Herzog, Moynihan Awarded Agnon Gold Medal

Chaim Herzog, Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, stressed last night that despite occasional differences there has been a “basic unity of purpose and common values” which has guided the Ambassadors of Israel and the United States at the UN. Herzog’s statement was made as he and Daniel P. Moynihan, the former U.S. Ambassador to the UN, received the 1976 S.Y.Agnon Gold Medal Award from the American Friends of the Hebrew University at a dinner attended by some 500 persons at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

Herzog, who praised Moynihan for his efforts in the Zionist debate at the UN General Assembly last year, said “the greatest credit due” Moynihan was that he was the first to realize the importance of the resolution equating Zionism with racism when it was first revealed in the Third Committee last October. “Over the years the inherent community of interest between that of the United States and that of Israel has guided your Ambassadors to the UN who have in themselves reflected United States government policy.” the Israeli envoy declared. “From time to time, the attitude of our two governments, has on certain issues not always been identical. After all, we are both sovereign nations. But such divergen- cies have never deflected us from the basic, unity of purpose and common values which have always linked our two countries, and will always linked our two countries, and will always link them in the future.” Herzog noted that “All this was true during the period of Daniel Patrick Moynihan as it is true currently in the case of my very distinguished and effective colleague Governor William Scranton, who in his statements to date has continued in the great and friendly tradition of his predecessors.”

Describing the attacks on Israel in every body of the UN, Herzog said the situation which is preventing progress toward Middle East peace does not affect only Israel. “When the enlightened free countries of the world do not have the moral courage to stand up and be counted on the issues which they know to be untrue, then they are as guilty as those who participate in the crime,” he declared. Moynihan compared the founding of Hebrew University 51 years ago to that of his own school, Harvard, where he is a professor of government. He noted that both were created before their countries were founded under adverse conditions and in a spirit of liberalism that “made cultivation of mind a goal which was not merely instrumental to the material well-being of society but which formed one of the proper justifications for that well-being.”

Bayard Rustin, the Black civil rights leader, praised Herzog and Moynihan. He said that American Blacks should support Israel not only because it is the lone democracy in the Middle East, but because when Blacks came to America as slaves it was “the Jewish spirit that gave us hope.”