MELCHETTS OPINION

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3826, 28 October 1936, Page 7

MELCHETTS OPINION

ARABS AND THE JEWS. LAND NOT PROMISED TO ARABS. Palestine was never promised to the Arabs. It was promised to the Jews as a National Home (writes Lord Melchett in the Daily Mail). It was promised for two perfectly definite reasons, about which there can be no doubt or equivocation. In the first place, the Allied Governments in 1917, at the time of our greatest danger in the war, made a bid for the support of the Jewish communities all over the the world by the issue of the Balfour Declaration, which is still an obligation of honour upon which there can be no going back. In the second place, the chemical genius of Dr. Chaim Weizmann undoubtedly assisted in saving the British Armies from destruction, and the reward for which he asked and which was given him was the pledge to restore his own people to their own land. At no time was Palestine west of the Jordan promised to the Arabs to be an Arab State. In fact, it was authoritatively stated by the then British Colonial Secretary, Mr. Winston Churchill, in 1922, that the whole of Palestine west of the Jordan was excluded from any pledge made to this country during the war. Vast Arab territories were freed in return for sporadic war-time services. Of all that great area the Jews were promised only a share in Palestine. Quite apart from pledges made by the British Government and its allies, there can be no evasion of the plain terms of the agreement, entered into on January 3, 1919, between the Emir Feisal, on behalf of the Arab kingdom of the Hedjaz, and Dr. Weizmann, on behalf of the Zionist organisation. That agreement clearly bound the parties thereto to submit to a definite delimitation of the boundaries between the Arab State and Palestine, and, moreover, provided that “all necessary measures shall be taken to encourage and stimulate immigration of Jews into Palestine on a large scale, and as quickly as possible to land.” settle Jewish immigrants upon the That should be sufficient once and for all to dispose of the fiction that

at the time when the Mandate was undertaken there was any doubt whatever in the minds of responsible Arabs as to what was to be the future of Palestine. As for accusations against the behaviour of the Jewish people in their development of the National Home, since that time it may be stated at once that the present troubles are not due to the Jews having acquired anything like half the total area of fertile land in Palestine. In point of fact, most of the land now owned by Jews was mostly either malarial swamp or barren sand dune. It has only been by miracles of effort and personal sacrifice that the Jews have managed to turn so much of what for thousands of years has been desert and swamp into fertile territory once more. Since 1930, according to official figures, only 57,000 acres have passed into Jewish hands—an average of less than 10,000 acres a year —and to-day the Jews own only about 300,000 a’cres out of a total area of 6,500,000, of which the cultivable portion may be taken at about 2,000,000 acres. As for the accusation that the troubles in Palestine are in any way due to Jewish “extremists,” I suppose that nothing has been more remarkable than the self-restraint shown by the Jewish population in the face of the most extreme provocation.