Fulbright Criticized for Perverse View of Israel’s Self-defense Policy

The Near East Report, a pro-Israel weekly newsletter published here, responded sharply today to Sen, J. William Fulbright’s stinging attack on Israeli policy. The Arkansas Democrat, addressing Yale University students Sunday, accused Israel and South Vietnam of resorting to “Communist-baiting humbugery” in order to manipulate American policy in their favor. The Near East Report claimed that Fulbright’s remarke contained “many distortions and inconsistencies.” (An Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman said in Jerusalem yesterday that Israel would refrain from responding to Fulbright’s attack because it would only give the Senator more publicity.) The Near East report said, “On one hand Fulbright speaks contemptuously of ‘client states’ among which he counts Israel. He is worried lest Israel involve us in her defense. But Israel’s determination to defend herself irks Fulbright. For he perversely turns around and derides what he calls Israel’s policy of ‘antiquated–and to a great degree delusional–self-reliance.'” The weekly took issue with Fulbright’s analogy between Israel’s conflict with the Arabs and the Vietnam war. “We have poured our soldiers and billions of dollars of materiel into Vietnam. We have not granted Israel any military aid. We have sold her weapons and our economic assistance has consisted, to a large extent, of loans rather than grants.”

Israel has not been appealing for American soldiers,” the newsletter went on, “She does not invoke the U.S.-Soviet cold war. Israel is not and does not claim to be in the forefront of the so-called free world struggle against international Communism. What Israel is up against is raw Soviet power, not simple Soviet ideology.” Fulbright, who is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, remarked that the U.S. and Israel have different concepts of what American interests in the Mideast are. He said the overriding American concern was to avoid another war and a possible confrontation while Israel, in contrast, has “an essentially cold war conception” that as “the bastion of democracy in the Middle East,” she is “defending American interests by holding the line against a surging tide of Communist imperialism.” The Near East report said Fulbright chose to ignore “the grim threat which alarms Israel. That is the massive concentration of sophisticated Soviet weapons–planes, missiles, as well as Soviet soldiers and technicians–on her doorstep. Fulbright overlooks the fact that every escalation in the Arab-Israel arms race has begun with the Soviet Union.” Even as Fulbright spoke, “new shipments of Soviet missiles and radar-directed cannon” were arriving in Egypt, the Near East report said.