In 1956, Arab League spokesman Fayez Sayegh took to the radio to rebut accusations that his office raised antisemitic allegations that American Jews were more loyal to Israel than to America. Sayegh stated that his Arab League office made no such claim, and then handed the radio show host a book, asking him to read a quote aloud. “When a Jew in America…speaks of ‘our government,’ to his fellow Jews, he usually means the government of Israel,” the host read on-air. The quote, Sayegh pointed out, came not from an Arab official but from Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. It was not Arab states but rather Israel itself that impugned the loyalty of American Jews, Sayegh claimed.
This paper explores this forgotten episode, examining evidence behind claims of antisemitism and showing how the AJC and Anti-Defamation League (ADL) responded in divergent ways to Sayegh. While the ADL continued to publicly raise concern about what it considered to be antisemitism, the AJC felt that American Jewry was caught between the Arab League and Israel. AJC leaders quietly met with Sayegh and convinced him to no longer raise the “dual loyalty” issue but struggled more with conveying its message to Ben-Gurion via former AJC President Jacob Blaustein. Despite Blaustein’s 1950 “exchange of views” with Ben-Gurion, in 1956, the Israeli leader ignored Blaustein’s repeated pleas for “clarification” in light of the threat that Sayegh posed. The paper thus urges a rethinking of the Blaustein-Ben-Gurion relationship in light of this unknown period of tension.