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The Jewish Agency was unable to pay the salaries of schoolteachers, so they went on strike, and the Jewish Council of Rabbis called for prayers “because the ship of Israel is storm-tossed and nearly sinking in a raging sea.” The Zionist Executive decided to send a delegation to London headed by Weizmann “to save the ship of Israel from sinking.”

Before his departure, Weizmann delivered a speech saying that this was the most dangerous hour in the history of the Zionist movement. He then issued an appeal from one of the Jewish colonies to the Jews of America to strengthen and protect the Zionist movement.

Through the Jewish Agency, the Jews obtained large quantities of weapons from the British government in Palestine to defend the colonies. They had about eight thousand guards protecting their colonies, in addition to the protection provided by the British army and police forces. The Kallin Society called on Jewish young men to enlist to defend the colonies threatened by the Palestinian revolt.

On 9 November 1938, the British government announced that it had abandoned the partition plan and invited the Arab governments to discuss the Palestine question and reach a solution. It invited Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Yemen, and Transjordan, but did not invite Syria and Lebanon because the French government, as a precaution, refused to have them invited. The question of representing the Palestinian people was disputed. As usual, the British government tried to have the decisive voice in choosing Palestine’s representatives and to ignore the Higher Arab Committee, but it failed. The committee made acceptance of the invitation conditional on the Palestinians having the right to choose their representatives, the release of the Palestinian leaders detained in the Seychelles, and the Arabs and Jews not meeting at the conference or having any contact with one another. On that basis, the detainees were released. They were Ahmad Hilmi Abd al-Baqi, Husayn Fakhri al-Khalidi, Yaqub al-Ghusayn, Rashid al-Hajj Ibrahim, and Fuad Saba, and the British government transported them by a special ship to Egypt.

The English intervened with several Arab capitals to exclude me personally from attending the conference. In fact, I had not wanted to participate in the conference personally.

The strength of the Palestinian revolt, which had then attracted the attention of the entire world and forced the British government to retreat, increased the Arab states’ interest in and care for the Palestine cause. Thus, the Saudi delegation to the London Conference was headed by Prince Faisal, and the Egyptian delegation was headed by