November 24, 1938
In the midst of the 1936-1939 Arab revolt, the House of Commons holds a debate on the future of British policy in Palestine. Malcolm MacDonald, the British colonial secretary, opens the proceedings with an overview of the current unrest in Palestine. He reassures the Commons that British forces are “steadily and surely re-establishing the authority of the government throughout the land.”
Defending the British obligation to facilitate the development of a Jewish national home, MacDonald says: “During the last 20 years many of them (Jews) have been hastening back to Palestine under the terms of a mandate which was endorsed by more than 50 nations, under which the administration of the country was entrusted to Great Britain. I do not think that anyone can justly say that during these years Great Britain has not been fulfilling her obligation to facilitate the immigration of Jews into Palestine.”
After praising the Jewish efforts and success in turning “sand dunes into orange groves” and transforming wasteland into “frontiers of cultivation and settlement,” MacDonald warns members of Parliament not to be overly affected by or sympathetic to increasing Jewish immigration into Palestine as a result of the persecution of Jews under Nazism.
Speaking two weeks after Kristallnacht in Germany and Austria, MacDonald says: “When we promised to facilitate the establishment of a national home for Jews in Palestine, we never anticipated this fierce persecution in Europe. We have made no promise that that country should be the home for everyone who is seeking to escape from such an immense calamity, and even if there were no other population in Palestine, its rather meager soil could not in fact support more than a fraction of those Jews who may wish to escape from Europe. The problem of the refugees in Central Europe cannot be settled in Palestine. It has to be settled over a far wider field than that.”
Members of the Commons respond with applause.
MacDonald offers sympathy for the “fear” of Palestinian Arabs alarmed by the growth of the Jewish community and its expanding economic superiority, though he says the Arabs benefit in many ways: “The Jews brought with them money; development works provided extra livelihoods; modern health services, which were extended not only to Jews but to Arabs, gave the individual a further lease and security of life.”
MacDonald proposes that, in lieu of the 1937 Peel Commission’s rejected suggestion for the partition of Palestine into two states, Arab and Jewish leaders meet in London for separate talks.
One of the other speakers is Winston Churchill, who argued two decades earlier that Palestine should be a Jewish national home. He criticizes the British plan to restrict Jewish immigration to Palestine and proposes a 10-year plan of fixed Jewish immigration tied to Arab population increases.
The conference suggested by MacDonald is held in February 1939. Britain clamps down on Jewish demographic and physical growth and essentially accepts Churchill’s broad suggestion to limit Jewish immigration. That policy is enacted with the 1939 White Paper. Britain does not allow Jews under duress in Europe to move to Palestine, lest Zionism’s growth upset Britain’s Arab allies in Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
