867N.01/5–2545

Memorandum by the Acting Secretary of State to President Truman

I am attaching a letter dated April 30 addressed to you by the Egyptian Prime Minister regarding Palestine,85 which the Egyptian Minister in Washington handed us with the request that it be sent on to you.

The enclosure to the Prime Minister’s letter (a memorandum on the Palestine question) is another in the series of communications which the different Arab States decided last March to send to this Government.86 We have replied by assuring the senders that their views have been carefully noted and that our policy toward Palestine is based on consultation with Arabs as well as Jews. This, you will recall, was the substance of the reply which we drafted for your signature to the Amir of Trans-Jordan and which you signed on May 17.

The attached Egyptian memorandum is a plea that justice be done to the Arab cause in the solution of the Palestine problems. The memorandum takes the position that there should be no further Jewish immigration into Palestine and that the Zionist project of setting up a Jewish State there should be resisted “at all costs”.

There is attached for your signature, if you approve, a reply87, which we have prepared and which we will be pleased to give to the Egyptian Minister here.

Joseph C. Grew
  1. Not printed; it expressed opinions common to all the communications addressed to President Roosevelt earlier in the year by Arab heads of government, and which were summarized in telegram 98 from Baghdad, March 10, 11 p.m., p. 691.
  2. See footnote 39, p. 692.
  3. Same as reply dated June 4, infra.