Diplomats -- United States -- Biography; Morgenthau, Henry, 1856-1946; United States -- Foreign relations -- 20th century
We feel that in so doing we are voicing the opinion of the majority
of American Jews born in this country and of those foreign born who
have lived here long enough to thoroughly assimilate American
political and social conditions. The American Zionists represent,
according to the most recent statistics available, only a small
proportion of the Jews living in this country, about 150,000 out of
3,500,000. (American Jewish Year Book, 1918, Philadelphia)....
We raise our voices in warning and protest against the demand of
the Zionists for the reorganization of the Jews as a national unit,
to whom, now or in the future, territorial sovereignty in Palestine
shall be committed. This demand not only misinterprets the trend of
the history of the Jews, who ceased to be a nation 2,000 years
ago, but involves the limitation and possible annulment of the
larger claims of Jews for full citizenship and human rights in all
lands in which those rights are not yet secure. For the very reason
that the new era upon which the world is entering aims to establish
government everywhere on principles of true democracy, we reject
the Zionistic project of a “national home for the Jewish people in
Palestine.”
Zionism arose as the result of the intolerable conditions under
which the Jews have been forced to live in Russia and Roumania. But
it is evident that for the Jewish population of these countries,
variously estimated at from six to ten millions, Palestine can
become no home land. Even with the improvement of the neglected
condition of this country, its limited area can offer no solution.
The Jewish question in Russia and Roumania can be settled only
within those countries by the grant of full rights of citizenship
to Jews....
Against such a political segregation of the Jews in Palestine, or
elsewhere, we object, because the Jews are dedicated heart and soul
to the welfare of the countries in which they dwell under free
conditions. All Jews repudiate every suspicion of a double
allegiance, but to our minds it is necessarily implied in and
cannot by any logic be eliminated from establishment of a sovereign
State for the Jews in Palestine.
Of this statement I was one of the signers. Congressman Julius Kahn and
I were asked to present these views to the Conference; Rabbi Isaac
Landman, editor of _The American Hebrew_, joined us, and the original
text was duly filed with the American Commission at Paris.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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