The White Paper on Palestine of May 1939 represented a major turning point in Britain's pre-war policy in the Middle East. In an attempt to meet Arab demands (and hopefully thereby ensure the support of the Moslem world should war break out against Germany) Britain agreed to limit Jewish immigration into Palestine and to terminate it completely after five years; to limit drastically the sale of land to Jews by Arabs and move towards responsible self-government with a promise of a constitutional conference after five years leading to independence for a Palestinian state. However when the British Government released the White Paper in May 1939, neither Arabs nor Jews endorsed the new policy. The Jews rejected the basic premises of the policy – that the Jewish National Home in Palestine had already been established and that Britain had thus fulfilled its obligations to the Jewish people under the Balfour Declaration. The Arabs of Palestine (as represented by the Arab Higher Committee) rejected the new policy because they felt that in a number of matters the new policy did not go far enough to meet their demands, while the leading independent Arab states (Egypt, Iraq and Saudi Arabia) refused to endorse the new policy until it had first been accepted by the Palestinians. While the rejection of the new policy by the Jews was anticipated, the response of the Arab world to the wide concessions made to them over Palestine disappointed British officialdom in Whitehall.