Yehuda Blum, Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, denounced the attack on Israel by President Fidel Castro of Cuba in his speech to the General Assembly last Friday. Blum said that Castro "joined the shrill hue and cry already raised in the (Assembly’s) general debate by the enemies of peace in the Middle East." The Israel envoy added that Castro is in no position to criticize Israel on the issue of human rights in view of the dictatorial nature of his regime. He termed Cuba "a tropical Gulag archipelago."
In his Assembly speech, the Cuban leader, who spoke on behalf of the non-aligned nations which elected him its leader at their conference in Havana last month, accused Israel of committing "the most terrible crime of our era" in its treatment of the Palestinians, who, he said, were "pushed off their land, persecuted and murdered." He mentioned the "merciless persecution and genocide that the Nazis once visited on the Hebrew people," but he compared the Nazi terror to the plight of the Palestinians.
His attack on the Jewish State and his quoting from the declaration of the non-aligned summit conference denouncing Israel, the Camp David accords and the Egypt-Israel peace treaty, was followed by prolonged applause from the majority of Third World delegates and other diplomats at the Assembly.
Castro also denounced the United States for its support of Israel, charging that America supports "Zionism aims" and "Israeli aggression at the expense of the Palestinian Arab people."
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