Former Premier David Ben-Gurion, long a vigorous proponent of the theory that Jews everywhere should seek to settle in Israel eventually, declared here last night that he now believed that Israel could not exist without Jewish communities in other lands, and that such Jewish communities could not exist without Israel.
The former Prime Minister, who is planning a visit to the United States and England in March, spoke at a meeting of the council of the dissident Israel Workers Party (Raff), which he organized last year in a challenge to the leadership of Premier Levi Eshkol.
He also indicated his belief that methods used by the Zionist movement to encourage immigration from the free western countries were useless, and that such immigrants would come only when Israel became “a torch of spiritual and moral values.” The Zionist movement, in its present form, he declared, would not be able to renew aliyah on a larger scale unless the “miracle” occurred of Russian Jewry being allowed to emigrate.
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.
