British Jews Interested in Israel. but Consider It Foreign State. Leonard Stein Says

In setting up Israel, the Jews of Palestine filled the vacuum created by the termination of Britain’s League of Nations mandate and by the impotence of the United Nations, Leonard Stein, president of the Anglo-Jewish Association, said here last night at the annual meeting of the organization.

The Jews, Stein went on, “fought courageously and with success. They have done more and done it more quickly even than many of their well wishers thought possible.” Stressing that it is no longer a question of a national home under an international mandate, Stein declared that for British Jews, as well as for all Jews who are not its citizens, Israel is a foreign state, state, with all that that implies.

The British Jews, he said, have one allegiance only–undivided allegiance to their own country, which is more is more than mere acceptance of legal forms, it is a wholehearted identification with the national life. “British Jews are not called upon to suppress their natural, honorable concern for the future of the Jews in Palestine,” Stein said, “but nothing that has happened or may happen in Palestine can affect their permanent loyalties and obligations as British Jews.”

The British Jews’ “unflinching determination” to stand by their “brethren in Israel,” was voiced here yesterday by B.B. Lieberman, chairman of the Palestine Committee of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, at a meeting of the Board. Insisting that British recognition of Israel must come sooner or later, he said that it would be better for Britain if it were to come sooner. He also stressed that the recent change in the British official attitude to Israel was due solely to the “valor of Jewish arms and the courage and determination of the Jewish people everywhere.”

Prof. Selig Brodetsky, president of the Board, asserted that if the Jews of Britain had permitted themselves to be “terrorized into silence on Palestine,” the situation of British Jews would be much worse today. It was the duty of British Jews to advocate a policy of justice toward all people, especially their own people in Palestine, Brodetsky declared.