Vice President Dan Quayle maintained Sunday that U.S. support for a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israel was aimed at preventing the Palestinian issue from being linked to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.
“Many anti-Israeli countries were trying to link the Palestinian question to Saddam Hussein,” Quayle explained on the CBS-TV program “Face the Nation.”
“President George Bush and the Bush administration resisted that. There is no linkage whatsoever,” Quayle stressed.
“I hope that Israel and the Cabinet and the prime minister recognize how far the president went to make sure that the Palestinian question, the occupation of the West Bank, is not related to Saddam Hussein.”
But Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens said the Security Council resolution had the opposite effect.
“If the purpose of the anti-Israeli resolution at the United Nations was to bolster the anti-Saddam Hussein coalition, in the final analysis it will prove counterproductive,” Arens said on the ABC-TV program “This Week with David Brinkley.”
He said the riot on the Temple Mount, in which Arabs threw rocks down on Jewish worshipers at the Western Wall, was “a clearcut case of Moslem fundamentalism running wild,” and “those who incited the mob bear sole responsibility for the tragedy.”
Quayle called the Security Council measure a “good resolution” and urged Israel to cooperate with the U.N. investigators being sent there by the U.N. secretary-general.
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.
