“Three percent of the human race has 17 percent of the votes in the United Nations and 60 percent of the world’s oil reserves,” former Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban told an audience of 600 national community leaders at a B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League dinner here. He said the Arab nations “with all this privilege of advantage and wealth, are the spoiled children of contemporary politics.”
Eban, who was Israel’s first Ambassador to the UN, made his remarks at ADL’s Bicentennial of Freedom Award Dinner honoring Edgar M. Bronfman, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of the Seagram Company. He said that the root and essence of the Mideast conflict is the Arabs’ “monolithic vision” of that part of the world.
Declaring that “anything not Arab is viewed as being alien,” Eban said they seek to “eliminate Israel’s Jewish personality as they sought to eliminate the Kurdish National Movement in Iraq and the Christians in Lebanon.” He warned, “if Israel is not strong, what has happened to Christians in Lebanon in the past 10 months can happen to Jews.”
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.
