A hint of what the report of the Palestine Commission of Inquiry, soon to be published, may contain, was given this week by Harry Snell, M. P., Labor member of the Commission, in an address before the South London Ethical Society on the subject of “The Faiths and Factions of the Holy Land.”
“Palestine,” said Mr. Snell, “is a centre of racial and religious conflict, implacable, bitter, unending, disgusting. That is the problem it presents today. The present crisis is not new. It has happened over and over again throughout the centuries. Where you get two races coming together—and you get the impact of the virile westernized international Jewish brain upon the fatalistic primitive Moslem Arab peoples—you are bound to have a situation which is extraordinarily hard upon both races.
“It would be marvelous if difficulties did not occur. And difficulties, as we see them at the moment, may be overcome, but the permanent difficult factor, the factor which would be the basis of division—that is to say the religious separation and faction—that is the permanent disturbing factor which we cannot alter.”
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