Page:The Truth about Palestine.djvu/9

 equally imperceptible to one far better qualified to speak for the Arab world than the members of the Palestine Arab Delegation. On March 1st, 1919, King Feisul, the son of King Hussein, who was then pleading the Arab cause at the Peace Conference, declared in a letter of which the immediate publication was authorised, that

"Our deputation here in Paris is fully acquainted with the proposals submitted yesterday by the Zionist Organisation to the Peace Conference, and we regard them as moderate and proper. We will do our best, in so far as we are concerned, to help them through; we will wish the Jews a hearty welcome home.

"With the chiefs of your movement, especially with Dr. Weizmann, we have had and continue to have the closest relations. He has been a great helper of our cause, and I hope the Arabs may soon be in a position to make the Jews some return for their kindness. We are working together for a reformed and revived Near East, and our two movements complete one another. The Jewish movement is national and not imperialist. Our movement is national and not imperialist. There is room in Syria for us both. Indeed, I think that neither can be a real success without the other.

"People less informed and less responsible than our leaders and yours, ignoring the need for co-operation of the Arabs and the Zionists, have been trying to exploit the local differences that must necessarily arise in Palestine during the early stages of our movement. Some of them have, I am afraid, misrepresented your aims to the Arab peasantry and our aims to the Jewish peasantry, with the result that interested parties have been able to make capital out of what they call our differences.

"I wish to give you my firm conviction that these differences are not on questions of principle, but on matters of detail such as must inevitably