The Jewish Trail of Tears The Evian Conference of ... - Haruth.com

Unlimited Jewish migration into Palestine, however, was an entirely “untenable”
proposition due its territorial size, “special considerations” arising out of the British
Mandate, “as well as the local situation [the Arabs], which cannot be ignored.” 36 The
Arabs feared that the refusal of the democracies to accept a “relatively small number of
refugees” could translate into a drastic demographic shift in Palestine should the
Mandatory Power allow the entry of thousands of Jews; a move, of course, favored by the
Zionists as the “only answer to Hitler.” 37 61,000 Jewish refugees had entered Palestine in
1935 but the Royal or Peel Commission of 1937, investigating the possibilities of
partitioning the Mandate, recommended that Jewish immigration be capped at 12,000 per
annum. However, in that year only 10,500 actually landed. The admittance level rose in
1939 to 16,400 but following the direction of the Woodhead Commission and the
issuance of the White Paper of May 1939 British policy would only allow the
resettlement of 75,000 over the next five years after which further Jewish immigration
would be terminated. By October 1936 the population of Palestine consisted of seven
hundred thousand Arabs and four hundred thousand Jews. 38
Henri Bérenger began his formal presentation by lauding France’s long history
and tradition of offering asylum to refugees. He acknowledged, however, that current
Arab Unity Programme,” Middle Eastern Studies 20, no. 4 (October 1984):79-80. Echoing similar
sentiments was Sheik Hafiz Wahba, the Saudi Minister to London, who warned Jews that peace in
Palestine was dependent upon Jewish concessions to maintain permanent minority status. The Sentinel,
July 7, 1938, 3.
36 Sanders, Shores of Refuge, 442.
37 Thomas Baylis, How Israel Was Won: A Concise History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Lanham, MD:
Lexington Books, 1999), 32.
38 Geoffrey Wheatcroft, The Controversy of Zion: Jewish Nationalism, the Jewish State, and the
Unresolved Jewish Dilemma (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1997), 209; Porath, “Nuri al-Said,” 79.
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