The British White Paper: 80 Years Later - by Larry Domnitch

This move by the British came as the culmination of over 20 years of intermittent waves of Arab terror, and at the end of three years of devastating Arab riots in British Mandatory Palestine.

Larry Domnitch..
Algemeiner..
19 May '19..

Eighty years ago, an ominous and devastating policy was enacted by the British government that would wreak severe destruction upon the Jewish people.

The MacDonald White Paper, named after the colonial Foreign Secretary Malcolm MacDonald, was proposed on May 17 and ratified on May 22, 1939. That week, British commitments to facilitate a Jewish state under the terms of the 1917 Balfour Declaration were essentially nullified. The White Paper also denied Jews desperately needed refuge as the Nazi threat emerged.

On November 9, 1938, the British government announced its intention to invite representatives of the Arabs in Palestine and nearby countries to confer with Jewish representatives at a London conference in search of a solution to the vast differences between them. The proposed meetings were a futile venture, as the Arabs refused to even sit with the Jews. Separate meetings were held, and they ended predictably with no resolution.

Under the MacDonald White Paper, the Peel Commission’s 1937 recommendation of the partition of the land of Israel was rejected. Jewish immigration would be restricted to 15,000 per year over the next five years, and land purchases by Zionists would be severely restricted as well. Any further immigration after the five years would be determined by the Arab majority, which would essentially terminate the Zionist enterprise.

This move by the British came as the culmination of over 20 years of intermittent waves of Arab terror, and at the end of three years of devastating Arab riots in British Mandatory Palestine.

The fact that the British Mandate over Palestine was a responsibility granted by an outside party, the League of Nations at San Remo in 1922, and therefore did not exclusively grant carte blanche to the British to act as they pleased, meant little since that organization was now of minimal importance. Anyway, who would hold the British accountable when their respective nations also had imposed severe quotas on Jewish immigration?

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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But there is one document that the British really should apologize for - by Elder of Ziyon

...Six million were murdered. Tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, would have been saved if it wasn't for the British White Paper. The disgusting policy of appeasement of what the paper paper literally called "Arab terrorists" - led to the deaths of untold numbers of Jews. If anyone is going to ask for apologies from the British, it should be the Jewish people for the immoral policy that sentenced so many of our relatives to death.

A Jewish demonstration against
the White Paper, 1939

Elder of Zion..
01 November '16..

On this 99th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, Arabs are starting a major campaign to force Great Britain to apologize for issuing it.

This is absurd, of course, for a number of reasons. The The Balfour Declaration was incorporated into the San Remo Resolution and became international law that set aside the entire area of Palestine to become a Jewish national home. This law is still effective today. The campaign is really an effort to deny Jews their right to self-determination.

But there is one document that the British really should apologize for.

The 1939 White Paper severely restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine at the very moment that the Jews of Europe faced death.

The British who wrote it pretended that it was all fair and proper, of course:

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Seventy Years Ago, Palestinian Arabs Threw Away Chance to Prevent Israel's Creation; Following the Same Policies Today

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
22 December 09

The greatest opportunity ever to prevent Israel’s creation and instead make the entire land a Palestinian Arab state took place in 1939, specifically on May 17, 1939, seventy years ago.

What is truly remarkable is that the debate at that time and on that specific day was almost precisely identical to the situation on the day you’re reading this article. If you can understand these events, it is possible to comprehend why the conflict has ended this long with no end in sight.

Let’s set the scene. The British knew that another war was on the horizon with Germany and Italy ready to disrupt their control of the Mediterranean and Middle East. Fearful of Arab revolts in alliance with their fascist enemies, London was ready to give lots of concessions to them.

On the Palestine issue, the British government was so desperate that it offered an amazing deal. A single Palestine state (the British had conceded to Arab opposition over the word "federal") would be established in ten years with an Arab majority. Land sales to Jews would be prohibited in most of the country and Jewish immigration would be strictly limited. If the Arabs had agreed, Israel would never have been established. As it was, the British implemented the immigration restrictions any way, dooming hundreds of thousands of Jews in Europe to horrible deaths.

But the Arabs in Palestine rejected the proposed political deal to put them in charge of the government with a timetable for turning the country over to them. They walked out of negotiations with Britain, ostensibly over the ten-year waiting period. Most importantly, they believed that their goals could be achieved more quickly and completely through a combination of an Arab uprising and an Axis military victory in the coming war.

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Another Tack: It's not the settlements, stupid

Sarah Honig
JPost
03 September 09

Without historical context there can be no real understanding of existential issues, certainly not of essential continuities. That's why those who seek to obfuscate and skew do their utmost to erase telltale fundamental perspectives and present whatever they focus upon as cogent isolated concerns.

Case in point: US President Barack Obama's fixation on settlements, whether they be a collection of squatters' makeshift lean-tos on a stony hill in the middle of a barren nowhere or entire populous urban quarters of Jerusalem.

The real issue is a layer deep beneath surface palaver. It's a layer which Arabs implicitly understand, which Jews pretend (or prefer) not to understand, and which Obama righteously denies. To paraphrase what Bill Clinton hectored during his first presidential campaign: "It's not the settlements, stupid."

Settlements are mere transitory pretexts, alleged irritants which in fact conceal a far darker but basic truth.

Obama hints at it when he admonishes against creating "new facts on the ground" ahead of the deal he proclaims he's about to concoct. Peace is feasible providing Israelis effectively stay inanimate and refrain from altering reality beyond the non-border (1949's armistice line, a.k.a. the Green Line). Otherwise they jeopardize Obama's magic remedy to all that ails the region but which thus far eluded cure by lesser healers than himself. His unspoken apparent assumption is that whatever betokens Israeli/Jewish life and vitality perforce undermines harmony and bliss. Bottom line priority - weaken Israeli/Jewish interests.

THIS HAS been the Arab subtext since the very advent of Zionism, though at different intervals the casus belli assumed different facades. In all instances the pro forma grievance was that Jews were "changing facts on the ground," just as now.

On occasion, as currently, the outcry centered on settlements, or more specifically on land purchases. (Jews weren't always accused of robbing Arab land. Sometimes their crime was buying stretches of wasteland.) At times it was immigration.

Often, it was both, as in the days of the infamous White Paper, published by Britain just months before the outbreak of World War II, when the Holocaust was about to be kick-started. Germany's Jews were already shorn of citizenship and stateless. Hitler's threats were well recorded, shouted in the world's face and hardly kept a secret.

Besides its draconian curbs on Jewish land ownership, the Neville Chamberlain government's White Paper also set a limit of 10,000 Jewish immigrants annually for a five-year period. It magnanimously allowed an additional 25,000 quota for the entire five years to allow for "refugee emergencies." Any post-1944 Jewish entry would necessitate Arab permission.

It must be recalled that Jews were at the time fleeing in all directions to escape Hitler's hell. The White Paper encompassed all the goodwill the international community could reluctantly muster, lest "changes on the ground" occur that would rile the Arabs in and around the Jewish homeland.

The fault wasn't Britain's alone. Obama's White House predecessor was fully complicit. Franklin Roosevelt unreservedly shared the predispositions of his European counterparts. Likewise, Obama isn't the sole pro-Arab Western leader today. He is unreservedly in line with kindred European Union pompous pontificators. The unholy Allied prewar mind-set has been revived.
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