Three Israeli academicians agreed today that the Middle East peace conference scheduled to open in Geneva Dec. 18 will not achieve its goal of a permanent peace settlement in the Middle East because it is totally unrealistic “to expect the Arabs to accept Israel.” they said. That opinion was expressed by Amnon Rubenstein, Dean of the law faculty at Tel Aviv University; Shlomo Avineri, chairman of the political science department at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem; and David Weiss, professor of immunology at the Hebrew University. They spoke and replied to questions at a press briefing at the Israeli Consulate here.
They maintained that the most that could be achieved at the Geneva conference is a disengagement of the armies in the area. But Weiss observed that despite the hatred that now prevails, peace in the Middle East is possible, as history has shown in other cases, notably between the U.S. and Japan after World War II. Rubenstein contended that the Soviet Union aims at the ultimate destruction of Israel. Observing that it is unprecedented in history for a superpower to threaten a small nation with destruction, he warned that IF Russia carried out its threats “we will witness the fall of Jordan, Iran and Turkey. Therefore, Americans must regard support for Israel as a vital American interest.”
Prof. Avineri, who is a visiting professor at Cornell University, opined that what the USSR wants in the Middle East is “controlled tension” from which they have profited enormously. He said that while U.S. Soviet detente as a whole has to be viewed constructively, detente enabled the Russians to get American computers and those computers may help the Russians build better SAM-6 missiles. Referring to the situation inside Israel the three said that they believe that the Labor Party will be weakened after the election but said that it is not likely that Menachem Beigin, the Likud leader, will be Israel’s next Premier. Regarding the question of the Palestinians, Avineri and Rubenstein said this was Jordan’s problem, not Israel’s, to solve. “If the salvation of the Palestinians is the destruction of Israel we, of course, don’t go along with it Rubenstein said.
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.
