While upon the subject of the Adriatic, gentlemen, we Fascisti cannot forget, we who speak for the first time in this hall, the attitude that you adopted in the affair of Fiume. We cannot forget that you attacked Fiume; and that when on 28th December General Ferrario said that he could not suspend the order for the bombardment that would have levelled that town to the ground, that general and the Government that gave him the order compromised our national dignity more than a little. (Approval on the Right.)
You put a knife to the throat of Fiume, but you did not solve the problem. You sent a commander there with an amazing scheme for the formation of a Government, which was to accept the conditions agreed upon at Belgrade—accept, that is to say, the Consortium, which means the near, if not immediate, destruction of the port of Fiume. Because you are well aware that after the lapse of twelve years Porto Barro and the Delta ought to go to Yugoslavia, and you have already handed them over, because, if you had not done so, you would have been obliged to make statements which have not been made.
ITALY, SIONISM, AND THE ENGLISH MANDATE IN PALESTINE
Same speech delivered in the Chamber, 21st June 1921.
Hon. Mussolini. I come now to another very delicate question that must be faced, because it is historically necessary and because, in view of the recent Pontifical Allocution before the Secret Consistory, it can no longer be put off.
We must choose: the Government must decide what line it is going to take up. Either it must adopt the English attitude in favour of the Sionists, or that of Benedict XV. I do not think that I shall be boring the Chamber if I run over the antecedents of this question.
On 2nd November 1917, the English Government declared itself in favour of the creation in Palestine of a national centre for the Jewish race, it being clearly understood that nothing would be done to offend the rights, civil or religious, of the non-Jewish communities already existing in Palestine or of the Jews in the rest of the world. Later the Allied Powers agreed to this, and finally, in Article No. 222 of the Peace Treaty, confirmed on 20th August at Sèvres, Turkey renounced all her rights in Palestine, and the Allied Powers chose England as mandatory.
Now it has come about, that while the civilised nations of the West have not altered the common régime of liberty for the different religions, in Palestine just the reverse has happened, and this in particular because the administration of the State in embryo has been entrusted to the political organisation of the Sionists.
But there have been Arabs in Palestine for ten centuries. There are 600,000 now, and 70,000 Christians, while the Jews only number 50,000. In this way an extraordinarily interesting situation has been created.
The native Jews, who have lived for years under the shadow of the mosque of Jerusalem, cordially dislike those immigrant elements which come from Poland, Ukraine and Russia, on account of their extremely emancipated ideas. They have already divided into three sections, one of which, commonly known by its abbreviated name “Mopsy,” being already inscribed in the Third International at Moscow as Communist Section.