upon the self-respect and the self-realization of the Jews, and upon their appreciation by the whole world, if the Jewish population of Palestine enjoys equal rights and autonomy, not because it is a question of Jews, but because they have had recognized their right as Jews to settle in the country.
“If we do not desire the colonization of Palestine for religious motives, we must desire it so that the world will see what Jewish intelligence, Jewish industry and Jewish ethics can achieve when they are allowed to develop freely.
“In other aims, we pursue the same road as the Zionists, a road that stretches beyond the reach of a single generation, until the goal is in sight and which therefore demands joint effort and joint will—joint will to do a work whose final forming must be left to our children and our grandchildren, the details of which, frequently concerning matters of the distant future, ought not to inflame passions today—a work which is undeniably fine and lofty and which can and should unite the Jewry of the whole world, and show that a united Jewry exists.
“That is the real form and aim of the Jewish Agency, in which Zionists and non-Zionists have equal rights and equal influence. If that has not been shown so clearly hitherto as some people would have liked, the reason lies in the experience and expertness which the Zionists have gained in the course of ten years of self-sacrificing work, and in the burden which the extended Jewish Agency had to assume immediately at the outset of its activity, by reason of the August events and their after-effects, and has survived.
“The Jewish Agency constitutes a working organization in a definite field, the neutralization of which will only serve to make clear the Diaspora question and matters of communal institutions. The exclusion of the Palestine question will mark out the parties more clearly. If the opponents too sit in friendship in the Council-chamber of the Jewish Agency, they have not thereby surrendered nor limited their complete liberty of action in all other questions. At most, the discussion can proceed with greater urbanity, and that would be no harm.”
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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.
