[Enclosure]
Memorandum by the First Secretary of Embassy
in the United Kingdom (Schoenfeld)
I called on Mr. Baxter this afternoon and talked with him
regarding the status of preparations for the forthcoming London
discussions on Palestine.
Mr. Baxter told me that the status of acceptances was the same as
it had been a fortnight ago. Egypt, Iraq, Saudi-Arabia,
Transjordan and the Jewish Agency had accepted. But the Yemen’s
acceptance had not yet been received and the Palestinian Arab
delegation was still undetermined.
The Yemen’s acceptance, he thought, would be received in due
time. The British Government had originally been in doubt
whether the Yemen wished to participate and as it did not desire
to embarrass that country with an undesired invitation it had
sounded it out first. The Yemen indicated that it did wish to
receive an invitation and accordingly could be expected to
accept.
The Palestinian Arab delegation was of course the difficult
problem. The leaders were scattered in various countries. The
British Government naturally could not pick the delegation. He
could say, however, in strict confidence, that the Government
was working through the Governments of the three neighboring
Arab States, Iraq, Saudi-Arabia and Egypt, and by their
cooperation hoped to secure a representative Arab delegation
from Palestine.
The Government here, though it reserved the right to approve of
the delegation would, he thought, accept the list that the three
Governments mentioned and the other interested Arabs presented
to it. But the matter was not yet completed and considerable
delay was occasioned by the necessity for triangular (and indeed
polyangular) correspondence between the three States referred to
and the Arabs in Palestine and elsewhere.
The date for the discussions, Mr. Baxter said, was also still
open. The Government proposed to fix it as soon as the
Palestinian Arab delegation had been named. The discussions, he
thought, could not well take place before the middle of January,
since the Prime Minister (Mr. Chamberlain) and the Foreign
Minister (Lord Halifax) would be in Home from January 11 to 14.
The former planned to return to London on January 15 whereas the
latter would stop off at Geneva for a day or two for the meeting
of the League Council.
I mentioned the recent debates on Palestine in Parliament and the
fact that their tone had seemed to indicate a certain sympathy
for the Arab point of view. Mr. Baxter said that it had also
been his impression that there was a greater appreciation of the
Arab viewpoint than had often been the case in the past. The
Arabs, he said,
[Page 1000]
had
usually felt that their viewpoint was inadequately presented and
that the Jews, who through the Jewish Agency had almost direct
access to the British Government, understood this sort of thing
much better and had generally been more successful in presenting
the Zionist point of view.
I asked him how the Jews felt about the forthcoming discussions.
He said that the Zionists were in rather a despondent mood. They
had also been keenly dismayed by the recent decision of the
Government not to grant permits for 10,000 refugee children to
enter Palestine at this time. The Government, however, could not
risk prejudicing the success of the London discussions or of
getting the Arabs to the discussions by authorizing this
increased immigration on the very eve of the discussions.
I referred to Lord Samuel’s recent speech in the House of
Lords,17 in which he
summarized proposals he had previously advanced when the Peel
Report was under discussion, looking toward a system of
government by communities in Palestine, with reserved areas,
immigration based on a proportional population system, etc., and
a loose federation of Arab States, and asked whether this
represented a practical scheme. Mr. Baxter doubted whether it
would be acceptable either to the Jews or Arabs. With regard to
the idea of federation, this, he said, was talked of in Damascus
and some places in the Near East but it was hard to know how
much strength there was behind it. The French, he thought, would
dislike the idea as calculated to endanger their special
position in Syria. Their interest in Syria was not only historic
and sentimental but also practical, for one fork of the Iraq
pipe line branched off into Syria and it had strategic
importance in connection with the Suez Canal and Djibouti. As
for the idea itself insofar as the Arabs were concerned, he
found it hard to judge how much vitality there was in it.
