Summary
His Majesty’s Government’s October 1930 statement of policy in Palestine (Cmd. 3692), presented by the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Passfield: it reaffirms the June 1922 statement, holds the Mandate’s two obligations to be of equal weight, revives the Legislative Council, and makes further Jewish agricultural settlement, land transfers and Labour Schedule immigration conditional on a Government-led development policy and on the total of unemployment in Palestine (Palestine: Statement of Policy by His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom, lines 111-347).
Details
- The statement was framed after the Shaw Commission report published in April 1930 and after receipt of Sir John Hope Simpson’s report on land settlement, immigration and development, pressure to anticipate that report having been resisted (lines 111-115).
- Its land finding is that with present methods of Arab cultivation there remains no margin of land for new agricultural settlement outside the Jewish agencies’ reserves; its immigration finding is that the Labour Schedule must be set by the total of unemployed in Palestine, Arab as well as Jewish, and its May 1930 suspension of further Labour Schedule certificates beyond the 950 already sanctioned is held fully justified (lines 273, 329-343).
- In Wolfe’s account the White Paper carried the Shaw and Hope Simpson recommendations to restrict Jewish immigration and land purchases, and was then negated by the memorandum Palestinian Arabs dubbed the “Black Letter”, penned by Malcolm MacDonald and signed by Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald (Purchase by Other Means: The Palestine Nakba and Zionism’s Conquest of Economics, PDF p.17 / printed p.149, as recorded on Shaw Commission).
- In Banko’s account, Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald’s February 1931 letter to Chaim Weizmann retracted the recommendations and reaffirmed the Balfour Declaration, and no drastic changes to immigration or naturalisation followed (The Invention of Palestinian Citizenship, 1918–1947, PDF p.131 / printed p.120, as recorded on Shaw Commission).
Related pages
Palestine: Statement of Policy by His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom, Lord Passfield, British White Paper of June 1922, Shaw Commission, John Hope Simpson