Representative John M. Vorys (Rep., Ohio) said today that the State Department had told him all diplomatic steps had been taken, short of involving the United States in commitments in case of war, to urge the British to change their Palestine plan.
Mr. Vorys wrote to the Women’s Mizrachi Organization of his district that he had received this information in response to a protest against the British White Paper which he had sent to Secretary of State Cordell Hull. He termed the British policy “a studied destruction of the Palestinian refuge for persecuted people.”
Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg (Rep.,Mich.), Representatives William B. Barry (Dem.), Sol Bloom (Dem.) and Hamilton Fish (Rep.), all New York, and Col. Frank Knox, publisher of the Chicago Daily News, were among others who issued protests against Britain’s Palestine policy.
Senator Vandenberg telegraphed to Dr. Solomon Goldman, chairman of the National Emergency Committee on Palestine: “I emphatically favor every cooperation that America can give to the proposed culmination of the promised Jewish homeland in Palestine.”
Representative Barry wrote to Secretary Hull that the “betrayal” policy, restricting immigration of Jews at this time, was “only analogous to the behavior of Hitler. It will take more than the visit of the King and Queen to blind some of us to the fact that every recent move of the British is in their own self interest and they are only pretending a concern for the preservation of international morality and democratic principles.”
Representatives Bloom and Fish issued a joint statement to the Emergency Committee calling upon the State Department to advise the British Government that its contemplated action of “freezing” the Jewish community in Palestine to a permanent minority status in an Arab-dominated state would be a violation of the American-British Convention of 1924.
Col. Knox declared in a message to Dr. Goldman that issuance of the White Paper was “fresh evidence of the cynical disregard for promises which will insure further depletion of Britain’s already depleted international prestige.”
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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.
