ISRAEL
SIR,—Mr. Childers is now wandering rather far afield in an endeavour to avoid answering the simple question I put to him—and to Ian Gilmour—many weeks ago. Let me recapitulate in short our straight- forward difference: In your issue of June 24, Mr. Gilmour (in his article on 'Zionism and Anti-Semitism') charged that Zionism had been 'extraordinarily callous' not only to Arab but also to Jewish refugees. Mr. Gilmour supported his charge with this accusation:
When President Roosevelt, during the War, was considering the feasibility of helping Jewish refugees to settle in America, Britain, etc., his plan, which would have absorbed all the DPs in Europe, was scotched by Zionists, not by anti-Semites.
Mr. Childers took the argument a step further in your issue of July 22. He wrote then :
Zionism deliberately arranged . . . that Western countries did not open their doors, widely and immediately, to the inmates of the DP camps . . . it was done by sabotaging specific Western schemes to admit Jewish DPs (i.e.. Roosevelt's and the Australians' Kimberley project).
When challenged as to their sources, Mr. Gilmour and Mr. Childers subsequently referred to 'that
• well-known American liberal' (who has lately repre- sented the interests of thC notorious Trujillo regime in the US), Morris L. Ernst. His book (So Far So Good) is supposed to provide the evidence, and now Mr. Childers (falling back as before on the ever-ready professional anti-Zionist propagandist Lilienthal) produces also a curious speech by Mr. Ernst which he made to an unnamed audience in Cincinnati on an unspecified date in 1950, and which runs completely counter to Ernst's version of the same events which he gave in his own book two years earlier.
I have searched through the available records, and questioned surviving individuals about this alleged Roosevelt plan and the related Ernst mission to London. There is no American nor British record of either; nor does the non-Jewish and non-Zionist Inter-Governmental Refugee Organisation (which was the principal governmental refugee authority) have any evidence of it or reference to it.
The plain fact is that there was no such Roosevelt 'plan,' just as there was no Kimberley 'project,' and neither therefore could have been sabotaged by the wicked Zionists. Surely it would be more gracious now for Mr. Gilmour and Mr. Childers to withdraw their grave but wholly unsupported and unjustified accusation, and forget all about Mr. Ernst and his evidently muddled recollections?—Yours faithfully,
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