Tribute to King Abdullah of Jordan was paid today in the House of Commons by Premier Clement Attlee and Winston Churchill. The latter said that the assassinated Arab ruler “was not only a champion of Arab rights, but always sought reconciliation between Arabs and Jews and Arabs and Israelites.” Emphasizing that such reconciliation “is the foundation of all future hopes in Palestine,” Mr. Churchill said “the Arabs have lost a great champion and the Jews have lost a friend.”
Ronald Storrs, one-time Governor of Jerusalem under the Mandatory regime, in an article in today’s Times, declares that the most serious lose involved in Abdullah’s murder is the future of Israeli-Arab relations. “While never countenancing the methods or consequences of extreme political Zionism, and indeed alone successful in the field against them, Abdullah realized that Israel had come to stay and he would have proved an invaluable member at any final peace conference, ” Storrs writes. “There can be no minimizing the general intensification of the Near Eastern atmosphere. Nevertheless, Britain and the Near East have survived worse tensions than this,” he concludes.
The British Government has been working for months to encourage an improvement in relations between Jordan and Israel, as well as between Jordan and Turkey. It has been London’s hopes that Turkey would serve as an anchor for a projected Near East pact which would include the Arab states and, eventually, Israel.
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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.
