Top-ranking leaders of the Zionist Organizations of America today called for a new effort by the U. S. Government to bring about peace between Israel and the Arab states and emphasized that the time for a change in our Middle East policy is long overdue.
In a keynote address at a meeting of the National Zionist Administrative Council, the ruling body of the ZOA between conventions, Dr. Harris J. Levine, chairman of the Council, declared: “More than 300 Congressional candidates during the last election Arabs states.” He voiced the hope “that these who thus went on record will recognize that they have a clear duty to make their influence felt in the Congress and in the Administration in this direction.”
The delegates assembled from all parts of the country also heard and endorsed a statement made at the meeting by Dr. Emanuel Neumann, chairman of the ZOA executive committee, warning that the newest manifestations of anti-Semitism and neo-Nazism in Germany threaten to “disqualify the Bonn Republic as an ally of this country consecrated to the cause of democracy and human freedom.”
Mortimer May, president of the ZOA, addressing the opening session of the two-day meeting of the Administrative Council, said that American Zionists “look forward to a full policy declaration by our government which we profoundly hope will halt the present drift toward disaster in the Middle East and strengthen the traditional American attitude of support for our true friend and reliable ally in that area – the State of Israel.”
Jasques Torczyner, chairman of the ZOA World Zionist Affairs Committee, said that in Israel “the uncertainty of the political situation growing out of the State Department’s policies and the threat of Arab aggression have created a public sentiment that is more and more pro-British and pro-French and much less pro-American than a year ago.”
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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.