Fulbright Calls for Imposed Peace Settlement if Parties Fail to Reach Accord

In a sharply worded 37-page speech to be delivered in the Senate tomorrow, Sen. J. W. Fulbright attacks Arab and Israeli “myths” about each other and favors United Nations imposition of a peace settlement “in the absence of a voluntary settlement by the parties.” In connection with a settlement guaranteed by the UN, the Senator proposed, Israel must withdraw from all occupied Arab territories and provide “a just settlement of the refugee problem” and the United States should–with force if necessary–“guarantee the territory and independence of Israel within the borders of (June 4) 1967.” Israel would have to agree not to “violate those borders herself.” Mr. Fulbright, who was first elected to the Senate in 1944, is the influential chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a leading opponent of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia. He has long been considered by Israelis to be hostile to Zionism and the Jewish State, and did not sign the letter from his 76 colleagues to Secretary of State William P. Rogers urging the sale to Israel of the 125 jets she has been requesting.

“Because the conflict is a threat to the outside world, it cannot be left solely to the humors of the belligerents,” Mr. Fulbright says in his speech, the text of which was released yesterday. “I have never fully understood why some of our statesmen feel that it would be a heinous crime for external parties to ‘impose’ a solution. Under the United Nations Charter the Security Council has full authority, possibly even the obligation, to impose a settlement upon warring parties who fail to make peace on their own.” The Senator’s remarks came on the eve of the UN’s attempt, under the auspices of special mediator Dr. Gunnar V. Jarring, to work out a negotiated settlement with Israel, Egypt and Jordan. In New York, United Nations observers noted that in the most recent Security Council resolution on the Mideast, on May 19, the Council voted 11-0, with four abstentions, to criticize Israel’s “premeditated” attack on Lebanon May 12 “in violation of the UN Charter,” but did not refer to Israeli charges of prior Lebanese terrorist attacks on Israel. Two and a half days later, on May 22, terrorists crossed into Israel from Lebanon and ambushed a school bus, killing eight children and four adults and injuring 21 others. Israeli Ambassador Yosef Tekoah had described the resolution on May 20 as “one-sided” and “another nail in the coffin of the Security Council’s ability to deal with the Middle East situation equitably, realistically and constructively.”)

SENATOR FAVORS PALESTINIAN SELF-DETERMINATION, INTERNATIONALIZATION OF JERUSALEM

Sen. Fulbright also recommends Palestinian self-determination without infringement on wholly Israeli territory, the internationalization of Jerusalem, and UN-guaranteed free passage through the Suez Canal and the Gulf of Aqaba. “In due course,” he says, “the Palestinian Arabs will find it necessary to accept the existence of the State of Israel and to recognize that further, futile efforts to destroy the Jewish State will only compound their own suffering.” Discussing his Middle East proposal today on NBC-TV’s “Meet the Press,” Sen. Fulbright said that now was the best time since World War II to effect a peace agreement with the Soviet Union and create a United Nations police force capable of enforcing a Mideast peace. Until such a development occurs, he said, his proposal for unilateral American guarantees of Israel’s security is necessary because “Israel has great doubts” about the United Nations. Sen. Fulbright also said in the interview: “If the Germans can make up with the Russians, why can’t the Arabs make up with the Jews?,” adding a few minutes later: “We have great interests in the Arabs, too.”

In his prepared Senate speech, Sen. Fulbright observes that “the ultimate danger is that the Arab-Israeli conflict could draw the superpowers and the world into a nuclear war–and that certainly is a matter of vital interest.” The Arkansas Democrat says in his text that “The myths that shape events in the Middle East are the oldest myths of all.” The Arabs, he says, mistakenly “perceive Zionism as a new form of Western imperialism” and “have little sympathy for the historic sentiments of the Jewish Diaspora”; they see Zionism as “not a program of deliverance for a persecuted race but a foreign conquest bolstered by strong ties between the conquering people and the most powerful governments of the West,” and they engage in “extravagant talk about ‘holy wars’ and about throwing the Jews into the sea.” The Jews, for their part, “are obsessed with the fear of a repetition of the Nazi holocaust,” even though Egypt and Jordan “have both, in effect, repudiated such Draconian threats”; they make “faulty” comparisons between the Arabs and the Nazis, and “Some elements within Israel and the world Zionist movement openly proclaim the need of a policy of expansion, which must give rise to a fear among Arabs not unlike that felt by the Jews when the Arabs talk of throwing them into the sea.”

FULBRIGHT: ISRAEL INSECURE NATION BUT MILITARY SUPERIORITY WILL NOT ALTER SITUATION

In addition, Sen. Fulbright contends, “the great powers have made their own special contribution to the mythology of the Middle East by infusing the crisis with the hocus pocus of geopolitics.” The Soviet Union and the U.S., he charges, “have surrendered much of their own freedom of action to the bellicose whims of their respective clients.” They have done this, he says, by “arming and financing them, committing their own prestige to the issue and, in so doing, converting a local conflict into a potential world conflict.” Under the Big Two’s “myth of militarism,” Sen. Fulbright continues, “Each clings to the notion that another round may settle things, although three wars have settled nothing, or that some new weapons system will stabilize the balance of power, as if either side would accept the other’s notion of what it takes to establish a proper balance.” “Militarism,” the Senator adds, has gained Israel territory and military superiority, “but they have failed to gain what they most want: security.” It is “clear,” he says, that Israel is “a desperately insecure nation,” but “it is anything but clear that her present policy of relying on military superiority is ever going to alter the situation.” The “object worth pursuing from Israel’s point of view” is to “eliminate” the Arabs’ “wish to threaten her.”

“Having been victorious militarily so far,” Mr. Fulbright says, “the Israelis are in a position to be magnanimous without being suspected of ‘weakness,’ which is something nations worry about whenever they are thinking about behaving sensibly. But thus far they have shown little inclination to trade their conquests for peace. Instead, they cling to the advantages won by their military victory of 1967, which is a rapidly wasting asset. One insecure frontier has been traded for another and all that the future seems to hold is continuing conflict, as threatening to the outside world as it is to the Arabs and Israelis.” Premier Golda Meir, the Senator says, “explicitly rejects the borders of (June 4) 1967,” and Foreign Minister Abba Eban “contributes pithy ironies about recognizing the right of the United Arab Republic to exist.”

The Israeli Embassy in Washington declined comment today on Sen. J. W. Fulbright’s Middle East security plan. But it was understood by diplomatic sources here that Israel welcomes the proposal for American guarantees of her security, though not in the context outlined by Sen. Fulbright. Israel is understood to feel that “an imposed solution is no solution,” that a peace settlement must be worked out basically among the parties if the causes of the conflict are to be eradicated. (In New York, the Israeli ambassador to the UN, Yosef Tekoah, preferred not to comment at this time. He said he felt Israeli reaction to the Fulbright plan should come from Jerusalem.)