Moynihan Says U.S. Should Announce It Will Not Let Israel Be Expelled from UN

Daniel P. Moynihan, the United States Ambassador-designate to the United Nations, said today that the U.S. should proclaim “now” that it will not stand for “even the effort” to expel Israel from the UN General Assembly. Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee which is holding hearings on his nomination, the former U.S. Ambassador to India and former political science professor at Harvard said he agreed with the views expressed before the committee a month ago by Arthur J. Goldberg.

Goldberg, a former U.S. Supreme Court Justice who served as Ambassador to the UN during the Johnson Administration, said at the time that the U.S. should assert its position against a move by the Arab states and their allies to expel Israel and warn that it would leave the General Assembly and freeze its financial contributions to the UN if such action were ever taken.

The subject rose when Sen. Richard Clark (D, Iowa), acting chairman of the committee, asked Moynihan if he agreed with Goldberg’s suggested course “If by chance” the Havana conference proposal to expel Israel is adopted by the General Assembly. Moynihan noted that the representatives of some 77 non-aligned and Third World countries had met in Havana in March and will meet again in Lima in August. He said it would be too late for the U.S. to take action in September with these representatives since by then the instructions from their governments will have been solidified. The non-aligned countries have called for a special session of the General Assembly in September to discuss economic problems.

Clark said, during his questioning of Moynihan, “I certainly agree” that the UN “ought to be a universal body” and that neither Israel nor-South Africa should be excluded. Moynihan pointed out that Israel cannot be expelled from the UN as a whole because the Security Council must decide that, implying a U.S. veto of such an act, But he emphasized that even the effort to expel Israel “would be a catastrophic action.” He described such an act as “madness” and “contrary to the spirit and the letter” of the UN Charter, “It is just this kind of mindless giving in and authoritarian streaks we should not encourage,” he said, Moynihan added that he could not “imagine” Egypt, as an example, “would want it (Israel’s expulsion) to happen.”