CARDINAL BOURNE AND PALESTINE

New Zealand Tablet, Volume LII, Issue 10, 18 March 1925, Page 27

CARDINAL BOURNE AND PALESTINE

A ' reasonable interpretation, application, and acceptation of .the British Mandate for Palestine may contain a solution of the Palestine question, satisfying both the population and the claims of Christendom, is the belief of Cardinal Bourne, who deals with the whole question in the current issue of the Messenger. The political oversight of Britainthe Cardinal says—was certainly in its own nature not unwelcome to the Palestinians; but it carried with it a condition, singularly distasteful to the vast majority of them, known as the Balfour Declaration, whereby the mandatory Power is pledged to afford in Palestine facilities for a home for Jewish people. The origin and development of that promise have often been misrepresented. They are constantly forgotten or . misunderstood abroad. The promise was given indeed by

the British Government under the terrific stress and claims of war in 1917, but it was accepted and endorsed, never in any way repudiated, by the, Allied, and subsequently by the Associated, Powers. It is impossible, I think, to find any protest against it, even on the part of the neutral countries, such as Spain.

In 1920 the promise was ratified at the Conference of San Remo, and embodied in the Treaty of Sevres. In 1922 the League of Nations annexed its fulfilment to the Mandate whereby Palestine is entrusted to British rule. It is, therefore, extraordinarily unfair to suggest, as some of our foreign friends occasionally do suggest, that the promise is peculiarly and exclusively of British origin, that England alone is responsible for it, or that it can be modified or annulled by a solitary act of the British Government.

The whole Allied and Associated world has accepted responsibility for it. Modification or annulment now rests exclusively with the League of Nations at Geneva. They are not dependent on the willingness or unwillingness of any one Power.

But, undoubtedly, that promise has created in Palestine a situation of extraordinary delicacy and complexity. The non-Jewish population in 1922 was said to be 675,000 in round numbers, the Jewish only 79,000; and it may be said that the promise was unwelcome to all but the Jewish population, and even to the old Palestinian element among the latter.

It is in such circumstances and amid such surroundings that England is now called to govern the Holy Land. When I visited it in 1919 the situation was distinctly menacing. There was a tendency on the part of certain immigrant Jews to claim and assert a domination in no way in harmony with the Balfour Declaration. This naturally aroused a fierce resistance on the part of the indigenous native Arab population, both Moslem and Christian. I stated frankly at Liverpool in 1920 my view of the position, a view which subsequent events showed to be quite accurate. Revisiting the same spots in 1924, any fairminded observer will admit that the situation has greatly changed for the better. There is no longer the same unwise insistence on an untenable domination on the oart of the Zionist. The Arab is, it would seem, learning that under a Mandate changes in the political situation must be of slow, patient attainment. In a responsibility of exceptional difficulty and complexity, the Administration has endeavored to be just and fair. The rulers have striven to grapple with the difficulties of their task. That they have made mistakes they would be the first to admit Meanwhile the fact of the Mandate, with the wise or unwise Balfour Declaration embodied in it, has to be remembered and faced. That Mandate reasonably interpreted, reasonably applied,- reasonably accepted may contain within it, by patient, quiet application, the long-sought solution ;of the government of the Holy Land so as to satisfy both the , Palestinian population and the rightful claims of Christendom to the veneration of those sacred sites which Our Master chose for His birth, life, sufferings, death, and glorious resurrection. 4 -1 ,-'■-■■'