182 A Short History of the Middle East
It came just at a time when the reconstitution of the Jewish
Agency with substantial financial support from the U.S.A. had
raised Zionist hopes high. Dr. Weizmann protested that the
White Paper was inconsistent with the terms of the Mandate, and
resigned his presidency of the Jewish Agency and the Zionist Or-
ganization. In Britain prominent members of the Conservative
opposition—Baldwin, Austen Chamberlain, Amery, Churchill—
sought to make political capital out of the situation by supporting
the Zionist complaints. 'The public ventilation of the controversy
was an impressive demonstration of the political power the Zion-
ists could mobilize in England/ Ramsay MacDonald, with the
lack of firm resolution characteristic of the later stages of his career,
capitulated to the Zionist pressure, invited the Jewish Agency to
confer with the government, and eventually restated its policy to
Weizmann in what the Arabs have nicknamed the 'Black
Letter'. Defining itself as the 'authoritative interpretation' of the
White Paper, it declared that H.M.G. did not intend to prohibit the
acquisition of additional land by the Jews, since this could be done
without prejudice to the rights and position of other sections of the
population, nor to stop or prohibit Jewish immigration. -1
'The first serious attempt to reduce the implications of the
Balfour Declaration to terms compatible with our pledges to the
Arabs had failed/2 The most important feature of the White
Paper, the control of land-transfers, was never put into effect; for
in January 1933 the Nazis came into power in Germany and a
steadily increasing stream of Jewish refugees began to pour out of
that country. Meanwhile the situation of the Jews in Poland and
Roumania, where government and unofficial pressure to get rid of
them had grown stronger since the creation of the National Home
had offered an outlet, was growing steadily worse. The need of the
Jews was more widespread, and in some respects more acute, than
in the pre-war Russian pogroms. They naturally turned to
Palestine as the only country they could enter 'as of right and not
on sufferance'. Confronted with this demand for asylum the
British government promptly pigeon-holed the Shaw Com-
mission Report, with its admonition that the 1929 Riots were but a
symptom of the dangerous and fundamental clash of the two rival
1 The Political History of Palestine under British Administration (Jerusalem,
1947), 13.
2 Round Table, 1939, 463.