IN PALESTINE

Waikato Times, Volume 121, Issue 20281, 25 August 1937, Page 7

IN PALESTINE

THE MANDATES REPORT SOLUTION OF PROBLEMB GREAT PRAISE FOR BRITAIN (Omcial Wireless.) (Received Aug. 25. 1 p.m.) RUGBY, Aug. 24 The full reports of the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations Council on the Royal Commission’s proposals for Palestine have been sent to members of the Council, and a summary of the report has been made public. Regarding the 1936 disturbances, tho Mandates Commission fully recognises the difficulties of preventing them, but Is not convinced that it would not have been possible to adopt more decisive measures at an earlier date, with a view to putting down armed resistance. In a preliminary opinion on the status of Palestine the possibility of maintaining the existing mandate is discussed. The Commission states that the inevitable antagonism between the aspirations of the two races was further accentuated and exasperated by circumstances which could not have been foreseen 20 years ago. The present mandate became almost unworkable, the Commission considers, when it was publicly declared to be so by the Royal Commission and the mandatory Government Itself. The 'Commission, therefore, considers it worth while continuing an examination of the advantages and drawbacks of the new territorial solution.

The Holy Places As regards the proposal to withdraw Holy places from the domination of the Arabs and Jews and place them under a special regime, the Commission thinks that such a step could not but be of advantage to the general peace, provided that this regime was based on an article of the present mandate safeguarding In perpetuity the rights of the various religions. While declaring itself favourable in principle to an examination of a solution involving partition, the Commission does not thereby endorse the idea of the immediate creation of two new Independent States. The Commission concludes: — Praise for Mandatory Power “As for the mandatory Power itself, the concern with which it has for nearly 20 years sought to appease the antagonistic feelings prevailing in Palestine must awaken in any man of goodwill a degree of admiration of the higher Justice exercised in a world in which brutal violence often stills the voice of humanity. Let Jews, who all too often and without justification show impatience at the delay and hesitation which the mandatory Power has felt compelled to bring to the building up of their national home, ask themselves where there is any other nation by which they have been so little persecuted and to which for generations past they owe so many benefits. Let the Arabs — whose opposition to what is nevertheless a measure of higher Justice, which cannot he carried out without sacrifice from their side, can be readily understood —remember the origin of their national emancipation. “ Without the British efforts certainly there would have been no Jewish national home, but also there would have been on the threshold of the twentieth century no Independent Arab State.”