Former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, accepting an honorary Doctorate in Philosophy from Israel’s Weizmann Institute, said that “no people have suffered more” from the absence of peace “than the Jewish people.”
Urging peace and “reconciliation” in the Middle East, Kissinger said that the Weizmann Institute, located initially at the desert’s edge in an area that is now cultivated, “can symbolize not only the past of Israel, but the future of the Middle East at a time when we must be concerned with security and dare not yet be certain that peace is possible. It symbolizes what must be the future for all the peoples in the Middle East.”
Kissinger, making his first address since leaving the State Department seven weeks ago, spoke at a dinner here last Thursday attended by 160 persons after receiving the degree that was awarded him three years ago. The honor was conferred upon him by Dr. Michael Sela, Weizmann Institute president, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Dr. Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first President. Among those joining the convocation was Sir Marcus J. Sieff, chairman of the Institute’s board of governors, whose parents were the Institute’s original founders.
“As the first Jewish Secretary of State, my relationship with the State of Israel and sometimes with the Jewish community in the United States has inevitably been complicated,” Kissinger said in his extemporaneous remarks. “Yet none of us who are conscious of the travail and the suffering and the future of the Jewish people can ever forget that the future of the Jewish people is inextricably linked with the future of peace and justice and freedom and security for all people.”
A pre-recorded address was heard from Meyer Weisgal, the Institute’s Chancellor and a disciple of Weizmann who was ill in Israel and could not be present. In paying tribute to Kissinger’s “shuttle diplomacy, his daily exertions on our behalf,” Weisgal recalled an arduous 11-day peace mission into the desert near Aqaba made by Weizmann in 1918–the basis of an historic but short-lived concords reached with Emir Faisal, then leader of the Arab world and later King of Iraq–and characterized Kissinger’s “almost superhuman efforts” in the Middle East as continuum that sought “to restore the spirit that was created between Weizmann and Faisal” nearly 60 years ago.
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.
