Israel Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett today bitterly attacked “appeasement” of Germany as “sowing the seeds of new aggression and horror” in his opening address to the U.N. General Assembly today. Declaring that the “evil spirit of Nazism still dominates German mentality,” Mr. Sharett said: “The people of Israel and Jews throughout the world view with consternation and distress the progressive readmission of Germany to the family of nations.”
With Germany’s “revolting record intact, her guilt unexpiated and her heart unchanged,” Mr. Sharett said the new appeasement “outrages the sacred memory of countless martyrs, betrays the sacrifices sustained in the overthrow of Nazism and sows the seed of new aggression and horror. The danger is now imminent,” he added, “that the only real beneficiary of the present world crisis will be the very country which by brutal violence provoked the last war.
“Having exterminated the bulk of European Jewry and reduced its surviving remnants in Germany itself to an insignificant number,” Mr. Sharett said in his address, which referred to both East and West Germany, “the Nazis now vent their rage on the dead by desecration of cemeteries and destruction of tombstones.” Such things, he said, pointed up the “unreformed and unrepenting wickedness of the new apostles of the resurgent Nazi doctrine.”
ISRAEL FOREIGN MINISTER BRANDS AGGRESSIVE WARFARE AS “SCOURGE”
Declaring that “peace and survival have become synonymous,” Mr. Sharett appealed to the 59 U.N. delegates for “self-restraint and mutual tolerance” among nations and pledged his own nation to “scrupulous non-interference in the internal life of others.” He branded aggressive war “the scourge to be outlawed,” but stressed that “swift reaction to aggression” was not enough. Calling for constructive endeavors as the “radical remedy,” he told the delegates of Israel’s “ambitious phase of reconstruction and rehabilitation,” and declared: “What is being achieved in the field of development in the narrow confines of Israel could certainly be repeated on a vast scale by an international pooling of efforts wherever multitudes of people crave for better health, education and creative activity.”
He said that in Israel, “where masses of Jews driven by misery and fear, drawn by the promise of freedom and dignity, are entering and settling down, large numbers of them are uplifted in the process from the depths of destitution and backwardness to greater productivity and civilized ways of life. If our neighbors would heed the call of the Security Council and make peace with us,” he added, “our constructive erdeavors could have merged with theirs for the benefit of the entire Middle East.”
Mr. Sharett also gave full Israel support to the Soviet Union’s call for a Big Five peace pact; asked that “serious study” be accorded the United States proposal for strengthening the General Assembly; appealed for the seating of Communist China in the world organization; and urged support for the Soviet suggestion that all eligible candidates be admitted to the United Nations.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
