Palestine

I have the honour to report that we dined with the Chinese Ambassador Dr. Liu Chieh and Mrs. Liu at the Embassy on Friday the 2nd April. Dr. Liu was formerly head of the Chinese Foreign Office. He is a distinguished and outstanding figure in Ottawa. He had been in Lake Success for the Palestine discussions,¹ and in the course of the after dinner conversation on Friday night he spoke with great frankness about the handling of the Palestine question by the United Nations.

Mr. R.G. Riddell, head of the First Political Division of the Department of External Affairs (United Nations Affairs etc.) who had also been dealing with Palestine at Lake Success, and Mr. D.M. Johnson, head of the Third Political Division of the Department (American and Far Eastern Affairs) were amongst the Ambassador's guests on the occasion.

Dr. Liu criticised the handling of the whole Palestine affair. The Assembly which decided on partition had never, he said, been allowed to discuss any other proposal. Partition could not be carried out without a preponderance of military force, and there had been no prospect at any time of the availability of force on the scale required.

Dr. Liu recalled the prominent part which the Canadian Delegation had played in the discussions. Mr. Riddell said that the Canadian Delegation were not the authors of the partition proposal; they had, he said, accepted it reluctantly as the least objectionable of four objectionable alternatives.

Dr. Liu said that the federal solution of the problem was never fully discussed. He added that there had been no contact between the Committee examining the partition, and that examining the federal, proposal. The Palestine problem could not be solved by a strict formula derived from the nomenclature of the existing juridical classifications of States; the solution had to be 'ad hoc', 'ex aequo et bono'; possibly unique. Ambassador Liu was glad that an examination of the case 'de novo' was now to be made.

Senator Robertson, leader of the Liberal Government in the Senate, asked me what I thought of the partition proposal.

I said that I held no unprejudiced view on the question of the partition of small countries like Palestine. The thing that had struck me most about the discussions at Lake Success was, I said, the sound basis on which Mr. Warren Austin² had based the case for the postponement of partition. He said that partition could not be carried out except with a preponderance of military force. The partition of Ireland was carried out and maintained by force. 'That's the point' Dr. Liu intervened. He did not think it to be the function of the United Nations to partition historic national territories.

I asked Mr. Riddell whether there was no hope of a unitary Palestine State with safeguards for the Jewish population. I referred to our own activities in the early thirties to facilitate the journey to Palestine of Irish Jews who genuinely believed in a Jewish national home. I distinguished those from the Faith-less Jews of London and Liverpool with whom the British have populated Tel-Aviv and Haifa.

Mr. Riddell said that his own study of the question had led him to the conclusion that the Jews would ultimately be satisfied with a guaranteed land tenure and control of immigration into the Jewish areas in the Holy Land.