Rostow Scores U.S. Mideast Policy

Eugene V. Rostow who was Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs during the Johnson Administration, charged tonight that since the 1973 Yom Kippur War the United States, in its efforts to wean the Arab states from the Soviet Union, has abandoned its reliance on United Nations Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338.

Noting that the resolutions provide that “the Israelis need not withdraw one inch from the cease-fire lines until there is a firm and binding agreement of peace,” Rostow declared that “In negotiating the military disengagement agreement between Egypt and Israel, our government gave up its strongest and most important negotiating position, and a fundamental principle as well.”

Rostow, who is now Sterling Professor of Law and Public Affairs at Yale University, in a paper prepared for delivery to the opening session of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy’s second symposium being held at the Waldorf-Astoria through Sunday, declared:

“The Arab states have turned to the Soviet Union for help in order to destroy Israel. We will have no chance of weaning them away from their Soviet connection until they have made a genuine peace with Israel, and the dream of destroying Israel begins to recede into history. By pressing Israel to give up some of the occupied territories without peace, we have allowed the Arab states to continue to hope that somehow, someday, with Soviet help, they will be able to liquidate Israel.”

RAPS U.S.-SOVIET DETENTE

Rostow, who is chairman of the symposium, strongly criticized President Ford and Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger for telling the American public that there is a detente with the Soviet Union which, Rostow said, does not exist. “We must,” he said, “face the fact that what the world confronts in the Middle East and elsewhere is not the natural sparring of superpowers, but a deliberate Soviet policy of conquest, seeking power for its own sake, and employing for that purpose the most ruthless and unprincipled tools of terror, and of aggression.”

Charging that the Yom Kippur War was the Soviet’ Union’s answer to the American rapprochement with China, Rostow declared: “The wars and other conflicts of the Middle East are not simply regional quarrels, or wars of religion, of dynasty and of culture. They could not have lasted, or become a threat to world peace, without the encouragement and assistance, and now the active participation, of the Soviet Union.”

Turning to the Palestinian problem, Rostow said that while this is the heart of the conflict between Israel and the Arab states, it does not follow that it can be solved by dealing with the Palestine Liberation Organization which he said “holds no mandate from the Palestinian Arabs.” Instead he urged that the American effort be concentrated to facilitate peace between Jordan and Israel since “they–and they alone–can solve the problem of Palestine, and remove it as a grievance and a burden in Arab life and a threat to world peace.”

ISRAEL IS A COMRADE IN ARMS

Dr. Mordecai Hacohen, chairman of the symposium committee, stressed in a statement prepared for delivery that Israel. “the only democratic country in the Middle East, has been our strongest and most faithful ally….Is it not our most moral and practical obligation to treat this ally not as a client waiting for charitable handouts but rather as a comrade in arms in our defense system and lend them the tools politically, economically and militarily to do our job in the defense of our own liberty, our own freedom, our own future?”

Discussing the topics to be aired at the symposium, Hacohen raised such provocative questions as whether the United States should get out of the UN; whether the U.S. in October 1973 “snatched away the hardest won, yet Israel’s greatest military victory and handed it over to her defeated enemies allowing them to claim victory instead?” and whether the diplomatic victory the U.S. has claimed in the Mideast has not in reality increased Soviet influence in the area.

Hacohen stressed that there never was a sovereign state of Palestine nor a Palestinian people. He said the solution to the Arab refugee problem is in Jordan and “it should be our policy, therefore, to help end the self-inflicted exile of the Arab refugees and assist all those who regard themselves Palestinians to return to their desired Palestinian homeland and be reunited with their Arab brethren within the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan….”

The symposium, whose theme is “The Middle East–Critical Choices for America,” will discuss political, economic, social and scientific aspects of the problem tomorrow and Saturday. It will conclude with a discussion of the UN and the Mideast which will feature addresses by Daniel P. Moynihan, the U.S. Ambassador or the UN, and Ernest A. Gross, a former U.S. representative at the UN. Other participants include Admiral (ret.) Elmo R. Zumwalt, Hans Morgenthau, Bayard Rustin, Milton Friedman, Edward Teller and John P. Roche.

The National Committee on American Foreign Policy, headquartered in Washington, was founded two years ago as a non-partisan committee aimed at a critical and constructive scrutiny of American foreign policy.