(2 of 2)
2) a restricted zone, where Jewish purchases could be made only by "special permission"; 3) a small free zone, where Jews could still buy. Obviously this represented an Arab victory, a Jewish defeat, and loud was the cry of the Palestine Jewish Agency, its friends in the U. S. and Great Britain.
The Labor Party attacked the bill, introduced in the House of Commons a motion of censure. And last week Colonial Secretary MacDonald faced at long last his political trial by ordeal. He had to stand before the House and take the withering attacks of Parliamentary opponents, and he had to know the answers. Cried Laborite Philip J. Noel Baker: "In the last war the Jews were very strong. They had great influence in many lands, and we desired their help. . . . Today the Jews are weak and a hunted race. . . . It was because their influence had gone that we dared to do this shameful act today, to repudiate the moral contract we made with them when the Great War was going on."
Conservative Back-Bencher Captain Victor Cazalet snorted that the Government, by mollycoddling the Arabs, risked giving the world an impression that Britain is "prepared to make terms with the enemy." Liberal Sir Archibald Sinclair argued that the League of Nations should have been consulted, accused the Government of "presuming to be the judge of its own case."
In rebuttal Secretary MacDonald spoke for 80 minutes, and veterans of the House declared that he gave a bang-up Parliamentary performance. He pointed out that it was the impoverished Arab working class who suffered when wealthy Arab landlords sold out to Jews. These ousted Arab workers, he warned, made ideal tinder for an uprising.
"If there were trouble in Palestine, there would be repercussions in Trans-Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and India," continued the Secretary. "... I must tell the House that we have had the sternest warnings in recent weeks that, despite appearances in Palestine, there was beneath the surface growing unrest in Arab villages and growing suspicion that the British Government was not sincere in its professions that it would protect Arab cultivators, peasants and laborers." At the end Secretary MacDonald received a rousing ovation, and a motion of nonconfidence, the first raised against the Government since the war began, was defeated by the comfortable vote of 292-to-129—a far larger majority than that won by the Government on a similar Palestine question last May.
The Arabs had won a glorious victory in the British Parliament, and it was a bitter day for those many Jews who had labored so that—as Zionist Dr. Chaim Weizmann once put it—"Palestine should be just as Jewish as America is American and England is English." Malcolm Macdonald had passed his test.
*For a similar example of self-denial, see p. 42.