Dalia Ofer.pdf - WNLibrary

fa ESCAPING THE HOLOCAUST
employment as a whole. The White Paper introduced unemployment among
Arabs as grounds for halting aliyah, which would resume only after the reentry
of unemployed Arabs into the work force.
The Jews argued that in the Arab economy (which was predominantly
agricultural) seasonal unemployment was common; consequently, Arab
workers turned to urban employment only during the off-season, making it
difficult to accurately determine the extent of unemployment. Moreover,
given the imbalance in size of the Arab and Jewish sectors and the slow
modernization of the Palestine economy, the possibility existed that the
Arab work force could supply all the manpower needs of the Jewish sector
in developing the country, a possibility made all the more likely by the
frequent migrations of large numbers of Arabs from neighboring countries.
The impact of the 1930 White Paper would be to curtail Jewish labor immigration
entirely.
In 1931, the British acceded to the Jewish request that the two economies
be treated independently, as before. The Zionist Organization rallied British
public opinion and the British press and successfully persuaded the government
to retract its stated position. In a letter to Chaim Weizmann, the president
of the Zionist Organization, Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald,
confirmed that Britain intended to fulfill the policy first enunciated in the
Balfour Declaration, in effect nullifying the restrictions introduced in the 1930
White Paper.
The 1930 White Paper provoked the Zionist leadership further in its introduction
of the concept of "political limits to Jewish immigration." The
White Paper claimed that previous immigration policy had intensified Arab
distrust of Britain and aggravated Arab suspicion of Zionist intentions, thus
hindering a reconciliation between Jews and Arabs. In so doing, the White
Paper assigned Jewish immigration a political weight, though at this stage
measures addressing it as such had not been proposed.
During the 1930s, the British authorities and the Jewish Agency clashed
repeatedly over the absorptive capacity of the labor market in Palestine and
over the labor aliyah quota dependent on it. In years of economic depression
as well as in prosperous ones, British approval of immigration certificates fell
far short of Jewish Agency requests; at most 50 percent and as little as 20
percent of requests were granted. With the outbreak of the Arab Revolt
(1936-38), economic considerations gave way to political ones. The Mandatory
government set out to restructure the immigration schedules as a
whole, fixing as a maximum limit 4,450 certificates for the six-month period
March to September 1936—a substantial decrease compared to the total of
18,000 set for the previous six months.
The Peel Commission report, published in July 1937, imposed explicitly
political considerations on further aliyah. In a special regulation, it enabled
the high commissioner to set an absolute maximum on the number of immigrants
and to establish limits within each category. This regulation was
intended to remain in force for one year (from July 1937 to August 1938).
The Peel Commission report also recommended a partition plan for Palestine,