Dickstein Denounces Bermuda Conference; Appeals to Churchill to Open Palestine

Chairman Samuel Dickstein of the House Immigration Committee, today denounced the Anglo-American refugee conference in Bermuda for “sterility” and called “inconceivable” the British plan to limit immigration into Palestine by enforcement of the White Paper.

The New York Democrat, in a brief speech on the floor of the House, appealed to Congress and the people for action on the refugee problem. Of the Bermuda conference, he said that “not even the pessimists among us expected such sterility at a conference which met to discuss a problem so vital, so urgent, so demanding of solution…The conferees of both countries conferred and what they accomplished is a very deep, dark secret. So deep and dark indeed, that we only know what they failed to accomplish. The Americans failed to offer admittance under the existing immigration laws. They could have done so by pooling the unused quotas of the last five years…The British delegates, like the Americans, came with a long list of their past good deeds, but with minds closed toward present or future plans.”

Dickstein praised the accomplishments of Jewish colonists in Palestine and asked for the creation of a Jewish army there. He reminded Premier Winston Churchill, now conferring with President Roosevelt here, that in 1939 he had denounced the White Paper on the floor of the House of Commons. “Churchill recognized the necessity for maintaining an open door policy in Palestine so that a persecuted people might find a haven and be given the opportunity to develop normally to make their contribution to the cause of world freedom and world peace,” Dickstein said. “He recognized the necessity then and he should recognize the necessity now.”