Zionist Actions Committee Session Opens; Goldmann Analyzes Talks

“Israel needs us now and will probably need us for many years to come,” Dr. Nahum Goldmann, co-chairman of the Jewish Agency executive, today told the opening session of the Zionist Actions Committee. In a lengthy analysis he outlined the major functions of the Zionist movement in the immediate future.

He was preceded on the Actions Committee rostrum by Premier David Ben Gurion, who welcomed the Zionist policy-making body in the name of the Israel Government. The Premier, in an expression of his own credo in relation to the Zionist movement, said that the movement’s vigor is not yet spent and predicted that it will show new strength in the future. He called on the leaders of the Zionist Organization not to lose their faith in the future of the movement and emphasized that the Zionist Organizations ability to accomplish its goals is not dependent on outside factors, “not even on the State of Israel and its laws,” but on the “faith and will for a life of independence of the Jewish nation.”

Dr. Goldmann declared that the task facing the Zionist movement at this time is threefold: adjustment of relations between Zionism and the Jewish nation and between the Zionist movement and the Israel Government and the straightening out of relations among the Zionists themselves. He scoffed at those who exaggerate the “downfall of Zionism.” He pointed out that the day-to-day tasks of Zionism now are not as dramatic as the achievements of the movement when it was fighting the Palestine Mandatory Government to bring in illegal immigrants. But, Dr. Goldmann added, this is no reason for the Zionist movement to develop an interiority complex. Nor, conversely, should the winning of the dramatic victories of statehood lead to a superiority complex on the part of the Israel Government and its officialdom, he stressed.

The prosaic, but important tasks, of the Zionist movement include mobilization of the Jews of the world to take a more active part in working for the State of Israel, the Agency leader declared. He called for the creation of two “fronts” in the movement’s battle: The first would be a front of all Jews–Zionist and non-Zionist alike–to assist Israel; the second would be Zionist “conquest” of Jewish communities all over the world “not by guns or by an army, but by persuasion.”

GOLDMAN ASKS ISRAEL NOT TO INTERFERE IN U.J.A.-BOND DRIVE SITUATION

In an appeal for an end to quarrels and differences between the Israel Government and the Zionist movement, Dr. Goldmann insisted that Israel must consider the Zionist movement its ambassador to Jewry. “If a status is given the Jewish Agency, it must be given wholeheartedly,” he added. He demanded that Israel’s Ambassador not mix into nor interfere in such quarrels as those between the United Jewish Appeal and the Israel bond drive. Israel must not send Ministers to the United States and send cable to the Jewish Agency over these differences, but must trust the Agency to settle them, he said.

He called upon the Zionists to drop their internal quarrels, which he said were more of a menace to Israel than the threats of the Arab states. He suggested the holding of annual congresses of local Zionist organizations and recommended the establishment of compulsory Zionist federations. Such developments, he said, would increase the authority of the Zionist movement and convert it into a tremendous factor in Jewish life everywhere.