Urging establishment of a Jewish state as a fundamental solution of the Palestine problem, the Jewish Agency for Palestine today proposed to the United Nations Palestine inquiry committee that it recommend immediate removal of discriminatory restrictions against Jewish immigration into Palestine and Jewish land settlement.
In a preliminary memorandum to the committee, the Agency emphasized the intolerable conditions under which large sections of the Jewish people now live, two years after the war, and it called upon the United Nations to take interim action to terminate the White Paper of 1939 and to give full effect to the terms of the Palestine Mandate pending conclusion of the U.N. deliberations.
“Despite the victory over Hitler gained two years ago, the martyrdom of considerable numbers of the Jewish survivors of the European massacres continues in displaced persons camps and elsewhere,” the memorandum said. “The Jewish Agency finds it difficult to conceive that the United Nations would wish the present unbearable state of affairs in Palestine and in the camps of Europe to be prolonged because of further protracted deliberations.”
JEWISH COMMONWEALTH CAN ERADICATE ANTI-SEMITISM, MEMORANDUM SAYS
Referring to the political solution of the Palestine problem, the Agency declared: “The issue is not merely one between Jews and Arabs. It concerns the whole world. Only the re-establishment of the Jewish Commonwealth can lay the evil spirit of anti-Semitism and offer the Jews that freedom and security which are the birth-right of every people.
“The fundamental problem has always been security and the right to live free from the recurring waves of hatred and prejudice. For those Jews who wished to find personal security and a new way of life, for the Jewish people as a whole, striving to liberate itself from the scourge of homelessness, a land in which the elementary right of self-government would be granted was an essential. That land, by historical association and continued attachment through the centuries, is Palestine,” the memorandum stated.
Turning to the question of Jewish-Arab relationships, the Agency emphasized the advantages derived by the Arabs from Jewish endeavors in Palestine. “Paradoxically enough, since the Balfour Declaration, Palestine has changed from a country of Arab emigration into one of Arab immigration–a phenomenon observable in none of the adjacent Arab countries who express solidarity with the supposedly wronged Arabs of Palestine,” the Agency declared.
The Agency cited the large measure of harmony which exists between Jews and Arabs working and living together in Palestine, in spite of contrary claims made by British and Arab leadership. It also noted the fact that independent states in the Middle East were established after World War I for the Arabs, while the Jewish people have no hope for a land of their own except in Palestine.
“The Jewish return to Palestine is no challenge to Arab control over a huge area, no threat to Arab civilization, no obstacle to Arab progress,” the memorandum stated. “On the other hand, the Arab claim to dominate Palestine must be weighed against the human need of millions of Jews and the national need of the Jewish people.”
The Agency declared that it approached the United Nations “with high confidence in the justice of its cause.”
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.
