Reference
Speeches and Statements of Iqbal

Compiled by A. R. Tariq

First Edition, 1973
pp. 218-219
Information
Letter of 20th July 1937 to Miss Ferguharson giving
his views on the Palestine Report
Related Articles
The Partition of Palestine I
The Partition of Palestine II
Print Version
 
The Palestine Report
 

Muhammad Iqbal

 
 
 
 

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.