A violent offensive against the Israel Government and against Dr. Nahum Goldmann, chairman of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, has been unleashed by the Warsaw radio in a series of Yiddish-language broadcasts.
Dr. Goldmann, leading figure in the negotiations which led to West Germany’s agreement to pay $822,000,000 in reparations to Israel and the Jewish people, was assailed for allegedly having stated that diplomatic relations would be established between Israel and West Germany.
The “Mapai-bourgeois majority” in the Israel Parliament was denounced for having rejected a leftwing motion for a debate on the rearmament of Germany. (Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett recently told the Knesset that the government had, on several occasions, informed the Great Powers of its fears of a revival of Nazism in Germany and had warned against the dangers involved in the rearmament of Germany.)
The broadcasts, monitored here, charged that Israel had been “sold out” to Germany. They asserted that “in Israel, as in the Arab countries, German monopolist firms have gained a foothold.” German concerns, according to the broadcasts, are building factories and constructing strategic roads and airfields on Israel’s frontiers “at the orders of their U.S. masters.”
By rejecting the motion for debate on rearmament of Germany, a broadcast charged, “the Mapai and General Zionist majority in the Knesset has shirked the most important problem facing Israel and the entire Jewish people.”
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.
