“The late Lord Balfour would not have opposed what is called ‘the whittling down of the Balfour Declaration,’ because the idealism conceived during the War in conditions of partial ignorance of the facts, must surely be modified with the passage of years,” declares “Near East and India,” a magazine reputed to be close to the British Colonial Office.
The magazine’s editorial says further, “in fact, the Balfour Declaration has already been superseded by the Churchill memorandum (the 1922 White Paper) and it is possible that the final interpretation of the promise to the Jewish people has not yet been reached.”
In another editorial, “Near East and India” endeavors to whitewash the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem for his letter to a Lebanese newspaper, later suppressed for publishing the letter, in which he incited the Moslems there against the French. Drawing an analogy between the Zionist aims in Palestine and the French interests in Syria, “Near East and India” reveals that the criticism of the Grand Mufti has behind it an attempt to drive a wedge between the Moslem and Christian Arabs in Palestine and Syria.
Describing the Mufti’s letter as a harmless document, the editorial says that the Mufti is known as a strong Arab nationalist, who never tried to conceal this fact, and that his attitude towards the Moslems of other countries is well known to the British authorities and therefore “Near East and India” is indignant that two members of Parliament found it necessary to draw attention to the Mufti’s letter in a communication of their own to the “London Times.”
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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.
