Following World War II, with the question of Palestine's future being considered, the ACJ continued to support a joint Jewish–Arab state rather than a Jewish state in Palestine, and opposed dispossessing the Arabs who were then living in Palestine. The presidency of the ACJ was accepted by the well-known philanthropist
Lessing J. Rosenwald, who took the lead in urging the creation of a unitary democratic state in
Mandatory Palestine in American policy-making circles. Rosenwald testified before the
Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry in 1946, urged the creation of a unitary Jewish–Arab state in Palestine, and allowing Jewish immigration to Palestine to continue only upon "renunciation of the claim that Jews possess unlimited national right to the land, and that the country shall take the form of a racial or theocratic state," and said that the United States and other UN member states should allow more Jewish immigration to solve the European–Jewish refugee problem. It later endorsed the Committee of Inquiry's recommendations, including that Palestine become neither a Jewish or Arab state and the admittance of 100,000 Jewish refugees into Palestine. In addition, it opposed the establishment of a Jewish state anywhere else in the world, not just in Palestine. The ACJ's official position was that European Jews should be rehabilitated by restoring their civil, political, and economic security. To demonstrate that American Zionists did not represent the views of American Jewry, the ACJ sent anti-Zionist letters to various government officials. It also opposed the Haganah's
Aliyah Bet program, which attempted to bring Jewish refugees into Palestine illegally past a British blockade. Following a statement by the vice-president of the
Zionist Organization of America that American Jews were prepared to spend millions of dollars to finance illegal immigration to Palestine, Rosenwald repudiated him, calling Aliyah Bet a "shocking disregard for law and order" and stating "lawlessness even in the name of mercy cannot be tolerated." In the final year before the
foundation of the State of Israel in 1948, the ACJ became very close to the
San Francisco-born Reform rabbi
Judah Leon Magnes, a humanitarian activist and first chancellor of the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1925), and the leading Jewish advocate for a
binational Jewish-Arab state in Palestine, who was forced to return to the United States. In 1948, the ACJ had 14,000 members.
After 1948 The creation of the State of Israel in 1948 led to internal conflict within the ACJ. After the State of Israel declared independence, the ACJ continued its anti-Zionist campaign, leading to the resignation of several prominent Reform rabbis, including its founder, Louis Wolsey, who called on the ACJ to dissolve itself since the Zionist movement had succeeded. In a speech to his congregation, Wolsey said that "I believe we should support the present reality of a land of Israel, with all our strength." The ACJ responded by stating that "we shall continue to seek the integration of Jews into American life. We are convinced that this necessary integration cannot be accomplished as members of a separatistic national group with national interests in a foreign state." Its position was that to American Jews, Israel was not the state or homeland of the Jewish people, but merely a foreign country. In December 1948, Lessing Rosenwald urged that the US condition friendship with Israel on Israel building an inclusive Israeli nationalism confined to its own borders and inclusive of its Muslim and Christian citizens rather than Jewish nationalism. Murray Polner, a historian of Judaism in the United States, wrote that "by 1948, with the establishment of an independent Israel, the council had earned the enmity of the vast majority of American Jewry, who viewed the group as indifferent, if not hostile, to Jews who had lived through the Holocaust and had nowhere to go." == Decline ==