The “Times of India” publishes a report from Basra, in Iraq, suggesting the possibility of an interchange of the numerous Jews living in Baghdad and Basra, who would go to Palestine and surplus Arabs from Palestine being sent in their place to Iraq.
The scheme is not as wild as it seems, the “Times of India” writes, and has much to recommend it. The paper makes a reference to the rapid drawing together of Iraq and Palestine, owing to the commencement of the construction of the Iraq Petroleum Company’s pipe-line between Haifa and northern Iraq.
The more practical and thoughtful Zionists have been extremely concerned, it proceeds, with the future of Judaism in Palestine, owing to the numerical preponderance of the Arab population, and such a scheme, it says, is the outcome.
Wholesale deportations of populations, it continues, have no longer any terror for the Near Eastern world after the experience of the Greeks and the Turks, which has worked out very well; and the same sort of thing might be practicable as between Palestine and Iraq.
Iraq, it goes on, is overwhelmingly a Moslem country. But there is a large and important Jewish minority numbering 60,000 in Baghdad alone. Arab immigrants would be welcomed in Iraq, where there is plenty of room for new labor. Money is badly wanted for new developments to employ this labor, but presumably, the paper suggests, the Zionists could be persuaded to supply this on their own terms and in this way a solid Jewish bloc might be built up in Palestine in an otherwise entirely Arab world.
The policy on the face of it, the “Times of India” comments in an editorial, may appear feasible, especially with the precedent of the Greeks and Turks before them, but it is difficult to conceive how the Jewish commercial community in Baghdad could be suddenly exchanged for Arab labor without causing disastrous dislocation.
Labor and money are both badly needed in Iraq for further development, it concludes, however, and the Arab kingdom may welcome this suggestion as an opportunity for procuring both, but, it asks, will the Jews of Baghdad?
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