Arabs Challenge Bevin Statement That They Will Admit Jews; Ask End of Immigration

The statement by Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin that the Arabs would be agreeable to the admission of 100,000 Jews into Palestine, was challenged today by the Arab Higher Committee in a statement demanding that Britain halt all immigration into the country.

The Arab statement was issued in reply to Bevin’s speech in Commons. It emphasized that continued Jewish immigration “is causing us great anmiety” and appealed to all Palestine Arabs and to the Arab people abroad to increase their fight against Jewish immigration into Palestine.

(Abdul Rahman Azzam Pasha, secretary-general of the Arab League, said in Cairo today that “it is impossible to bring us to accept the immigration of one single Jew into Palestine.” He also told a press conference that “America has absolutely nothing to do with the Palestine question.”)

Jewish circles here today charged that while the Palestine Government is taking wide-spread measures to stop Jewish immigration, it is carefully avoiding action on large-scale illegal immigration of Arabs from Syria, Transjordan and other Arab countries.

It is reliably reported that substantial numbers of Egyptians are arriving daily in Palestine in search of employment. They leave Palestine-bound trains at the Egyptian border near Raffa where they are met by guides who steer them past the frontier posts to Gaza. Many Arab farmers from countries neighboring Palestine are permitted to enter the country to sell their produce, but instead of returning home they frequently remain in Arab villages and seek employment in Palestine.

IRGUN TERMS BEVIN’S SPEECH “BLACKMAIL”; AGENCY TAKES ISSUE WITH STATEMENT

The Arab press in Palestine is generally jubilant over Bevin’s statement while the entire Hebrew press is highly critical of the Foreign Secretary’s stand. The Irgun Zvai Leumi, in a broadcast over its illegal radio station today termed Bevin’s speech “blackmail.”

A Jewish Agency spokesman, addressing a press conference, took issue with the Bevin statement, charging the Foreign Secretary with “complete lack of understanding” of the fundamentals of the Balfour Declaration. He pointed out that the restoration of the Jewish people to nationhood forms the basis of that declaration as well as of the Palestine Mandate. If Bevin asks whether the term “Jewish National Home” means a Jewish majority and a Jewish state in Palestine, the Zionist reply is that it means just that, he declared.

“The talk about Jews being a religious group is incorrect,” the representative of the Jewish Agency said. “We want to be represented in the United Nations as a people. We would regard it as a tremendous fraud on our people if we were permanently reduced to a minority within a country which was promised to us as a National Home. Mr. Bevin, in that part of his speech, has shown a lamantable lack of understanding.”

The Agency spokesman pointed out that the Peal Report contemplated Palestine becoming a Jewish commonwealth, if Jews are a majority there. “Thus,” he said, “the British Government evidently realized that a Jewish state might be established in the course of time.” There was nothing in the ##hill White Paper of 1929 which would preclude the establishment of a Jewish state, he added.