The "Evening News" and the "Daily Mail," both links in Lord Rothermere’s chain of papers, yesterday resumed their campaign to get Great Britain to clear out of Palestine. The "Evening News" prominently displays a cartoon showing a smiling Arab riding on a grinning camel, both of whom are carried by a little man representing the British tax payer, proceeding along a limitless desert with a burning sun overhead and Premier MacDonald in a police uniform with a long sword is shown standing by smilingly. The cartoon is labeled "Carry on Sergeant" and refers to the Prime Minister’s declaration in Parliament on the Palestine question.
Finding it impolitic to use Premier MacDonald’s statement as the basis of an attack on the labor government because both the Conservatives and Liberals have associated themselves with the declaration, the Rothermere papers utilize the opportunity to attack all of the existing parties and to propagate the new economic Empire Party, headed by Lord Rothermere, and one of whose chief planks is get Great Britain out of Palestine.
In an attempt to show that Great Britain has not even a moral obligation towards the creation of the Jewish National Home, the "Evening News" editorially criticizes the Jewish Legion formed by Vladimir Jabotinsky as composed of "Russian Jews who had taken refuge in England from military service in Russia. It was a unit that never saw military service and one of which Jabotinsky himself once allegedly observed ‘we are not merely a regiment. We are a political performing company.’ The formation of that unit, whose members otherwise faced the alternative of being conscripted into the British army or being shipped back to Russia, was hardly an adequate consideration for the responsibilities that the Balfour Declaration envisaged."
The editorial further explains that there was no Jewish "drang nach osten" because "Palestine is an agricultural country and the Jew is not an agriculturist. The Jewish National Fund and the others possess only 75,000 acres of land. For the Jews Palestine is not a business proposition and if certain politicians have their way Palestine will be administered by British bayonets indefinitely."
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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.
