Jewish Congress Attacks American Jewish Committee

The American Jewish Congress today issued a statement taking issue with the resolution adopted by the executive committee of the American Jewish Committee in which objection was voiced against Israel’s granting a special status to the Jewish Agency as well as against the Agency’s conducting Chalutz activities in the United States.

Charging the American Jewish Committee with a “retreat to isolationism,” the Congress declared that the resolution adopted by the Committee shows “that the Committee’s brief flirtation with pro-Zionism has ended and that the price of its future aid to Israel will be the acceptance of its traditional anti-Zionist attitudes and policies.

“It is clear that the Committee today regards efforts to place the challenge of life and work in Israel before American Jews as somehow un-American and in conflict with what it terms ‘the full integration of American Jews in American life,'” the Congress statement says. “Its fears reveal that, despite its repeated affirmation that ‘America is our home,’ the Committee itself is the most insecure and least integrated of American Jewish groups. For only those who are troubled by a deep sense of insecurity can fear that projecting to American Jews the challenge of helping to build a new society or affirming that the fullest expression of Jewish living and maximum fulfillment as a Jew can be achieved in the Jewish state, smacks even remotely of disloyalty to America.”

The statement charged that the American Jewish Committee, in challenging the authority of the Jewish Agency, “is seeking to undermine the processes of organization and co-ordination with regard to Israel which have been evolved over decades.” It said that “the threat of the Committee to withhold financial support from Israel unless its terms are met constituted an attempt to impose the view of a tiny minority on the entire community.”