PALESTINE PLAN

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 80, Issue 248, 19 October 1937, Page 7

PALESTINE PLAN

PART OF BIGGER ISSUE NATIONAL FEELINGS The British plan for the partition of Palestine focuses attention on a problem much larger than the conflict between Arabs and,Jews in the Holy Land, writes Anna O’Hare McCormick in the New York Times. This problem is not restricted to a tiny strip of territory between the Syrian and Egyptian borders at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. It involves all of the Arabian peninsula and reaches across the African desert into Algeria. Actually, it involves all of Europe, because the interests of Europe clash in the neighbouring continents, and the issue raised in Palestine is tied up with the status of native populations, with the limits of nationalism, with the Imperial anxieties of Great Britain, with the internal policies of Germany, Poland, and other European States. The report of the Royal Commission, extraordinarily full, frank, and fair as far as it goes, fails to expand on the British interest in the triangular solution or on the wider aspects of the problem itself. It is a mistake to imagine that outbreaks of Arab nationalism are confined to Palestine or that they are solely the result of the establishment of the Jewish homeland. Arab feeling is dramatised there because of the energy and high tempo characterising the Jewish development of the country. The inevitable conflict between two claims, two races, two stages of civilisation, is sharpened because there it is also a conflict between two incompatible promises made by a third Power. And because the eyes of the world are on the Zionist experiment, what happens in Palestine is widely publicised. A Wider Conflict? But in all the Arab lands signs of the same conflict are clearly visible. The rising tide of Arab nationalism is manifest in a long succession of revolts. from riots in Syria to obscure conspiracies in the desert. Last year this reporter disembarked at Algiers just in time witness a native demonstration in the main street that resulted in several casualties. This year an equally casual stop coincided with the arrival of a worried Commission sent from Paris to investigate the causes of Arab discontent. The tension in the country was palpable. In response to an inquiry in the native quarter this visitor found herself the centre of something uncomfortably likh a protest meeting. Indignant young Arabs appeared from nowhere to retail their grievances. In fluent French they assailed the French. “Look where they live and look where we live!” they stormed. “In their fine villas they grow rich exploiting our country. Even the English,” they cried, “would not treat the native population as we are treated. But be sure our day is coming.” A Double Pressure. Sporadic, unreported, spreading, this fever mounts. It is strongest- - and this explains the high temperature in Palestine—where the native population is most exposed to foreign enterprise. It flames fiercest in cities, and in the young educated in foreign schools. Among a widely-scattered people like the Arabs, otherwise as bitterly divided among themselves as their betters in Europe, the eruption of nationalism ironically reflects similar volcanic movements in Europe. It is ironic because native populations everywhere are becoming self-con-scious, are being inflamed to resist foreign penetration, just at the moment when the Imperial urge to annex natives drives the Have-Not Powers to clamour for colonics. It is doubly ironic because extreme nationalism in Europe is the force creating the condition which rouses nationalist resistance in Asia and Africa. This nationalism prohibits immigration and compels emigration. The persecution of their Jewish citizens by countries like Germany and Poland has forced the pace of the homeland development, turned nonZionists into Zionists, and produced a problem serious enough to suggest the drastic solution now proposed. Another Side There is also another side of the picture. It is not in the nature of things that hungry, progressive, enterprising people will continue indefinitely to live trapped and immobilised in over-crowded countries while vast areas remain undeveloped in the hands of native populations. Not, at

least, if these areas are on the margins of a Europe squeezed into economic and political concentration camps, one almost as brutal as the other. The Ethiopian conquest was an explosion as much biological as imperialist. All aver Europe economic and political pressure operates to make the lot of minorities so intolerable that they long for the lesser bitterness of exile. The report of the Royal Commission offers no adequate answer to the aspirations of the Zionists, the misery of unwanted minorities, the Arabs waving flags in imitation of the favourite sport of more advanced nations. The proposal to define and circumscribe the Jewish settlement in Palestine, and, by setting limits, to reconcile the Arabs to live peacefully in the shadow of an energetic and highlydeveloped people, is a makeshift solu- | tion, obviously temporary. It is no! 1 an answer; but it raises one of the most importunate questions of our - time. If it highlights the bigger problem of which it is a part, it serves a useful purpose. -