Says Many Will Leave Agency Due to Nationalistic Interpretation

In the course of an address last Sunday morning on “The Truth About Palestine,” at Congregation Rodeph Shalom. Rabbi Louis Wolsey said the following:

“The policy of the present MacDonald government is subject to the grave suspicion that the Balfour Declaration is in danger of revocation or nullification. It is true that the present Prime Minister has stated both in and out of office that he favors the Zionist claim in Palestine ; but the MacDonald government hangs by so slender a thread that a vigorous enforcement of the Balfour Declaration might mean a vote of censure, and a restoration of the Conservatives. In that event the British government will not be insensible to the fact that the Zionists are a small fraction of the Palestinian population and that the Arabs are ambitious to have a window on the Mediterranean. British self-interest will not be oblivious to the fact that as always, the Jew is a minority, and politically impotent.

“In the meantime. Britain may put on the appearance of support of the Balfour Declaration so long as there is the possibility of cajoling money from American Jews through the instrumentality of the Jewish Agency. But when it becomes apparent that this Agency, through its declaration at Zurich, has attempted to foist upon the Jews of the world a nationalistic interpretation of the Jew, then those who maintain that they are Jews by religion and who were beguiled into the Agency on the representation that it was to be non-partisan, will step

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out of the Agency and refuse to support it. Such Jews will not ignore the fact that the Balfour Declaration has already been violated and that it will be violated still more, in precisely the same way as Great Britain has broken its covenant with the Arabs.

The political policy of Great Britain has always been motivated not by idealism, but by a cold self-interest. The situation in Palestine under the mandate of Great Britain, is considerably more unhappy than it was under the rulership of the Turks. Great Britain made a pledge to the Arabs when it was in Great Britain’s interest, but when there seemed the possibility of enlisting the sympathy and the support of the Jews of America and of Eastern Europe in the Allied cause, it broke the covenant with the Arabs and issued the Balfour Declaration. Now that it seems to be Great Britain’s interest to defer to the Arabs, who are very much in the majority, it calls the Balfour Declaration the Lloyd George Declaration, and then proceeds to repudiate Lloyd George.

“If only the Zionists had been wise enough to devote their propaganda to the establishment of a home in Palestine where Jews might develop an industrial, an economic and a cultural life, instead of a political interpretation and a political domination, these massacres never would have taken place and the Balfour Declaration would not have been a plaything or a scrap of paper.”