News Brief

numbers, hence it is “fallacious to argue as though, if Jewish capital did not flow in from outside, the works could be executed and the employment available just the same.”

Commenting on paragraph 29 of the White Paper, which dwells upon the desirability of “the closest cooperation between the government and the leaders of the Arab and Jewish communities,” the memorandum says that the Jewish Agency desires such cooperation but that the tone and temper of the White Paper does nothing to encourage it. Here the memorandum cites passages which “sometimes directly and sometimes by implication, tend to discredit the Jewish Agency, to disparage Jewish achievements in Palestine and to embarrass the Jews in their relations with the government and with the Arabs.”

JEWISH EFFORTS UNRECOGNIZED

“It is characteristic of the spirit in which the White Paper seems to have been conceived”, the memorandum says, that “while straining every point which can be made to the disadvantage of the Jews, and making invidious suggestions which in some cases seem to have been quite gratuitously introduced for their own sake, the White Paper refrains from giving any prominence to the positive advantages which Palestine has derived from Jewish colonization. Save for a few perfunctory references which make no impression whatever compared with the numerous passages in which the Jews are disparaged, the White Paper gives the Jews no credit whatever for their constructive achievements. It is not overstating the case to say that the impression conveyed is that the Arabs must recognize the presence of the Jews in Palestine as a disagreeable necessity from which there is unfortunately no escape. That the value of the Jewish effort in Palestine should pass so completely unrecognized in a document in which so much stress is laid upon their failings is all the more remarkable in view of the numerous tributes which have on other occasions been paid to the Jews, both by representatives of the government and Sir John Hope Simpson”.

The memorandum asserts that the White Paper “appears to have preceeded on the opposite principle to that laid down by the Permanent Mandates Commission, which in its recent report laid stress on the desirability of convincing the Arab fellaheen of the ‘undeniable material advantages that Palestine has derived from the efforts of the Zionists'”.

PAPER UNFORTUNATE IN TONE

The memorandum concludes with the following statement:

“We have now completed our explanation of our grounds for regarding the White Paper as unfortunate in its contents, and (we regret to have to add) not less unfortunate in its tone and outlook. Nothing could be more distressing to the Agency than to find itself in a position in which it must either protest against the White Paper or mislead His Majesty’s government as to the feelings of those it represents. Nothing would have been more welcome than to be able whole-heartedly to cooperate in the policy which His Majesty’s government has announced. The Agency is deeply conscious of its duty to the Mandatory Power, but it has also a paramount duty to the Jewish people, and it is bound to make it clear that Jews throughout the world are unanimous in the belief that the policy of the White Paper is not in harmony with the spirit of those provisions of the Mandate which make the Mandatory responsible for creating in Palestine such political, economic and social conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish National Home”.