A bi-partisan move was launched in Congress this week-end for a petition from members of both Houses to the State Department asking it to halt any proposed shipment of arms to Saudi Arabia, it was learned here today.
The petition is expected to cite the recent demand by King Saud of Saudi Arabia that the Arab states undertake to wipe out Israel, even to the extent of sacrificing 10,000,000 Arab lives.
Louis Lipsky, President of the American Zionist Council, conferred today for an hour with Henry A. Byroade, Assistant Secretary of State for Middle Eastern Affairs. Mr. Lipsky told newsmen the talks ranged over “the general situation in the Middle East.” He was accompanied by I. L. Kenen. Washington representative of the Council.
Addressing a meeting of the Jewish National Fund in New York Monday night. Mayor Robert F. Wagner hit out sharply at the State Department’s plans to send arms to Saudi Arabia and Iraq on the grounds that the weapons would be used against Communism. “Let me say that the shipment of arms to the Arab states can only result in one thing–the complete undermining of any attempt to achieve a permanent peace between Israel and its surrounding neighbors,” the Mayor declared.
“It is utterly fantastic,” he said, “not to realize that the Arab nations would use these arms against Israel. There can be no question in anyone’s mind that these weapons would be used against the State of Israel at a propitious time. Time and time again have the Arab states spoken about a second round against the tiny State of Israel.”
Addressing another meeting in New York this week-end, Rabbi Mordecai Kirschlum, president of the Mizrachi Organization of America, called American policy in reference to the Middle East one of “confusion and cross purposes.” He insisted that this “shortsightedness” threatens “to set the stage for new aggression by the Arab nations against Israel.”
The Farband-Labor Zionist Order has appealed to President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles not to send arms to the Arab states, the organization announced.
ROSENWALD DECRIES “PRESSURE” ON STATE DEPARTMENT
In a letter from Lessing J. Rosenwald to Assistant Secretary Byroade, made public this week-end, the American Council for Judaism asserted that there is no “Jewish opinion” on the question of U. S. arms for the Arab states. The Council president declared that it was up to the State Department, not “pressure groups,” to decide the question.
Referring to the policy of “impartiality and sympathy” for the peoples and nations of the Middle East, enunciated by President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles, the Council letter expressed the hope that the State Department would be left free to work out solutions for the area Without the pressures of “partisan domestic blocs which have bedeviled American policy in the area in the past.”
Senator Alexander Wiley, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, this week-end told a meeting of the pro-Arab American Friends of the Middle East that for America to take a pro-Arab or pro-Israel approach in the Middle East was to court disaster. He asserted that primary consideration should be given to the formation of a regional organization wider than the Arab League.
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