Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion today told the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, that one of Israel’s services “which has the means to find out” had been ordered to try to discover whether a single organization was behind the anti-Semitic outbreaks in 25 countries of three continents. He was understood to refer to Israel’s Intelligence Service.
The Prime Minister replied to separate Communist and right-wing Herut motions that the Israel-West German arms agreement be canceled because of the incidents. A Knesset majority rejected the motion. Mapam and Achdut Avodah, the two left-wing parties, abstained from the vote inline with their adamant opposition to any arms deals with West Germany.
Despite recent events, the Prime Minister declared, he was not ready to retract “a single word” of what he had said about Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and West Germany six months ago in the debate which followed disclosure of Israel’s sale of mortars to the Bonn Government. He said then that while there were Nazis “many in important posts, the Germany of today is not Hitler’s Germany.”
“There have been anti-Semitic occurrences and Jewry would be short-sighted if it did not view this with utmost seriousness,” the Prime Minister said today. “However, I reject expressions like ‘nation of murderers’ in reference to the present German nation because such expressions are racist. Every man and regime should be judged according to its own acts.”
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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.
