Criticism of the United States reversal of its Palestine policy and sponsorship of a temporary U.N. trusteeship for the Mandate was ?iced today in leading New York newspapers. At the same time, major American Jewish Groups struck out sharply against the plan to scrap partition.
Charging that the United States has “played a shabby trick on the Jewish community in Palestine, “which puts its faith in our promises,” the New York Times stated: Three things need to “be said, and to be said at once, concerning the present shift of American policy on Palestine. The first is that it comes as a climax to a series of ?oves which has seldom been matched, for ineptness, in the handling of any international situation by an American Administration.
“The second is that it is a plain and unmistakable surrender to the threat of force. And the third is that it holds little promise to being able to avoid the very hazards which it is intended to circumvent.”
The Herald-Tribune editorially asserted that “there are few Americans who will be able to regard the action of their government in the case of Palestine without a ?king of the heart. Quite apart from the merits of the partition plan,” the paper said, “it is painfully obvious that Mr. Austin’s statement to the Security Council on Friday represents either a reversal of the earlier policy of the United States or an acknowledgment that the policy ignored facts which were patent to the most casual observer Neither alternative is to the credit of the Administration.”
Louis Lipsky, chairman of the executive committee of the American Jewish Conference said that he refused to believe that the American proposal for a temporary U.N. trusteeship for Palestine “expressed the considered policy” of the administration in view of its previous efforts in behalf of partition.
The American Jewish Congress assailed the “shameful tactics and duplicity to which our State Department has resorted,” calling them “un-American and thoroughly dishonorable.”
Frank Goldman, president of B’nai B’rith, said that the United States proposal for the shelving of the partition of Palestine is “a more than astonishing reversal of the American official position of last November. It is an amazing reversal of the varying policy of five preceding administrations and of the Congress for more them a quarter of a century.
The American Council for Judaism supported the American reversal on partition as “the only position the United States could take under the circumstance.” Leasing J. Rosenwald, president, said “it was the wisest step for the government to take. If a mistake was made, now is the time to rectify it, rather than proceed ahead to disaster.”
The United Zionist-Revisionists declared that “the Palestine partition scheme of the Jewish Agency, the climax of years of retreat and appeasement, has miserably collapsed.” It called for immediate establishment of a provisional government in Palestine to wage a “relentless” struggle for Jewish statehood “under the leadership of those who never acceded t o defeatism.”
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
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.
