The Indianapolis News · Indianapolis, Indiana · 23 December 1937

CP-1937-013

Arabs Bitterly Determined to Oppose Palestine Partition

Filed beneath a year-in-review feature headed "APRIL, 1937: Hitler Talks of Nazi Need for Those Lost Colonies"

Webb Miller, United Press, Jerusalem via London

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Transcribed from the clipping

“JERUSALEM, via LONDON, December 23.—Bitter determination to resist the imposition of the British royal commission’s recommendations for the partition of Palestine into three parts is being increasingly manifested as the Christmas season approaches in the land of Christ’s birth.

Rioting, bloodshed and daily assassinations have increased in their recurrence… Foremost Arab leaders expressed undying opposition to the plan. I talked with leaders of every shade of political opinion who are still at liberty, including several Arabs at Beirut who fled into Lebanon to escape arrest and deportation.

There was surprising unanimity of opinion in refusing to agree to any form of ‘dismemberment.’ Extremist leaders said they intend to intensify their guerilla warfare and terrorist activities against the British and Jews, despite repressive measures, unless the partition scheme is abandoned.

They proclaimed their intention of continuing armed resistance as long as is necessary to attain their basic aim of independence. Arab rejection of partition is based chiefly on the following outstanding points:

1. Partition withholds what Arabs regard as their inalienable right to complete independence in all Palestine’s soil, similarly to the neighboring independent Arab states.

2. In the section provisionally delimited by the royal commission as comprising the suggested Jewish state, there live 325,000 Arabs as compared to 300,000 Jews.

3. The greater portion of the fertile coastal land has been assigned to the Jewish state, leaving the arid, rocky and infertile mountainous portion to the Arabs.

4. The proposed frontiers would throw a barrier between Arab Palestine and Arab Syria, which are linked by bonds of blood and culture, thus constituting a barrier to Arab unity.

5. The proposed British mandatory zone passes through lands principally Arab-owned and further infringes Arabian territorial unity.

6. Inclusion of Jerusalem in the British mandate, with its 75,000 Jews, 25,000 Moslems and 20,000 Christians, would result in its eventual control by Jewish interests, which would be intolerable in view of the location there of the holy places of the Moslem faith.

7. Of nearly 1,000,000 Arabs in Palestine, only about 570,000 would be included within the frontiers of the proposed Arab state.

8. The Jewish state is over-populated with immigrants, and the result would be Jewish aspirations for expansion.

9. The Jews are a minority of intruders whose political connections in Palestine ceased twenty centuries ago, while the Arabs have maintained unbroken residence more than thirteen centuries.

10. Britain’s imperial and military considerations have been permitted to outweigh justice to the Arabs…”

Context added by this archive

An American news agency printing the Arab case against partition as a numbered list, in the correspondent’s own summary of what he was told, eleven years before 1948. Above it on the same page: Hitler talking about Germany’s lost colonies, a dog column, and a notice that Woodruff Place would hold its annual Yule program.

Cite this clipping

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More from the 1930s

• Record Fruit Crop Grown On Farms of Holy LandBuffalo Evening News · 4 January 1937
• MUFTI SAYS LIBERTY IS AIM IN PALESTINEThe New York Times · 13 January 1937
• Palestine Arabs Charge PrejudiceChicago Defender · 30 January 1937
• $52,753,335 SPENT TO COLONIZE JEWSThe New York Times · 6 February 1937
• ARAB HUNGER STRIKE FREES 100 PRISONERSThe New York Times · 16 May 1937
• Text of Official Summary of the Royal Inquiry Commission’s Report on PalestineThe New York Times · 8 July 1937
• All 218 clippings from the 1930s →

In these collections

The same copy, in 2 other papers

• Arabs Watchful in Holy Land As Shepherds 1937 Yrs. AgoPaducah SunPaducah, Kentucky23 December 1937CP-1937-011
• Proposed Partition Of Palestine Is Bitterly Opposed By PeoplePaducah SunPaducah, Kentucky23 December 1937CP-1937-012

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.