Into Three Parts?

At a single sitting one morning last week the new British Cabinet of beak-nosed, decisive Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain resolved that the way to end 17 years of bickering and battle between Jews and Arabs in Palestine is to carve them up into separate countries. Protestant and Catholic Irish were thus carved asunder in 1921, and although objectors to this drastic British measure did not stop at murder, strife has subsided between Protestant Northern Ireland and the Catholic Irish Free State (see col. 2). The Cabinet last week sent Minister of Colonies William Ormsby-Gore directly over to the House of Commons to announce the partition of Palestine as a general principle, ordered released within a few days the 400-page report on Palestine of its Royal Commission chairmanned by Earl Peel.

Arabs had no way of knowing what was in the report except from Jewish news dispatches from London which said the Royal Commission would report that "the national aspirations of the Jews and Arabs in Palestine are irreconcilable" and that a solution can be found "only in the establishment of two separate States and the division of the country between Jews and Arabs."

Jewish sources published hastily drawn maps which differed considerably. All agreed, however, that the Jewish State will be in the north of Palestine, mainly along the Mediterranean; that the Arab State will be in the south, mainly inland; that His Majesty's Government will retain for themselves a corridor running inland from the port of Jaffa to such Biblical holy places as Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Some Jewish insiders opined that this British corridor will bend north at Jerusalem and extend all the way to Nazareth, others were sure it would stop at Jerusalem. Most agreed that Judea will be given to the Arabs.

In Jerusalem stacks of freshly printed placards and pamphlets proclaiming martial law were on hand, ready in case of trouble to be posted up or dropped from British bombing planes. The battle cruiser Repulse sped from Malta to Palestine this week, her decks carrying a full flight of airplanes. Mild High Commissioner Sir Arthur Grenfell Wauchope, who has governed Palestine for several years with a policy of "muddling through," was reported in Jerusalem dispatches as slated to receive a peerage and be replaced in Palestine by drastic Sir John Anderson, the efficiently ruthless sahib who, as Governor of Bengal, suppressed a series of assassinations of British officials by natives which had reached anarchic proportions. Sir John Anderson is never quoted as uttering such homilies as Sir Arthur Grenfell Wauchope's often repeated dictum: "I am a good Christian and opposed to bloodshed." In case the Arabs rise, declared Palestine's leading Zionist newsorgan, "the Jews are prepared to shed their last drop of blood in a war waged for the defense of our last hopes!"

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