“I am confident that the friendship between our government and the State of Israel will continue uninterruptedly,” Dr. Abba Hillel Silver last night told a United Jewish Appeal dinner here.
“There are people in the lower echelons of our State Department, ” he said, “who are interested, if not in liquidating the State of Israel, then in isolating it, in limiting it as to population, in constricting it still further as to territory, and in weakening it in relation to its Arab neighbors by giving arms to the latter. The rash of recent speeches which emanated from some of these quarters are indicative of this attitude,” he said.
Insisting that such a campaign would not succeed, Dr. Silver declared that the anti-Israel forces in the State Department have been encouraged not only by the Arab lobby in Washington but “by the oil lobby, the Friends of the Middle East and their Jewish auxiliary–the American Council for Judaism–and other pressure groups.” These, he noted, were the same forces which had opposed the establishment of Israel, refused to reconcile themselves to its existence and are now “doing their utmost to embarrass the State of Israel, to cripple it and, if possible, to destroy it.”
The Soviet Union’s delegate to the United Nations, Andrei Vishinsky, is “flirting with the Arabs to embarrass the United States,” Dr. Silver charged, while “the Arabs are flirting with Vishinsky to blackmail the United States. ” There are people in government circles who were never friends of Israel, he continued, who are now “exploiting their unsavory maneuvers” to undermine the State of Israel with the aid of the American Government.
“I am persuaded that the men at the head of our government will never permit it. They want a secure and prosperous Israel even as they want security and prosperity for all the Arab people in the Near East. I am hoping that this wiser statesmanship will soon correct the unfortunate impressions which have been created,” Dr. Silver concluded.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
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.
