British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin’s erroneous statement in Parliament this week–that the U.N. Palestine partition resolution of Nov. 29, 1947, awarded Haifa to the proposed Arab state–was described by a spokesman for the British Foreign Office this week-end as an “obvious slip.” He said that as soon as “an occasion offers itself, the error will be corrocted by a spokesman for the Foreign Office in Commons.”
Expressing regret at the entire incident which “had arisen from Mr. Bevin’s unfortunate statement,” a Foreign Office spokesman said that Bevin made his statement “while he was under great stress, as was noticed by observers present.” He expressed the hope that “this will be remembered in Israel” and that the whole incident will be forgotten as unrepresentative of the Foreign Office’s views.
A corrected version of Mr. Bevin’s statemont in the Hansard–the official record of Parliamentary proceedings–will say that Haifa was given to the Jews, but the Arabs refused to recognize this decision and cut off the flow of oil to the city’s refineries.
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