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-; v-'.T; Arnold ,'. t. Toynbee is a ' X'-1-': �/�Yl graduate of Oxford,:: He was ; ; /. ft member of the AHddle East-�;X::XX: Nerti Section of the British del- -\-:X:;~-..r '�,} egatidn at\$he,'Peace Confer-^. v' erice. He is; the author of ;X'-u NatlonaJity and .the War, The New Europe, and Chapters on Greece and- the Balkans.
. ^jP\Actiona.{tha^ would be'.regarded as-J.j^c^ficV^iri'^.pr^ary .-life soften pass ?�'*'&fll^$tit?f ern&rk in'"'the' world, of inter-'-"-'jt'-;��' ^'ia^AalfpoHtic8' / For example, sup-\XX<p09\n^ twov commodities had been 'XiiXX'p?OY$d'by l/equent .experience, to ex-; .'ploae ,6n' contact with one another, v-�. . -� a person--'fiad In g himself in possession X]["< of: premises stocked with one of these' i jfoie'rials';,wpiild -naturally: be (jeterreoV <;>rvy -i>y the fatal ^accidents that had over-^;^'''t!ifeeri his heighpofs, from introducing 'fXXX71hto\the same premises a large consign-, I'X&XXjbtnt �* ^e �ther substance. - He XX:'X ..would be still more cautious if he were V-V-'n'- ',-iipt an owner or tenant blit a trustee. ��.>>-/.' And yet the government on whom the mandate for Palestine has been XiX- '.centred hag'committed itself to at feast
as hazardous a policy. All round ^Palestine, in countries where there is >a mixed population, and no mandatary :;in, control, explosions are occurring. -Anatolia;'In particular, has fallen jnto a chronic state of war; Greeks are Swiping- out-Turks and Turks Greeks, and there seems ho prospect of the destruction coming to an end until "one- nationality or the other has been eliminated and .their common country 'permanently ruined. In the meantime in Palestine, the British govern-' rhent having undertaken to",assist the local population to lead an independent 'Existence at the earliest possible moment under the strenuous conditions of modern life, is deliberately trying to /introduce, "bi-nationalism," with all its dangers and difficulties, into what has hitherto been a comparatively homogeneous country'.
The essence of the Western political .idea called "nationality" is' that a homogeneous population should be exclusive and absolute sovereign over a block of territory marked off by frontiers frorn the rest of the habitable world, tt is a system which has grown out of the special conditions of the region where it originated, and-whicfc is more pr less unsuitable to societies that have developed on different lines. Hence the explosions that have coincided with
^ its: advent among the mixed populations, of the Near and Middle East. But the triumph of nationalism in the East is an inevitable consequence of
.the ascendency of Western civilization. Its progress from one region
/and one population to another cannot be stayed. And in these circumstances it is a strange policy to accentuate, in
. an Eastern country, like Palestine, those, very conditions which make Nationality, in the East, such a dangerous novelty.
Before the War, Palestine contained . about 600,000 Arabic-speaking Moslems and Christians (the former greatly predominating) and 100,000 Jews. Of these Jews, the majority were urban. . They were crowded together in Jerusalem and in one or two country towns, and the forty agricultural colonies which had been planted successfully during the past. forty years only accounted for about 12,000 persons. In these circumstances, the rise of national ieeliog produced two effects. On the Pne hand, the Moslem and Christian 'Arabs began to feel themselves one with their Arab neighbors; especially with those of Syria,, from which Palestine is divided by no physical boundaries. On the other hand, the Palestinian Jews, especially the agricultural coionbta, and, still more, a majority of the Jewish "Disbermon" all over the Wpt)d* began to look forward to making .+v><^. evtntuaHy their own in the
sense in which the United States belongs to the American people or France to the French. '
These two slowly materializing claims were made concrete and urgent by the War, and the British government enlisted the sympathy and support of both, claimants by promising to do something for'each of them. Without prejudice to the position of the existing inhabitants of the country, Palestine was to be made, a Jewish "National Home'* a:nd the present trouble arises primarily from a belief, widely prevalent'among the Arabs and pot absent among a section of the Zionists, that one clause of this undertaking 4s in-cpmpatible ^ with the otper. Some Zionists insist that "National' Home" is a meaningless phrase unless Palestine is (o be as Jewish, as England is English-�an interpretation which has just been expressly repudiated by the British government, but which is, it must-be* confessed, the ordinary notion of a nation's rights in its "home" heritage, however impossible a dream it may be in Palestine f6r the Jews. On the other side, the Arabs almost
universally maintain, -^ith equal reason, that it will and must prejudice their position if the>Palestinian Jews, who nave hitherto been a passive/and unaggressive minority, are to haveN a pnor.cUim to acquiring the undeveloped resources of the country, are to increase their numbers by immigration until they equal or surpass those of the Arabs, and are to have the Hebrew language�which very few, even among the Palestinian' Jews,s speak as their vernacular/ or mother tongue�placed on an official equality with Arabic in the administration. Indeed, these ^are all eventualities which the majority Voujd attempt to rule out by legislation if they possessed self-government, and Mr. Churchill has in fact declared this to be a rea&on why the Palestinian Arabs cannot now enjoy the same independence as those of Mesopotamia to whom the mandatory power has given a native Arab government, with which it is settling its relations in the form of a treaty between one independent state and another. "There is no question," Mr. Churchill wrote on the first of March last to the Palestine Arab Delegation, "of treating the people of Palestine as tess advanced than their neighbors in Iraq and Syria. . . . . If your Delegation really represents the present attitude of the majority of the Arab population of Palestine," (and Mr. Churchill has no grounds for suggesting that this is not
.the case) "it is quite' clear tbat# the creation at this stage of a national government would preclude the ful-Bllment of the pledge made by the British government to the Jewish people."
_ Thus the natural national expectations of the Jews and th& Arabs are both doomed to disappointment by the, fact that the mandatory power has commitments to. both, and it is � ./e^ent that a country which has-, to be a\"national home" for two nations, cannot be one for either of them in the usual sense of the. term. At the same time, it is clear that the British government�as well as the American, French and Italian governments, . all of which endorsed the Balfour Declaration�is committed to "bi-nationalism" in Palestine, however highly explosive this political compound may be. The hazardous experiment must be carried forward, and the Zionist organization has now officially accepted the British government's program of procedure. This shows very praiseworthy strength of mind and moderation on their part, when the pressure of the extremists is taken into account. But after all, the Jews have everything to gain by a regime under which they will be able to rise from being a small minority to becoming equal to or even stronger than the Arabs; and to the Arabs this is bound to seem merely
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