Swiss Parliamentarian Says Jews Must Have Country of Their Own After the War

A plea for the creation of a Jewish national home somewhere, so that the Jews may have a country of their own as a “base of their existence, ” is suggested today is a front page article in the liberal Swiss weekly, Die Nation, written by Sonder Egger, a prominent member of the Swiss parliament. The article, which has aroused great interest here, reads:

“If a Swiss or an Italian or a Frenchman goes to America he will find friends but no home. The Jews find homes wherever they go and wherever they find other Jews. This fact is of the greatest importance if the Jewish problem is to be solved. The Jews must have a country to which they belong. The base of their existence must not be dispersion throughout the world, but a gathering in one Jewish national home. Only such a home will give Jews what they lack most; a feeling of belonging somewhere, of having a country which will lend them support. They will thus be freed of a ‘world citizenship’ which makes them at home everywhere and nowhere.

“From such a home Jews may go to other countries as do Germans, Frenchmen, Britons and Italians, but they no longer will be strangers, who, with a sort of bad conscience, fear that they will be thrown out of the country, and who suffer as a result of being strangers. They will be men belonging to a country, to a people, men who can return whenever they please, simple moral human beings.

“It is a misinterpreted sense of humanity to deny the existence of a Jewish problem. It is better to recognize facts and seek a human solution. Only to be detested is the terrible and cowardly way in which the present times try to solve the Jewish problem. The Jews themselves realize that the most important aim is to close the sad chapter of European persecutions. Jews are indeed ‘ the people at war.’ We hope that future and better world planning will allow them to be what they most long for, “the people of peace.'”