An appeal to the United States to act immediately in support of peace in the Middle East by furnishing Israel with arms and by concluding a security agreement with the Jewish State was adopted unanimously here tonight by several hundred delegates at a meeting sponsored by the American Zionist Council to rally support for assistance to Israel in her current danger.
The declaration asserted that Israel needed defensive arms to offer “effective resistance to the aims of Communist imperialism and its Arab allies in the Middle East and North Africa.” The meeting urged, too, that the security pact be offered not only to Israel but to “all other states which renounce aggressive aims and acts.”
Rabbi Irving Miller, chairman of the American Zionist Council, hit out at “suggestions in high places” that discussion of the Arab-Israel situation be kept out of the debates during the 1956 election campaign. He scored the idea as “a cowardly departure from American political custom and precedent” and pledged that the Zionists would never accept limitations of this kind.
After reviewing the current dispute in the Middle East between British and American oil interests, Rabbi Miller said: “The effort now being made by governments which serve the interests of the oil companies instead of the welfare of their own people to force Israel to make territorial sacrifices in order to allay their own quarrels is a basic and shabby denial of democratic aims and hopes.”
Mrs. Judith Epstein former president of Hadassah, stressing that the conversations between President Eisenhower and Prime Minister Eden “are proof of the importance which is attached to the Middle East crisis and the bearing it will have on the future of the world,” declared: “We cannot understand why Egypt’s act (acceptance of Communist arms) has-not alerted the American Government and American citizens to the instability and untrustworthiness of Egypt as a friend of the West.
The Zionist Organization of America published an appeal today to the U.S. Government urging it not to submit to “appeasement” proposals by Sir Anthony but to adopt “an American policy” on the Middle East. The appeal asked that America restore equilibrium to the Middle East by allowing Israel to acquire the arms she needs for defense against aggression and that the United States “should conclude security treaties with Israel or any other state in the region that honestly desires to live at peace with its neighbors.”
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.
