A resolution protesting against the United States Navy policy which in effect supports the anti-Israel boycott proclaimed by the Arab League was adopted here last night by the executive board of the Maritime Trades Department representing 250,000 maritime workers organized in 28 AFL-CIO unions.
The resolution called upon the U.S. Government to rescind the Navy’s stand. It termed the Navy’s policy a “Hitlerite boycott. ” It called upon Congress to make a thorough investigation of the “disgraceful and un-American contacts with Arab states.”
The board’s resolution went on to say that “certain American ships, manned by American seafaring men and built by American shipyard workers” were barred from the Middle Eastern trade because they were owned “in whole or in part by persons of the Jewish religion.”
The resolution charged also that the Government was put in the position of joining the Arab states in discriminating against American flag-shipping. The board said further that the current policy put the United States in the position of contradicting the stand expressed in the United Nations upholding freedom of the seas.
(A similar protest was made yesterday in New York by Paul Hall, president of the Seafarers International Union. The SIU’s protests were made in letters to President-Elsenhower, the Navy, the Agriculture Department and the Commodity Credit Corporation. Mr. Hall said the policy indorsed the Arab boycott, permitted foreign nations to bar American ships from carrying their own government’s cargoes, created an American government blacklist of American vessels and threw new burdens on the already hard-pressed American merchant fleet. )
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.
