Buffalo Jewish Review · Buffalo, New York · 13 November 1925

CP-1925-008

United Palestine Funds Appeal

British Say Palestine Can Absorb Seventy Thousand to One Hundred Thousand Jewish Immigrants in 1926

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Transcribed from the clipping

“FOR the first time the Jews of America are going to be organized for Palestine on a national scale. The Baltimore conference, called for November 29th by Rabbi Stephen S.

Wise, national chairman of the United Palestine Funds Appeal for $5,000,000, is expected to bring together more than five hundred of the leading Jews of America… No Zionist leader in 1918 would have dared to predict in 1918 that Palestine would be able, in 1925, to admit and absorb 4,000 new immigrants every month… In the opinion of the British, the greatest colonizing power in history, Palestine can absorb in 1926 from 70,000 to 100,000 Jewish immigrants!

Palestine today is already admitting five times as many Jewish immigrants as all the other countries of the world, including the United States, combined… Meanwhile the pressure upon the gates of Palestine becomes greater from day to day. It threatens to become an irresistible avalanche.

In Poland, 20,000 immigrants a week demand certificates of immigration into Palestine… We Zionists have undertaken—one must use the language of the sporting page—we have undertaken one of the amazing stunts of history.

We have undertaken, with nothing but nerve and enthusiasm, to build an empty country into a home for millions of men and women, possessing an old civilization, a long tradition, and perhaps the highest standard of living in the world. We have gone to the world and secured, in return for nothing, the acceptance of a historic claim and a humanitarian ideal.

We have induced the world to open Palestine for us, and to keep it open until there, in all the implications of the term.”

Context added by this archive

Two phrases, ten lines apart, that the rest of this archive spends a century circling. The British are the greatest colonizing power in history, said admiringly, as the authority for an absorption figure. And the undertaking is to build an empty country into a home for millions of men and women. Empty.

Printed in Buffalo in November 1925 — six months after the same city’s papers could have read that the Arabs of Palestine were cultivating nine million dunam (CP-1925-002). The appeal also invents a word for Jews who disagreed: the Jewish anti-Palestinian, who is called a freak.

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