I am still an invalid and fear I
cannot write to you a long letter giving you in detail my view of the
Palestine Report and the strange thoughts and feelings
which it has engendered or is likely to engender in the mind of
the Indian Muslims as well as the Muslims of Asia generally. I
think it is time for the National League of England to rise to the
occasion and to save the British people from this great injustice
to Arabs to whom definite promises were given by British
politicians in the name of the British people. Through wisdom
alone comes power; and when power abandons the ways of wisdom and
relies upon itself alone, its end is death.
Prince Muhammad Ali of Egypt has made a constructive suggestion
which must receive consideration from the British people. We must
not forget that Palestine does not belong to England. She is
holding it under a mandate from the League of Nations which Muslim
Asia is now learning to regard as an Anglo-French institution
invented for the purpose of dividing the territories of weaker
Muslim peoples. Nor does Palestine belong to the Jews who
abandoned it of their own free will long before its possession by
the Arabs. Nor is Zionism a religious movement. Apart from
movement, the Palestine Report itself has brought out this fact in
perfectly clear manner. Indeed the impression given to the
unprejudiced reader is that Zionism as a movement was deliberately
created not for the purpose of giving a national home to the Jews
but mainly for the purpose of giving a home to British imperialism
on the Mediterranean littoral. The Report amounts on the whole to
a sale under durance to the British of the Holy Places in the
shape of the permanent mandate which the Commission has invented
in order to cover their imperialistic designs. The price of this
sale is amount of money to the Arabs plus an appeal to their
generosity and a piece of land to the Jews.
I do hope that British statesmen will abandon this policy of
actual hostility to the Arabs and restore their country to them. I
have no doubt that Arabs will be ready to come to an understanding
with the English and if necessary with the French also. If the
British people are duped by propaganda against the Arabs, I fear
the consequences of the present policy will be grave.