Neutralization of Israel under international auspices could solve the Arab-Israeli conflict, according to Dr. Nahum Goldmann. The world Zionist and Jewish leader outlined his proposal in his autobiography, just published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. The book has attracted considerable attention in Israel.
Dr. Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress and former president of the World Zionist Organization, asserts in “The Autobiography of Nahum Goldmann: Sixty Years of Jewish Life,” that neutralization would mean that the nations of the world “would recognize Israel’s unique role of providing for its Jewish and Arab citizens, offering a haven to Jewish refugees and, at the same time, serving as the national and cultural center that guarantees the future of the Jewish people throughout the world.”
Israel, “whose mere existence requires the moral and spiritual solidarity of all the Jews of the world, must by definition be neutral if all Jews are to be able to maintain emotional and spiritual ties with it, irrespective of their nationality and political orientation,” he contends. “Any political alignment on the part of such a state makes it difficult and sometimes impossible for Jewish citizens of certain other countries openly to profess their allegiance to it.”
Contending that “Israel cannot exist forever as a hostile island in an Arab ocean,” Dr. Goldmann asserts that a neutralized Jewish State would require that the United Nations, “and above all, the two super-powers, would have to guarantee the state’s existence and integrity by methods that would be effective.” He argues that Israel’s integration into a Middle Eastern confederation of equal states is the only alternative he can see to neutralization but he is skeptical about confederation, arguing that “the Arab world is so divided internally that a long time may pass before a real confederation,” including Israel, could be established. Existing Israeli foreign policy, which he says has not changed substantially since former Premier David Ben Gurion retired in 1962, will not bring about either solution, he contends. That policy, he says, must lead to increasing alignment, if not formal alliance, with the Western bloc, while the Eastern bloc continues to arm the Arabs, with increasing involvement of the two super-powers and their blocs “in this local conflict.”
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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.
