Biltmore Conference
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The Biltmore Conference, also known by its resolution as the Biltmore Program, was held in New York City at the prestigious Biltmore Hotel from May 6 to May 11, 1942.
Various Zionist and non-Zionist Jewish organizations were represented in the American Emergency Committee of Zionist Affairs, which called an "Extraordinary Zionist Conference" as a substitute for the full (22nd) Zionist Congress which had been cancelled due to World War II. Attendees included Chaim Weizmann, as President of the Zionist Organization, David Ben-Gurion as Chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive, and Nahum Goldmann as a member of the Executive.[1] The four main organisations of American Jewry were present: the Zionist Organization of America, Hadassah, Mizrahi, and Poale Zion.[2] Among the American organizers was Reform Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver.[3]
The joint statement issued at the end of the session was known as the Biltmore Program. The program asked for unrestricted Jewish immigration to Palestine. The final point of the program reads as follows:
- The Conference declares that the new world order that will follow victory cannot be established on foundations of peace, justice, and equality, unless the problem of Jewish homelessness is finally solved. The Conference urges that the gates of Palestine be opened; that the Jewish Agency be vested with control of immigration into Palestine and with the necessary authority for upbuilding the country, including the development of its unoccupied and uncultivated lands; and that Palestine be established as a Jewish Commonwealth integrated in the structure of the new democratic world. Then and only then will the age-old wrong to the Jewish people be righted. [4].
After approval by the Zionist General Council in Palestine, the Biltmore Program became the platform of the World Zionist Organization.
The significance of the Program was in stepping beyond the terms of the Balfour Declaration (which had been reaffirmed as British policy by Winston Churchill's White Paper of 1922) that there should be a "Jewish National Home" in Palestine. It was also signicant because it was a first joint statement by Zionist and non-Zionist Jewish groups on Palestine, and committed such non-Zionist groups to the idea of a Jewish Commonwealth in all of Palestine. According to Ami Isseroff, the Program was "a crucial step in the development of the Zionist movement, which increasingly saw itself as opposed to Britain rather than a collaborator of Britain, and it determined that henceforth Ben-Gurion and Zionist executive in Palestine, rather than Weizmann would lead the Zionist movement and determine policy toward the British."[5]
Although it spoke of the Jewish people for the "the economic, agricultural and national development of the Arab peoples and states", the Biltmore Program was implicitly a rejection of the proposal for a binational solution to the question of Arab-Jewish co-existence in Palestine. Hashomer Hatzair, a socialist-Zionist group, accordingly voted against the program.
[edit] References
- ^ Mideast Web
- ^ Palestine Facts
- ^ Palestine Facts
- ^ quoted in Gelvin, James L. (2005). The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-85289-7p. 122)
- ^ Mideast Web
