Albert Montefiore Hyamson

This enabled the Department of Information to hide the official nature of its propaganda, and allowed Zionists to produce material to promote their movement.

[5] A film The British Re-conquering Palestine for the Jews, made after General Allenby had taken Jerusalem, which was sent to Jewish centres around the world.

He felt that Hyamson's attempts to apply the immigration regulations made him very unpopular with pan-Zionists despite having admitted many thousands of Jews.

[12] In the summer of 1926 Hyamson went on a tour of centres of Jewish population in Eastern Europe to investigate the conditions of the countries sending the largest numbers of immigrants to Palestine.

The Palestine Government responded to criticism about the situation by replacing Hyamson and his deputy Richard Badcock with Eric Mills and Samuels himself.

The Hyamson-Newcombe proposal suggested the founding of an independent Palestinian state with all citizens having equal rights and each community had autonomy, including for municipal authority for Jewish villages, towns and districts.

The Zionist leadership rejected the proposal, while Judah Leon Magnes (who had received a letter from David Ben-Gurion warning him that it was a 'deception') welcomed the ideas as the 'portals to an agreement'.

Founding members also included Basil Henriques, Sir Brunel Cohen, Joseph Leftwich, Louis Gluckstein, and Rabbi Israel Mattuck.

The fellowship saw political Zionism as damaging the good relations the diaspora had achieved in the country of their birth, and as linked to a moral decline within Jewry.

By 1947, Leftwich felt that Hyamson was trying to turn the Fellowship into an organisation similar to Judah Magnes' Ihud (which sought Jewish-Arab co-operation for a bi-national unitary state).

This was, according to Newcombe, a 'logical and moderate plea written in a matter of fact and convincing way' that attempted to show a non-Zionist solution to the Palestine problem composed by Christians, Jews and Muslims.

The document broadly reiterated the Hyamson-Newcombe proposal, where an independent Palestinian state would be characterised by control of their own municipal authorities.