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Agency’s Memorandum on Disorders to Be Published July 1

June 30, 1937
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It was announced here today that the memorandum submitted to the League of Nations by the Jewish Agency for Palestine, relating to the Palestine Arab disorders of 1936, will be published July 1.

The memorandum is accompanied by a letter addressed to Palestine High Commissioner Sir Arthur Grenfell Wauchope in which it is charged that at the time of writing, May 4 last, security of life and property continued to be “signally lacking, to the grave concern of the Jewish population and all peaceful inhabitants.”

The letter, signed by Dr. Chaim Weizmann, president of the Agency, states that measures to enforce security were characterized by “considerable delay.”

It also charges that foreign governments having no locus stand under the Mandate were allowed to interfere in the affairs of Palestine with the result that “forces hostile to the Mandate have been fortified in the hopes of eventually forcing the British Government; through violence, to abandon the policy of a Jewish national home.”

The Weizmann letter outlines a number of demands described as of urgent importance. Among the demands listed are compensation for loss of life, personal injury and damage to property; Government support for supernumerary police made necessary by the disorders; facilities for the new Tel Aviv port, created as result of the disturbances closing Jaffa port to Jewish merchants; raising the proportion of Jewish railway personnel; rectifying the municipal boundary between Jaffa and Tel Aviv.

The letter concludes with a protest against recent labor immigration schedules declaring:

“The Jewish Agency considers it vital to the interests of the Jewish people and lasting peace in Palestine that the Jewish national home be enabled within the shortest time to develop, through immigration, settlement to such an extent as to render futile any attempt, through violence, to arrest its growth.”

The memorandum gives the Jewish population at the end of 1936 as 404,000, an increase of 27,000 during the year. Jewish immigrants during 1936 totalled 29,727, it is stated.

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