Melchett Lays Britain’s Anti-zionist Policy to Unfriendly Views of Palestine Officials

The ill-concealed unfriendly attitude of the Palestine officials charged with carrying out Britain’s obligations to the Jews under the Balfour Declaration and the Palestine Mandate is blamed for the British government’s anti-Zionist policy by Lord Melchett, prominent British industrialist, who resigned as chairman of the Council of the Jewish Agency and of the Agency’s political commission as a protest against the White Paper, in a statement today to the Vienna Freie Presse, Austria’s leading paper.

Lord Melchett charges that the Palestine problem has been acute since 1921 because of the unwillingness of Palestine officialdom to execute the Mandate, and particularly because of the “dualism between good-will expressed by the various London governments and the executing officials who created for us only obstacles and difficulties because they do not believe in the possibility of the realization of the Balfour Declaration. Hence they used their utmost efforts through the years to prove the impossibility of its realization.”

Offering to produce a list of all the high British officials in Palestine who had repeatedly told him of the impossibility of carrying out the Balfour Declaration, Lord Melchett says that this official lack of sympathy created in Palestine “a direct and indirect atmosphere of friendly neutrality against the

Jewish work in Palestine to which I have often drawn the attention of premiers and colonial secretaries as well as the high commissioners.”

Summarizing the outlook for the future, Lord Melchett believes that no real progress is possible in Palestine so long as the “spirit of individual officials is unchanged and so long as the government leaders do not realize that it is not sufficient to say a few friendly words regarding the Mandate and the Jews.” Lord Melchett voices the conviction that the White Paper is also the work of the Palestine officials assisted by the younger officials of the Colonial Office.