Sir John Hope Simpson, who was sent by the British Government to Palestine in 1930 to investigate land and immigration conditions there and who subsequently recommended that Jewish land-buying and immigration be restricted, today voiced opposition to the establishment of a Jewish Commonwealth in Palestine.
Asserting that the Balfour Declaration did not provide for the conversion of the whole of Palestine into a Jewish National Home, Sir John writes in the Spectator, leading British weekly, that the Palestine Mandate must be interpreted in the light of act. 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, which says that the well-being and the development of the peoples in the mandated territories is a sacred trust of civilization.
“By no stretch of interpretation can Article 22 be deemed to justify the replacement of the Arabs by a Jewish population or the erection of a Jewish government in Palestine,” Sir John argues. He refers to the Churchill White Paper issued by the British Government in 1922, which interpreted the terms of the Palestine Mandate, and set forth official policy in a manner designed to limit the interpretations which had previously been placed on the Balfour Declaration, and which set up the principle of economic absorptive capacity for the regulation of Jewish immigration into Palestine.
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.
