In an address broadcast in the United States by the National Broadcasting Company, Colonial Secretary MacDonald tonight defended the British policy on Palestine, stressing that adequate safeguards would be provided for the Jewish homeland under the proposed independent state and again stating that the form of the state, unitary or federal, remained to be determined through experience.
It may be, the Colonial Secretary said, that the state should be unitary, or it may be that it should be composed of Arab and Jewish provinces, each with a large degree of autonomy. “We must wait and see how matters work out in practice during the transitional period,” he declared.
At any rate, Mr. MacDonald promised, Britain would require that the Jewish homeland “really be safeguarded” before independent statehood would be established. During the 10-year transition, the homeland would be protected by the High Commissioner, who would retain power, he asserted. This policy, he held, was in accord with the aims of the mandate. He concluded with an appeal to Arabs and Jews for cooperation.
For 20 years, Mr. MacDonald said in the opening part of his 15-minute speech, Britain had been carrying out its promises to the Jews, resulting in creation of a flourishing community. Britain hoped that the Arabs would come to see the benefits of Jewish colonization, “but that hope has been finally dashed.”
Arab fears of Jewish domination, he said, were expressed in the three-year revolt. If it were just a bandit movement, it could have gone unheeded, but it assumed the proportions of “a widespread, patriotic movement” which could no longer be ignored.
It would be “fatal,” Mr. MacDonald said, if the animosity were allowed to become “permanent between peoples who must live in a common homeland.” This fact, coupled with the threatened spread of the unrest throughout the Near East, led Britain to seek a way to a solution that would ensure that neither group would dominate the other and “in time good will and peace might flourish.”
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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.
