PEACE IN PALESTINE

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 15, 8 April 1927, Page 14

PEACE IN PALESTINE

JEWS AGAIN TILL THE SOIL Arab fear of the Zionist movement has been reduced to the vanishingpoint, says Dr. Chaim Weizmann, head of the World Zionist Organisation, and Jew and Arab are now learning to cooperate in building up Palestine and their own fortunes. And it is remarkable enough, writes Dr. Weizmann in the “Washington Star,” that, “while critics concentrate their attention on Palestine and hold up the Zionist efforts as the most dangerous feature in the Near Eastern situation, the country itself is perhaps the only and progressive spot in the entire region.” On the other hand, we are told, bayonets bristle in Syria and Egypt, where there is no Zionism. In Palestine the British garrison has been gradually reduced Lintil now the sole force maintained there, we are told, consists of 250 British soldiers and a gendarmerie recruited entirely from the local population. The Jews are entering, or re-entering the country', not as colonising conquerors, or as missionaries, or proselytisers, but as builders, says the Zionist head, and continues: “In seven years we have brought 100,000 Jews into the country. We have founded 60 new agricultural colonies; we have built new cities, opened scores of new industries and introduced the methods of the progressive West into a land languishing in ignorance and neglect. The more we have succeeded, the friendlier have become our relations with the Arabs. Six years ago, when our work was untested and our motives and our methods unknown, Arab fear reached its highest point. That fear was exploited by politicians, most of them non-Palestinian, with the interest of neither the Jews nor the Arabs at heart. “The peaceful rebuilding of Palestine has implications which stretch out far beyond Palestine. Granted the success of the experiment, there can be created in the Near East new relationship between the Christian, the Moslem and the Jewish worlds. Individual institutions devoted to world peace should watch the experiment with the most sympathetic attention.”