ANGLO-AMERICAN COMMITTEE OF INQUIRY

: On 13 November 1945, after the end of World War II, Great Britain and the United States announced the formation of a commission in charge of examining the problem of European Jews and of Palestine. The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, also known as the Singleton-Hutcheson Commission, first met in January 1946 in Washington, D.C., before traveling to Europe to visit the remains of concentration camps. It then moved to Cairo to conduct hearings with officials of the recently established Arab League, then to Palestine to meet with British military and civil administrators as well as representatives of the Palestinian Arab and Jewish communities. In April 1946 the committee released its report, recommending that 100,000 Jewish displaced persons from Europe be authorized to enter Palestine, and calling for the annulment of the 1940 Land Transfer Regulations restricting Jewish purchase of Arab land. It also called for an indefinite extension of trusteeship, in effect an extension of the British Mandate. It recommended that "Jew shall not dominate Arab and Arab shall not dominate Jew in Palestine" and that "Palestine shall be neither a Jewish nor an Arab state." Shortly afterward, in the summer of 1946, the report was shelved; Britain backed away from adoption of the report, and the United States was unwilling to assist in its implementation. A year later, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) issued a recommendation to partition the disputed land.

SEE ALSO League of Arab States.