Arab Moderates Offer Aid to Britain in Imposing State Plan

The British Government had today an offer of cooperation from the Palestine Arab moderates if it announces a policy following the lines of its last proposals at the Palestine conference — which were rejected by the Palestine Arab extremists and the Jews.

The proposals called for ultimate establishment of an independent Palestine state in which the Jews would be limited to a one-third proportion in the population, after a transitional period during which self-governing organs dominated by Arabs would be set up and Jewish immigration and land buying restricted.

Fakhri Bey Nashashibi, head of the Arab National Defense Party, declared before the departure from London of his party’s delegation to the conference that such a policy would be supported by the great majority of the Palestine Arabs since it included the assurance that the Palestine Arabs would always remain a majority and that Palestine would not be made a solution of the Jewish refugee problem.

Nashashibi added that if the Arab extremists, adherents of the exiled ex-Mufti of Jerusalem, refused to cooperate in establishment of self governing institutions, the moderates were willing to step in. He characterized the rejection of the proposals by the Mufti’s group as “a negative policy under the camouflage of nationalism.”

The Time published a letter from Jewish Agency President Chaim Weizmann on the correspondence between Sherif Hussein of Mecca and Sir Henry MacMahon, wartime British High Commissioner for Egypt. The letters, on which the Arabs base a large part of their claims to Palestine, were published in a White Paper during the Palestine conference after preparation by an Anglo-Arab committee.

Dr. Weizmann declares in his letter that the Jewish delegation to the conference had not been consulted on publication of the correspondence and had not been given an opportunity to offer comment or to produce documents the existence and relevance of which had been acknowledged in the committee’s report.

He states the committee’s report failed to mention the most relevant fact that no demands had been made by the Arab delegation to the Peace Conference for fulfillment of the promise alleged to have been made in the correspondence. On the contrary, he asserts, the Arab delegation in its statement to the Council of Five had expressly excluded Palestine from its demand for the independence of Arab territories. Two members of the Anglo-Arab committee, General Nuri Pasha es-Said of Iraq and Auni bey Abdul Hadi of Palestine, Dr. Weizmann declares, were also members of the Arab delegation to the Peace Conference and were present when the statement was made.

Commenting in an editorial, the Times declares it was certainly strange that the Arab delegation to the Peace Conference should not have made a demand for Palestine before the Council of Five if they were then persuaded of the justice of the Arab claim to the region.