Foreign Minister Yigal Allon told the Knesset last night that Israel had “reason to hope” that the United States would raise the issue of Soviet Jewry “at the highest level” during the summit conference in Moscow. He said the issue had been discussed with President Nixon during his recent visit here and there were ”grounds for assuming” that the appeal “had not fallen on deaf ears.”
Allon, who is also Deputy Premier, was responding to motions by Likud on the stepped-up harassment of Jewish activists in advance of the Nixon visit to Moscow. He said the Soviet action exposed the weakness of their case against aliya and their lack of self-confidence in their own policy. The arrests, army inductions, secret police harassment, telephone cutoffs and other measures were “intolerable in the twentieth century,” he declared. The Foreign Minister said he had details of the harassment of activists in Moscow but not in other cities. However, he said, enough was known to provide “a very somber picture.”
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