Balfour's Tour

PALESTINE (British Mandate)

The last lap of Lord Balfour's visit to the Holy Land (TIME, Apr. 6, 13) proved more exciting than the first and ended with regrettable suddenness.

The Earl and his party had proceeded from Jerusalem to Nazareth and Haifa in a sort of triumphal tour. At all points, he was met by enthusiastic Jewish colonists; Arabs appeared to inform him that they lived peacefully with their Jewish neighbors.

Over the border in Syria (French mandate), whence the Earl had gone presumably at the invitation of the French, things were different. At Damascus, a furious mob twice attacked his hotel. The second onslaught, which started in "The Street That is Called Straight," almost ended in disaster, for when the gendarmes had nearly been overpowered French troops appeared and spanked off, with the flats of their swords, the seething crowd, which was yelling "Down with Balfour!"

An hour or so after the second attack, Lord Balfour was spirited from the spot in a high-powered automobile and only reappeeared at Beirut, where he boarded the ship Sphinx which was bound for Alexandria, Egypt.