THE JEWS AND PALESTINE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21976, 10 June 1933, Page 10

THE JEWS AND PALESTINE

Mi. Ramsay MacDonald, in opening an Anglo-Palestine Exhibition in London, took occasion to make acknowledgment of the services rendered to civilisation by the Jewish people. His tribute comes with particular appropriateness at the present time. The treatment which the Jews are receiving under the present regime in Germany has directed general attention to the position which they occupy in the world. For the attacks to which they have been subjected in one country they are possibly finding some consolation in the sympathy extended to them in others, notably in the British Empire. Mr Ramsay MacDonald’s testimony to the great services which the Jewish people have rendered in science, art, and politics must have the endorsement of all enlightened and fair-minded persons. It is by no means necessary to go to large communities within the British Empire to find convincing illustration of the part played by Jewish citizens in the advancement of culture, while the prominence of Jews in the professions appears to have been one of the spurs to Nazi animus against them in Germany. As the Jewish Committee for Enlightenment observed in a recent statement, it has been the historic fate of the Jews to be scattered all over the world, and the committee’s conclusion that the great majority of Jews must remain in the countries in which they were born and in which they reside is incontrovertible, for Palestine is only a small country, and the process of the establishment there of a national home for the Jewish people must be gradual. Some light is thrown on the measure of success attending this great experiment by the writer of a recent article in the Fortnightly Review who is evidently concerned to be as impartial as possible. He writes of the Jewish national home as having risen in the past two years to a position of

economic prestige and political stability unknown by it previously, and to a height of success of which it had never dreamed, so that the event is regarded almost as a miracle in the Jewish world, serving as a powerful spiritual tonic to a weary and harassed people.

Apparently, however, there is another side of the picture. The writer of the article does not find that recent changes in Palestine are by any means all satisfactory. It is apt to be overlooked, he points out, that Palestine, at its best, cannot support even a twentieth part of the Jewish population of the world, that at present Jews form only a sixth part of the population of the Holy Land, and that no lasting prosperity or even security is assured them without the strong friendship and goodwill of their Arab neighbours. Concern is expressed j over dangers attendant on the introduction of certain changes into the social structure of the Jewish settlement and with the psychological outlook of world-Zionism which threaten to transform entirely, it is suggested, .the spiritual complexion of the Jewish national homel and to rob the Zionist movement of its best and most attractive features. Much is said concerning a drift away from the fundamentals of Zionism, from the social ideal, and the principle of collective work on, and national ownership of, the land, to make room for individual enterprise and private capital. Jewish productive activity is said to be giving place to a resumption of trading, with speculation rampant, i and land soaring in price and passing into the hands of capitalists. A proposed abandonment of colonisation with reclamation of the land by Jewish hands and the substitution of a so-called middle-class immigration is described as a special danger. The idea of a Jewish national home for the preservation of Jewish petty trading is said to receive its main advocacy in Poland, where Jewry is in its worst state of economic and general decay. Curiously enough, according to this apparently Jewish writer in the Fortnightly Review, “ a Zionist Hitlerist movement ” fully rigged-out except for Hitler’s anti-Semitism, is actually in existence now in Poland, and is penetrating into Palestine with “its policy of political aggression, social reaction, and the economic restoration of the small trader.” This goes to suggest that the Zionist dream and realities in Palestine are somewhat at variance.