Moscow Attacks Ben Gurion, Sharett, Says They Are U.S. “agents”

The Soviet Government today attacked the leaders of the Israel Government, branding Premier David Ben Gurion and Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett “agents” of the United States “carrying out instructions from the State Department.”

The attack, the most severe ever made in Moscow against members of the Israel Government, was made in an article published in the New Times, official publication of the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The article also termed Ambassador Abba Eban, Israel’s envoy to Washington and head of the Israel delegation at the United Nations, a “British agent.” The Zionist movement, the article said, is “an agency of American intelligence.”

The Soviet organ also attacked the American Joint Distribution Committee. It claimed that although the J.D.C. has not been operating in the Soviet Union for a number of years, its “agents” have been conducting underground activities in the country. “It is clear from the arrest of the band of doctor murderers that the network of this espionage outfit continued to operate in the deep underground by criminally masking itself,” the New Times said.

ZIONISTS ARE PROMOTING ANTI-SEMITISM, SOVIET ORGAN ASSERTS

Asserting that “the Zionist agents have been caught red-handed.” the organ of the Soviet Foreign Office charged the Zionist movement with “supporting American aggression and preparation by the imperialists for a new world war.” It said that Zionist leaders are “maliciously hostile” towards the Soviet Union and declared that “Israel’s representatives at the United Nations aid the Anglo-American bloc in interfering with Soviet proposals directed at strengthening friendship between peoples.”

In attacking the Zionist movement and the leaders of the Israel Government, the article went so far as to claim that they were helping promote anti-Semitism and support a policy of restoring Hitlerism. “Supporting the policy of the American imperialists directed at unleashing a new war to dominate the world, the Zionists at the same time are factually supporting everything which contributes to this policy, it particular, the policy of restoring the order of Hitler and establishing bloody, fascist regimes permeated by a spirit of racial bigotry, including anti-Semitism,” it said.

(Commenting on raids on Jewish homes which are being conducted in the Soviet zone of Germany, the New York Herald Tribune today says editorially: “The Jews of East Germany, clinging despite the past to their homeland, can only regard the charge that they are “homeless cosmopolitans,” or “bourgeois Zionists” as a wild fantasy; they can only be bewildered by the tale that the Joint Distribution Committee, which aided them in their distress, is a tool of capitalist imperialism.”)