PALESTINE POLICY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 21 July 1939, Page 6

PALESTINE POLICY

MR MACDONALD DEFENDS WHITE PAPER VITAL NEED OF RESOLUTE CONSISTENCY. PROBLEM OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION. (British Official Wireless.) (Received This Dav. 1.13 p.m.) RUGBY. July 20. In the House of Commons, (lining a Palestine debate, the Colonial Secretary. Mr .Malcolm MacDonald, gave an assurance that if the Council of the League of Nations reached any decision which involved, in the Government’s view, an alteration in the mandate, the Government would take no steps to bring about that alteration until Parliament had an opportunity to consider it. Mr MacDonald said that action by Britain which would do most to destroy any hopes there might be of peace in Palestine would be to determine on a policy and then either reverse it or hesitate about it, thus showing a lack of confidence in it and therefore starting another long period of having no policy at all. Turning to the question of the closing of the immigration quota in the next six-monthly period because of the volume of illegal immigration, Mr MacDonald said we should be committing a breach of the White Paper policy if we had not taken that decision. The Government was not indifferent to the fate of refugees from Central Europe. Mr MacDonald quoted figures of illegal immigration into Palestine, showing that forty per cent came from Poland and Rumania. What was going on about the immigration of Polish and Rumanian Jews made it perfectly clear, he said, that there was an organised movement to break the immigration law in Palestine for the sake of breaking the law and to smash the White Paper policy for the sake of smashing that policy. Illegal immigration was aggravating the’bitter hostility and hatred that existed between Arabs and Jews in Palestine and he thought the British Government was entitled to appeal to the Jewish authorities and the Jewish people to put a check upon it. OPPOSITION CRITICISM. Opposition speakers strongly opposed the Government’s policy as expressed in the recent White Paper. Mr Thomas Williams said this policy was a further surrender to aggression and placed a premium on violence and terror. He criticised the suspension of Jewish immigration and declared that the Government was not fulfilling its pledges by using the iron hand, not against Hitler or the Grand Mufti, or murderers and terrorists in Palestine, but against refugees fleeing from Nazi terrorism.

Sir Ronald Wilson said that at best Palestine could never accommodate more than a small portion of the refugees and that nothing like the present situation had been envisaged at the time of the Balfour Declaration.

Mr George Mander said he believed it was true that five of the seven mem l bers of the Permanent Mandates Commission had denounced the Government’s policy as incompatible with the terms of the mandate.