Declaring that “the ordinary Jew and the ordinary Arab have no hatred for one another,” Dr. Judah L. Magnes, president of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, in an article in the January issue of Foreign Affairs urges that the United States join Britain “in helping find and, if necessary, impose a reasonable compromise” between Jewish and Arab aspirations in Palestine.
“The first step – and the sooner it is taken the better – should be an announcement that the adjustment will not include either the establishment of Palestine as a Jewish state or as an Arab state,” Dr. Magnes writes. “Such an announcement might help dissipate the increasingly bellicose atmosphere and might, perhaps, turn both Jewish and Arab propaganda in the direction of peace and understanding.” The search for a compromise between the Jews and the Arabs, Dr. Magnes believes, might well be furthered by the selection of a few Englishmen and Americans to cooperate with Jews and Arabs in canvassing the possibilities of such a compromise. Dr. Magnes then makes the following concrete suggestions:
“1. Union between the Jews and the Arabs within a bi-national Palestine.
“2. Union of Palestine, Transjordan, Syria and the Lebanon in an economic and political federation. These lands form a geographic unit and constituted a political and economic Union at several times between ancient Semitic days and the First World War.
“3. Union of this federation with an Anglo-American union which is assumed to be part of that greater union of the free nations now laboring to be born out of the ruins of the decaying world.”
Explaining these points in detail, Dr. Magnes says that if the political equality of the Jews and the Arabs in Palestine is accepted as part of the compromise to be reached between the two peoples, then “there seems to be no good reason why a beginning should not be made now with a bi-national administration, so that officials may be trained as soon as possible for the great tasks which confront them.” He emphasizes that the time to begin to prepare the Jews and the Arabs for responsibility in a bi-national Palestine is now and not after the war.
Touching on the question of Jewish immigration to Palestine, Dr. Magnes expresses the belief that a union of Palestine, Transjordan, Syria and Lebanon in an economic and political federation, if and who formed, would solve this problem. “The whole question of numbers in Palestine would then lose its present primary significance for the Arabs,” he writes. “For a federation of the four states in question, whatever its form, would include an Arab population of several million, The Arabs would be relieved of their fear of being swamped and dominated by a majority of Jews. A Jewish majority in the federation is hardly conceivable.”
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.
