Basic U.S. Policy on Middle East Outlined by Top Washington Official

Four “basic ingredients” of the American policy for the Middle East were listed here tonight by Ambassador Chester Bowles, addressing the national biennial convention of the American Jewish Congress which is being attended by some 500 delegates from all parts of the country.

Mr. Bowles, who is President Kennedy’s special adviser for Asia, Africa and Latin America, recently returned from a trip to the Middle East. He told the American Jewish Congress delegates that the “basic ingredients for a realistic American Middle Eastern policy are:

1. The U.S. must be prepared to help all the nations of the area maintain their independence.

2. The instruments of the United Nations must be used to reduce specific tensions “and to prevent the Arab-Israel dispute from developing into an open conflict that could rapidly spread.

3. All Middle Eastern nations should be encouraged “to devote less time to angry propaganda debates with their neighbors and more to the solution of their own problems of internal development.” The U.S. should also “give special priority assistance to those countries which are genuinely concerned with improving the lot of all their citizens, not just a wealthy few.”

4. “A persistent, patient effort should be made to find some basis of cooperation between neighboring Middle Eastern nations, however tentative or restrictive the areas of cooperation may be.”

BOWLES PRAISES ECONOMIC AND INDUSTRIAL GROWTH OF ISRAEL

Ambassador Bowles cited “some sign of progress” in easing the Arab refugee problem. Noting current efforts at a solution undertaken by Dr. Joseph Johnson, special representative of the United Nations Palestine Conciliation Commission, he added: “Let us hope that there may be some attempt to reach agreement on arms limitation–unofficial, if not official.”

Mr. Bowles praised the economic and industrial growth of Israel as one of the most rapid rates of development in the world.” He said Israel’s foreign technical assistance programs now reached more than 20 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America and disclosed that more than 1,000 students from 52 countries were studying in Israel. This was a by-product, he said, of “the Arab boycott (that) has forced Israel to seek friends and markets outside the Middle East.

“Israel’s neighbors are not yet in a mood to appreciate and applaud these efforts,” he declared. “Israel’s very success still generates an unreasoning antagonism. Yet even this may change as the Middle Eastern nations succeed in pushing forward their own national development plans, and as a new confidence begins to breed tolerance and understanding.

“Eventually, perhaps, we may see the emergence in the Middle East of a single dominant idea whose benefits are so important for all concerned that traditional differences may be forgotten, as the Common Market is row bridging similar differences in Europe,” he told the A.J. Congress convention.

SAYS SITUATION IN MIDDLE EAST IS IMPROVING; LISTS REASONS

The Presidential adviser listed three “important but unpublicized” developments that he said gave ground for “measured confidence” in an improved Middle East situation:

1. Communism as such is gradually losing its luster and the Soviet Union is emerging as “both a modern edition of Czarist Russia and a major cut-rate oil competitor to boot”; 2. The U.S. is “much less tense in its relations with the nations of the Middle East and less inclined to expect immediate solutions to age-old conflicts”; 3. Middle Eastern nations themselves are becoming “less focussed on conflicts with their neighbors and more interested in their own international development.

“These three changes,” he said, “add up to a kind of quiet political and economic relaxation which, with a measure of good luck, may gradually make for lessening tensions and greater opportunities for all concerned.”