The Roots of the Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace Lobby - by Mitchell Bard

Interestingly, the lobby’s funding apparently dried up during the period from 1949 until 1967. I could find no calls for the end of Jordanian and Egyptian occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, nor could I find any demands for a Palestinian state in those territories to achieve the “legitimate rights of the Palestinian people.” 

Mitchell Bard..
 Algemeiner..
 02 July '19..

 I have been going through the archives of the pro-peace, pro-Jewish state (later Israel) lobby, and I’ve found some interesting fundraising letters that offer insight into the thinking of the early advocates of this slogan. In November 1917, the lobby was formed to rally liberal Jewish support for the Balfour Declaration’s call for the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. To distinguish itself from other Jewish organizations, the new group said it would lobby to ensure the United States supported Balfour’s insistence that nothing be done to “prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”

 In 1936, the lobby asked for donations to help it persuade members of Congress to tell President Franklin Roosevelt that he should support British immigration quotas to limit the number of Jews who could go to Palestine, in order to mollify Palestinian Arabs who claimed they were being displaced, and were reacting with violence.

 In September 1938, the lobby asked members of Congress to sign a letter urging Roosevelt to join his British ally, Neville Chamberlain, at a meeting with Adolf Hitler in Munich to discuss how to avoid war and achieve peace in Europe.

 Less than two months later, the lobby sent a message to its followers expressing outrage over the pogroms against Jews in Germany and Austria, but raising questions about whether the actions of some of the Jewish communities had provoked the response.

 In the interest of peace, the lobby called on Roosevelt to pressure leaders of the Jewish community in Palestine in 1939 to accept the British White Paper, which called for the creation of a unitary state in which the Arabs would be the majority, and would impose restrictions on land acquisition by Jews, limit Jewish immigration to the country’s “economic absorptive capacity,” and make it contingent on Arab consent.

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  Mitchell Bard is Executive Director of AICE and Jewish Virtual Library.