PALESTINE: Baljour Day

“Balfour Day”

Twenty-five thousand Jewish protestants against the “Passfield Declaration” on Palestine (TIME, Nov. 3 & 10) introduced themselves by main force last week into Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden (capacity 20,000). Perspiring police worked furiously to thin out the crush, finally drove a police car gently but firmly across the packed arena, ejecting by this means some 500 standees.

In immaculate evening clothes, Banker-Zionist Felix Moritz Warburg (Kuhn, Loeb & Co.) and other Jewish leaders addressed the crush from a platform draped with the Stars & Stripes. Irish little James John Walker was introduced as “The Mayor of the Greatest Jewish City in the History of the World.” His keynote: “My message to Downing Street is, ‘I wish we had twice as many Jews in New York as we have!’ ”

Harvard’s Professor Felix Frankfurter, chairman of the meeting, keynoted:

“For me, British honor remains British honor! I refuse to believe that [the Passfield Declaration] expresses the policy of His Majesty’s Government.”

Passfield Explains. In London His Majesty’s harassed Colonial Secretary, gnomelike Baron Passfield (Sidney Webb), wrote a letter to the London Times, tried to show that the policy set forth in his statement does not violate the Balfour Declaration under which Jews have been promoting their “National Home” in Palestine.

Primarily Lord Passfield scouted the charge that His Majesty’s Government proposes to stop all Jewish immigration to Palestine. Matter of fact the Colonial Office approved last week 1,500 immigration permits for the next six months. True this is a deep undercut, compared to the 2,300 permits issued during the last six months, but moderate Zionist spokesmen in London gave Lord Passfield credit for being several shades less black than New York’s more truculent Zionists were painting him.

Swede on Palestine. In Stockholm Judge Loefgren, chairman of the League of Nations Wailing Wall Commission, accused Jews of forgetting Britain’s promises to the non-Jewish population of Palestine. “It may be,” he declared, “that two promises equally valid are simultaneously impossible of fulfillment.” (i.e. Britain may have promised both Jews and Arabs more than she can give them both at once.)

Concluded Judge Loefgren: “We must not be astonished if the [British Labor] Government . . . tries to find a solution or an interpretation to make both ends meet. . . . Neither party [Jewish or Arab] is satisfied . . . the government has struck the right note in trying to mete out justice.”

In Palestine the 13th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration passed quietly, uneventfully last week, both Jews and Arabs cowed by British troops, afraid to demonstrate.