Z.O.A. Convention Opened; Silver Asks for American Arms for Israel

The 59th annual meeting of the Zionist Organization of America opened here today with an address by Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver calling for the United States to supply Israel with defensive arms and urging the West to extend to Israel a binding military pact.

Rabbi Silver told the Z.O.A. that “if our government is persuaded that the vast armaments which the Soviet Government has poured into Egypt and other Arab lands” endangered Israel “and that the situation calls for urgent rectification, then it should not pass the buck to other governments to correct the imbalance. Such a position possesses the virtue neither of rightness nor of forthrightness.”

Addressing hundreds of delegates, Rabbi Silver said “the free world cannot, on the one hand, undertake to sell or to give arms to countries in all parts of the world as part of an over-all policy to strengthen them against possible aggression-realizing that an arms race of vast proportions is on between the East and the West–and on the other hand deny the right to the young Republic of Israel to acquire weapons to defend itself against threatened aggression on the ground that this would encourage an arms race.”

Dr. Silver charged that recently “international conferences were called and associations were set up in connection with the seizure of the Suez Canal which pointedly excluded Israel.” He said “such attempts to achieve peace and stability in a region of the world of which Israel is a vital part and ignore Israel are doomed to failure. Israel must be regarded as a focal point in any peace strategy in the Middle East. The Western world will recover the diplomatic initiative which it lost in that part of the world as soon as it comes to acknowledge this simple fact.”

Rabbi Silver said that “neither the United Nations nor the Western Powers have ever used their full power and authority to induce the Arab states to negotiate a peace settlement with Israel any more than they used their full authority and the sanctions indicated in the Charter of the United Nations to compel Egypt to lift the blockade against Israeli shipping in the Suez Canal.”

Defending Israel’s defense policy, Rabbi Silver said “it serves no purpose at all to brand every act of self-defense on the part of the Israeli an act of reprisal. Just what is expected of the people of Israel? Is it expected of them that they should sit there on the borders as clay pigeons to be shot at will by Arab terrorists and then to have the families of the slain and wounded comforted by the fact that a representative of the United Nations has rebuked the nation to which the assailant belonged? And is this to continue indefinitely?”