Israel Foreign Minister Abba Eban said here yesterday that the Japanese jetliner affair proved the futility of hijacking, He said its finale in Benghazi showed Libya to be the “pathological capital of the world.”
Speaking to an international audience of visiting youth, Eban said, “I don’t know what they wanted, the whole thing was ridiculous. It is an illustration of the uselessness of hijacking. We are sorry it took place.” Libya, he said, is the place “to which the crazed hijackers almost naturally gravitated.” Contentions that Israel was vulnerable to such attacks, Eban said, proved to be exaggerated by the fact that the abductors refrained from entering Israeli air space.
Eban also said Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s criticism Monday of Soviet policy in the Middle East was the outcome of U.S.-Soviet consensus on keeping the Arab-Israeli conflict dormant.
“Some of the frustrations Sadat expressed,” he said, “are due to the fact that detente has so developed that the powers are not willing to let the Middle East get in the way of rapprochement. That is why Russia is giving Egypt perfunctory support that Egypt finds unsatisfactory, so we find Egypt floundering even at the United Nations.”
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
