Menachem Beigin, leader of Israel’s right-wing Herut party, urged South African Jewry last night to protest to the Israel Government against the contemplated establishment of diplomatic relations with West Germany.
The speech to a crowded Revisionist meeting at Johannesburg City Hall was one of a series being made by Beigin and Chaim Landau, his deputy, in a special tour for a Revisionist fund-raising campaign which has brought expulsion of the party from the South African Zionist Federation and formal charges of a “breach of communal discipline.”
In his emotion-packed address, Beigin asked how Jews could remain silent if the time should come when an ambassador “of those whose hands have the blood of our fathers and mothers” would be in the Holy Land.
He denounced the certainty that “over the Holy Land the most unholy anthem of “Deutschland Uber Alles will he sung, an anthem that was sung over the ashes of our murdered parents.” No trade deals, he said, could “compensate for that.”
He also urged “all freedom loving people, Jewish and Christian alike,” to reply to the Arab boycott of Israel with a “counter-boycott of the Arabs.”
The new danger to the West created by Syria’s lurch to the left would never have happened, he said, if the United States had not made the “blunder” of opposing Israel’s Sinai campaign and forcing Israel to withdraw. Had Israel “sweated it out” and remained, he asserted, the Nasser dictatorship would have crumbled.
The Herut leader warned that if France was forced out of Algeria, “all of North Africa” would be in “hands hostile to Israel” and “fertile ground for Communist penetration,” adding as “a representative of Israel,” he appealed to Frenchmen: “Don’t leave Algeria, you have the right to stay.”
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.
