Mr. Malcolm MacDonald, Secretary of State for the Colonies, has made it quite clear that the view expressed in these columns regarding the British Government's attitude to the Palestine question was the correct one, for in the course of the debate on Monday, after reviewing the history of the matter, he stated "Surely these assurances meant that the Jewish National Home in Palestine did not mean a Jewish State against the wishes of the Arab population." That that view is held by some Jewish writers is clear from the review of a book written. by so eminent a man as Mr. Neville Laski, President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, entitled "Jewish Rights and Jewish Wrongs," in which he is quoted as saying that the ideas of the National Home in Palestine is defined as "a system which will give both to the Jews and io the Arabs complete political and civil security, and self-government in matters that concern each community alone—neither a Jewish nor an Arab state, but a Palestinian State." That position, it was pointed out last Friday, was made quite clear in the White Paper issued by Mr. Winston Churchill in 1922. Mr. MacDonald now points out that the policy of the British Government is to seek to make such arrangements that the interests of the minority, and the majority in Palestine shall be adequately secured; there is no intention of handing over the Arabs to become members of a Jewish State and the sooner that is fully recognized the earlier will there be some prospect of peace in that unhappy land. The design to create a Palestinian state in which neither Arab nor Jew shall suffer from any sort of discrimination is the same scheme which has existed all along, and for Great Britain to adopt any other line, no matter how the proponents of the Jewish case may seek to discover interpretation of declarations which cannot in face of the fact be justified, would be to inflict upon the Arabs a wholly unwarrantable injustice. They have their rights as well as the Jews, and it is in the endeavour to satisfy both that Great Britain is succeeding in satisfying neither.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.