE SOLUTION

NEW YORK, May 14. The best and most just solution of the Palestine problem would be the establishment in Palestine of an independent dual democratic State, with equal rights for Arabs and Jews. M. Gromyko, in the first detailed Russian statement on Palestine since the special United Nations session began, told the Assembly that the Soviet delegation, while reserving its final attitude until actual decisions on Palestine’s future were to be made, had come to .this conclusion. M. Gromyko said is should be a Stato in which both peoples could co-operate, and the experience of other countries in which different nationalities lived together in harmony should be taken into account. Only if that solution proved impossible would the partition of Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish States be necessary. ■ The world must reject the establishment of an Arab State without due guarantees of Jewish rights or of a Jewish State without guarantees to the Arabs. M. Gromyko said that Palestine had become a semi-military police State, and it was not surprising that both Arabs and Jews demanded termination of the British • mandate. The mandatory system of government was bankrupt. The Jews’ wish to have a country of their own was understandable in view of the ugly tact that “ not a single country in Western Europe did anything between the two world wars to protect the Jews from Nazi oppression.” Faris el Khoury (Syria) again warned the Assembly that there would be serious bloodshed if Jewish immigration continued, saying that home-' less Jews should return whence they came because it would be easier for them to be assimilated by the people whose language they spoke. Polish Jews should return to Poland and not seek a new home in Palestine, to which the Jews had no historical claim. If the delegates would read their Bible they would find that the Palestinian Arabs were descendants of the Philistines, who resisted. the fiist Jewish invasion of Palestine 15 centuries before Christ. Adbel Rauman Azzam Pasha, Secretary-General of the Arab League, told reporters that the Soviet plan for a dual State was not acceptable to the Arabs. The only workable solution was a State dominated by Arabs, in which the Jewish minority would be guaranteed constitutional rights.