Birmingham Post Herald · Birmingham, Alabama · 30 December 1917

CP-1917-008

Palestine the Key To the Possesion of Europe

Famous Authority on the Holy Land Tells Why It Must Never Be Given Back to the Turks, and Advocates an Autonomous Palestine Under British Protection, With Careful Guarantees of Religious and Economic Freedom.

By BASIL MATTHEWS

Scan 860 × 2032 pixels

Transcribed from the clipping

London, December 6.—(Special Correspondence.)—A shining oasis in the desert of British unpreparedness for war was the fact—hitherto, I believe unpublished—that a few weeks before the war broke out a British survey was completed of the hitherto unmapped district between the Egyptian survey and the old Palestine exploration fund survey of Palestine.

The maps were finished but not printed. The result is that in the present brilliant campaign General Allenby has perfect maps of every wady and spring of the desert between Palestine and Egypt, while those in the hands of the Turko-German forces are relatively incomplete and inaccurate. In this work of Palestinian exploration and survey Wr.

Masterman of Jerusalem, took a continuous and active part. His knowledge at once of the country’s history, present condition and of the amazing blend of races that inhabit Palestine is unsurpassed. It was a joy to me, some months before war broke out, to go over the highly efficient hospital that Dr.

Masterman has been developing and controlling for some years in Jerusalem.

How this transcription was made

Read from the scan by a machine looking at the image of the page, not by optical character recognition and not by a person. The clipping carries no masthead or date line, so its date and newspaper rest on the record it arrived with, not on anything visible in the scan.

Context added by this archive

Date check: No masthead and no date line appear on this scan. The dateline reads "London, December 6.—(Special Correspondence.)", twenty-four days before the slide date of 1917-12-30; that gap is plausible for mailed special correspondence rather than cable. The year cannot be verified from the image.

Cite this clipping

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More from the 1910s

• Palestine Not a Solution of Jewish ProblemThe New York Times · 10 June 1917
• PLANS IDEAL PALESTINEThe Baltimore Sun · 27 June 1917
• WAR TANKS WHERE SAMSON LIFTED GATES OF GAZASan Antonio Express News · 22 July 1917
• JEWISH SOCIALISTS FOR FREE PALESTINEThe New York Times · 23 July 1917
• Turkish Jews Opposed to Zionism.The American Jewish World · 7 September 1917
• Gaza and Beersheba, Ancient Places, Taken By Modern New ArmiesPittsburgh Post-Gazette · 18 November 1917
• All 77 clippings from the 1910s →

The same copy, in 1 other paper

• Palestine, Truly Home Of the Jews, Should Be Kept From TurksTulsa Tribune5 January 1918CP-1918-010

Their text and this one are nearly identical. Found by comparing transcriptions, not by reading them side by side, so this establishes that the text overlaps and not that these papers ran the same dispatch. How this was done.