World Press Digest

The Blackshirt, the official organ of the Mosleyite Fascists, commenting on the trade between Palestine and Nazi Germany, writes.

Can you beat that! We are to cut off our nose to spite our face and refuse to trade with Germany in order to defend the poor Jews. The Jews themselves, in their own country, are to continue making profit dealing with Germany themselves.

Fascists cannot better counter the malicious propaganda to destroy our friendly relationship with Germany than by using this fact.

SAYS ARABS PROFIT BY JEWISH PROGRESS

Masada, the official organ of the Youth Zionist Organization of America, takes up the issue of Arab labor in Palestine and comments as follows:

It is with no little impatience that we must listen to the constant plaint of the “liberals”— “But, what of the Arabs?” Without knowledge of the facts, these people speak as if Zionists conquered Palestine “with fire and sword” and then entered upon the exploitation of the “natives.” It will be a revelation to these so-called liberals, though not to Zionists, that the prosperity in Palestine is as much an Arab prosperity as a Jewish one.

The real wages of the Arab worker have increased by two-thirds in the course of the last decade. Arabs have deserted the villages and towns where Arab effendi still pay a worker three piastres a day. They have flocked in and about the Jewish colonies and cities where the construction trades, the industries as well as agricultural projects offer decent wages. No less than seven thousand Arabs are now employed in Jewish enterprises. The Zionists devoted 16,000 dunam of land from the recent Huleh purchase by the Jewish Agency exclusively for the settlement of Arabs. The Arabs have not done as much for their own workers.

DOUBTS SINCERITY OF RABBI’S SOCIALISM

The Y.M.H.A. Bulletin, official organ of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association, criticizing the 241 rabbis who have sanctioned Socialism in Palestine, writes editorially;

What is happening to conservative American rabbinical leadership? Have they become semi-radicals? And so several points come to mind. Knowing the role that the rabbinate has played in America during the past years one is apt to doubt the sincerity of their voicings. Just to what extent these gentlemen of the Jewish church are really in earnest in carrying out the principles to which they have given their adherence remains to be analyzed in the light of their past actions.

We have yet to meet a rabbi who though eloquent in his voicings of the solid pillars that support the synagogue will turn his voice against these same pillars when they come out against the Child Labor Amendment. It has come to our knowledge that very few rabbis have left their pulpits to take a turn at the picket line. At none of the sermons we had the chance to listen to did the learned gentleman in the pulpit denounce the Jewish banker who might have been unloading worthless stocks and bonds on the American public.

Nor has a rabbi crashed the front pages of a newspaper with the startling statement that the most important member of his congregation is paying starvation wages to his workers who are laying up wealth for him.

Thus in the light of what has gone before one can have no faith in the rabbinical brand of Socialism. Only when the rabbis of America stop rattling at general inferences of the economic order and get down to specific details of condemnation of our social system will their words carry weight in intellectual circles.

QUESTIONS SINCERITY OF HISTADRUTH

Under the heading “The ‘Hechsher’ on Palestine Labor,” The American Jewish World comments on the fact that the American reform rabbis save endorsed Socialism in Palestine, as follows:

The 241 members of the Central Conference of American. Rabbis who, as individuals, signed the endorsement of the Palestine Labor Movement, were right when they pointed out that the prophetic ideal “Zion Bemishpat Tipodeh,” “Zion will be redeemed only through justice,” was as profoundly true today as of old.

They are right in indicating the value of building in Palestine a co-operative rather than a competitive society and of securing a decent living standard for all workers. The right of collective bargaining upon which the Histadruth insists, is one of the essential means to that end.

One may question, however, whether the Histadruth has always used its best endeavors “to foster a communal consciousness and communal unity among the Jews of Palestine.” There were occasions when it permitted class-consciousness to overshadow the problem of Jewish unity. Class-consciousness in general is decidedly not one of the prophetic ideals. Neither is social justice, as Rabbi Louis I. Newman pointed out, necessarily the monopoly of any single group.