Ambassador Yosef Tekoah of Israel urged the Security Council yesterday not to tamper with Resolution 242 which he called “the only existing basis for agreement on a just and lasting peace” in the Middle East.
The Israeli envoy warned that because “progress toward such agreement has been slow…is not a justification for destroying the only common ground, unless, of course, one wishes to create a void that would entail also the undermining of Israel’s commitments on the basis of Resolution 242.”
Ambassador Tekoah addressed the Security Council late in the afternoon, exercising his right of reply to the delegates of Kuwait, Algeria, and Sudan. He said that statements by each of those nations had “reaffirmed…with a greater or smaller degree of explicitness” the Arab objective to “eradicate” the State of Israel.
“The Security Council cannot ignore this attitude of the Arab states. Israel will not ignore it. The government of Israel would be amiss in its international and national obligations if it did not remain at all times alert to the fact that Arab states continue to strive for the liquidation of the only independent Jewish state and preach this objective in the United Nations.” Tekoah said.
Quoting from a May 8, 1973 Washington speech by former U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Arthur J. Goldberg, Tekoah said “Resolution 242 does not explicitly require that Israel withdraw to the lines occupied by it before the outbreak of the (1967) war….Resolution 242 simply endorses the principal of ‘withdrawal of Israel’s armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict’ and interrelates this with the principal that every state in the area is entitled to live in peace within ‘secure and recognized boundaries.'”
SOVIET DELEGATE RAPS ISRAEL AS USUAL
The Soviet Ambassador, Yacov Malik took a diametrically opposite view of Resolution 242, in a speech to the Security Council this afternoon Malik, who is this month’s President of the Council but spoke as the representative of the Soviet Union, declared that the “primary prerequisite” for peace in the Middle East was the total withdrawal of Israel from all of the Arab territories it captured in the 1967 Six-Day War.
He contended that the essence of Resolution 242 lies in “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force” and accused Israel of paying only lip service to the resolution. Israel, Malik charged, has distorted 242. Peace will come only when the use of force ceases, he said. He said that Resolution 242 called for the recognition of the sovereignty and independence of states within secure boundaries. This, he said, is for all states in the Middle East, not just one.
Malik called the crisis in the Middle East a threat to the entire planet. He said it was an “intolerable” and “abnormal” situation that existed solely because of Israel’s “aggressive, arrogant policy.”
“The world is tired of the repeated propaganda by Israel,” Malik said. “Israel has lost the trust of the world” and in order to restore it, it must withdraw from the territories and seek peace in accordance with UN resolutions, the Soviet envoy said.
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