Sen. Robert Dole of Kansas, the Republican candidate for Vice-President, has pledged that the United States will never jeopardize Israel’s security. “I wish it were possible to come here tonight and to lay before you some radical new initiatives, some grand strategy for peace,” Dole told the 79th annual national convention of the Zionist Organization of America Thursday night. “Instead, I come only with the firm commitment that the Ford Administration will continue to search, and that it will never jeopardize the security of Israel in the search for peace, nor will the Ford Administration retreat one inch from its commitment to the security of Israel,” he said.
Dole also stressed that “I believe no enemy of Israel, real or potential, can mistake the will or the intentions of President Ford toward the safety and security of Israel.”
However, Dole said friends of Israel should not question American efforts to win friends among the Arabs. “The United States has a role to play with each nation in the Middle East,” he said, “and those who doubt or suspect the motives and actions of the United States in that regard should recognize that the interests of Israel rest with a resolution of the conflict there which is acceptable to all parties and beneficial to all parties.”
WARNS AGAINST PALESTINIAN STATE
Discussing the issue of the Palestinians, Dole said the Lebanese conflict has demonstrated the fallacy of the Palestinian argument that Israel should become a secular state. He said the state the Palestinians “envision for the future looks precisely like Lebanon before they tore Lebanon apart. The events in Lebanon are the best refutation for the Palestinian argument for a new state,” he said.
Dole charged that “demagogues” have since 1948 used the plight of the Palestinians to stir up hatred against Israel while keeping the Palestinians themselves in camps and feeding them hatred. “Finally, the generation that grew up in the camp was set loose, not merely on Israel, but on the world,” he said.
Dole pointed to his own record of support for Israel and Soviet Jewry. Noting that the Jewish vote in Kansas is minimal, he said, “my support of Israel is based on conviction, not politics.”
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