David Schoenbrun, the award-winning television political commentator, charged that Secretary of State William P. Rogers was endangering the cause of world peace and selling Israel out by recommending Israeli concessions toward a Suez Canal settlement and by continuing to insist on virtually total Israeli withdrawal from the occupied Arab territories.
He said that the thrust of United States policy should be to remove the Soviet presence from the Middle East by pressing the Kremlin to pull out concurrent with an American pullout from Southeast Asia. Such a plan, Schoenbrun said, would be in the best interests of the US as well as those of the Mideast and Indochinese nations. Additionally, the commentator said, the US should continue to keep Israel militarily strong, as she is the most democratic country he has ever visited.
Schoenbrun said it was hypocritical for the Russians to charge Israel with aggression, and he called “obscene” the recent Security Council condemnation of Israel’s policies in East Jerusalem. Schoenbrun’s lecture Sunday night at Congregation Beth Torah in Brooklyn, was attended by 450 persons.
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