Sharp criticism of Great Britain’s policy as hampering the development of Palestine was voiced last night by Dr. Selig Brodetsky, of the executive of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, addressing a conference of the Jewish National Fund of Great Britain.
Referring to the Royal Commission, which will leave on Nov. 5 to investigate recent disorders in Palestine, he warned against consideration of proposals for segregating the Arabs and the Jews as “unfeasible, and if feasible, unacceptable.”
He denounced recent proposals for setting up separate Arab and Jewish cantons as a “defeatist measure” and warned that this would mean restriction of Jewish activities to the Jewish cantons, instead of to the whole of Palestine.
Mr. Brodetsky called on the British Government to abandon its “policy of hampering Jewish development by placing obstacles in its way.” He stressed that development in the agricultural sphere, in which only 15 per cent of the Jewish population of the Holy Land is engaged, was unsatisfactory.
Jewish capital investments in Palestine approximate between $350,000,000 and $450,000,000, he estimated.
Defending the employment of Jewish labor exclusively on Jewish National Fund lands, Mr. Brodetsky declared that the Jews had a right when barred from working on land in other countries, to insist that Jews alone work the land acquired at great cost and sacrifice.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
