Protests Mount in U.S. over State Plan

A protest movement began to rise in the United States today against the British plan to establish an independent Palestine state with the Jews as a minority, Zionist officials in New York and in Washington kept in close touch with Jewish Agency leaders in London by telephone and cable. The Zionist Organization of America’s executive committee met today to prepare a statement to be issued tonight.

A. Alan Lane, chairman of the American Committee for the Protection of Minorities, announced that if the British Government should go through with its proposals, a series of “Balfour pledge meetings” throughout the United States, Great Britain and Palestine would be concluded to oppose them. The committee, he said, also would sponsor a joint protest of foreign policy and other non-sectarian organizations to President Roosevelt and the League of Nations.

The Jews have picketed Palestine for 19 centuries, but they can now hold a sit-down strike within the country, Dr. Solomon Goldman, president of the Z.O.A., declared last night at a meeting of the advisory committee of the World’s Fair Jewish Palestine Pavilion. Dr. Goldman declared: “We can tell Britain this: we have stood now for 19 centuries and picketed in front of Palestine. It’s true, other peoples came there and settled. But all the time we stayed there and picketed, telling the other people, ‘You are living there as robbers and thieves.’ So we say now we will continue to picket. But this time it can be a sit-down strike from inside.” Dr. Israel Goldstein, president of the Jewish National Fund, said of the British plan to establish an independent Palestine state: “Never will the Jewish people accept a Jewish Munich.”

Attributing the “final betrayal of the Balfour pledge,” to the “game of power politics,” the New York Herald Tribune said editorially today that in that game the Zionists “have no real means of bringing pressure to bear on the British, since pressure could be applied only by lending support to Nazi Germany.” Referring to the possibility of “protest from the United States,” the Tribune concluded that without being prepared to administer the entire Near East this Government “cannot either helpfully or rationally interfere with whatever the British may evolve as the most pragmatic answer to their difficulties there.”