Refugee Problem to Linger Even if Hitler Is Defeated

Palestine Believed Capable of Accommodating 3 Millions More; Miracle Wrought There in Decade

By DR. BERNARD JOSEPH, Legal Adviser of the Jewish Agency for Palestine. Special to the Buffalo Evening News.

Refugee Problem to Linger Even if Hitler Is Defeated — Buffalo Evening News, 23 April 1941 — Buffalo Evening News · Buffalo, New York · 23 April 1941

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Transcribed from the clipping

“NEW YORK, April 23.—The refugee problem will not come to an end with the defeat of Fuehrer Hitler. On the contrary, this vast human tragedy which has grown increasingly acute with the expansion of Nazi power will confront the world with one of the most crucial issues of the day.

Hundreds of thousands of men, women and children will have to be re-established and rehabilitated…

Population 1,525,000. How many more Jews can Palestine take in? The total population of Palestine is 1,525,000. In Bibical times Palestine sustained a population of from 4,000,000 to 5,000,000 persons and those were not the days of the tractor and scientific cultivation of the soil which the Jewish pioneers have introduced during the past two decades.

Immigration and absorptive capacity represent a cycle. Every new immigrant may be said to bring his own obsorptive capacity in his suitcase… Today there is a system of 257 agricultural colonies stretching from one end of the country to the other which support a rural population of more than 137,000 Jews… Since the issuance of the Balfour Declaration on Nov.

2, 1917, a series of governmental commission have made pilgrimages to Palestine with extraordinary regularity to determine how many settlers Palestine could maintain.

More than ten years ago, when the Jewish population was less than 250,000, a distinguished British official declared that the country was so crowded that there was not room left in which to swing a cat… in Palestine in the past 20 years, the rebuilt Jewish homeland has the capacity to provide homes for an additional 3,000,000 immigrants… Desert wastes, malaria-infested swamps and rocky soil have been reclaimed and placed under cultivation for the first time in centuries through the toil and sacrifice of young Jewish settlers… If the Jewish problem is to be solved constructively, if anti-Semitism and the homelessness of a people are to disappear, the Jews have a right to expect that out of the peace treaties to follow the end of this war will emerge a Jewish Commonwealth in Palestine.”

Context added by this archive

A full page arguing that Palestine can absorb three million more people. It is signed by the legal adviser of the Jewish Agency and printed as reporting, not as opinion. The piece gives one number that includes Palestinians — “the total population of Palestine is 1,525,000” — and uses it as the denominator for how many more can fit.

Palestinians are not named anywhere in the article, and no sentence asks what they thought. The one British finding that the country was already full is quoted only to be laughed at: “not room left in which to swing a cat.” Bernard (Dov) Joseph later wrote The Faithful City, the book a Duluth reader would cite in a 1979 letter held in this archive.

“Bibical” and “obsorptive” are the paper’s own spellings.

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"Refugee Problem to Linger Even if Hitler Is Defeated," Buffalo Evening News, 23 April 1941. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1941-001. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1941-001