Political report of the Executive of the Jewish Agency submitted to the ... Zionist Congress and the ... session of the Council of the Jewish Agency · 1937-08-01 · 8.1937 · p. Seite 71

71 and the issue of the White Paper of 1930, the assumption was spread abroad that Jewish land settlement had caused an inordinate increase of landless Arabs, that assumption has subsequently been refuted by the careful inquiry carried out by the Government in 1932-33. Only 656 Arabs have been found to come within the category of those who were displaced as a result of Jewish land purchase in the course of a period of over ten years. Only a fraction of this small total has declared its readiness to make use of the opportunities of re-settlement offered by the Government — a fact clearly showing that the remainder had in the meantime been absorbed into the economic life of the country. Moreover, the bulk of these 656 were not former land owners but tenant cultivators for the benefit of which category Government passed protective legislation in 1933. The Jewish Agency thus finds no justification based on facts for a new law restricting the freedom of landowners in disposing of their property. 7, The Jewish Agency is aware of the exemptions and reservations with which it is intended to fence the prohibition. The measure is not to apply to the Beersheba sub-district, nor to land planted with citrus or to urban land. The size of the inalienable subsistence areas will vary according to the different forms of cultivation prevailing in the various districts, and will be reduced in the course of time as land is improved or new irrigation possibilities discovered. The High Commissioner is furthermore to retain the power to allow the sale of subsistence areas if this be in the interests of the public good, by which is meant cases where the sale is necessary for suburban development or the development of rural land or for the execution of important drainage or irrigation schemes. Consideration is also to be given to the possibility of effecting exchanges of subsistence areas with a view to consolidating them into compact blocks, presumably in order to make land available for new colonisation. All these reservations, however, cannot alter the fundamentally negative character of the new measure as one restricting the scope of Jewish land settlement and representing Jewish colonisation as a menace to the future of the Arab agricultural population. 8. The Jewish Agency has made strong representations to the Mandatory Government against the introduction of this restriction. It has stressed in the course of those representations that the acquisition of land for settlement is the very essence of the Zionist endeavour and that there can be no security or healthy existence for the Jewish National Home without a broad and solid land basis. It has pointed to the contradictions and incompatibilities between the proposed measure and the express provisions of the Mandate and of the Prime Minister's letter. It has described the distress of large parts of the Jewish people in he Diaspora to whom Palestine today is the only haven of refuge and who must be