Truman is Urged to Send New York Mayor to Palestine As “one-man Inquiry Commission”

Mayor O’Dwyer today declined to make any comment on a report that the White House is considering sending him to Palestine as a one-man commission to look into the situation there and report back directly to President Truman.

The suggestion to send the New York mayor to Palestine as President Truman’s emissary is reported to have come from a group of Jewish, Catholic and Protestant clergymen. It was made without his knowledge. Prior to being elected mayor, O’Dwyer was the head of President Roosevelt’s War Refugee Board.

STATE DEPT. ASKED FOR CLEAR CUT STATEMENT ON POLICY IN MIDDLE EAST

The New York Herald Tribune, which is usually friendly to the Jewish cause in Palestine, today published an editorial asking the U.S. Government to issue a clear-cut statement concerning the relationship of the Palestine issue to American economic and strategic interests in the Middle East.

The United States has economic and strategic interests in the Middle East,” the editorial says. “That is obvious in the fact of American oil concessions in Saudi Arabia, in the recent note to Russia on the Dardanelles. But those interests have never been authoritatively defined for the American public, nor have the possible bearings of the Palestine problem on these interests been discussed officially. Unofficially, it has been asserted by many observers that the threat of Arab unrest is a mere bogey, that even were a solution unfavorable to the Arab League imposed in Palestine the leaders of the league, such as Ibn Saud, would still find it to their interest to maintain friendly relations with the United States and Great Britain.

“If the Arabs inside and outside Palestine are really powerless to do harm British policy and American lack of policy in that area are inexplicable. If major strategic interests of the two powers will be jeopardized by relieving the lot of the displaced Jews of Europe the facts should be placed before the American people, officially and with whatever documentation is available. National security, whether it involves Allies, bases or petroleum, is not an ignoble objective, and can be made to appear so only when it is a cloak for other motives. The United States should not be placed in the position of appearing to follow blindly where the British Foreign Office leads, engaging, meanwhile, in sterile and intemperate attacks on its guide. It is time to stop shadow boxing over Palestine and get down to the roots of the matter.”