BRITAIN IN PALESTINE
THIS MONTH'S QUOTE
While the victorious Allies were dividing up the post-World War 1 world
between themselves, the Emir Feisal was a lone Arab voice on the fringes of
the Peace Conference. In speech to the Big Four statement who represented the
Allies, Feisal said:
“We believe that Syria [which included Palestine], an agricultural and industrial area thickly peopled with sedentary classes, is sufficiently advanced politically to manage her own internal affairs. Arabia and Iraq are two huge provinces made up of three civilised towns, divided by large wastes thinly peopled by semi-nomadic tribes. The main duty of the Arab Government there would be to oversee the educational processes which are to advance the tribes to the moral level of the towns.
In Palestine the enormous majority of the people are Arabs. The Jews are very
close to the Arabs in blood, and there is no conflict of character between the two
races. In principles we are absolutely at one.
The powers will, I hope, find better means to give fuller effect to the aims of our national movement...
To begin reading the story of Britain in Palestine,
click here
At the beginning of the 20th century, Palestine was an Arab country, apart from small communities of religious Jews. The idea that within fifty years many of the indigenous Palestinians might be expelled from their land to make way for hundreds of thousands of Europeans would have seemed unfathomable. And yet, from 1917 onwards, the land of Palestine was the target of a campaign by the British government to turn Palestine into a Jewish state, without consulting the inhabitants or taking account of their wish to continue to live as citizens of the land where their ancestors had lived for centuries.
The true story of how that transformation came about has been obscured by decades of misleading information. This site attempts to correct much of this information, by showing that:
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A 100-Year-Old Injustice
Yesteryear in Parliament
From a House of Lords debate on 20 July 1937 on the report of the Peel
Commission which, among other things, recommended partitioning
Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab one, at a time when, even after intensive immigration of European Jews, the population was still more than 60% Arab.
THE LORD ARCHBISHOP of CANTERBURY, Cosmo Gordon Lang:
I have such a natural, deep, abiding interest in the Holy Land that I feel I cannot be altogether silent. I have been gradually driven to the conclusion that the Balfour Declaration, accepted and embodied in the Mandate of 1922, with its double obligation, has imposed upon the administration of Palestine an insoluble problem and an impossible task...