Making a California in Palestine

By Commander, the Hon. J. M. Kenworthy, Formerly Assistant Chief of Staff, Gibraltar, Admiralty War Staff, London, and Labor Member of Parliament.

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Transcribed from the clipping

(Criticism of the Zionist experiment in Palestine, expressed recently by Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, has attracted wide attention. In this article a distinguished Englishman who has recently visited Palestine, gives the situation as he sees it.)

There is still misapprehension amongst sections of American public opinion about the situation in Palestine and the work of the Zionists in the Holy Land. As a non-Jew who was in Palestine in December, 1926, I may be able to remove some of these misapprehensions. While there I traversed the whole country from Dan to Beersheba and I crossed into Transjordania as well.

I met the leaders of every section of the population and visited every important center. I am in a position to draw a contrast, as 18 years ago, while serving as a naval officer in the British Mediterranean fleet, I had an opportunity of seeing the country under Turkish rule.

To put the matter briefly, Palestine is being made into a modern civilized state with progressive western ideas in the midst of a vast area neglected for centuries under Moslem rule. The effect of the Palestine example alone on the surrounding countries would make it worth while. There is no unrest amongst the mass of the Arab population.

Just after the armistice the Arab farmers were told by the political agitators that their land would be taken from them, and they were naturally dissatisfied. They have been reassured on this point and, further, appreciate the direct benefits they have reecived from the Jewish colonization of the country and the extra trade and employment resulting from this colonization.

The anti-Semitic agitation in Palestine is led by a handful of would-be dictators who not only want the Jews out of the country, but would eject all the Christians and Englishmen as well.

How this transcription was made

Read from the scan at 6x. NOTHING ON THIS CLIPPING IS DATED: no masthead, no folio, no page number, no copyright line and no dateline, so the newspaper and the date of 8 June 1927 rest on the hand-typed slide label alone. The YEAR is corroborated from outside this clipping, in that the same article by the same writer appears elsewhere in this batch carrying “(Copyright, 1927.)”. THE NEWSPAPER IS NEW TO THIS ARCHIVE: no record under this title existed before and no masthead is available to settle the form of the name. THE SAME ARTICLE APPEARS ELSEWHERE IN THIS BATCH under a different headline, three days earlier, AND THE TWO TEXTS ARE NOT IDENTICAL. This printing opens “There is still misapprehension amongst sections of American public opinion” where the other opens “There is still some misapprehension among sections”; the same among/amongst difference recurs at “no unrest amongst the mass of the Arab population”; and this printing sets “reecived” where the other sets “received”. The openings were compared at magnification on both scans. Anything matching these printings on exact strings will miss the pair. “Reecived” is kept as this compositor set it. The bracketed paragraph naming Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick is the paper’s own note on why it is running the piece and is transcribed where it sits, not as a deck. The right-hand inch of every line in the second column is faded almost to white; it was readable at 6x, and it is the half of the article not transcribed here.

Cite this clipping

"Making a California in Palestine," Seattle Union Record, 8 June 1927. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1927-030. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1927-030