Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion today warned that Israel would face a “death struggle” if war with Egypt occurred. He spoke at a meeting of professional workers. He said:
“If we ran into a war with Egypt and won, then Egypt would still remain. But, if we suffered a defeat, it would mean our utter destruction, for they are ready to do to 2,000,000 in Israel what Hitler did to 6,000,000 Jews in Europe.”
Stressing the need for Israel to maintain a deterrent against Arab aggression, he said: “Above all, we must keep our intellectual, moral and spiritual superiority without which we will be defeated.” He stressed the urgency of the need to raise the level of the youth of new immigrants, and repeated his pledge of free secondary education in five to seven years, and free university education in 15 years.
Discussing immigration to Israel, he divided a majority of non-Israeli Jews into “the Russian Jews who cannot come here, and the American Jews who don’t want to come.”
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.
