The Commission started part of its work in Egypt before it reached Palestine. The Arabs had been given wrong ideas concerning the meaning of the British declaration and the intention of the Zionists: pro-German agents had spread rumours intended to be both anti-English and anti-Jewish. They declared that rich Jews would exploit the land of Palestine and would destroy Moslem holy places. Dr. Weizmann met certain Arab leaders in Egypt and succeeded in removing their fears and anxieties. It was found that the Felaheen cultivators in Palestine do not fear the Jews. They realize that the Jewish colonies increase the prosperity of the country by introducing improved agricultural methods. But the Effendi Arabs, who are landlords, fear the establishment of a just rule over the land. These Effendi are largely cosmopolitans and absentee landlords, living in Syria and Egypt. The Zionists are anxious to prevent, if they can, any speculation in land, whether by natives of Palestine or by foreigners. The prosperity of the colonies is bound up with a just land policy, which will prevent the fruits of a man’s labour enriching others and will place at the disposal of the Jewish colonies unused and State lands as well as badly cultivated large estates.
The Zionists have been fortunate in gaining the confidence of the King of the Hedjaz and of Prince Feisal.
Although by the Hague Convention the military authorities could not make any alteration in the laws of the land, they did in two matters of administration increase the power of self-government possessed by the Jews. They allowed certain colonies to appoint their own police and their own Jewish tax-collectors. So corrupt had the Turkish tax-collectors been, that the Jewish tax-collectors, while taking less from the colonists, were able to hand a larger sum to the Government.
Much consideration was given by the Commission to the work of strengthening and supporting the organizations for relieving distress—orphanages, hospitals, and so on: a work much needed owing to war conditions. Special reports on the utilities of the various hospitals, schools, and orphanages were drawn up. In Jerusalem great distress was found. The Halukah Jews, settled in Jerusalem to study and pray and entirely dependent on the support of the Jews of other countries, had been by the war cut off from their means of livelihood. Widows and orphans were many, the adult men having suffered excessively from epidemics. The Commission opened laundries and a kind of shirt factory to provide employment for women and did its best to find employment for the men, although the importation of raw materials was very difficult.
On 17th June there was opened at Jaffa the first conference of Jews of the liberated area of Palestine. Major Ormsby-Gore, the Political Officer in charge of the Zionist Commission, delivered the following speech:—
“You have asked me, as Political Officer in charge of the Zionist Commission which has been sent out to Palestine by H.M. Government, to attend this historic gathering and to say a few words of good wishes to you, the representatives of all Jewry in the occupied part of Palestine, on behalf of my Government. I do so with a full heart. My Government—the British Government—has said one or two important things during this war concerning Palestine.
“My Government has said that, if England and her Allies win this war, the future Government of Palestine shall not be Turkish, because in this war England and her Allies are fighting, not for the extension of any Empire, nor for the acquisition of further power or further territory, but they are fighting for an ideal, shared by all our Allies, namely, that countries shall be governed in the interests and according to the wishes and the aspirations of the inhabitants of those countries. We are satisfied when we look at the results of Turkish rule upon the land and the people of Palestine, that such rule ought to disappear in the interests of Palestine and of civilization. The Turkish rule in Palestine was an alien rule, and was not in the best interests of any of the inhabitants of Palestine, and, moreover, such a rule crippled the free development, economic and political, of this country.
“My Government has said that it wishes to see the people of Palestine among others freed from the rule of the Turks, but it has as yet said nothing as to what Government should take its place—that is a matter for the Peace Conference. But Mr. Balfour has made an historic declaration with regard to the Zionists, that he wishes to see created and built up in Palestine a National Home for the Jewish people.
“What do we understand by this? We mean that those Jews who voluntarily come to live in Palestine should live in Palestine as Jewish nationalists, i.e. that they should be regarded as Jews and nothing else, and that they should be absolutely free to develop Hebrew education, to develop the country, and live their own life in their own way in Palestine freely, but only submitting equally with all others to the laws of the land.
“I shall tell the British Government, when I go back, what the Jews of Palestine have done already to realize their ideals, and what they feel with regard to this National Home. I can say when I go back that I can see in this gathering to-day the pioneer work of the National Home, i.e. a National Home built up on a Hebrew foundation with a definite consciousness and ideal of its own. I can say that whether you come from Russia, from Salonica, from Bokhara, from Poland, from America, from England, or from Yemen, you are bound together in Palestine by the ideal of building up a Jewish nation in all its various aspects in Palestine, a national centre for Jewry all over the world to look to. This is the ideal of the future, an ideal which I am convinced will be realized without doing any injustice or injury to any of your neighbours here. But while I look forward to the realization of this ideal, I must remind you of the grim realities of the present.