THE Speech, and Its Context

Abba A. Solomon provides startling explanations for the "Zionizing" of the otherwise integrated American Jewish community, and the development of inordinate American support for the State of Israel. The author's investigation - of a watershed February 1948 speech by chairman Jacob Blaustein - shows that the American Jewish Committee, then the nation's most influential American Jewish organization, had reluctantly supported partition of Palestine in an effort to stop escalating Jewish nationalist terrorism. In fateful moments in America's relations with Palestine, after David Ben Gurion declared the Jewish nationalist state, the AJC kept silent on the betrayal of its ideal of nonsectarian government for all Palestinians. This decision has reverberated in the American Jewish community since - hostage to Israeli state violence and left helpless to offer an alternative to Jewish domination of Palestine.