Evening Star · Washington, District of Columbia · 14 January 1934

CP-1934-001

British Policy Now Forces It to Help Arabs Ousted From Palestine Farms

Jerusalem, Palestine

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Transcribed from the clipping

“JERUSALEM, Palestine.—The supreme irony of England’s policy in Palestine is that it must spend a good part of its energies in trying to undo its own work.

British support of Zionism has so jeopardized the situation of the Arabs that the government is now engaged in trying to restore the balance between the two peoples which its own policy destroyed… So many Arabs were forced off their farms by Jewish land purchases that the government has felt obliged to set up elaborate machinery for tracing these Arabs and resettling them on other land and to prevent eviction of any more tenant farmers by future land sales.

The superior capital resources of Jewish farmers were enabling them to resist crop failures and other difficulties so much better than the Arabs could that the Arab farmers are faced with almost literal extinction… The ‘register of landless Arabs’ was set up after expert British investigators reported that large numbers of Arabs were being forced off their farms by Jewish land purchases and that these Arabs were a danger to law and order and faced ultimate starvation.

The register was designed to identify these Arabs with a view to settling them on other land. This program failed. The Arabs themselves solved the problem. Eight hundred twenty-one families, or about 4,500 persons, were finally registered as having lost their lands and found no other means of making a livelihood as a result of Jewish land purchases.

The government then offered to sell some of these families new lands to cultivate. The Arabs refused the land offered. This stalemate has only just been broken by the Arab Youth Conference Executive, which bought land near that which the farmers had lost and offered it to them. The farmers have now accepted it.

The government’s resettlement program met with bitter criticism from both Arabs and Jews. Jews protested against the use of public funds, raised by taxation of themselves, as well as of the Arabs, to help only Arabs.

The government had no responsibility, Jews maintained, toward tenants who had no rights to the land they cultivated and who in many cases had actually received money bonuses from Jewish purchasers to vacate. The Arabs could find other work to support themselves, the Jews said.

Arabs claimed that the land offered the landless farmers was so different from that which they had left that they could not cultivate it, that it was malarious, that it was ‘near the Transjordanian frontier and thus betrayed a government intention gradually to force the Arabs out of the country, and that the land was to be administered by a Jew.’

The conditions under which Arabs were accepted for registration were so ridiculous that only a small proportion of those entitled to help were even offered it, according to Arabs.”

Context added by this archive

A British colonial register of people who had lost their land, explained to American readers in 1934, with a number on it: eight hundred and twenty-one families. Both arguments are printed at length, including the Jewish one that the tenants had no rights to the land they farmed and had taken money to leave it.

The subheadings are “Faced Literal Extinction,” “Arabs Solve Own Problem,” “Remits $967,500 in Tithes” and “Criticize Government Loans.” The column beside it is headed “Nazi Movement Finds South Africans Cold.”

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