Partition Plan is “act of Treachery” Dooming Jews of Europe, Silver Charges

Dr. Abba Hillel Silver, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the American Zionist Emergency Council and President of the Zionist Organization of America, today attacked the “federalization plan” recommended by the Anglo-American experts as a “conscienceless act of treachery, dooming the helpless Jewish survivors in Europe to further death and humiliation and driving the Jews of Palestine to further desperation.”

Speaking for the entire Zionist movement in the United States — the Zionist Organization of America, Hadassah, Mizrachi and Poale Zion — Dr. Silver denounced as “revolting” and “immoral” the Cabinet Committee’s recommendation that the admission of 100,000 homeless European Jews to Palestine, first urged almost a year ago by President Truman and unanimously recommended as an immediate step by the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, be made “conditional” on the adoption of the “federalization” proposal.

“In plain English, this means that 100,000 helpless refugees are to be used as hostages by Britain and the United States in order to extort from the Jewish people acceptance of a political formulation which clearly repudiates every international commitment made to the Jewish people with respect to Palestine — a formulation which the governments concerned surely know the Jews cannot accept,” Dr. Silver said. His statement continued as follows:

“The unfairness of the ‘plan’ itself can best be illustrated by quoting directly from the dispatch in this morning’s New York Times, which reported the facts: ‘The Zionist district would include 1,500 square miles, compared with the 2,600 recommended by the Peel Report proposing partition in 1936, and the 45,000 in the area constituting Palestine when it was originally promised as a Jewish national home.’ Forty percent of the present population of Palestine, then, would be offered three percent of the land internationally pledged to the Jewish people.

“This is a plan for the ghettoization of the Jews in their own Homeland. Even that small portion of the country remaining for Jewish settlement under the ‘plan’ would be controlled almost completely by the same British Colonial Administration, whose only right to be in Palestine in the first place is the duty assigned to it by the Balfour Declaration and the Palestine Mandate: facilitation of the development of the Jewish National Home. We quote again from the New York Times dispatch: ‘Under such a constitution, Palestine’s provinces would have considerably less autonomy than was enjoyed by Britain’s American colonies in the 18th Century.’

“But, like those American colonists, the Jews of Palestine — and Jews throughout the world — will not submit to this evil decree. For the Jews of Europe it is now Palestine or death; for the Jews of Palestine it is now liberty or death. The Zionist Movement of this country will be actively identified in this historic struggle. The Jewish people will not be destroyed!”