Minister of the Interior Eduard Depreux announced today that the Cabinet has decided that the French delegation at Lake Success will take no stand on the Palestine issue for the present. He told a press conference that the French attitude on partition will be determined by the international situation at the time the U.N. General Assembly votes.
The Socialist organ Le Populaire today carries a dispatch from its correspondent at Lake Success charging that French indecision is a result of misleading information given the Quai d’Orsay by “pro-Arab British sources” who stated that it was impossible to obtain a two-thirds majority for partition. The correspondent writes that the British information is false and there are good prospects for obtaining the necessary 38 votes.
He warns, however, that the opportunity will be lost if there are too many abstentions and says that French abstention may induce others to abstain. Consequently, Foreign Minister Georges Bidault, voluntarily or involuntarily, would have to bear the responsibility for the defeat of partition.
A similar point of view is expressed in an editorial in the conservative daily L’Ordre, which accuses Bidault of timidity and says that both France’s interests in the Middle East and her sympathy for the Jews call for a pro-partition stand. The editorial asserts that there is no real danger of an Arab uprising if partition is supported unless one of the Big Four instigates such a rebellion to satisfy “low mercantile interests.”
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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.
