Tongues Show Palestine’s Diversity

No less than sixty languages are spoken in Palestine by the more than one million inhabitants, the Daily Telegraph reports in an analysis of Palestine’s political divisions and deadlocks under the British mandate. The Telegraph writes:

This diversity of peoples is no doubt appropriate to a country where you can go from 3,000 feet above sea level to 1,300 feet below sea level in an afternoon. It is, moreover, a partial explanation of Palestine’s still suspended political development. If that country is happiest which has no history, a land of three faiths, where at least half a dozen civilizations of different dates have left present survivors, cannot be expected to coalesce at the mere twinkling of a British Mandate.

“CROWN COLONY” RULE

The present administration may be described as a Crown Colony regime with special local variations, of which the most important centers in the Zionist movement and its objective—the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine. This movement is not, as sometimes represented, a war-time or post-war creation evolved out of the eccentricities of British Imperial policy in the Near East. The Jewish colonization which gave it a foothold in Palestine began in 1880.

The establishment of a “legally secured, publicly recognized home for the Jewish people in Palestine” was adopted as the program of a World Zionist Congress in 1897. Twenty years later, on the day after Lord Allenby captured Gaza, Lord Balfour proclaimed it the policy of the British Government to facilitate “the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish people . . . it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

ZIONISTS AND ARABS

These words, which were incorporated verbatim into the Mandate which Britain received from the League of Nations in 1922, and centered in detail into its various clauses, seemed to meet the obvious objectives from two sides.

There were (and still are) some millions of Jews indifferent and even hostile to the views of the Zionists, who had no wish to find themselves suddenly expatriated from their present national homes in Europe or America.

There were (and still are) some hundreds of thousands of Arab inhabitants of Palestine who did not intend to become the subjects of a Jewish State or (alternatively) to leave the country where their ancestors had lived under many masters since the seventh century or earlier.

DECLINE OF COOPERATION

It seemed in 1917 that Palestine might become the Promised Land of both peoples. The pre-war Jewish settlers in Palestine had suffered from the Turks no less than their Arab neighbors.

The burden was now lifted, and Dr. Weizmann, the Zionist leader, could in 1918 stand side by side with the then Mufti of Jerusalem and the representatives of the British military administration upon a common platform and proclaim the future one of good will. Palestine was to be neither a Jewish nor an Arab State, but a country where both races would find peace under the protection of Britain.

The detailed story of the decline from those days of co-operation has no place in the present article. Suffice it that the Mufti’s successors and rivals in the Arab leadership refused to accept the conception of a Jewish Home in Palestine at all, and with few exceptions refused to co-operate with the British mandatory administration.

STRENGTH OF BICKERINGS

Provocation on both sides, racial riots, and petty pickering have varied in intensity according to the supposed strength of the High Commissioner of the movement, and the degree to which at any given time the British Government may be considered liable to intimidation.

There is a point in the experience beyond the impartiality of the Administration. The existence of a Palestine Government which justifies its name presupposes a common feeling of Palestine nationality, such as neither of my indignant friends would admit.

It is, indeed, this fact which has blocked the efforts of successive High Commissioners to introduce a Legislative Council which might prelude future self-government. The Arab leaders first declined such an offer in 1921, and continued to decline in all subsequent negotiations.

When the present High Commissioner, Lt.-Gen. Sir Arthur Wauchope, went on leave during the past summer, it was confidently believed that he would re-