The Maccabaean

WE have set out in previous issues of Palestine what are the proper territorial limits of the new Palestine. It is worth while making clear in the same way the principles of the administration of the new Palestine. The new Palestine is to be a Jewish Palestine. What that means is not that non-Jews are not to have full political rights, full religious freedom and full protection for their property, but that the Government looks forward to the Jewish element becoming both quantitatively and qualitatively the characteristic element in Palestine, and that it takes all necessary measures for enabling the Jewish element in Palestine to secure this position. The problem is, therefore, twofold. Negatively, it is to secure the rights of the non-Jews by affording them the necessary guarantees; positively, it is to open the way for the creation by the Jews of the world in Palestine of that great Jewish national home which they desire and need. What, then, is the form of administration most likely to carry out this double function with the least friction and with most success? The mere statement of the question suggests that an immediate independent Jewish State, that is, the entrusting forthwith of the whole political government of, and responsibility for, Palestine to Jews, would not be an ideal solution. With the best will in the world the Jews, so long as they were in the minority in Palestine, could not govern the non-Jewish majority without exciting suspicion of unfairness and discrimination, even if they managed to avoid the reality. Nor is that the only argument against the immediate creation of an independent Jewish State. Without developing those other arguments we think it will be agreed that some kind of external suzerain in the early stages of the Jewish Palestine would be advisable. Who should that suzerain be? We have repeatedly shown in Palestine that the suzerain must be a single Power. Administrative control by an International Committee wherever it has been tried has failed. Only a few weeks ago we had the Tangier correspondent of the Times (London) stating how it has mismanaged the affairs of the unhappy people of Tangier. The cries of the hapless folk of the New Hebrides have been drowned in the greater calamities of the war. As for Egypt, that is a tale of wrong-doing and injury to the people of Egypt by divided administrative authority which ought to be familiar to all students of politics. The condominium is condemned by its own history, and we hasten to add it is rejected with all vehemence by the Jewish nation. It is possible that the good old gang of diplomatists who gave Tangier and the New Hebrides and Egypt a condominium for their own purposes may try to repeat the experiment for their own purposes on the living body of the Jewish Motherland. The old school of diplomatists learns nothing and forgets nothing, and in the congenial darkness which the censorship creates we may be sure that it is hatching its ancient and accustomed crimes against humanity. The Jewish people are resolved not to be its victims.

The sovereignty over Palestine must belong to a single Power. In Palestine we have repeatedly urged that the Power must be Great Britain. We have argued it from the British point of view and we have argued it from the Jewish point of view. It is not unnatural that this particular con-

tention is not received with enthusiasm in Paris, but there are some people, not under suspicion of pursuing the ends of the old diplomatists, who suggest that the trustee might be the United States. That is a suggestion which has, from time to time, been aired in the pages of Palestine, and we have more than once called it the second best solution. But second best it is, not the first best. One argument against it is that the United States has neither the experience nor the administrative personnel for developing a self-governing dominion in Palestine. Another is that the whole outlook of America on democracy is too arithmetical to be applied in the happiest possible way to the creation of a Jewish Palestine. The third is that, economically, Palestine under American supervision would be sundered from its natural economic neighbours and its natural economic markets. The economic neighbours of Palestine are Mesopotamia and Egypt, to say nothing of the new Arab State in Syria. The chief economic markets of Palestine are Egypt and Great Britain to-day, and in the future, without a doubt, Palestine should have a most intimate economic association with Mesopotamia, Persia, and the Middle East. An American Palestine, as we have said, would break these natural connections. In all these particulars, and there are others, American sovereignty over Palestine would be, from the Jewish point of view, inferior to British sovereignty over Palestine.

But there are two considerations for practical men to bear in mind. One is, What does the American Government think about it? and the other is, What do the Jewish people think about it? The American Government has made no formal announcement at all, but it has certainly never shown any desire to shoulder the responsibility for a protectorate over a Jewish Palestine, and there is no reason to think that it has any special desire to do so. On the contrary, the evidence all suggests that America would prefer British suzerainty. The attitude of the Jewish people is beyond doubt. The Jews of England, the Jews of America, the Jews of Russia, the Jews of every country, so far as opinion can be tested, prefer a British sovereignty over Palestine. That preference coincides with the wishes of the British Government itself. The practical political considerations approve the intrinsic merits of a British sovereignty over Palestine.

What must be the form of the British sovereignty? It must not be an absolute sovereignty. It must be a trusteeship. All good men must hope that the Peace Conference will evolve a League of Nations. Anyhow, whatever authority Great Britain may come to exercise over Palestine it will take its title and its mandate from the Peace Conference. It will receive a trust to exercise its sovereignty over Palestine for the development, as speedily as possible, of a great Jewish society in Palestine. The proper way in which to guarantee that mandate would be to make the British trustee answerable to some organ of the League of Nations. Mr. Herbert Sidebotham, in his book England and Palestine, strongly urges that solution. We should go a little further, and suggest that the United States might very well be the Chairman of such an organ of the League of Nations. The