Dr. Abba Hillel Silver, chairman of the American Zionist Emergency Council, charged today in a telegram to Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson that British martial law in Palestine “is part of a carefully conceived plan calculated to bring about the economic strangulation of Palestine Jewry.”
Speaking for the entire Zionist movement in the United States, which is represented in the Council, Dr. Silver expressed the earnest hope that the United States Government “will register its protest with Great Britain against this policy on legal and humanitarian grounds, and will insist that this assault on the well-being of a whole people cease forthwith.
“While martial law has not stopped violence, it is rapidly leading to the economic destruction of the peaceful Jewish population,” Dr. Silver pointed out. “At a time when a war-ravaged world is painfully struggling toward economic rehabilitation, the most remarkable constructive experiment at large-scale settlement of our days is thus being wantonly destroyed. Against this deliberate attempt to ruin the Jewish people in Palestine, and thereby to make impossible the further development of the Jewish National Home, the American Zionist Emergency Council raises its voice in protest.
“It is repugnant to every concept of fair play, that while going through the motions of bringing the Palestine issue before the United Nations, the British Government uses the interval to prejudge the issue by adhering to the stubborn enforcement of an illegal policy and by attempting to crush the Jewish National Home, through economic pressure.”
AMERICAN MIZRACHI HEADQUARTERS IN PALESTINE REQUISITIONED BY BRITISH
An urgent appeal to the American consulate in Palestine to intervene “on behalf of the American religious national Mizrachi movement whose Jerusalem head quarters, Bet Meir; was requisitioned by the British Government in the Holy Land” was cabled today by the Mizrachi Organization of America, following a meeting of its executive here.
The cablegram, which was signed by Laon Gellman, national president of the American Mizrachi Organization, charged that the British Government, in taking over by force the Mizrachi headquarters, had “violated the exclusive property rights of American citizens.” It appealed to the American consular officials in Palestine “to intervene promptly on behalf of tens of thousands of American religious Jewish citizens.”
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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.
