A plan said to have been drawn up by British civil servants to limit Jewish immigration to Palestine so that the Jews should never within a measurable period of years out number the Arabs was described today by Ferdinand Kuhn Jr. in a London dispatch to the New York Times.
He said:
“Behind this plan is the general principle that the maximum Jewish immigration in any year must not exceed the margin between the natural increase of the Arab population and the natural increase of the
Jewish population in the same year. This will mean, for example, that if the natural increase of the Arabs in one year is 25,000 and the natural increase of Jews 7,000, then the maximum number of Jewish immigrants in that year shall be 18,000.
“Population experts estimate that without Jewish immigration the increase of the Arabs would exceed that of the Jews by 18,500 next year. By 1941 the excess would drop to a little more than 17,000 and by 1946 to approximately 16,000.
“If the civil servants scheme were adopted and Jewish immigration kept within these limits the total number of Jews in Palestine in ten years’ time would be 36 per cent of the total number of Arabs, compared with about 28 per cent now, and the Arab community would be freed of its haunting fear of being outnumbered.”
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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.
