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Labor Organ Sees Need of Jews and Arabs Becoming Good Palestine Citizens

April 3, 1930
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The report of the Inquiry Commission has inevitably gone beyond the immediate occasion of last summer’s troubles to the deeper causes of Palestinian unrest, declares the “Daily Herald,” the organ of the British Labor Party. “Jewish immigration as a plan of making in the ancestral home a National Home for the Jewish race,” says the “Herald,” “has brought about contact of two races, two creeds and two civilizations.

“On one side are Jews, filled with the enthusiastic aim of developing a backward country and settling their people in a National Home. To the Arabs this movement appears as a dangerous foreign invasion, threatening their lands, their livelihoods and their culture. To them it is an alien incursion on the biggest scale and of the most alarming type. They are afraid, and fear is always the father of violence.

“To such a conflict there are three possible ends: the Zionist movement may fail and the Jews withdraw; the Jews may gradually dispossess the Arabs and press them back over the Jordan River; or both races may come, in the course of time, to live amicably together.

“That third thing can come only in one way, only if Arab and Jew subordinate their #ribal sentiments in a common Palestinian nationality. Without ceasing to be good Jews or good Arabs, they must become good Palestinians. For that essential condition is a minimum of interference from the outside and newcomers must give their first loyalty to Palestine and must no longer be, as they seem to the Arabs today, agents of remote and mysterious organizations, the advance guard of a great and menacing invasion from the West.”

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