The Republican Party convention at San Francisco has adopted a “strong” plank on the Middle East situation, Bernard Katzen, director of the Republican National Committee’s Ethnic Division, declared here today at a special press conference which he had summoned for a discussion of the GOP’s stand regarding the Middle East region. “I am confident,” he said, “that the Republican Party will demonstrate its support of those nations which are our friends. Certainly Israel is in that category.”
Mr. Katzen pointed out that the Republican platform’s plank dealing with the Middle East not only pledged United States “economic and military assistance” to help maintain stability in the Middle East and to “prevent an imbalance of arms” in that region, but also reaffirmed the party’s pledges of 1960 concerning that area.
He read the 1960 pledge which had specifically urged the Arab states and Israel “to undertake negotiations for a mutually acceptable settlement of the causes of tension between them.” He noted that the 1960 plank, now reaffirmed, had also pledged the GOP to help solve the Arab refugee problem, seek to end blockades and boycotts, urged freedom of navigation in international waterways, called for “cessation of discrimination against Americans on the basis of religious beliefs” and called for “an end to the wasteful and dangerous arms race and to the threat of an arms imbalance in the area.”
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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.
