Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban yesterday assailed the Jewish Defense League. “We don’t need JDL people coming into Israel to interfere with a good relation growing for example between Israelis and the Arabs in Hebron,” he said before viewers of the NBC-TV’s “The Today Show.”
Eban made this remark in response to a question posed by the program’s moderator, Frank McGee, concerning the detainment in Israel of Rabbi Meir Kahane, leader of the JDL, on charges of allegedly shipping arms abroad to conduct terrorist activities. Eban refused to comment on the Kahane case but said, “…on the movement itself, our position is that we really do not need these organizations coming from abroad to tell us how to live with each other or with our Arab population.”
In response to other questions from both McGee and Pauline Frederick, an NBC correspondent, Eban reiterated Israel’s right to retaliate for terrorist actions, and called upon all nations to act against terrorist groups. Eban called the terrorist movement an “urgent obstacle” that needed to be removed “in order to create the basic atmosphere in which peaceful discussion can go forward.”
Eban also hit the United Nations for being “wedded to the technique of public debate and rhetoric” and said that it’s not “the most congenial arena in which private conciliation can go forward.”
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