ADL Leader Calls for Boycott of Arab Nations While Oil Embargo Continues

An American Jewish leader tonight called for withholding U.S. exports to Arab countries “for as long as the Arabs withhold their oil supplies to this nation.” Arnold Forster, associate director and general counsel of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, told a news conference that “the United States has been using a carrot while forgetting that it also has a stick… we do have a protective weapon against Arab oil blackmail–our exports of food, automobiles, airplanes, fuel products, tourist trade.” Forster, a panelist on the forum dealing with the energy crisis, part of the League’s 60th anniversary meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria, said it would be “a tragic error” if the great powers ignore the “absolute validity” of Israel’s need for secure borders and try to impose against its will a political settlement that would leave Israel vulnerable to the kind of attack it suffered on Oct. 6.

The result, he declared, would be to recreate all the circumstances that produced four Mideast wars in 25 years and could produce a fifth “as quickly as the USSR can re-prepare the Arabs for it.” Forster warned that the Arabs will use “every anti-Jewish propaganda tactic, political pressure and economic muscle” to cause “disruption and divisiveness in American society in order to tilt U.S. foreign policy against Israel.” At an earlier session, Seymour Graubard, ADL national chairman, said that the current Arab-Israel war “is not simply a conflict between Arabs and Jews but a battle over who will control the world.” Noting that the Soviet Union had “orchestrated” the war “as part of a persistent aggressive strategy for taking over the Middle East and using oil to achieve an energy stranglehold,” he cautioned against the possibility of a USSR-U.S. detente that would be nothing more than “another tactic in the USSR’s zig-zag climb to world communism.”