The manner in which the Jewish case was presented to the Royal Commission of inquiry has been criticized by Menachem Mendel Ussishkin, 73-year-old Zionist leader, who declared the Zionists should have appeared “not as the accused, but as the accusers.”
Mr. Ussishkin, who is president of the Jewish National Fund and chairman of the Zionist general council, told a conference of General Zionists here that the commission should have been informed that Great Britain was obstructing the Jewish homeland and had failed to protect life and property.
The veteran Zionist recalled he had advocated this view:
“We must tell England quite plainly: in the course of 18 years we had four pogroms organized against ourselves. However the mandate may be interpreted, England has undertaken the duty to protect life and property. That it has failed to do, either because the administration of the country was not fit to carry out its terms or because it did not wish to carry them out.
“In the first case, England should have changed the administration; in the second it was necessary to indict England openly. I hardly believe that serious outbreaks would have occurred if the English administration had not wanted them to happen.”
Regarding land, Mr. Ussishkin said the commission should have been told “Since you have given your consent to the establishment of a Jewish national home, you must have realized that it is impossible to build on nothing, but on the land. We have paved every field and every marks with gold, but you, instead of helping us, have piled stones in our way and have made the country into a hell. It is not we who are guilty, but you.”
He said, in regard to immigration, Zionist leaders should have presented all the “restrictive and oppressive measures against the Aliyah. He declared that it was useless to try to prove the Jewish case by tables “which can be disproved by other tables,” but it should have been stated:
“There exists an Arab people which inhabits Iraq, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and possesses plenty of land, and there exists another people which possesses nothing but the little piece of land sufficient for a grave.” And the Government must provide land for the Arabs, but not at the Jews’ expense, he added.
Because he was the only one to insist on this point of view, Mr. Ussishkin said he had refused to appear before the Royal Commission in the interests of “internal unity.”
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