Israel’s envoys to the United States and the United Nations charged here that the presence of the Palestine Liberation Organization at next month’s Security Council debate on the Middle East was designed to destroy the chances of a negotiated peace in the Middle East in favor of an imposed settlement. “Israel will not be a party to this futile exercise,” declared Simcha Dinitz, Israel’s Ambassador to Washington. “The American reassertion of itself in the council of the United Nations has, I fear, perhaps come too late,” said Chaim Herzog, Israel’s Ambassador to the UN.
The two Israeli diplomats spoke in accepting Stephen Wise Awards “for distinguished service to Israel” presented by the American Jewish Congress at a dinner here Saturday night. Other Stephen Wise Awards were presented to El Al Israel Airlines and to Martin and Lillian Steinberg of Brooklyn, leaders of the American Jewish Congress.
Dinitz said the Nov. 30 Security Council resolution inviting the PLO to take part in Middle East peace discussions next Jan. 12 was “a prescription for stalemate, not for progress.” He added that it serves the interests of the Soviet Union, Syria and the PLO. “Yet it would be folly to believe that the resolution was aimed solely at Israel. Its primary aim was to undermine the basis for a negotiated peace and substitute for it a prescription for an imposed solution.” Dinitz declared. “Since the target is to undermine the efforts for peace of which the U.S. is the chief architect, then I have reason to believe that a common ground can be found between the U.S. and Israel in forestalling such a development.”
Herzog warned that recent UN votes reflected “a determined, avowed effort to destroy the Geneva conference, to destroy the process of negotiation and to replace it by a process of dictation in which the Security Council will attempt to impose a Soviet-Arab solution on Israel.”
The UN Herzog continued, “has now become the main opposition to the process of negotiation towards peace in the Middle East and has become potentially the war mongering center of the world. There is little that the free world can hope for from the UN.” He praised the “strong and unequivocal stand” taken by the American Ambassador to the UN, Daniel P. Moynihan, on the resolution on Zionism and other issues.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
