“We could never live with ourselves if we had impaired the well-being and security of Israel,” Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told a group of high American and Israel officials, including Premier Yitzhak Rabin, at a dinner at the Israeli Embassy last week.
Kissinger characterized Israeli-American official “differences” in their analyses of the Middle East situation as “merely family quarrels because we are people of the same values and there are limits beyond which these disagreements can never be pushed.” Regarding Rabin’s talks with President Ford, Kissinger and Defense Secretary James Schlesinger last week, Kissinger said “the discussions we have had have moved us closer to a new momentum in the Middle East.”
Kissinger’s remarks came in a toast to Rabin at a dinner Thursday night given by Israeli Ambassador Simcha Dinitz. Those present included Donald Rumsfeld, President Ford’s Chief of Staff at the White House, and Robert Hartmann, an intimate advisor to the President. An Israeli official present described the remarks as the most favorable to Israel made by Kissinger since he became Secretary of State three weeks before the Yom Kippur War broke out.
ISRAEL MUST ‘LOOK WITH MORE CARE’
Kissinger also said in his toast “the stories that make newspaper headlines” of Israeli and American analyses do not go to the heart of the matter. He pointed out that “our perspectives are different. Your margin of survival is so much narrower than ours.”
Noting that any “mistakes” Israel might make are “likely” to lead to grave consequences, Kissinger said, “you therefore have to look with more care. We have not known tragedy as a country in any sense of the word as you have.”
“No people needs peace more than Israel, and no one has been working harder to achieve in than the Prime Minister, whom I have admired for his statesmanship ever since I met him,” Kissinger said.
In his toast, Rabin said that Israel is small and remote and “still we feel…that when we think something serves our interests, we do it even though it is not always liked by some people here. But we do it because we feel there is a strong basis of common interest, common heritage, and common feelings in the long run between Israel — the small democracy — and the United States, the great democracy.”
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