THE TRUTH ABOUT PALESTINE.
BRITISH PLEDGES IN FAVOUR OF JEWISH NATIONAL HOME.
This is not the place for a detailed presentation of the Zionist case. The "Official Statement" opens with an allusion to British pledges. It will be sufficient to remark that the British pledges in favour of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine were given publicly in the face of the world, that they are wholly unambiguous, and that they have been repeatedly, authoritatively, and unequivocally re-affirmed. They were renewed by Lord Curzon on assuming office as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in November, 1919; by Mr. Churchill during his official visit to Jerusalem in March, 1921; by His Majesty's Minister at Prague, representing the British Government at the Carlsbad Zionist Congress in September, 1921; and by Mr. Balfour at a Zionist reception at the British Embassy in Washington as recently as January, 1922. The list is by no means exhaustive, but it is sufficient to indicate the character of the engagements which the Palestine Arab Delegation invites the British people to repudiate.
PALESTINE AND THE BRITISH TAXPAYER.
For that repudiation the reward held out is the saving to the British taxpayer of "the huge amounts he is now spending in the country." The annual military expenditure involved (the Civil Administration is entirely self-supporting) is approximately £2,500,000,[1] or about one-fourth of one per cent. of the national expenditure. With the opening of a new financial year there is every reason to anticipate that even this relatively small expenditure will be appreciably reduced. Such are the "huge amounts" which the British taxpayer is invited to save by the repudiation of an explicit British pledge—this on the wholly unwarranted assumption that if no such obligations had been contracted, Great Britain could, in any circumstances, contemplate an immediate and a complete evacuation.
- ↑ Sir L. Worthington Evans, House of Commons, July 20th, 1921.
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