...I naturally subscribe to everything that the Noble Lord opposite and the right hon. Gentleman have said about Sir Herbert Samuel. Both the right hon. Gentleman and the Noble Lord have imbibed in their stay in Palestine some of the atmosphere of that country. No doubt since the Armistice, or perhaps before it, the military atmosphere there was anti-Jew and pro-Arab. They moved in the society of the effendis, the ex-Turkish officials owning large acres; the old lords of the country. They liked them. They got on with them. They listened to their views, and when the Noble Lord and the right hon. Gentleman get up in this House and tell us what are the views of the Arabs about the Jews, how bitterly hostile they are, they are voicing the views of the Arab effendis, the old officials of the Turkish Government. These people hate the Jews, and for a perfectly good and sufficient reason. The Jews go in from Rumania, Russia, Poland, and go in not only as Jews but as outposts of Labour ideals, of Western ideas of civilisation, they plant themselves down in Palestine. The first thing the Jew does is to start a trade union.
The next thing he does is to try and get the uneducated and unskilled Arabs to join him in raising wages. There is nothing on earth that any governing class hate more than the ignorant, stupid, slavish proletariat getting ideas as to what wages it ought to get. These wretched Jews, these Bolshevik Jews, start telling the Arabs they ought to get more wages when they are working on Government contracts. Hitherto the effendis have had the time of their lives, getting the Arabs to work for them and swindling them of their pay. This sort of thing has gone on in these Eastern countries for countless centuries.
Now that the westernised Jews go into the country and teach that this is not what the working classes ought to put up with the effendis do not like it. They pass it on to the Noble Lord (Earl Winterton) at dinner. The officers of the British Army burn with zeal when they think of it. Naturally, of course, they, like the effendis, like to get their labour cheap; they do not like these new ideas; their life becomes more expensive.
§ Sir F. BANBURY Do not the Jews get their labour cheap in Russia at the present time: they pay nothing at all?
§ Colonel WEDGWOOD The right hon. Baronet does not understand. The Jews here are an Eastern race. The Jews in Palestine are the pioneers of Western civilisation, breaking in upon the immemorial slumber of the ages. It is these horrible new Europeans that are the victims of the pogroms! It is not the Arab cultivator that hates them. He works in with the Jews quite nicely, is good friends with the Jews and does not quarrel with them.
The Noble Lord, I think, really ought to know that most of the Arabs are pastoral, not cultivators. They wander to and fro on the earth, and are not likely to be injured by close connection with the Jewish element. It is not the poor country Arab at all who counts for much. The people who count are these financial Arabs who have been in the custom of swindling the inhabitants of Palestine. They hire the cheap labour, and are in favour of killing off the new agitators and emigrants. All these things work up together, and the effendi uses, them for his own purpose to stir up the low class Arab into murdering the Jews—and that is the history of pogroms all over the world.
§ Mr. ORMSBY-GORE The hon. and gallant Gentleman refers to the Levantines.
§ Colonel WEDGWOOD The Levantine in a red fez. He stirs up the "black hundreds" to butcher the Jews, and on the first occasion of these riots the Government immediately stopped the influx of more Jews into Palestine. That is the worst possible policy to pursue. That is putting a premium on the pogroms. If you stop more Jews going in, that is exactly what the effendis want—to keep Palestine a preserve for the old ideas. When you give these people what they want in return for murdering the Jews you are likely to require more than 5,000 troops there. Unfortunately, Sir Herbert Samuel gave in to the Arabs. I hope if he has to choose again he will pay a little less attention to the evidence that is being concocted to prove that Jewish agitators and Bolsheviks came straight from Lenin at Moscow.
There is one way in which you can protect the Jews without throwing any administrative charge upon the revenues or the taxpayer of this country, and without increasing the garrison of 5,000 English troops; and that is by simply allowing the Jews to form a defensive force of their own. They had an excellent regiment during the War. That regiment did admirable service. At the end of the War the military administration, as it then was in Palestine, immediately disbanded it. Let them form their own regiments.
The Palestinian Jews and the Zionist organisation are perfectly prepared themselves to find the money for the equipment for the troops. Give them a chance to defend their own settlements and we shall hear much less of this danger spot in the East. It is not necessary to fear that they will attack the Arabs. The Jews are a most peaceable people. They know the minority is always unwise to attack the majority.
At the present time all the police of that country are Arabs. These Arab police stimulate others to assist in massacring the Jewish inhabitants. The danger for the Jews is very real. I submit to the Government they should take every step they can to assist in the formation of territorial forces to protect the Jews, and at the same time to relieve the taxpayers of this country from an expense which otherwise will fall upon their shoulders. Meanwhile the right hon. Gentleman has my blessing. I could wish that years ago he had been appointed to the Colonial Office instead of the War Office. We might have saved millions at both offices. Wherever he is he becomes the stormy petrel for his own department, and I cannot help thinking that it would be well that the rest of the Government should come to take his new view, that after all, peace is the principal necessity for the inhabitants of this country.
And the reply in the debate from William Ormsby-Gore, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State:
...I turn to Palestine. I do not agree with what my Noble Friend (Earl Winterton) said about Palestine entirely, but I agree to a greater extent, though not entirely, with what was said by my hon. and gallant Friend (Lieut.-Colonel Wedgwood), I certainly share the view if you take Galilee, for instance, that the Arab cultivator and the small Arab in Palestine gets on extremely well with his Jewish neighbours and his Jewish neighbours with him. I quite agree in Jaffa, and in the towns and in the immediate vicinity of the towns, directly you come to the middle class of both sects of population that, so far from there being any amelioration of racial animosity, there has been an increase during the last few months. It is lamentable. I have been in that country and have held a responsible office in that country. I was a political officer in Jerusalem all through the summer of 1918. I always thought that the only chance for Palestine to become prosperous and go ahead was to attract Jewish capital, Jewish brains, Jewish labour, and Jewish energy to restore actually the very soil of the country. I was also convinced that in the Levantine portion of Palestine, that portion of Palestine west of the Jordan—they are not true Arabs, because the population of Palestine west of the Jordan is a mixture composed of Phoenicians, Canaanites, Arabs, Egyptians, and other tribes—if the Moslems of that country were to be worthy of the great traditions of the Holy Land, it was absolutely essential to bridge the gulf between them and other races, and more particularly the Jews. I believed the Jews—they are original cousins in blood, with great traditions of civilisation behind them—were the people to do it. Lord Beaconsfield, in books like "Tancred," set out ideas that have been long associated with that perpetual Zionist movement which has gone on for the last 2,000 years, and which 315 does not depend on any particular number of Jews in Palestine, but on the association of Jewish energies with the ultimate reconstruction of Palestine. When I saw what Jewish, colonists have done in Palestine I was convinced that it was a practical policy.
I quite agree that there is no room in Palestine for a very large number of Jews, and probably not a very large number of Jews want to go there. There are 15,000,000 Jews in the world, and it is very fortunate that the whole 15,000,000 do not want to go into a country which is about the size of Wales. A large number will remain, as heretofore, scattered throughout the nations of the world, without any particular home, but bound together as all Jews are by a common religious tradition. That common Jewish tradition has one centre only, and that is Palestine. If you want to understand the Zionist movement you have to understand something of the Jewish religion. Palestine is inseparably bound up with their religious ideas and religious sentiment. It is essentially connected with the idea that the Bible was written by Palestinian Jews; that the greatest productions of the Hebrew race and their contributions to humanity came from Palestine; that the Psalms came from Palestine, and if they are going to write Psalms again they are going to be written in Palestine by Jews. That is the idea behind Zionism, and it called forth the Balfour Declaration.
It is that sentiment which has caused a great many Christian people all over the world to sympathise with the Zionist idea, and it is that cultural aspect of Zionism which will be of enormous value to the Near East. The Near East wants a movement of that kind. If, in the coming century, there is going to be an approximation between East and West, there is either going to be that approximation or a great gulf fixed between East and West. There is either going to be a split between Asia and Africa, on the one hand, and Europe on the other, or a bridge built. I am not at all sure that that bridge cannot and will not be built in Palestine. It is quite possible, from a Jewish university in Jerusalem, that West can be explained to East and East to West, and that you will be able to revivify what the West wants from the Eastern ethical 316 and spiritual ideal, as similarly you will give to the East some of the practical, social and political ideals that have been worked out in the West.
It is that aspect of Zionism which is so important and significant. You see it working out in quite small things. The right hon. Gentleman has described his visit to Richon le Zion. The mere existence of a Jewish peasantry is, to our minds, something quite extraordinary and wonderful. We associate Jews with Park Lane and Whitechapel. I stayed with a Jewish farmer, going out in the morning with his cattle and coming in in the evening after labour in the fields, and living in communities where the old Hebrew is talked. That is a charming and new thing which is worth encouraging at some sacrifice. I want to say a word about the difficulty between these pioneers, who deserve our sympathy and encouragement, and the Arab, who is a little afraid of those immigrants and particularly of a new invasion. We have to understand the situation. I agree that the new immigrants come, for the most part, from the Ghettos of Eastern Europe, from the Ukraine, Roumania and Bukovina, where they lived a secluded life under persecution apart; where the tides of the late War passed over them, probably killing off most of their families. They have seen Bolshevism come up, and Wrangel, and various people, who have all persecuted them in turn. Those who were Zionists were persecuted by the Bolsheviks, be cause those people stood for a national view which was proclaimed by the Bolsheviks in Russia as being the antithesis of Bolshevism. These people come with all their prejudices from Eastern Europe, and admittedly they do not form that golden bridge between East and West. I hope that the Colonial Office, which can do a great deal in this matter, will do something more to encourage the emigration into Palestine of Sephardic Jews, that is to say, the Jews who were originally in Spain, and lived with the Arabs and who know the Arabs and have the tradition of Arab culture. You will find them all over the Mediterranean. They have gone to Salonika and Smyrna, and further East. Those are the people who ought to be facilitated and encouraged to go to Palestine to lay the foundations of the national home. Culturally they are enormously valuable, and will make a success of this great experiment.
I do not want to emphasise the Jewish-Arab aspect of this question; that will work itself out in time. In Jewish Palestine the task that Great Britain has to perform is to ensure that the Christian holy places will be as well and better looked after in the future than in the past. Why are we always concentrating on the Moslem and Jewish aspects of Palestine? Cannot we occasionally remember the Christian aspect of Palestine? After all, for too long, Easter after Easter the Church of the Holy Sepulchre has been the scene of bloodshed and sectarian rivalries which have been encouraged by the Turkish Government. For centuries Christians have been offended by the sight of Christianity in Jerusalem. England has a unique and great responsibility and opportunity. Are we going to hand that over to anybody else? Is there anybody else who can take it? The Crusaders may have been impetuous, and have wanted to thrust their idea on somebody else, but is there not some moral idea behind the Crusades? Is there not the idea that in the land which we all regard as holy there should be such conditions of government that for the pilgrims and representatives of all nations and races Jerusalem shall be regarded as a house of prayer for all men? Any policy which entails scuttling from Palestine and handing it back to the Turk, or anybody else, will provoke an outburst of the most deep indignation on the part of the most religious-minded people in this country which no anti-waste campaign could possibly withstand. I must congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on the reductions he has already made, and I shall support him in every way I can in what he is doing. I want to say one word in this connection. Whatever he does, do not let us make the same mistake in Palestine as was committed in Mesopotamia two years ago, that is to say, have too many English officials; rather have a less efficient Government, manned by Palestinians, Jews, Christians and Moslems, getting them to work together in the same office. They may not be as efficient as British administrators, but let us keep the number of British officials in Palestine down to the barest possible limits. I hear accounts that there are too many already, and it will be most unfortunate if the same mistake as was 318 made in Mesopotamia were to be produced in Palestine again.
One word about Trans-Jordania. Across the Jordan you have a real Arab country, and I am delighted that there a settlement has been arrived at. A settlement has been arrived at, for the present at any rate, by having a member of the Sherifian family and by trying to start something like a decent administration. For centuries there have been bloody feuds between the tribes. Their conditions are quite separate. Do not let us create any economic barriers between them. Free trade and eventually federation are absolutely essential. Free intercourse also is absolutely essential. I am quite sure that that country can never develop except through Palestine. The right hon. Gentleman referred to his water schemes. I hope he will go on with them, and that he will get to work in Eastern Palestine. Too much time is being wasted in preparing and thinking out schemes. What we want is actual results, and then when we can show the world those actual results, these people will not wish to exchange their position under Great Britain as the mandatory power for any other form of rule. If we show no results, then they will say: "Political memories are short, why not let the Turks come back?" If they do come back, it will be for another 400 years. We have to have peace with Turkey. It is absolutely vital if we are going to reconstruct the Arab territories. We shall have to recognise the Turkish, the Arab and the Jewish national movement, and we shall have to make an honourable understanding between them. The less of Foreign Office interference and of Foreign Office control there is, to my mind, the better. The Government must do everything it can to put a stop to the war now going on in Asia Minor. It must use its good efforts for peace, and make it quite clear that the national movements will be recognised and the desire to have their own civilisation considered. I believe if we have such a policy the right hon. Gentleman will make a great name for himself in history and this House will have cause to be proud of its own work.
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