Dr. Abba Hillel Silver, chairman of the American section of the Jewish Agency, leaving today for Israel, ridiculed the sudden concern of the British Government for the Arab refugees and emphasized that “as long as Israel is besieged by invading Aral armies it is senseless to talk about returning tens of thousands of Arabs to the state of Israel to serve there perhaps as a fifth column.”
Contrasting British solicitude for the Arab refugees with British action in the case of Exodus and other Jewish refugee ships, Dr. Silver said: “One fails to be impressed by the synthetic humanitarianism of the British Government and its sudden concern for Arab refugees when one remembers that eleven thousand Jewish refugees are still being forcibly and lawlessly held behind barbed wires by the British Government on Cyprus and are denied the right to go to Palestine — a country over which Great Britain has no right to exercise any authority whatsoever following the termination of its Mandate on May 15. Nor has the British Government been requested either by the United Nations or its mediator to detain these refugees.
The failure on the part of the member bodies of the United Nations to implement that settlement or the attempts by the mediator radically to revise that settlement to the disadvantage of the state of Israel will of necessity compel the new state to reconsider its commitments, Dr. Silver warned.
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.
