Hailing the report of the Mandates Commission on the Palestine riots of 1929 and the Commission’s criticism of the British government’s failure to carry out the obligations of the Palestine Mandate, the Yiddish press of New York, editorially commenting on the report, sees in its tone and text an indication that world public opinion is now veering towards the support of the Jewish claims in Palestine and away from the British and Arab contentions.
“The Day” finds that the Mandates Commission’s report is the first hand that the world has extended to the Jews to support them in “their battle with the dark powers of the British Colonial Office. It is the first ray of light that has fallen from the outside world into our midst.” Seeing in the report a pleasant surprise for the Jews and an unpleasant one for the British government, “The Day” notes that the report marks the first occasion in Jewish history in which “an international body expressing the opinions of almost all the powers of the world has up-held the Jews in their case against such a great power as England.”
S. Judson, in the “Jewish Morning Journal,” is of the opinion that if the League of Nations had hitherto only been “the conscience of the world,, in theory, the report of the Mandates Commission makes it so in fact as well. No group of people, he says, coming from any one individual country and from one definite camp could have had such a wide view on such a matter as the Jewish-English-Arabic complication in Palestine. “Only a world-representative body . . . could have reached the conclusions that the Mandates Commission arrived at.”
“The Forward,” the Socialist Party’s organ, characterizes the report as a happy event for the Jews because since the investigations in Palestine began “they have received one blow after another.” Comparing the report of the Mandates Commission to the minority report of Harry Snell in the Shaw Commission’s report, the “Forward” is of the opinion that the criticism leveled against the British government was not meant for the Labor government but was intended for the previous Conservative governments under whose regime, the “Forward” recalls, most of the “sins of omission and commission” were made.
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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.
