Our Palestine Problems

Professor Brodetsky, head of the political department of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, here discusses the chief problems of Palestine today. His article will be concluded in tomorrow’s edition of the Jewish Daily Bulletin.

The chief problems associated with Palestine and the Jewish National Home are those of immigration, land settlement, and constitutional structure. Either simultaneously or in turn, these problems have occupied the attention of the movement ever since the establishment of the British mandatory regime, and of the whole of Jewry during the last few years. Without men and land there can be no Jewish Home in Palestine, and without such constitutional foundations as secure the collective rights and national status in Palestine of the whole of the Jewish people, such home cannot be described as a Jewish National Home.

Our difficulties in Palestine have therefore centered round these problems. The problem of the land formed the subject of perhaps the bitterest and most protracted attack ever made upon the Jewish National Home. It began on a large scale with the Arab evidence before, and the majority report of the Shaw Commision after the anti-Jewish disturbances in 1929, and, while it has been definitely proved by official Government investigation that the charges about Jews displacing Arabs from the land, and pushing them out of Palestine are completely unfounded, nevertheless, the campaign has produced a body of restrictive legislation and administrative practice in regard to Jewish purchase of land in Palestine, which, combined with foolish and criminal competition and speculation by Jews themselves, has had the effect that in the last four years only 92,000 dunams of land have been acquired by Jews, three-fifths by the Jewish National Fund. The problem of finding sufficient land for Jewish settlers, especially if it is to be looked for in the form of large areas commensurate with the comparatively increased immigration of the present day is one that will have to be faced without delay.

THE LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL

The question of the constitution of Palestine has become a matter of deep concern in the last few weeks. Although the problem has been with us ever since the establishment of the Civilian British Government in Palestine, and as much as eleven years ago a Legislative Council was made impossible in Palestine by the refusal of the Arabs to vote for their representatives in such a Council, yet the matter is one of particular difficulty today, in view of the entirely different circumstances in which both world Jewry and Palestine are now placed. While in 1923, Jews represented only about 12 per cent of the total population of Palestine and in 1931, at the official census, Jews numbered 17 per cent of the total population, we are now 23 per cent of the population, and, at the present rate of immigration, the percentage of Jews is changing at the rate of one per cent of the total population every two or three months.

A Legislative Council established at the present juncture would provide the opponents of the Jewish National Home with a constitutional instrument which could, and there is every reason to believe, would be utilized in order to impede the development of the Jewish National Home, and thus also bring to a close the encouraging economic progress which has characterized the history of Palestine during the last few years.

The Jews cannot agree to the establishment of a Legislative Council under the present circumstances since it is bound to stamp them as a national minority in the one country in the world where they cannot agree to be relegated to that status. The Zionist movement and the Jewish Agency are, therefore, opposed to the projected Legislative Council and they regard an agreement between Jews and Arabs in Palestine which will ensure the implementing of the terms of the Mandate in so far as the Jewish National Home is concerned as well as general cooperation between the two races as pre-requisite to any fundamental constitutional changes in Palestine.

IMMIGRATION

But the third problem, that of immigration, underlies the two important and fundamental problems already mentioned. For it is Jewish immigration into Palestine that makes land in that country indispensable for Jewish settlement, and it is the fact that Jews can enter Palestine and make their homes there of right, and not on sufferance, and as representing the evolution of a new Jewish National life in that country, that is at the bottom of our negative attitude to the suggestion of a Legislative Council. And in regard to immigration our difficulties have been continuous and complex.

During the last two or three years, Jewish immigration has grown from the almost negligible dimensions represented by the schedule of 350 certificates granted for the six months October, 1931, to March, 1932, and a total immigration of about four thousand in 1931, to an immigration of about ten times that number in 1933, and the immigration of the present year which will probably be about one-third more than that of 1933. The effect has been that the Jewish population of Palestine, which was about 175,000 in November, 1931, will three years later, have become fully 300,000, or an increase of seventy per cent in three years. Enthusiasm over these figures sometimes takes the form of comparing the Jewish immigration into Palestine with the Jewish immigration into the United States of America before the war. Between the years 1900 and 1914 the average Jewish immigration to America was about 95,000 per annum, while the total increase of the Jewish population in Palestine in 1933 was about 40,000, and in 1934 will probably be about 50,000.

WORLD CONDITIONS

The answer is simple. Jewish conditions in the world have for the last few years assumed a depth of tragedy unknown for many generations. One naturally thinks first of the German situation, with about half-a-million Jews who have been deprived of their citizen rights, and with a whole generation of Jewish boys and girls for whom the prospect of taking economic root in the land of their birth is practically nil. This has been understood by everybody. The mandatory power has treated German Jews with special sympathy, and the executive of the Jewish Agency has given one-third of all the certificates granted by the government to German immigration both from Germany itself and from lands to which German Jews have gone as refugees.

But we must not forget the large masses of Jews outside Germany. In many countries, the position of the Jews, while not officially the same as that in Germany, is yet, in fact, not very different. Governments make declarations about the equality of all citizens, and about friendliness towards the Jews. But the exclusion of Jews from all official posts, whether in government or municipality, and from all public works; the gradual expulsion of the Jews from the professions, and from the export or import trade; the elimination of Jews as competitors for any kind of employment; all these measures have produced an economic condition of the five million Jews living in the area bounded by the Baltic on the north, the Alps and Balkans on the south, Soviet Russia on the East and the Rhine on the west, which means misery for two-thirds, destitution for one-third, a condition of existence that can hardly be called living for the older generation, and economic hopelessness and impotence for the youth.

To this must be added the two or three million Jews of Russia, and Jews from countries like Turkey, Yemen, and other Oriental countries, where economic misery alternates with persecution or mob attacks.

OTHER GATES CLOSED

And with the growth of Jewish misery has come the closing of all the gates of lands to which Jews used to immigrate, especially the United States of America and the British Dominions. While in 1933 the Jewish population in Palestine increased by 40,000, the total Jewish immigration to all other lands in the world was probably not more than 20,000. If then Palestine takes two-thirds of the whole of Jewish emigration from the lands of Jewish misery, it appears that the large numbers quoted in regard to Jewish immigration into Palestine represent only a very partial alleviation of Jewish misery.

Jewish immigration into Palestine must thus be looked at from two points of view: the need for Jewish emigration from the Galuth and the possibility of Jewish immigration into Palestine. The need for emigration from the lands of misery is vastly greater than the possibility of immigration into the land of hope. It therefore follows that, in considering whether Jewish immigration into Palestine is adequate, we must adopt as the minimum criterion that laid down by the British Government itself, namely, the absorptive capacity of Palestine for new immigrants. Without Zionism and without the ideal of solving the Jewish problem, there would never have been a Balfour Declaration and a Mandate, and possibly there would not have been a British occupation of Palestine; but even if we consider Palestine as completely distinct from the Jewish problem of emigration from the lands of misery, surely the very least that can be said is that every possibility for Jewish immigration that exists should be utilized to the full, especially as the agencies which produce these opportunities of immigration by creating openings of employment, are Jewish agencies which, in the vast majority of cases, do not undertake work in Palestine without the assumption that such work will produce opportunities for Jewish labor and Jewish immigration.

NOT BEING USED TO FULL

The question is therefore: Is the principle of absorptive capacity really carried into effect? Unfortunately it must be stated that the absorptive capacity of Palestine is not being used to the full, or in any measure that can be called satisfactory. Palestine can absorb many thousands of Jews more than it does. The land is crying out for more Jewish labor. The shortage of Jewish labor has brought with it also a shortage of Arab labor, for many thousands of Palestine Arabs are working in employment which could be used for Jews, or once was actually used for Jews. The shortage of labor is such that it was recently reported that, in extensive Arab districts, there was not sufficient Arab labor to deal with the harvest. The labor vacuum created in Palestine has had the effect of attracting thousands of Arabs from outside Palestine— from Transjordan, and even from Egypt and Syria, particularly the Hauran.

ENDANGERS POSITION

The shortage of Jewish labor is endangering our position in agriculture. Thousands of Arabs have taken the place of Jews in Jewish orange groves, and the result has been that large areas of what is nominally Jewish agriculture consists only of a few Jewish employers and thousands of Arab workers. All of us agree that a Jewish National Home must mean a Jewish peasantry rooted in the soil. Till two years ago there was a progressive process of rooting Jewish peasantry in the soil of Palestine. In the last two years the progress has been in the opposite direction, and thousands of Jews have been uprooted from the soil. One used to talk about “displaced Arabs”; the problem of Palestine today is the displacement of Jews from the land.

The shortage of Jewish labor is producing a dangerous disturbance in the economic balance of Jewish life in Palestine, as is indicated by the process of concentration in the cities. Three years ago the Jewish rural population was twenty-six per cent of the total Jewish population, and now it is as low as twenty-one per cent.