Palestine

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 363, 7 June 1946, Page 5

Palestine

\ X JE print on.page 11 a report of some remarks made by R. H, S. Crossman on the problem of Palestine. Mr. Crossman was one of the six British members of the Joint Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry into Palestine, and made these comménts in the course of an interview by the BBC. They are what most of our readers will regard as uncompromising remarks and many wil think provocative. They are certainly realistic-the comments of a man who sat down to consider not merely what was just but what was possible, and who knew in advance that the Committee’s reward would be the hostility of both sides if it asked both for coricessions, and in any case of one side. Our readers of course know what has happened since the Committee reported, but none of us knew, before Mr. Crossman told us, that the British members went into the Inquiry without even an interview with the Foreign Secretary and that they had no contact with anybody in London until they returned and handed in their report. Mr. Crossman’s remarks are so convincing on that point that it would be indecent to doubt him, and no reasonable person will. But they are also so astonishing that it is not easy to know what to think about them. It was like handing over a gun that might or might not be loaded to someone else to examine, or asking a herd-tester, who might or might not be a good rider, to try a new horse while the farmer himself went for the cows. We have that sensational proof of impartiality to begin with, and later Mr. Crossman’s downright statement that, while the Balfour Declaration carefully avoided committing anybody to a Jewish state in Palestine, that no longer means anything, since the Jews themselves have | arrived, are going to stay, and in the end will "win through to selfgovernment." Winning through to self-government means _ establishing a Jewish state, a word that Mr. Crossman was as careful as Mr. Balfour not to use; but as a realist he has no doubt concluded that the name now is neither here nor there.