American Council for Judaism Submits Its Views on Palestine Report to State Department

The American Council for Judaism has endorsed all of the recommendations of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, including the provision for the admission of 100,000 displaced Jews into Palestine, and has urged the adoption of the report as a whole, as a humanitarian proposal designed to save and to safeguard Jews of Palestine and of Europe, it was disclosed today. The Council urged the early implementation of all of the recommendations.

Its views were expressed in a communication to the State Department submitted by Lessing J. Rosenwald, president of the Council, at a meeting with Dean Acheson, Under-Secretary of State, and Loy Henderson, director of Near-Easters Affairs, following an invitation extended to the Council by the State Department, asking it to convey its comments on the Anglo-American Committee’s report. A similar expression of support has been communicated to President Truman.

The Council stressed the imperative need of adopting the report as a whole as providing a “realistic balance between contending forces.” The rate of implementation of the specific recommendations, the Council maintained, “will necessarily vary depending upon their nature, but the policy implicit in the total report should be accepted by the adoption of the report as a whole. This would serve the important salutary purpose of indicating clearly the lines of policy which will guide our Government in its relationship to the problems dealt with in the report and will act as a restraint upon partisan interpretations. Partisan pressures,” the statement adds, “which demand the acceptance of only those recommendations that are favorable will lead unquestionably to unsettled conditions within and outside of Palestine.”

The Council endorsed the recommendation for immediate immigration of 100,000 Jews into Palestine and urged that every precaution be taken that “such certificates are not diverted from the displaced refugees.” The Council further expressed its complete concurrence and support of the committee’s recommendation that Palestine shall not be a Jewish or Arab State and asked that every effort be made to have the Jewish Agency, the Arab League and their constituent organizations accept this declaration.

The statement further advanced the desirability of inviting the “native talent of the Palestinian people, Christians, Jews and Moslems, to assume a larger part of the official administration,” and hailed the committee’s recommendation continuing immigration opportunities into Palestine in accordance with the absorptive capacity of the country and that such immigration shall not be determined by racial or religious qualifications. The Council also supported the recommendation of the committee to remove discriminatory practices now in existence in Palestine which, it said, “tend to alienate one section of the Palestinian population from another.”