There are to be two Advisory Committees for the forthcoming Palestine census, one Arab and one Jewish, owing to the insistence of the Arabs that the Committee should be constituted strictly according to their numerical proportion in the population or that the Arabs should have six representatives in the Committee and the Jews two, to which the Jewish institutions refused to agree.
The Jewish Advisory Committee on the Census consists of Mr. Isaac Ben-Zvi, the Palestine Labour leader, Mr. Reuben Katznelson, Assistant Director of the Hadassah, and Rabbi Blau, of the Agudath Israel.
The Advisory Committees will co-operate with the official committee, which will include the heads of the Government Departments of Health, Land and Education. Everything has been done to establish a united Jewish front in regard to the census, the Agudath Israel having been called in for consultation with the Executive of the Jewish Agency and the Vaad Leumi, and their representative being included among the members of the Jewish Advisory Committee.
A thorny problem that is bound to arise in the preparation of the questionnaire for the census, in the preparation of which the Advisory Committees will be asked to co-operate, it has been pointed out, is the proposed inclusion of one or more questions relating to the landed state, or landlessness, of the population. Official circles are inclined to believe that the census might yield valuable information on the question of landlessness, a hint to this effect being given in connection with the White Paper, while Jewish circles regard any such question as coming under the head of queries with a political tendency. The Jewish leaders insist that the census machinery is not calculated to produce answers on these questions, objecting that information supplied under certain conditions may only tend to mislead the public on a vital question which should be made the subject of a special investigation.
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