Tekoah Calls UN Performance in Mideast Disappointing and Ineffective

Yosef Tekoah, Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, said in a broadcast this morning that the UN’s record of achievement in the Middle East was “disappointing,” that it has projected a pro-Arab “parliamentary imbalance” instead of a “balanced consensus,” and that it has “not even been able to censure the murder of Israelis” or enforce its own cease-fires. Mr. Tekoah, who has criticized the world organization and Secretary General U Than in the past, declared that of the “countless resolutions” on the Mideast in the General Assembly, “almost all are pro-Arab.” because members with that attitude outnumber Israel by “40 or 50” to “only one,” and that five of the current 15 members of the decision-making Security Council were anti-Israel. The UN’s record, he charged, has fallen short of its “lofty ideals.”

Mr. Tekoah was heard in an interview recorded recently in Israel by Arnold Forster, general counsel to the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, and broadcast today on WMCA Radio. The ambassador, who previously represented Israel in Brazil and in the Soviet Union, asserted that a Mideast solution must result from Arab-Israeli negotiations, because “no war in the world” has ever been settled without direct talks between or among the parties involved. The attempt of the Big Four to impose a settlement, he charged, was “circumventing, delaying and undermining” the search for peace. But Mr. Tekoah did not recommend that the UN be replaced. Though it needs “a change of attitude” by hostile members to be effective in matters of warfare, he commented, it “continues to be useful” in economic, social and legal areas.