Oil & the Rabbis

"Clear the way for those rabbis." the stationmaster shouted. The 500 orthodox Jewish leaders, most of them with shrub-shaped beards, many in silky cloaks with thick velvet collars, filed silently through the hurly-burly of Washington's Union Station. Marching off to the Capitol, they presented to Vice President Henry Wallace and a group of Congressional leaders a seven-point petition.

Out stuck request No. 6: "To open immediately ... the doors of Palestine, the Holy Land of our forefathers which was given to Israel for eternal heritage by the Lord, blessed be His name, with oath and covenant." The Vice President, his voice low, squirmed through a diplomatically minimum answer and the rabbis took trolley cars to the Lincoln Memorial. Across the Mall rolled the Star-Spangled Banner, chanted in the strange, almost sobbing intonation of Hebrew. Then the rabbis faded out of sight and out of mind.

Princes and Palestine. Few days before, two main foes of the main Jewish idea had been feted, dined, greeted, and generally given the full red-carpet treatment. The foes: Prince Feisal, Foreign Minister to Saudi Arabia's wily Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, and younger brother Prince Khalid. The grave, observant Arab Princes, ostensibly here to study "Southwest irrigation projects," thus far seemed to be spending a great deal more time with diplomatic bigwigs than in inspecting irrigation ditches.

Oil & Empire. Next coincidence of the week was the news leak that the U.S. was dickering to buy a piece of Arabia's fabulous oil resources.

Since 1933 the California Arabian Standard Oil Co. (owned 50-50 by Standard Oil Co. of California and Texas Co.) has been leasing concessions from Ibn Saud until today it controls an area 60% larger than California (254,000 sq. mi.), including all the promising fields. Now the U.S. Government itself is negotiating with California Arabian Standard and presumably with Ibn Saud's representatives for direct participation in the oil exploitation. This, if it went through, would be historic --for the first time in its history the U.S. Government would embark upon a career as a speculative oil magnate on foreign soil. Nor could New Deal "anti-imperialists" readily complain, for this was a pet project of oilman Harold L. Ickes.

Whether the oil deal was imperialism or no, it would bring problems with it: when the U.S. grasps for Arabian oil it also grasps for the Palestine problem, Ibn Saud, Moslems, rabbis and all.

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