When the freedom-loving, victorious Allied Nations foregather about the peace table, the Palestine mandate should be reviewed. There is serious question as to whether it has not been actually misused. The White Paper itself has been declared by many authorities to be illegal.

The United States has a definite obligation in this matter. The Balfour Declaration was issued after consultation with the United States. Congress added its sanction in a joint resolution which said:

"The United States of America favors the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish people."

A special treaty with Great Britain, after rejection of the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations Covenant, incorporated the text of the Palestine Mandate, which included the Balfour Declaration.

Moreover, every President from Woodrow Wilson down to Franklin D. Roosevelt has given favorable expression to the Palestine project.

It is highly important, too, to keep in mind that in giving sympathy and support to the present movement to prevent the White Paper from being made effective after this month, there can be no question of offering offense to the present British Government, for the very plain and simple reason that the leaders of the present British Government condemned the White Paper in the strongest terms when it was issued. Mr. Winston Churchill himself said in Parliamentary

debate on May 23, 1939:

"There is much in this White Paper which is alien to the spirit of the Balfour Declaration, but I will not trouble about that. I select the one point upon which there is plainly a breach and repudiation of the Balfour Declaration-the provision that Jewish immigration can be stopped in five years' time by the decision of the Arab majority."

Mr. Churchill should make good on that statement. The United States should do what it consistently can to bring him to that action.

The day of liberation is close at hand for the victims of Axis conquest on the Continent of Europe-and in the Far East. This same day of liberation should make freemen of the Jews of Europe who have escaped torture and death, and who have fought to survive until victory comes.

Let there be no hypocritical peace, with freedom for only a part of the people of the world.

The Atlantic Charter solemnly promises that all men in all lands shall be allowed to live out their lives in freedom.

The doors of Palestine must be reopened-and kept open.

Hon. SOL BLOOM,

NEW YORK, N. Y., February 16, 1944.

Chairman, Committee on Foreign Affairs,

House of Representatives, Washington, D. C.

SIR: As a delegate of the American Federation of Jews from Central Europe I was present at the hearings on February 7th and 8th. Following your suggestion, made at the conclusion of the hearings, I beg to submit to you the following statement:

On various occasions and also in the course of the hearings the return of the Jews to Central Europe after the war has been advocated as a proper way for, at least, a partial solution of the Jewish problem. Those in favor of such a return forget that many parents depend on their children who, on their part, will refuse to live in countries which to them hold out no prospects of liberty, dignity, and happiness.

They lose sight of the fact that German education for more than 10 years has been most thorough. For those subjected to that sort of education it will be easier to cross continents and oceans than to overcome the distance to people which they have learned to despise and to murder. The same difficulty exists for the Jews with regard to their persecutors.

Again, the same small amount of energy, left in a Nazi victim that will enable him to carry on in the stimulating atmosphere of Palestine, will not be sufficient to have him resume his life in Germany and to have him fight against the background of ghastly memories, unredeemed souls and of a slowly, if at all, receding flood of bias and hatred.

Therefore, the majority of those who will survive the dreadful camps as well as those who have found only temporary refuge in various parts of the world will know that going back is not identical with coming home. They will want to stay away from the land of their persecutors.

I should like to call your attention to another point. There are thousands of Jewish orphans a strange sort of orphans indeed for they have become so while their parents were still alive and dragged away from them into no man's land. Their arrival in Palestine, as experience has shown, means to them reunion with their greater family before their reunion with their own family-if such a reunion will ever take place.

The adults among the immigrants from Central Europe who have made numerous and genuine contributions to industry and agriculture of Palestine, their strong and healthy children together with the whole Jewish population in Palestine they have all the tools for complete self-government. They wait for the right to use them and they wait for their brothers to come.

May I state, my dear Mr. Bloom, that those whom I represent, are the natural supporters of, the resolution now pending in both Houses.

Very truly yours,

MAX GRUENEWALD.

APPENDIX

THE JEWISH NATIONAL HOME IN

PALESTINE

COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

SEVENTY-EIGHTH CONGRESS

SECOND SESSION

H. Res. 418 and H. Res. 419

389

THE JEWISH NATIONAL HOME IN PALESTINE

House Resolution 418 and House Resolution 419, relative to the Jewish National Home in Palestine, were introduced and referred to the Committee on Foreign Affairs on January 27, 1944.

Much of the basic source material relating to this question has not heretofore been collated. In order that it may have at hand such data, and in an effort to provide the Committee on Foreign Affairs with full information regarding the issues involved, the chairman has assembled copies of the following original documents: The texts of the Mandate on Palestine; the joint resolution of the Sixty-seventh Congress, signed by President Harding, favoring the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jews; the British White Paper on Palestine of May 1939; the Convention of 1924 between the United States and Great Britain relative to Palestine; and other data on this subject contained in official documents of the State Department, the British House of Lords and House of Commons, and also of the Jewish Agency in Palestine.

ACTION INITIATED AT BERMUDA CONFERENCE, APRIL 1943, INDEFINITELY POSTPONING BRITISH WHITE PAPER BAN ON IMIGRATION

Under provisions of the British White Paper of 1939, further Jewish immigration into Palestine was limited to 75,000 immigrants and refugees and all Jewish immigration was to cease on March 31, 1944. By 1943 only a little more than half of the 75,000 Jews permitted to enter under terms of the White Paper had been able to reach Palestine. As the result of action initiated at the Bermuda Conference of April 1943, the expiration date of March 31, 1944, was indefinitely postponed by the British Parliament to enable the authorized remainder, approximately 30,000 Jews in number, to enter Palestine whenever they should succeed in reaching that haven.

The resolutions now pending before the Committee on Foreign Affairs provide:

That the United States shall use its good offices and take appropriate measures to the end that the doors of Palestine shall be opened for free entry of Jews into that country, and that there shall be full opportunity for colonization, so that the Jewish people may ultimately reconstitute Palestine as a free and democratic Jewish commonwealth.