Now-editorial Notes

Palestine Jewry was bewildered by the rumors n connection with the recent visit of Emir Abdullah, ruler of Transjordania, in Palestine and his proposed visit to London.

The cable published in today’s Jewish Daily Bulletin indicates that the bewildering rumors were well founded. The ruler of Transjordania, after a brief stay in Palestine where he brief stay in Palestine where he conferred with the Arab leaders and with the Palestine authorities, left for London. The Arab Executive made public a statement, which was cabled to the League of Nations, declaring that the Palestine Arabs demand an independent Palestine within the Arab federation, the establishment of parliamentary government representing all Palestine inhabitants but rejecting Zionism. It is believed, according to this report, that Emir Abdullah’s trip to London is undertaken for the purpose of modifying the present agreement between him and Great Britain in order that the rights granted him fourteen years ago be expanded of negotiating a loan for the development of Transjordanian natural resources, of proposing the creation of an economic and customs union between Iraq. Transjordania and Palestine, and of agreeing to the British plan to build a British military base in Akkaba Bay.

If this report is true, the Arab proposal to the British Government will be to repudiate the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate over Palestine granted to Great Britain by the League of Nations. Obviously Great Britain cannot seriously entertain such a proposition.

The Arab Executive in Palestine has maintained the position that the Arabs and the Jews would live together in Palestine upon friendly terms, if not for the Balfour Declaration and the British rule in Palestine.

That is practically what the Mufti told me in 1927. When I asked him whether the Arabs preferred the old Turkish rule under which they had been deprived of all their rights, the Mufti answered that under British rule they had no rights either.

It is well to recall on this occasion what the father of the Balfour declaration Lord Balfour, said in 1920, at Albert Hall:

So far as the Arabs are concerned-a great, an interesting and attractive race I hope they will remember that while this assembly and all Jews that it represents through the world desire under the aegis of Great Britain to establish this home for the Jewish people, the Great Powers, and among all the Great Powers most especially Great Britain, has freed them, the Arab race, from the tyranny of Arab race, from the tyranny of their brutal conqueror, who kept them under his heel for these many centuries. I hope they will remember it is we who have established the independent Arab sovereignty of the Hejaz. I hope they will remember that it is we who desire in Mesopotamia to prepare the way for the future of a self-governing, autonomous Arab State, and I hope that, remembering all that, they will not grudge that small notch-for it is no more geographically, whatever it may be historically-that small notch in what are now Arab territories, being given to the people who for all these hundreds of years have been separated form it-but surely have a title to develop on their own lines in the land of their forefathers, which ought to appeal to the sympathy of the Arab people as it, I am convinced, appeals to the great mass of my own Christian fellow-countrymen.”

If the Arabs fail to remember this, Great Britain cannot afford to forget it.

TERRORIZED POLISH JEWRY

The protest by the Jewish Labor Committee, headed by B. C. Valdeck, to the Polish Ambassador in Washington, against the outrages committed by the Polish Nara, the new so-called National Labor Organization, is indeed very mild. The young Polish National Radicals, having received their training and inspiration from the anti-Jewish National Democrats, have become Nazified and have revived the methods of violence practiced in Russia before the war and in Poland during 1919 and 1920. At that time the Polish government had to cope with chaotic conditions at home and with the fear of bolshevist invasion.

The government of Pilsudski is known to be opposed to the anti-Jewish program of the National Democrats, which have been seeking to strike at the Pilsudski regime by striking at the Jews. Because the Pilsudski government has on several occasions demonstrated its sympathetic attitude toward the Polish Jews, it has been nicknamed by the National Democrats a “Jewish government.”

The economic boycott against the Jews of Poland stated by the party of Dmowsky years ago, has reduced Polish Jewry to a state of ruin and despair. Politically the Pilsudski regime has discouraged anti-Jewish discrimination. It has combatted the National Democrats and their anti-Jewish program for some time, not so much for the sake of the Polish Jews as the sake of its own self-preservation.

After the signing of the nonaggression pact between Germany and Poland, the Nazi influence has made itself felt extensively in Poland. Nazi agitation against the Jews has become more intense. The new National Labor Organization, an offspring of the National Democrats, was formed chiefly for the purpose of inciting various forms of anti-Jewish violence. The efforts of the government and the local authorities to suppress these outrages have not been sufficiently effective.

Poland cannot afford to forfeit the sympathy of the world by falling under the sway of Hitlerism and by permitting the Nazified Polish youth to indulge in outrages that are a mixture of Russian Black Hundred pogrom tactics and Hitlerite bloodless pogrom methods.

The three million Polish Jews, ruined economically, are now also being terrorized. It is high time for the Polish government to put an end to the terrorist ways of the National Democrats and the Nara, who are discrediting the government while seeking to create a new Nazi inferno in Poland.