N.Y. Papers Hit Britain’s Course in Palestine

Metropolitan newspapers today criticized Britain’s course in Palestine.

The New York Times, commenting on the “disquieting reports” of a new plan being considered in London, urged that the United States “advise against any revision downwards of the terms of entry into Palestine pledged by the Balfour Declaration” on the ground that such restriction would “cut across the efforts growing out of the Evian conference and the initiative for resettlement of refugees sponsored by president Roosevelt.”

The New York Post, in an editorial entitled “Will Palestine Be the Second Czechoslovakia?” said: “The English Government has a moral obligation’ resulting not only from the Balfour Declaration, which promised Palestine as a homeland for the persecuted Jews of Eastern Europe, but from the great surrender at Munich.” The Herald Tribune inferred that the Mediterranean settlement “will follow strictly pragmatic lines, allowing the justice to fall where it may,” as was done in Czechoslovakia. The World-Telegram, in a lengthy editorial captioned “Eretz Israel,” said that the long time the Jews will have to wait for their homeland “seems too long to one who has not the heroic patience of the Jew.” It reviewed the Jewish plight and Palestine history, asserting that between the Arabs and the Jews, “the British have muddled and blundered.”