League for a Free Palestine Assailed by American Zionist Emergency Council

The American Zionist Emergency Council, representing all major Zionist groups in the United States, today assailed the League for a Free Palestine, declaring that its founders are “a small group of persons who, within recent years, acting in accordance with the opportunistic impulses of the moment and exploiting the miseries which have befallen our people abroad, have established one paper organization after another.”

In a formal statement, the Council charged that “far from advancing the cause of a Jewish Palestine, or the interests of the Jewish people, the League will be productive of nothing but public confusion.” The statement listed “paper organizations” created by the League’s founders as follows: the Friends of a Jewish Palestine, the Committee for a Jewish Army and the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe. “None of these organizations or committees have had any official relationship, direct or indirect, with any responsible body in American Jewish life,” the Council added.

It pointed out that while “the promoters of the new organization acknowledge the great contribution made by the World Zionist movement to Palestine and to the Jewish people, they allege that the Zionist movement is purely sectarian in character and that therefore it is necessary ‘to fill the long-felt need for a Palestine Freedom movement’ with a non-sectarian organization. The new organization differentiates between ‘European and Palestinian Jews who have no other desire than to live in Palestine,’ who are members of the ‘Hebrew’ Nation, and Jews living in all other lands, who presumably do not belong to the ‘Hebrew’ Nation.” This definition was described by the Council as “specious nonsense.”