North Canterbury Gazette TUESDAY, JUNE 30, 1936 THE NEAR EAST

North Canterbury Gazette, Volume 5, Issue 62, 30 June 1936, Page 4

North Canterbury Gazette TUESDAY, JUNE 30, 1936 THE NEAR EAST

The situation in Palestine is now so serious that it is difficult to see how peace can be restored without war. All the Arabs were doing a few weeks ago was sniping police lorries and assaulting isolated Jews. To-day they are tearing up railways, blowing up trains, ambushing companies of soldiers, and behaving in other ways as if Britain had opened hostilities against them. But Arabia is the last country with which Britain wants a war—even such a smallscale war as the subjection of the Arabs would involve. She desires peace with Arabia if she can't have friendship, and she expects the Arabians to be as sensible on their side of the advantages of peace with her. But the trouble is that they no longer respect Britain or greatly fear her. Her prestige throughout the East has declined so suddenly and so calamitously that neither the Arabs nor the Egyptians nor the Turks nor the Greeks at present regard her as unassailable. They certainly do not believe that she is in the least likely to assail any other power, whatever the temptation or the provocation, and because that is the present attitude from Bulgaria right round to the Libyan desert, the Arabs will probably go on raiding until Palestine is occupied by British troops. And in the meantime the Turks are determined to bolt and bar the door to the Black Sea. the Italians are making fortresses of the Dodecanese Islands, and the Greeks are wondering how long it will be before they are ordered out of the "Italian lake."