Tekoah, Miller Say Lesson of Holocaust is That Jews Must Hold Firm

The lesson of the holocaust was cited last night by Israel’s United Nations Ambassador Yosef Tekoah to explain his country’s steadfast position in the current stalled Middle East peace talks. Speaking at memorial services for six million Jewish victims of Nazism held at Hunter College, Tekoah said, “Some may even be ready to come to us with advice on how to behave; with counsel that we should be less firm in our legitimate demands, less insistent on our rights, more confident of the good will of our enemies.” Rejecting this approach, he declared: “We cannot be, not after the holocaust, not after 23 years of war in which we have had to defend Israel’s very right to life. Not when our existence continues to be menaced.” Tekoah dismissed proposals that Israel put its trust “in international guarantee, in the United Nations, in international forces and in great powers.” He said, “No nation in the world does that, Which people has been saved by international sympathy by international guarantees–Czechoslovakia, Biafra, East Pakistan? Israel will not be Czechoslovakia. Why must Israel be asked to be different?” Observing that Israel has “had enough of war,” Tekoah asserted that “We cannot agree to the restoration of conditions which have been the cause of war. No state in the world has ever consented to end a conflict by leaving the sources of friction unchanged. We will not be different from others. We are determined not to return to the chaos and vulnerability of the 1967 lines. Nobody in our place would.”

Rabbi Israel Miller, president of the American Zionist Federation, told the audience that the observance of the holocaust “is dedicated not only to the obstinacy of our grief but to the obstinacy of our hope. We refuse to forget, even as we refuse to be comforted.” He declared that it is the “strength of the commitment of those who died, that we must inherit. We must be as obstinate, as intransigent, as inflexible in our hope, as we are in our grief. The voices of the Jews of the Soviet Union are the voices of strength and hope. It is this obstinacy of hope that will inspire American Jewry to fulfill its destiny here and for Israel.” Earlier in the week, Senator Jacob K. Javits told 5,000 persons at Carnegie Hall attending the 28th anniversary meeting of the Warsaw ghetto uprising that “the opportunity is at hand for our nation to perform a tangible and substantive act of commemoration” to the ghetto revolt. This act would be for the U.S. Senate to ratify the Genocide Convention. The Senate Foreign Relations committee recently voted to recommend ratification by the full Senate. Speaking at the same rally. Mayor John V. Lindsay said: “We are here today not to mourn, but to hope. What sustains our hope is the past, the fight to be human and free.”