Korn Says if Arabs Start War with Israel, Israel Will Not Lose

A member of Israel’s Parliament and Secretary General of the World Labor Zionist Movement, told Labor Zionists tonight that “if the Arabs start a war with Israel, Israel will not lose.” Itzhak Korn, a leading member of the Israel Labor Party added that the question of war or peace in the Middle East is “now up to President Sadat of Egypt who threatens us with a pistol to our heads.”

But he noted, “we continue the building of our country.” Korn, who addressed the convention of Farband, Poale Zion and the American Habonim Association, asserted: “When Israel calls for peace negotiations without preconditions it is clear to all the world that she is ready to withdraw to secure and negotiated borders and seeks no territory for its own sake.”

The three separate Labor Zionist groups are holding separate conventions in the same hotel, the Americana, at the same time, today through Sunday, and after two days of “convention separateness” will vote on uniting their memberships into one organization.

In his address, Korn noted that second only to Israel’s survival “stands the question of Soviet Jewry.” He declared: “Because of the united efforts of Jewish communities throughout the world, efforts of which every Jew can be proud–there has been unprecedented immigration from Russia.” It has been estimated that about 12,000 Jews have arrived in Israel in 1971 from the Soviet Union.

YOUTH IS NOT OUR ENEMY

In a keynote address to the Farband convention, Jacob Katzman, its national secretary, extolled the idealism of a large segment of serious Jewish youth and students in this country. He observed that “many thousands are earnestly seeking to strengthen their Jewish culture, and to build a more meaningful Jewish life in America and in Israel.” He called on the Jewish leadership and institutions in America “to pay less attention to the negative and to concentrate more on the positive manifestations of our youth, and in American Jewish life in general.”

JDL TACTICS CONDEMNED

In his keynote address to the convention of Poale Zion, the United Labor Zionist Organization of America, Prof. Leo Diesendruck, Labor Zionist leader and outgoing president of Poale Zion, assailed the tactics of the Jewish Defense League and rightist groups. He noted that violence as a tactic of community struggle has been almost entirely abandoned by its proponents among the Blacks and radical students.