“My appeal is to American Jewry to gather all your forces at once and save what land you can in Palestine. We must put aside all other considerations and buy as much land as we can through the Jewish National Fund.” With this appeal, Menachem Ussishkin, world president of the Jewish National Fund, faced a gathering of leaders of the Jewish press at a luncheon at the Hotel Commodore on Wednesday. He revealed that his purpose in coming to America was to start a campaign for buying land in Palestine.
“It is late, but not yet too late,” he said. “For twelve years some of us have been ceaselessly calling out: buy land.
“Now opposition has been raised against us. The Simpson Report, the White Paper, the Mufti, Shiels, the British Colonial Office, all see what our blind leaders could not see. They try to put up land bars against us. And we come to the realization that with all of our effort, with the hundreds of millions that we have expended, we have only six per cent of the area of Palestine in our possession!”
SITUATION NEVER AS BAD
The 67 year old leader expressed himself fully, openly, without regard for opposition. “In 49 years of Zionist work I will frankly say I have never seen the situation so bad as it is now. We have not only the Arabs against us but also the English, and the Jews.”
“It was easy enough for me to get a visa from the authorities at Washington,” he said ironically. “But it was not so easy to get a visa from the authorities in New York. For two years I have been trying to come here,” but, he implied, the Zionists were against it.
“Nevertheless, I have faith, and I will keep up the struggle on all fronts, and I believe others will be with me. And we can still conquer, but we must act at once. Every day is as a year.
“For thirteen years there has been falsification. Lord Passfield, bless him, has spoken the truth. England does not want us to build up Palestine. All other statements are diplomacy, or simply lies. We will either bow under this realization and give up, or we will create our own truth. If all the Jews in the world stand together and demand the right that was assured us by all the nations, if we appeal to the world, and to the English people who still retain a sense of honor to fulfil that guarantee of our rights, we will succeed.
“If we accept the bits and leavings offered us, we lose everything. We labored fifty years, and put in a foundation for a national home. We must put up the walls and the roof, or the structure goes to ruin.
“First, let us set aside the foolish suggestion that the Mandate may be taken away from Great Britain. No nation, especially England, gives away what it possesses. We must work within that realization. We must get the British people to force their government to be honest with us.
“Second, we must secure Arab peace. In a way this is also a foolish word, for how can we secure peace with people with whom we have never quarreled?
“Shall we wait until Palestine is already built into an Arab land? The British government proposes to float a loan of two and one half million pounds in Palestine to settle on land Arabs who never before have owned land. The loan being made in Palestine will be made by taxation. Jews will pay more than half of that sum to settle the Arab on what is now unused land. Even in the old days in Russia no one ever dared propose so unfair a scheme against the Jews. If the Conservatives had done this we would have said, ‘we’ll appeal to the Socialists.’ But the Socialists have done this. The one institution they found in Palestine to single out for criticism was the Jewish National Fund, the Keren Kayemeth, which is based on a Socialist principle, that the land shall belong in perpetuity not to individuals but to the nation!”
ONLY QUESTION OF MONEY
In calling for his campaign, Mr. Ussishkin said, “the Talmud tells us that when God is angry with his sheep he sets blind shepherds to lead them. That has happened to us. But we still may have our eyes opened. If we had one third of the land in Palestine, we would be spoken to differently now. Today, it is still possible to do something. It is only a question of money.
“If your leaders don’t understand that we must have land before everything else, and have it at once, then I’ll tell it to you over their heads. If the Jews of America would give to Palestine ten per cent of what they lost in the stock market last year, we would have Palestine. If they give only a part of what they’ve set aside to lose next year, we may still have Palestine.
“I’m not here to ask for alms. I’m here to tell you to save what you can now. Don’t be blind any longer. With the ground under our feet, we could outlive twenty Passfields. Without it, twenty Balfours couldn’t help us.
“It was hard for me to leave Palestine. I don’t speak of the difficulties of the journey. But to leave Palestine for one hour now is like a man’s leaving the house when his child is sick.
“But I am here. And I say, that all the material forces of the American Jews must be gathered at once for a stupendous effort. We must buy land.”
To the charges that the National Fund still owned 150,000 dunams of undeveloped land, he answered in detail, showing that much of it, such as the Wadi Hawereth lands and the Haifa Bay lands, was territory that had just been taken over by the Jews, and has been drained or cleared for settlement. “We have no land reserve,” he said flatly.
“But even this would not be wrong. Every great colonization plan has a reserve of land. We must secure the territory; we should have secured all the territory first and then thrown open the gates and said, ‘Jews, go and settle!'”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
