Reconstruction of the Government and the bringing in of leading critics of the MacDonald Palestine policy is expected considerably to alter the Palestine situation. Prime Minister Winston Churchill himself fought MacDonald’s policy in the House of Commons.
Major Clement Attlee and Arthur Greenwood, now members of the War Cabinet, led the Labor Party fight against the White Paper and the land ordinance, while Air Minister Archibald Sinclair, who although not a member of the War Cabinet, will be consulted as a leader of the Liberals on all Questions of policy, is also pro-Zionist.
Inclusion in the Cabinet of Herbert Morrison and Alfred Duff-Cooper brings in two outstanding friends of the Zionist movement.
It is expected here that the Labor and Liberal members of the Cabinet will press within the Cabinet for a Palestine policy more in accordance with the views of their parties.
The new Colonial Secretary, Lord Lloyd, is intimately acquainted with the Near East situation through service there during the World War as an associate of Col. T.E. Lawrence and subsequently as High Commissioner of Egypt and chairman of the British Council. Although generally considered pro-Arab, Lord Lloyd is known to consider the Jewish position sympathetically. In an article in the Sunday Chronicle of Oct. 23, 1938, he proposed a solution of Palestine problem by assuring the Arabs of a majority in Palestine and opening the Transjordan to Jewish immigration.
“It seems generally assumed,” Lord Lloyd wrote at that time, “that a solution of justice to Arabs necessarily involves injustice to the Jews and vice-versa. I do not believe that to be the case. I believe that the assurance to the Arabs of a permanent majority in their own country on the one hand, and compensation to the Jews in wider immigration into Transjordania on the other, would provide an equitable settlement and one that is administratively as well as politically feasible.
“It would not, admittedly, meet the extreme demands of either party, but it would provide for a national home for the Jews on the one side without injustice to the indigenous population on the other. On such a basis Jew and Arab could and would live peacefully side by side in the future as in the long past. The abandonment of partition in favor of a policy as above outlined will need courage, The Prime Minister (Neville Chamberlain) has never lacked this quality.”
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.
