JEW AND GENTILE

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 478, 6 October 1928, Page 27

JEW AND GENTILE

SOCIAL ANTIPATHIES CHECK PROGRESS IDEAL MING OBSCURED “A state of haughty aloofness between Jew and Englishman in Palestine” is growing up, according to Colonel Josiah Wedgwood, British M.P., -who has devoted an article in the August issue of “The" Menoral Journal” partly to a criticism of the Palestine policy of the British Colonial Office. Colonel Wedgwood “takes it for granted that the British Government, whether Conservative or Labour, has as its object in Palestine the ultimate establishment there of a Jewish dominion within the British Empire of Union.” He thinks a generation wall be required before the aim is accomplished. “The first step toward this goal,” he ■writes, “would be for the Secretary of State to declare that this is the goal and to lay down the general line and period of advance, and to inform the Palestinian Secretariat accordingly. This would end immediately the present policy of indifference and resentment, of reluctance to co-oper-ate, the no-policy of mere resistance to change which marks the attitude of Palestine officialdom to the Jews. How Problem Arose “To understand the mind of the British in Palestine, both ruler® and

such residents as there are—to see why they are not hitting it off with the Jews and why there is growing up a state of haughty aloofness between Jew and Englishman in Palestine—one must realise first that Palestine w'as born only in 1919. But English were there before, and Christians were there before—not just the average English and Christians, but missionaries whose very environment and profession made them anti-Jew, if not anti-Semite. Jerusalem was the centre of the latest w'ar of the religions, and the Turk or Syrian who kept the outward peace was respectable, even an ally, in contrast with the rival Jew. Long before 1919 the acceptable small talk among the English in Jerusalem consisted in stories about Jews—their folly, their dirt, their greed; and the Jews have and do reciprocate with stories about the missionaries—their folly, their manners, their ignorant conceit. The servant problem and the motor-ear are submerged in Palestinian small talk. “Into this I-must-tell-you-a-story-about-the-Jews Society came the first batch of British officials, ex-army, exEgypt The tone of the service in Egypt has necessarily been very different from the tone of the service in India or Africa or Malaya. Egypt has been under the Foreign Office, where diplomacy plays a larger part than administration. It has not been the business of British officials in Egypt to protect the native workers, or to develop exports and imports, or generally to-act as a beneficent State. Their business was to avoid trouble witb the native administration so far as was compatible with financial stability and the safety of foreign financial inter-

ests. Duties to the weak or duties to Great Britain were never stressed in Egypt. “With the army, in the army, there came into Palestine officials of this sort, with this background; and they fitted into the English missionary suburban society, and took on the old stories and old jealousies. This first batch were tired men and disillusioned. They did not come to Palestine as we did in the Transvaal of 1902, solely anxious to play an Elizabethan part in building up an empire, out with the fear of demobilisation before their i eyes. Sees Clash of Aims “It is not only in society that the religious play a large part. Their every political instinct is against the new prospects opening up for the land which they have made more than their own. To them Palestine is the Holy Land, a land of shrines and memories, to be preserved as it was in the time of our Saviour, unsullied by modernism and materialism. To the Zionist, Palestine is a land to be filled with prosperous settlers and teeming factories, the banner of the West pushed forward into the sleepy East. It is not a wholly unworthy motive which makes the-whole governing class—civil, military and religious —look upon the development of Palestine into a prosperous twentieth century Anglo-Jewish colony with repugnance. They view with equal displeasure the advent of Jewish capital and Jewish settlers and American tourists; they all ‘vulgarise the Holy Land.’ ” Colonel Wedgwood assails the tithe, or the tax on the gross produce of agriculture in Palestine. “As no al-

lowance is made for the costs of pro- j : duction,” he writes, “intensive culti- : vation is made at a loss; the more idle a man is the less he pays. The Govern- j ■ ment is largely swindled, and dishonesty rewarded. In fact, no one , . who has anything to do either with : the payment or collection of this tax j has anything to say in its favour.”