The Palestine Arab Executive has communicated to the High Commissioner of Palestine, Sir John Chancellor, its decision not to send a delegation to London, in exactly the same terms as the statement which has been given in the press, the Colonial Office has informed the J.T.A. to-day, adding that this resolution adopted by the Palestine Arab Executive is now under consideration by the British Government, and it is therefore premature to state whether simultaneously with the discussions between the Government and the Jewish Agency in London, there will be similar discussions with the Arabs in Palestine.
The Colonial Office also confirmed to the J.T.A. that the Jewish Agency leaders have been invited to attend to-day a meeting with the representatives of the British Government, at which questions of Palestine development will be discussed. It was unable to say, however, whether the question of the Development Fund will also be considered, since the amounts required for the Fund have not yet been approved by Parliament. The meeting to-day will, in addition to the representatives of the Colonial Office, be attended also by a representative of the Treasury and by the Lord Advocate for Scotland, Mr. Craigie Aitchison, who participated in the first stage of the negotiations with the Jewish Agency. No representative of the Foreign Office, whose head, Mr. Arthur Henderson, presided during the first stage of the negotiations, will be present, however.
It had been expected that the question of the Palestine Development Loan might have come up during the discussion in the House of Commons last night on the Palestine and East Africa Loans Guarantee Act of 1926. No reference was made, however, to Palestine, the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, Mr. Pethick Lawrence, explaining that the Government only wanted to enable Tanganyika to raise a second loan for the purpose of development desired by that colony, and for technical reasons this could not be done without an amendment of the Palestine and East Africa Loans Guarantee Act. The position was he said, that they had a kind of “Alice in Wonderland” position where they could not satisfy the conditions of the Act so far as one loan was concerned without breaking them so far as the other was concerned, and this technical flaw, therefore, had to be done away with. The motion was agreed to by the House.
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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.
