Symbols & Facts

The British cruiser Ajax dropped anchor last week at Haifa. In the first winter of the war against Hitler, the Ajax had been a symbol of hope and freedom when she and two other light British warcraft harried the German pocket battleship Graf Spee to self-destruction off Montevideo. She was not that sort of symbol last week to hundreds of desperate Jews who stared at her from impounded refugee ships in Haifa harbor.

The British, for the moment, were more interested in facts than in symbols; and one cogent fact was that Jewish immigration was running at 10,000 a month as against a quota of 1,500. Determined to stop this, the British sent powerful naval and air forces to stop and search any ships, under any flag, suspected of carrying illegal immigrants.* London announced that intercepted Jewish refugees would be held on Cyprus, where a mile-square camp, doubly enclosed by barbed wire, has been set up near Famagusta.

The British also asked all European governments through which the Jewish underground operates to help block refugee movements at their sources and at the exit ports. Governments outside the Soviet sphere promised to do what they could, but there was no prospect of help from the Soviet Union and her satellites.

The Russians have dispatched, by rail, such heavy shipments of Jews from Poland to Vienna that the monthly influx has risen from 2,200 in May to 14,500 for July; a rate of 40,000 is indicated for August. The Russians have facilitated the passage of Jews from the Russian to the U.S. zone in Germany and thence to the underground. Thousands of Palestine-bound Jews have started their water jump from the Black Sea ports of Russian-controlled Rumania.

Lest anyone think that all this was motivated by a tender concern for Zionism, Professor Victor D. Lutzky, who holds down the Palestine desk at the Soviet Foreign Office, delivered a significant lecture in which he declared 1) that Zionism was an imperialist-capitalist campaign to set up a "bourgeois state" in Palestine, 2) that Zionism lacked the support of the "Jewish masses" and 3) that Palestine belonged to the Arabs. Meanwhile, Radio Moscow and Izvestia continued their efforts to rouse both Arabs and Jews against British imperialism.

*The British had no intention of "blockading" Palestine, although most of the U.S. press said they had.

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