A demand that the Government speed up a survey of the extent, value and ownership of land in Palestine was voiced before the British Royal Commission today by Dr. Maurice B. Hexter, of the Jewish Agency’s executive.
Other demands presented by Dr. Hexter as he completed his testimony included:
Government assistance to the system of concentrated small holdings, as well as for cooperatives; reduction in interest rates; introduction of legislation to aid irrigation and to encourage water borings in the Beersheba district in Southern Palestine; and allocation of a fair portion of State waste lands to Jews.
Sir Morris Carter and Sir Laurie Hammond joined in questioning Dr. Hexter on aspects of the land problem.
They asked particularly what was to be done when all cultivable land was divided up, whether legislation should be passed prohibiting land sales (one of the cardinal demands in the recent Arab general strike) and how future Arab generations could go on without land.
Sir Morris asked also if introduction of irrigation legislation by the Government would mean that the Arabs would be enabled to sell four-fifths of their property, leaving the land occupied in the proportion of four Jewish families to one Arab family. (According to present laws governing sale of land, Arabs selling their property must keep one-fifth of it as a subsistence area.)
“Isn’t that depriving the Arabs of their rights?” Sir Morris asked.
Dr. Hexter replied that the League of Nations Mandate provided, in Article 6, for encouragement of close Jewish settlement. He said that this provision was reiterated in a letter to Dr. Chaim Weizmann, president of the Jewish Agency, by Ramsay MacDonald, then Prime Minister. (The letter, written in 1931, modified provisions of the famous Passfield White Paper, issued in 1930 following the Shaw Commission’s investigation of the 1929 riots. It set a new immigration basis, permitted Jews to share in public employment in proportion to their contributions to revenues and removed restrictions on Jewish land purchase.)
Lord Peel at this point asked: “Did Arabs appear before Mr. MacDonald in connection with this one-sided document?”
I. Wolffson, manager of the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association, also testified at today’s session.
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