Palestine: Statement of Policy by his Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom. Presented by the Secretary of State for the Colonies to Parliament by Command of His Majesty July 1937.

The British Government, which ruled Palestine from 1917 to 1948 under a League of Nations Mandate, issued periodic policy statements known as White Papers that related to the tensions and recurring violence between the Arab and Jewish communities of Palestine. The present Statement of British Government Policy accepts in principle the recommendations of the Peel Commission in that territorial partition between Arab and Jewish States was the only solution to the conflict since Arab and Jewish aspirations were seen by the British as being utterly irreconcilable. What was an immediate consequence upon the issuance of this White Paper was a radical reduction of permissible Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel, precisely at the very time that Jews were desperate to flee the onset of Nazism in Europe.