Forcing Palestine to Become a World Problem

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Transcribed from the clipping

“After a quarter-century’s experience in administering Palestine under mandate originally extended by the now defunct League of Nations, the British government appears helpless to settle upon a policy for the region’s future that would be acceptable to both Arab and Jewish populations. Britain’s trouble in that regard is mainly of its own making.

It has not been the impartial, disinterested referee that the administrator of an international mandate should be. Britain’s own interests in the Near East often have moved its government to play one element against another in a series of events that have caused an irreparable schism between Palestine’s most powerful factions.

London has become increasingly discouraged by its failure to obtain with the United States an agreement as to what the Palestine policy should be, as well as by American refusal to bear an equal share of the responsibility for maintaining order in the troubled region should Anglo-American proposals for settling the question be put into action.

Former Prime Minister Churchill lately was moved to suggest that Britain resign its Palestine mandate — a drastic proposal for that longtime champion of empire.

Actually, the Palestine question is an international issue — and one which could be reasonably interpreted as endangering the peace — that has reached the point where it should be handled by the United Nations. It should be placed on the agenda of the U.N. Assembly and Security Council at the earliest opportunity.

The question involves many thousand displaced persons in devastated Europe who desire to emigrate to Palestine, the Jewish and Arab peoples in residence, and the Arabs in a half-dozen other states. Also interwoven in the issue are the opposing Near East interests, strategic and economic, of the Soviet Union and Britain and, to a lesser extent, the United States.

The trouble simply is beyond the British government’s ability to settle. It also is too broad for satisfactory solution to be found by joint Anglo-American action, even could those two parties agree. The situation existing in Palestine poses a world problem of the type which the United Nations Organization was specifically designed to handle.

Should it prove unable to do so with reasonable satisfaction to all parties’ legitimate interests, it would be time to recognize the failure of the organization as it is presently constituted.”

Context added by this archive

An American editorial in 1947 naming Britain’s own interests as the cause of the schism, and treating the Arab and Jewish populations as two peoples in residence.

A correction

arrived captioned The Recorder 2019; content places it around 1947

Cite this clipping

"Forcing Palestine to Become a World Problem," (newspaper unidentified), 1 January 1947, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1947-001. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1947-001