PALESTINE: Plans

The murderous Arab-Jewish dispute over Palestine in the past ten weeks has left 1,700 Arabs, Jews, British soldiers and police dead or wounded. Into this bloody mess last week stepped the figure of Seyyid Tawfik al Suwaidi, Foreign Minister of Iraq. Invited to London by the British, Seyyid Tawfik conferred last week with the only Jew in the Chamberlain Cabinet, War Secretary Leslie Hore-Belisha, and with Scottish Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald. Seyyid Tawfik then proffered a plan. Ignoring Britain’s original idea of partition, he proposed that Palestine be set up as an independent state under British influence, similar in status to Iraq, that further immigration of Jews be prohibited and that the population be stabilized at the present ratio of 900,000 Arabs, 400,000 Jews. London Zionists, dead set against any plan in which the Jews would have minority status, howled that if the Iraqi’s plan were accepted the Jews would be “sold down the river like Czechoslovakia.”

The Iraqi proposal was only one of a number under consideration. Meanwhile, a British commission sent to the Holy Land to report on the workability of partition was laboriously drafting its conclusions, expected to reveal them in three weeks. In Rome, British Ambassador Lord Perth conferred with Italian Foreign Minister Count Ciano on several topics, one of which was reported to have been the possibility of diverting further Jewish emigration from Europe to Ethiopia, rather than Palestine (see p. 23).