A Proclamation on the Moral Rights of the Stateless and Palestinian Jews. Advance Copy, Not for Publication.

This proclamation, brimming with emotive outrage, was endorsed by 1,521 prominent Americans, including military, political, labor, religious and academic leaders, as well as industrialists, authors and artists (among them Langston Hughes, Humphrey Bogart, Aaron Copland, Eugene O’Neill and Senator Harry Truman); expressing their empathy for the plight of the Jews in Europe and the Middle East and demanding the moral right of stateless Jews to create a Jewish army to fight alongside the Allies against the Axis forces. Written by Hillel Kook (a.k.a. Peter Bergson) and issued by Pierre van Paassen, chairman of the Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews, it was eventually published as a two-page advertisement in the New York Times on December 7th 1942 (not coincidentally, the first anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor). The proclamation declares: “We, free people of America, a nation proudly fighting under its own flag against the enemies of freedom and civilization in this global war for survival, proclaim to our valiant allies, the British Commonwealth of Nations, to the free peoples everywhere in the world, as well as to our godless enemies: That we shall no longer witness with pity alone, and with passive sympathy, the calculated extermination of the ancient Jewish people by the barbarous Nazis… We proclaim our belief in the moral right of the disinherited, stateless Jews of Europe and of the stalwart young Jewish people of Palestine to fight - as they ask to fight - as fellow-soldiers in this war, standing forth in their own name under the ancient banner of David the King, fighting as the Jewish Army.” The proclamation concludes: “Therefore, from this day onward, as heirs of the glorious American tradition and by virtue of the great moral authority vested in our nation at the present critical historic conjuncture, we people of America, recognize the solution of the age-old Jewish problem in Europe as one of the objectives of democracy and as a preliminary condition to permanent peace in the world.”