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From The Militant, Vol. XII No. 13, 29 March 1948, p. 1.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
With ice-cold ruthlessness, the U.S. government is proceeding to bury its plan to partition Palestine and establish a Jewish state. On March 20, Senator Austin announced in the UN Security Council that the U.S. had abandoned partition and was now proposing a “temporary trusteeship.” Behind this switch are the interests of American oil imperialism. When it became clear that the Arab feudal rulers, on whose domains is to be found about 40% of the world oil supply, were uncompromisingly hostile to the partition proposal, the State Department abruptly reversed its Palestine policy.
It is difficult to believe that only four months have passed since the partition resolution came out of the UN on Nov. 30. In these four months the Jews have run the gamut from wild jubilation to despair and disillusionment. Last winter, partition was greeted in thg Jewish, liberal and Stalinist press with banner headlines literally proplaiming, the millenium. Rabbis announced that “it is possible for the first time to say that our six million dead have not died in vain.” (Jewish Day, Dec. 7, 1947)
The Zionist leaders and press actually portrayed Truman as a savior of the Jewish people; and pictured American imperialism as the agent of the liberation. On Dec. 5, Emanuel Neuman, president of the Zionist Organization of America, speaking to a mass meeting in Manhattan Center in New York, said: “If we now have this decision of the United Nations, it is due in very large measure to the sustained interest and unflagging efforts of President Truman.”
On Dec. 6, in his column in the Jewish Day, Dr. Margoshes said: “There is hardly a Jewish citizen in the United States who does not find himself deeply indebted to Harry S. Truman and the political party whose standard bearer he has been ...” On the same day, Dr. Abba Hillel Silver, one of the international leaders of the Zionist movement wrote a letter to President Truman in which he awarded the latter “the place of distinction in Jewish history.”
Today everyone knows what the high-sounding phrases and promises of President Truman are worth. How was it possible for adult political leaders, like the Zionists, to be so easily fooled? At the very least, their recent conduct demonstrates their unfittness for the role of political leadership of the Jewish masses.
One of the lowest forms of the human species is the political leader of an oppressed minority who grovels before the imperialist power, who works with might and main to induce faith and trust in imperialism, instead of leading an uncompromising fight against it. Such has been the role of the leaders of all the Zionist parties without exception, ever since the foundation of the Zionist movement. Such was their role in the support of the imperialist-sponsored plan for carving up Palestine. The net effect of their activity is to deliver the Jewish masses to the imperialist oppressors, and to divert them from an effective struggle.
The central need for revolutionary Jewish workers and youth is to drive a wedge between the Jewish masses and the reactionary and utopian Zionist movement. The Jewish masses of Palestine are interested in a program which will lead to peace between Jewish and Arab workers and peasants, and not to war. The Jewish masses throughout the world need a program for their liberation – and this can only be achieved in struggle against capitalist imperialism, not in struggle for an imperialist policy.
At present, the Zionist leaders are overcome with despair. Their proclamation to establish a Jewish: state May 16 (they could not do it even with the help of the UN, how; will they do it against its opposition?) is no more than an act of desperation, which shows the blind alley in which the Zionist movement has landed.
Militant Jewish workers and youth will recognize that this is a time for reconsideration. This is the moment to evaluate the Zionist-policy – its negative results, its mistakes, its objective betrayals, and its present hopeless confusion. Now is the time to study the program of the Fourth International and learn that only by joining with the advanced revolutionary section of the world labor movement, and fightingside by side in labor’s struggle, can the Jews work to destroy anti-semitism and fight to build a new socialist society where Jews can take an equal place with all other peoples. And even in more immediate terms, the alliance with the labor movement is the necessary precondition for the organization of a big-scale campaign to open the doors of the U.S. and other countries to all Jewish refugees – the only realistic short-term program to save European Jewry.
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