Now-editorial Notes

The flood disaster in Poland has reached huge proportions. Hundreds of people have lost their lives and thousands are shelterless and without food. Many of the victims are Jews. The Jews of Poland, in dire economic distress, are mobilizing their various charitable organizations to give immediate relief to the stricken population in the flood area. The Polish government and the Red Cross are doing their utmost to meet the emergency. But the magnitude of the calamity makes it imperative that the Jews of America, through the organized relief agencies, shall dispatch additional relief without delay ruth is not the Jewish government in Palestine. The Jewish people in Palestine and in the Diaspora have given no mandate to the Histadruth to act as a “responsible government” or as any other kind of government. Jewish Palestine can afford no dictatorships. The dictatorship of the Jewish proletariat would be almost as detrimental to the interests of the Jewish people as a plutocrat or a Fascist dictatorship would be. The entire ideal of the rehabilitation of Palestine as the Jewish National Home would be vitiated by the establishment of any type of dictatorship in Jewish Palestine.

It is most unfortunate that the Arlosoroff case and the acquittal of the Revisionists who had been tried for murder and freed, have released passions of political partisanship and strife which are rocking the Yishuv and filling the Jews throughout the world with deep anxiety.

Dr. A. Coralnik, the well-known publicist and chairman of the now defunct Stavsky Defense Committee, has made the following sensible statement:

“I wish to declare that with the acquittal of Stavsky our work has ceased, and I consider it inopportune and unfair to indulge in further recriminations and revive the issue under the banner of one party or another. The Court in Jerusalem has spoken—the case is closed. I would urge all my friends, to whatever party in Jewish life they may belong, to make every effort possible in order to bring about, if not a permanent peace, at least a truce between the two warring factions, the Revisionists and the Labor party in Palestine.

“Palestine is too small, Jewish life is too hard for such a cruel factional fight. I am not preaching unity or obliteration of party differences. I wish to impress my friends only with the idea that the art of politics, the art of life, has one fundamental principle, and this is proportion, measure, self-control. The future of Palestine cannot be moulded by unrestrained passion, but by the controlling, restraining and creative power of reason. Therefore it is urgently necessary that the Stavsky case shall be buried and forgotten, and that this sorrowful chapter of the new Jewish life shall be sealed.”