The only conceivable basis for peace in the Middle East is Security Council Resolution 242 because it is the only program which all parties have accepted, including the United States and the Soviet Union, according to former Under-Secretary of State Eugene V. Rostow, now Sterling professor of law at Yale University.
“I’m more optimistic than I have ever been that a peace agreement is quite feasible to hope for if not to expect,” Prof. Rostow said at a symposium yesterday on “World Politics and the Jewish Condition,” at the American Jewish Committee offices here to introduce a new book by that title. The book, a compilation of background papers prepared for AJC’s Task Force on the World of the ’70s, contains articles by Prof. Rostow and nine other international relations experts.
The same “forces of tension among the major powers” that led to the cease-fire in Vietnam could also lead to peace in the Middle East, he said. The emergence of the People’s Republic of China as an active participant on the international political scene “gives new hope of a true detente among the major powers, and the acceptance by the Soviet Union of a policy of peaceful co-existence.” Without Soviet influence, Soviet support, and Soviet arms, there would have been peace long ago between Israel and its neighbors, Dr. Rostow said. “The Arab states would have had no alternative but to accept Israel’s right to exist.”
Dr. Zvi Y, Gitelman, assistant professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, and an authority on the political scene in Eastern Europe, supported the contention that the Soviet Union might be ready to cultivate trade and political relations with the West and to make some concessions in its domestic policies in order to achieve these goals. “While there are no indications that Soviet authorities are now prepared, or will be prepared in the future, to allow Jews the cultural, religious, social and political opportunities that would allow them to survive and flourish as an organized nationality and community,” he said, “they can probably afford to let some portion, carefully defined, of the Jewish population to emigrate to Israel in the interest of improving relations with the West.”
Emigration seems to be the “only currently realistic solution to the Jewish problem in the USSR,” said Dr. Gitelman, who also authored a chapter of the book. But, he added, while it is legitimate to focus on emigration it is important to bear in mind that at least half of the Jews in the Soviet Union would remain there. Therefore, he continued, “the main thrust of our concern should be toward a Russian-Jewish culture,” within the context of Soviet ideology.
Seventy members of the Federation of Jewish Youth in Belgium demonstrated in front of the Iraqi Embassy in Brussels last night on behalf of Iraqi Jews. They carried banners listing the names of the Iraqi Jews believed to have been recently executed. Police arrested the 70 demonstrators but released them “There were no other incidents.
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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.
