867N.00/631
The Chargé in Saudi Arabia ( Shullaw ) to the Secretary of State
[Received June 1.]
Sir: I have the honor to refer to the Department’s strictly confidential instruction no. 41 dated April 6, 194360 concerning a conversation which took place on March 30, 1943 between the Under Secretary of State and the Egyptian Minister.
The remark of the Minister that each of the United Nations might well take a proportionate number of Jewish refugees is interesting in view of the fact that King Ibn Saud in his letter to President Roosevelt dated April 30, 1943 makes somewhat the same suggestion but in an oblique manner. The King’s advisor, Shaikh Yusuf Yassin, several times recently has suggested that each of the United Nations should provide homes for the refugee Jews and should not look to Palestine, a small country, to carry the burden. Yusuf Yassin’s suggestion [Page 786] relates not only to the settlement of refugee European Jews at the present time but to a possible reduction in the Jewish population of Palestine after the war. His ideas, or perhaps only the presentation of them, have undergone an evolution in the past few months. In his first remarks to me on the subject he appeared to favor only the stopping of further Jewish immigration into Palestine. Later the idea was added that after the war recent Jewish arrivals in Palestine should be removed from the country since Palestine otherwise would be sheltering a disproportionate share of the world’s responsibility of furnishing homes for the Jews.
Respectfully yours,
- Not printed.↩