#History #timeline

The Report of the Palestine Commission

Key takeaways

content: "@peelReportPalestineCommission1937" -file:@peelReportPalestineCommission1937

Reading notes

• Report generally accepted by British government

• Had to arrive at a conclusion as to what were the underlying causes of Arab attitude and of the disturbances of 1936

• Not dealt with very fully

• Arabs frank about their position

• Never accepted the version that had been placed on the McMahon letter; would not admit the validity of the Balfour declaration; and argued the Jewish home was in opposition with the Covenant of the League of Nations

• Concerned with the historical Arab mindset

• Do not think that the 1936 disturbances were primarily caused by Jewish action

• Arab view is that they have the right to control their country in which they have lived for the past 12/13 centuries

• They believed that the British government and parliament was so under the control of Jews as to never get a fair hearing

• Only at the closing of the report that Arabs started to come forward

• Jews believed that with a firmer government and a greater assertion of authority a more resolute order would be established

• The rise in arab nationalist sentiment coupled with history of other Arab territories seems to have destroyed any chance of the two races working together

• Arabs made three definitive demands;

• Self-government should be set up at once

• Not a dunam of land ought be sold to the Jews

• All Jewish migration should be stopped at once

• Attitude toward Jews already in Palestine was not 'satisfactory'

• No basis for compromise

• Arabs of Palestine remark how they can't be the only Arabs that can't have a chance at governing themselves

• Three major reflections of the administration were looked into; land-settlement, immigration, and self-government

• The Jewish agency always produced estimates of migrant figures that was greater than the governments own estimates

• Convenient that the agency existed to train and organise prospective immigrants and to relive the administration of certain business

• The Arabs never organised an agency such as the Jews had during the mandate period

• Economic absorptive capacity, though useful as a test, is really not sufficient and matters such as social and psychological impact must also be considered

• Arabs opposed any scheme that fell short of self-government

• The Jews did express consideration of parity- assembly of 50% equal power no matter the size of either population

• Not satisfactory to have democratic institutions theoretically based on numbers but really based on inequality, and so we dismissed the iea as impracticable

• Administrators were supposed to but did not do very much toward it, foster Palestinian citizenship[p

• Nobody could discover a single speciemin of the Plaestinain flag (it did not exist)

• Another great difficulty was the fact that a state with a population of over a million and a half, there were three officila languages

• In terms of education, jews and arabs were taught in different schools, with Jews operating their own schools and arab education under government control

• Felt that the only way to arrive at a final settlement of the matter was to divide the country into Jewish and Arab ares which would make It possible to give a degree of self-government

• Condition of jews in arab countries would improve once this antagonism is put to rest

• Not practical to assign Jews a purely Jewish area and vice versa

• Jeruslaem must be a neutral power, as a Christian Power, will give complete toleration to the other religions

Summary of Discussion

• Andrew Macfadyean said the document was melancholy at best

• Never heard of the best way to cure a patient by cutting it into three pieces

• Central argument fo the report was there had been a contraditction in the mandate from the state

• Lay between the terms of the mandate and engagments entered into by the Brtiish government during the course of the war

• Partition was an open invitation for the arabs to criticte the mandate itself

• If jews had been allowed to develop transjordan with economic capital investments, perhaps the attraction of that would have diverted problems from palestine altogether

• The partition plan saught to shut up the Jews, in a more cramped and more dangerous ghetto

• ''In one part of the Report it had been said that a British national anthem and a Jewish national anthem had been heard in Pales? tine, but not an Arab national anthem. The Arab national anthem in Palestine, as throughout the Arab world, was : " There is no God but God, and Mohammed is the Prophet and the Servant of God." This was their only national anthem. In the same way, the most important year in Arab history was the year of the birth of the Prophet and the foundation of Arabian nationhood, which was known in history as the year of the Elephant. By a curious coincidence the Persian (Arabic) word for elephant is Peel''

• Partition was a frank admission of failure by the British Government - Sir Ronald Storrs