Haycraft Commission

The commission was headed by Sir Thomas Haycraft, then the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in Palestine with H. C. Luke, assistant governor of Jerusalem and J.N.

Muslims were represented by 'Aref Pasha al-Dajani, Christians by Ilyas Effendi Mushabbak and Jews by Dr. Mordechai Eliash.

[1] The report noted that the violence by Arabs on the Jews was apparently triggered by a clash between the MPS (Miflagah Po'alim Sotzialistim) or Bolsheviks and the authorized Jewish Labour Party but that this "could not have been sufficient to give rise to more than a street riot of the ordinary kind".

The commission added that: "We have been assured, and we believe, that had there been no Jewish question, the Government would have had no political difficulty of any importance to deal with so far as its domestic affairs were concerned".

Dr David Eder, head of the Zionist Commission, had addressed the committee and stated that only Jews should be allowed to bear arms, and that "there can only be one National Home in Palestine, and that a Jewish one, and no equality in the partnership between Jews and Arabs, but a Jewish preponderance as soon as the numbers of the race are sufficiently increased.

Perhaps most significantly, it was proposed that the anomalous position of the Zionist Organisation should be abolished and the country governed with the help of a body that represented all sections of the community.

The Arabs felt that they were "the victims of Zionist coercion of the Government, which they most thoroughly distrust", and that "nothing short of a modification of the Jewish policy and the establishment of some form of proportional representation will ease the situation".

He maintained, however, that this feeling had been "a good deal modified" since Jewish colonies had been "provided with arms (under conditions strictly limiting their use to self-defence)".