Chairman Hubert H. Humphrey of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on the Near East yesterday criticized what he termed the U.S. Administration’s failure to meet the Soviet challenge in the Middle East. At the same time, he landed Israel’s “midget Point Four program” by which Israel is extending technical assistance to Ghana, Burma, and other new nations.
Speaking before a conference on Middle East development sponsored by the Middle East Institute the Senator stated: “It would be helpful if a few people started to say what is indeed the fact–that many of the problems of the Middle East existed long before the State of Israel was established, and that they would continue to exist independent of the so-called ‘Palestine question.'”
He said that too often Americans looked at the Middle East “almost exclusively” in terms of the Arab Israel dispute. He thought “the United States must stop hemming and hawing, playing both sides of the street as though the right hand can be separated from the left.” He added that he still did not know what the State Department’s actual attitude toward Egyptian President Nasser might be.
The Administration has failed to meet the challenge” in the Middle East, Sen. Humphrey declared. He asserted that “the President has given no indication of freeing himself from, or even being very alert to, the disastrous, irrelevant, and unrealistic policies pursued during the past five years in the Middle East.” He called for a coordinated new policy including discussion of a regional arms embargo with Russia, a guarantee against forceful change of borders, increased economic aid and establishment of a comprehensive Middle East development authority by the free world.
Sen. Humphrey questioned whether U.S. arms furnished the Arabs would ever be used against the Soviet Union. He indicated that the recipients of the arms might use them more likely against Israel. He said the Baghdad Pact actually proved to be only a “source of disunity.”
Eric Johnston, who has served as special Presidential envoy to the Middle East, told the conference that the Arabs fear Israel more than Communism. He said many Arabs feel Israel eventually will be liquidated. According to Mr. Johnston, the Soviet Union was exploiting such Arab attitudes.
Chairman James Terry Duce ruled discussion of the Arab refugee question “out of order when a conferee sought to raise the issue from the floor. The conferee, taking the Arab side, demanded to know why the conference had not taken up the Arab refugee problem. Mr. Duce said it was a “thorny problem” and thought progress was being made in viewing it in human rather than political terms. He said further discussion of the matter could only result in “heat and not illumination.”
Israel’s economic achievements were lauded at the conference by A. J. Meyer, associate director of the Harvard University Center for Middle Eastern Studies. At the same time he said: “Israel’s astounding economic advance to date has been directed by decentralized arrangements. More than a dozen agencies–government ministries and bureaus. Histadruit and others–“evolved elaborate plans for their particular operations, but to date the arrangement represents a mosaic of plans rather than a coordinated whole.”
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