Addressing the Palestine Economic Society, Geoffrey Walsh, economic adviser of the Palestine Government, today severely criticized the Jewish community for tolerating strikes which, he said, were damaging the country’s economic welfare and hampering Palestine’s war effort.
(There have been an increasing number of strikes in Palestine in recent months, occasioned by rising living costs resulting from war conditions. In December, Jewish workers held a general strike in support of demands for a 373 per cent wage increase.)
Meanwhile, a conference of 1,600 Arab and Jewish citrus growers in Jaffa decided to ask the Government to buy their crop at the rate of £5 per dunam, payable from Government loans, and to discontinue rural property taxes and forced auction sales.
The meeting elected a committee of 28 Jews and 28 Arabs which will name a delegation to submit the resolutions to High Commissioner Sir Harold A. MacMichael. The conference was presided over by Mayor Raufel Bitar of Jaffa.
Other developments in Palestine were:
The death toll in the sinking of the refugee ship Patria on Nov. 25 reached 150 when two more bodies were recovered.
The annual conference of the Women’s International Zionist Organization in Tel Aviv decided to plant a forest in the name of Miss Henrietta Szold on the fifteenth of Shevat (Feb. 12). The site has not yet been selected.
The Palestine Symphony Orchestra, composed of European refugees, will leave for its annual tour of Egypt next week, it was announced.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
