Professor Says Nixon’s ‘even-handed’ Mideast Policy is Unworkable

Dr. Steven L. Spiegel, assistant professor of political science at the University of California at Los Angeles and a member of the 1969 study mission of American Professors for Peace in the Middle East, said that the Nixon Administration’s “even-handed” policy was unworkable because “we will never be anti-Israeli enough for the Arabs.” Even if the Arab governments were to accept a peace pact with Israel, he continued, it would be undermined by guerrilla opposition. An “even-handed” attitude toward the “two irreconcilable forces” of Israel and the Arabs, he said, “alienates” both and “gives the Russians a false sense of security.” Dr. Spiegel spoke at a panel discussion, “Israel Between East and West,” sponsored by American Histadrut Cultural Exchange Institute, with Israel Histadrut Associates and American Habonim Association. The other panelist, Dr. Uri Ra’anan, professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University and a Russian expert at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War led to the Kremlin’s having to suppress numerous pro-Israeli demonstrations in the USSR, and Israel’s existence interferes with its attempts to subdue and eliminate Jewish communal life in Russia. Both professors delivered their remarks before Secretary of State William P. Rogers announced that the United States would not sell jets to Israel at this time.