Monday, July 09, 2018

Sir Archibald Sinclair on Jewish Settlement

I quote Article 6 of the League of Nations Mandate decision quite often.

It reads, in full:
The Administration of Palestine, while ensuring that the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced, shall facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and shall encourage, in co-operation with the Jewish agency referred to in Article 4, close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes.

Someone else quite was taken with it.


Sir Archibald Sinclair:

Article 6 of the Mandate says that the Government will encourage the close settlement of Jews on the lands, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes. Why is not that Article more extensively and whole-heartedly carried out? 

That was from a speech of his in Parliament on March 24, 1936

Note: this is a corrected version.

I like what Winston Churchill, a close friend of Sinclair, said when he spoke to the Peel Commission in 1937 and told them


he had always believed that the intention of the Balfour Declaration was that Palestine might in the course of time become “an overwhelmingly Jewish State.” During the Second World War, although most of his Cabinet colleagues rejected this idea, Churchill clung to it and on many occasions intervened with senior Cabinet Ministers to prevent “an Arab solution” of the Palestine question being permanently fixed.

On 19 May 1941, in a secret memorandum, he wrote of his hope for the establishment after the war of a “Jewish State of Western Palestine” with not only the fullest rights for immigration and development, but also with provision “for expansion in the desert regions to the southwards which they would gradually reclaim.”
and

Earlier, on 30 January 1908, he wrote in a letter of his sympathy with the “ultimate goal” of the Jewish people. As he explained in his letter: 

“Jerusalem must be the only ultimate goal. When it will be achieved it is vain to prophesy: but that it will some day be achieved is one of the few certainties of the future.”


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