What’s the story?
The papers of Frank Aydelotte, President of Swarthmore College from 1921-1940, includes a range of documents concerning Palestine and Palestinian education. Aydelotte was appointed to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine by President Truman in 1945. His commitment to Palestinian rights brought him into contact with prominent Palestinian and Jewish leaders, whose letters and writings became a part of his papers. Two such documents speak to Palestinian and Jewish resistance to the United States’ early support for Israel.Khalil Totah was a Palestinian Quaker educator and intellectual who was the Executive Director of the Institute for Arab Affairs in New York City from 1945-1950. He was passionate about educational reform as a tool for Palestinian liberation, and advocated for Arab rights in Palestine and the United States. In April 1949, Totah wrote to Clarence Pickett and Henry Cadbury of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), responding to AFSC’s March 1949 bulletin (which you can read online at the AFSC’s website: https://afsc.org/sites/default/files/documents/1949%20Palestine%20Refugee%20Relief%20-%20Newsletter.pdf). Totah opposed AFSC’s support for the United Nations and its partition plan. He criticized the United States for contributing to the Jewish refugee crisis by failing to accept enough displaced Jewish refugees into the United States. He also declared that the Partition Plan was motivated by American imperialism and political aims rather than genuine concern for Palestinian and Jewish wellbeing.
Elmer Berger, a leading anti-Zionist rabbi, was in regular communication with Aydelotte. He directed the anti-Zionist reform Jewish organization the American Council for Judaism, and in this pamphlet he responded to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’ 1953 report on his visit to West Asia. Berger criticized Dulles for meeting with Israeli state officials, and spoke out against “Jewish nationalism” as a danger to American Jewish communities. Berger asserted that the Arab world perceived Israel as “the latest climax of Western colonialism” and appealed to American fears about communism and the USSR’s influence. Berger described Zionism as “a foreign, obtrusive nationalism complicating the national status of Americans of Jewish faith.
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theme: Unfinished Revolutionssubjects: Zionism, anti-Zionism, Israel, Palestine, United Nations, nationalism, American Jewish community
contributing repository: Swarthmore College Special Collections
submitted by: Julia Stern
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