Zionists Hit Dulles for Offering Israel ‘counsel of Weakness’

Rabbi Philip S. Bernstein, chairman of the American Zionist Committee on Public Affairs, told Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in a letter today that his statement on the Middle East “filled us with dismay and foreboding” and offered Israel only a counsel of weakness and defeatism in the face of Communist aggression. He urged that Israel be permitted to acquire the defensive arms it needs to prevent war.

Earlier. Dr. Israel Goldstein, president of the American Jewish Congress, denounced the Dulles statement and said it must have left many Americans “deeply disappointed in the declining moral quality of American statesmanship. “He charged that the acts of the State Department in the vital question of Israel’s security have been and continue to be unmistakably pro-Arab.

Wholehearted approval of the Dulles statement was voiced today by the Jordanian Ambassador, Abdel Rifai, following a long interview with Assistant Secretary of State George V. Allen. He praised the Dulles statement as a “realistic understanding of the situation.”

In a nationally-syndicated column, the Alsop brothers warned today that even if the danger of war in the Middle East “is surmounted this year, it is universally admitted that the new Communist political offensive in the Middle East has already scored brilliant successes.” The New York Post editorially characterized the Dulles statement as “an invitation to new Arab blackmail” and declared that “it was barren of any real sensitivity to the feeling of isolation which must be growing in Israel.”