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British Press Forecasts Partition of Palestine, Hits Mufti’s “escape” to Near East

June 16, 1946
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The partition of Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states by the United Nations is forecast by the appointment of President Truman’s Cabinet committee, Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin’s statement at the Labor Party conference, and the Arab position as revealed at the Bluden meeting of the Arab League Council, the London Times says today in an editorial commenting on the Palestine issue.

“Such general ventilation of the difficulties may well strengthen the growing conviction that only a return to the Peal Plan (for partition) or some variant of it, will yield a satisfactory solution,” the newspaper states. It also warns that Jewish extremists are endangering the Jewish cause, declaring “when one side appeals to force, it cannot be long before the other follows suit.”

The Daily Telegraph commenting on the Mufti’s flight from France to the Near East, points out that there is “enough trouble in Palestine without this harbinger of special mischief.” The paper says that the Mufti will do the Arab case “no good.”

The News Chronicle says that the Mufti’s escape endangers Anglo-French and Anglo-Arab relations, while the Daily Mirror calls the “escape” an encouragement to all reactionary forces of the Middle East and insists that if the British Government had done the “right thing at the right time” the Mufti would now be in Britain under look and key. The liberal Manchester Guardian sees hopes of Arab-Jewish agreement in Palestine diminishing as a result of the Mufti’s presence in the Near East.

Prof. Seing Brodetsky, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, issued a statement expressing “deep concern” over the Mufti’s flight and the failure to bring him to trial as a war criminal. He called the Mufti “one of the prime instigators of the extermination of 6,000,000 Jews,” and said he was guilty of a campaign of violence and murder of Britons and Jews in Palestine. The statement also stressed the Mufti’s role in the unsuccessful pro-Nazi Iraq rebellion in 1941.

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