British Parliament approves The White Paper

The White Paper of 1939, also known as the MacDonald White Paper after Malcolm MacDonald, the British Colonial Secretary who presided over it, was a policy paper issued by the British government under Neville Chamberlain in which the idea of partitioning the Mandate for Palestine, as recommended in the Peel Commission Report of 1937, was abandoned in favour of creating an independent Palestine governed by Palestinian Arabs and Jews in proportion to their numbers in the population by 1949 (section I). A limit of 75,000 Jewish immigrants was set for the five-year period 1940-1944, consisting of a regular yearly quota of 10,000, and a supplementary quota of 25,000, spread out over the same period, to cover refugee emergencies. After this cut-off date, further immigration would depend on the permission of the Arab majority (section II). Restrictions were also placed on the rights of Jews to buy land from Arabs (section III).

The White Paper was published on 9th November 1938, two weeks after Germany annexed Sudetenland. The night it was published a massive pogrom took place in Germany and 25-30,000 Jews were sent to concentration camps, 200 synagogues destroyed and 91 Jews murdered. The White Paper was approved by Parliament in May 1939, a few weeks after Britain agreed to Germany annexing the rest of Czechoslavakia.