During the Jewish insurgency in Palestine, a campaign against the British by Jewish underground groups in Palestine (the Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi), the ACJ opposed what it viewed as Jewish terrorism. Following the King David Hotel bombing, it issued a statement calling for American Jews to "repudiate the perpetrators of those outrages and those leaders of Jews, in and out of Palestine, whose incitement is equally responsible." In a statement, Lessing Rosenwald called for the American Jewish community to condition any further assistance to the Yishuv (Palestinian Jewry) on the end of violence. 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 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 founding of the State of Israel in 1948, the Council became very close to San Francisco born rabbi Judah Magnes, humanitarian and founder of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the leading Palestinian-Jewish advocate for a binational state, who was forced to return to the United States. In 1948, the ACJ had 14,000 members.