Bipartisan support of Israelis request for a security pact with the United States in view of the arms deal between the Communist countries and Egypt was voiced by a number of Governors and members of the U.S. Senate throughout the country in messages addressed to the American Zionist Council under whose auspices the huge mass-rally at Madison Square Garden took place last night.
The 20,000 people who jammed Madison Square Garden also heard Dr. Abba Hillel Silver appeal to President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to make it possible for Israel “to live and to defend itself.” Dr. Silver pointed out that no government or people will approve more enthusiastically the recently expressed opposition of President Eisenhower to an arms race in the Middle East than the government and people of Israel.
“They want no arms race,” Dr. Silver said. “They want to spend every precious dollar available to them on the upbuilding of their country, on agriculture, irrigation and colonization, on science, education and health and on caring for the broken in body and spirit who come to them from many lands, and most of them in recent years from Arab lands where their positions have become insecure and fraught with danger. But the State of Israel wants to live and wants to make sure of its survival as a free nation.
“When Israel now appeals to the free world in an hour of danger, when its bitterest foe has succeeded in augmenting its considerable military arsenal with staggering purchases of weapons of all kinds, it is not of an arms race that Israel is thinking but of survival,” Dr. Silver said. He emphasized that by imperilling Israel through a denial of adequate means of self-defense the United States would “play directly into the hands of the Soviets.”
Former President Harry S. Truman, in a message to the rally, said: “I am disturbed by the situation in the Middle East. It will always be a matter of great satisfaction to me that the U.S. was the first to extend recognition to the State of Israel. The Soviet policy of the delivery of arms to Egypt is a very dangerous one to the peace and tranquility of the Middle East. The immediate objective of our Government should be the immediate conversion of the Tripartite Declaration of 1950 into a more clearly defined security guarantee for all the peoples of the Middle East.”
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.
