THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW
ESTABLISHED 1840 REGISTERED AS A NEWSPAPER
VOL. 170 No. 5070
LONDON JULY 10th, 1937
SIXPENCE
PRINCIPAL CONTENTS
THE WORLD WEEK BY WEEK . . . 37
THE END O F THE ZIONIST EXPERIMENT ; JEW ISH D ISAPPOINTMENT : BRITAIN'S REAL INTEREST ; THE FOOLING OF THE PUBLIC ; FASCISM NOT INTERNATIONAL ; THE ATTEMPT ON SALAZAR ; THE UNREALITY O F FRENCH POLITICS ; THE FRENCH HOTEL CRISIS ; TOWARDS CORPORATIVISM IN THE STEEL INDUSTRY ; OVER-ZEALOUS FRIENDS OF DIVORCE LEADING ARTICLES
(i) The Church and the Churches
(ii) Before 65
. .
A CRITICISM OF MARX .............................. 42
. 4 0
41
III. The Doctrine and Method of Marx By M . C. D'ARCY, S .J . JULIAN THE APOSTATE .............................. 44
By J . BRODRICK, S.J. DUBLIN LETTER .......................................... 46 ROME LETTER......................................................47
A FAILING SENSE .......................................... 48
By A. WARREN DOW SELLING CREMATION
49
BOOKS OF THE WEEK .............................. 50
ORDEAL IN ENGLAND ; PO PE PAUL V ; IR ISH SAINTS IN ITALY ; ADONA IS ; TRAVEL BOOKS ; A LIBRARY LIST BOOKS FOR CHILDREN .............................. 56
By CECILY HALLACK THE CHURCH ABROAD .............................. 58 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.............................. 60 TOWN AND COUNTRY .............................. 62 THE CRUSADE OF RESCUE . 63 SCHOOL SPEECH DAYS .............................. 66 OBITUARIES ......................................................68
THE WORLD WEEK BY WEEK The End of the Zionist Experiment
There Can be no Real Security
In its largest bearings, the Report of the Royal Commission, which recommends the partitioning of Palestine, recommendations which the Cabinet has accepted, marks the end of the great experiment of Zionism under British protection. The Commission proposes to divide Palestine into a Sovereign Arab State and a Sovereign Jewish State, while Great Britain keeps under a special mandate Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth, with a corridor to the sea.
This last recommendation is a very welcome recognition that the Holy Land is not merely the concern of Mohammedans or Jews. The Arab State will be most of Palestine, the Jewish State no more than a third, and the Report is a decisive historical event because it marks the abandonment by Great Britain of the earlier policy that the Jews, as their numbers grew, were to possess themselves of all Palestine as their country.
Had Palestine been an island, it would have been arguable that they should have been admitted until they out-numbered the 900,000 Arabs ; but, in fact, the Arabs have behind them the Arab States of Asia Minor, and while British power could, at great cost, hold Palestine for the Jews, it could never give them confidence and security. The utmost it could give them would be police protection in a fiercely hostile environment, among men waiting for a day when Britain should be preoccupied elsewhere. Life in such circumstances would be but a mockery of the National Home, and we can only trust that the Zionist leaders will recognize with what honesty of intention we endeavoured through twenty years to make a national home possible. But the truth is that Great Britain can hold down the Arabs but cannot give the Jewish beneficiaries of the system any real feeling that they are secure and in their ov/n home.
What has wrecked these hopes has been the intensity of Arab Nationalism and the solidarity of feeling throughout the Near East. After the events of the last twelve months, and with parallel experience in India and Egypt, it would be deliberate day-dreaming to imagine that peace could be found in Palestine by any other measures. We can now appreciate how the Balfour declaration of twenty years ago in an over-sanguine way assumed that, as Palestine Arabs had for so long endured the domination of the Turk, it would be feasible to reserve one small portion of the old Ottoman Empire as a refuge for the Jews.
In fact, the increase of national feeling, hastened in many places by the War, but universal, produced the clash in Palestine which has made the country an uncomfortable one ever since Jewish immigration began to reach large figures. Between 1919 and 1931 there were 100,000 Jewish immigrants, three-quarters of them from Russia and Poland and Roumania, and nearly all the rest from Central Europe. Within the last five years, beginning with the 1933 exodus, another 150,000 entered Palestine, 35,000 from Germany. The total of Jews is now some 400,000, most of them recent immigrants.
The best hopes for the future lie in diminution of immigration so that the circumscribed Jewish State becomes a small regional settlement and no longer the projected basis of a country. Jewish Disappointment
The Jews, in the first wave of disappointment over proposals which end all hopes of Jerusalem once again becoming the capital of a Jewish State, look round on a world where few places offer them homes. They are having to recognize the bitter fact that the nineteenth century stands out as, relatively speaking, a Golden Age in their history, one in which their numbers increased vastly, when new countries were being opened up by international capital, which asked no questions about race. The twentieth century, which is witnessing the revival of national life and the reassertion of strong national ideals in country after country, has no similar welcome for these able, unhappy aliens, whose close connection with revolutionary movements in every country must increase the prejudice which they arouse whenever they pass beyond being a small and quiet minority.