J.s. Press Approves, with Reservations, America’s Responsibility for Palestine

Leading New York newspapers, though approving is principle the fact that the United States Government has assumed part of the responsibility for Palestine, express the belief that the statement represents a blow at Zonist aspirations, and urges that whatever aid the Anglo-American committee of inquiry may bring to the suffering Jews, be brought quickly.

“The New York Times” concedes that the statements of Truman and Bevin “will prove a vast disappointment to these immediately concerned,” and that “under this arrangement the average European Jew’s chance to get to Palestine will be, like his chance to win in any other lottery, a slim one.” On the other hand, it says, the proposed rate of immigration – 18,000 a year – is greater than the 15,000 a year under the White Paper.

The Times approves Mr. Bevin’s policy of insisting on the creation of conditions is European countries which will permit the Jews to live there without discrimination and expresses the hope that “the new committee quickens the free world’s conscience, is it has the power to do, to the sufferings and present predicament of these innocent people.”

The “New York Herald Tribune” considers President Truman’s announcement to be a striking departure from the American policy of the last quarter of a century. “President Truman,” the paper declares, “has accepted an equal responsibility for the United States in any decisions…and also gained…an equal right to bring its influence constructively to bear on the solution not only of the Palestine problem, but of the problem which the misused and tortured Jews of Europe present to the conscience of civilization as a whole”. Such a departure, the paper states, “is a sound one, because it rests on the principle of distributing responsibility.” The paper believes that the committee of inquiry may become “a rough model for the-kind of agency which must be developed if a working international system is to be achieved.”

“The New York Sun” does not see any need for a new inquiry. “If our State Department,” the paper declares, “and the British Foreign Office do not know plenty of facts about conditions in Palestine, then a lot of persons employed in both of them ought to be fired out of hand.”