1921 Report..........from the British
Mandate for Palestine - Interim report of the Mandatory to the League of Nations Balfour Declaration text 30 July 1921
It is obvious to every passing traveller, and well-known to every European resident,
that the country was before the War, and is now, undeveloped and under-populated. The methods of agriculture are, for the most part, primitive; the area of land now cultivated could yield a far greater product. There are in addition large cultivable areas that are left untilled. The summits and slopes of the hills are admirably suited to the growth of trees, but there are no forests. Miles of sand dunes that could be redeemed, are untouched, a danger, by their encroachment, to the neighbouring tillage. The Jordan and the Yarmuk offer an abundance of water-power; but it is unused. Some industries--fishing and the culture and manufacture of tobacco are examples--have been killed by Turkish laws; none have been encouraged; the markets of Palestine and of the neighbouring countries are supplied almost wholly from Europe.
The seaborne commerce, such as it is, is loaded and discharged in the open roadsteads of Jaffa and Haifa: there are no harbours. The religious and historical associations that offer most powerful attractions to the whole of the Western, and to a large part of the Eastern world, have hitherto brought to Palestine but a fraction of the pilgrims and travellers, who, under better conditions, would flock to her sacred shrines and famous sites.
The country is under-populated because of this lack of development. There are now in the
whole of Palestine hardly 700,000 people, a population much less than that of the province of Gallilee alone in the time of Christ.* (*
See Sir George Adam Smith "Historical Geography of the Holy Land", Chap. 20.)
Of these 235,000 live in the larger towns, 465,000 in the smaller towns and villages. Four-fifths of the whole population are Moslems. A small proportion of these are Bedouin Arabs; the remainder, although they speak Arabic and are termed Arabs, are largely of mixed race.
Some 77,000 of the population are Christians, in large majority belonging to the Orthodox Church, and speaking Arabic. The minority are members of the Latin or of the Uniate Greek Catholic Church, or--a small number--are Protestants.
T
he Jewish element of the population numbers 76,000. Almost all have entered Palestine during the last 40 years. Prior to 1850 there were in the country only a handful of Jews. In the following 30 years a few hundreds came to Palestine. Most of them were animated by religious motives; they came to pray and to die in the Holy Land, and to be buried in its soil. After the persecutions in Russia forty years ago, the movement of the Jews to Palestine assumed larger proportions.
Jewish agricultural colonies were founded. They developed the culture of oranges and gave importance to the Jaffa orange trade. They cultivated the vine, and manufactured and exported wine. They drained swamps. They planted eucalyptus trees. They practised, with modern methods, all the processes of agriculture. There are at the present time 64 of these settlements, large and small, with a population of some 15,000. Every traveller in Palestine who visits them is impressed by the contrast between these pleasant villages, with the beautiful stretches of prosperous cultivation about them and the primitive conditions of life and work by which they are surrounded.
The success of these agricultural colonies attracted the eager interest of the masses of the Jewish people scattered throughout the world. In many countries they were living under the pressure of laws or customs which cramped their capacities and thwarted their energies; they saw in Palestine the prospect of a home in which they might live at ease. Profoundly discontented, as numbers of them were, with a life of petty trade in crowded cities, they listened with ready ears to the call of a healthier and finer life as producers on the land. Some among them, agriculturists already, saw in Palestine the prospect of a soil not less fertile, and an environment far more free, than those to which they were accustomed. Everywhere great numbers of Jews, whose religion causes them to live, spiritually, largely in the past, began to take an active interest in those passages of their ritual, that dwelt, with constant emphasis, upon the connection of their race with Palestine; passages which they had hitherto read day by day and week by week, with the lax attention that is given to contingency that is possible but remote. Among a great proportion, at least, of the fourteen millions of Jews, who are dispersed in all the countries of the globe, the Zionist idea took hold. They found in it that larger and higher interest, outside and beyond the cares and concerns of daily life, which every man, who is not wholly materialist, must seek somewhere.
X.--TRANS-JORDANIA.
Included in the area of the Palestine Mandate is the territory of Trans-Jordania. It is bounded on the north by the frontier of Syria, placed under the mandate of France; on the south by the kingdom of the Hejaz; and on the west by the line of the Jordan and the Dead Sea; while on the east it stretches into the desert and ends--the boundary is not yet defined--where Mesopotamia begins. Trans-Jordania has a population of probably 350,000 people. It contains a few small towns and large areas of fertile land, producing excellent wheat and barley. The people are partly settled townsmen and agriculturists, partly wandering Bedouin; the latter, however, cultivate areas, more or less fixed, during certain seasons of the year.
