Jewish Organizations Assail Soviet for Comparing Israel to Nazi Germany

The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations issued today a statement sharply assailing the Soviet Government for its repeated comparisons at the United Nations of Israel’s victory in the six-day Arab-Israeli war and the Nazi atrocities. The text reads:

“In statement after statement since the collapse of Russia’s Arab allies in the Middle East, the Soviet Union has repeatedly charged Israel with Hitlerite atrocities and war crimes at the United Nations. The Soviet representatives and their supporters have indulged in an orgy of vilification and abuse in order to represent as Nazi aggression Israel’s successful defense against an enemy which has sworn to destroy her in a ‘Holy War.’

“The Soviet Government has sent insulting and threatening notes to the Government of Israel, which it insists on describing as ‘the Tel Aviv authorities.’ Now the Soviet Government newspaper Izvestia has made the lying charge that Israeli troops have shot down women and children in Hitlerite public executions in occupied Arab territories.

“This is vicious, unscrupulous and politically explosive propaganda warfare. Under Soviet incitement the Arabs fought and lost the hot war for Soviet influence in the Middle East. Now the USSR has taken upon itself the full responsibility of verbal aggression.

“This powerful country, which has never published a word of criticism of the fact that Nazi war criminals are actively mobilized in Cairo and Damascus in the war against the Jews, which has given unstinting support to the Arab states which disseminate the crude anti-Semitism of the Protocols of Zion, this country which is preventing the development of Jewish life within its own borders, does not hesitate to fasten the hideous label of Nazism on the survivors of a small Jewish nation which lost a third of its members in Nazi atrocities.

“The accent of present Soviet propaganda is the accent of the Stalinist doctors’ plot and the destruction of Soviet Jewish society; it is the accent of Soviet anti-Semitic propaganda against Judaism, of the fever of Jew-Hatred that periodically seizes the Soviet press. It means that the incorrigible anti-Semites who infest Russian society are again being given their hour.

“It is not the first time in this century that a Great Power has accused Jews of sub-human crimes and threatened dire punishment for these imaginary evils. The world knows the terrible price the Jewish people have paid for such monstrous accusations. The Soviet Union should think again before it follows the appalling example of the power whose pathological hatred of Jews was the beginning of a process that brought death and destruction to many nations.”