A trade union leader said last night that the United States “should impose an absolute ban on the import of any Arab oil whatsoever, and take whatever domestic steps are necessary to make up the shortage.” This view was expressed by Lane Kirkland, AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer in an address this weekend to 1000 delegates attending the 51st annual convention of the National Committee for Labor Israel at the New York Hilton. The labor leader declared that it is “better to have an oil shortage than a moral shortage.”
Focusing on the United Nations General Assembly invitation to the Palestine Liberation Organization to address the world body, Kirkland said the UN “has set the scene for its own ultimate disgrace.” He noted that was a far cry from the time when the UN had been “a citadel of human idealism which presided over the birth of Israel.” By providing the PLO with a platform, he continued, the UN “is showing that hijacking works, terrorism works, extortion works, mass murder and infanticide work.”
Dealing with the same issue, Dr. Judah J. Shapiro, who was reelected for a second term as president of the NCLI. decried “the respectability bestowed by nations of supposed political and cultural maturity on Palestinian terrorist groups and their acts of violence.” This move, he observed, “undermines the confidence of the world’s willingness to let the Jewish State and world Jewry live in peace and security.”
Dr. Shapiro also warned that the Jewish position in the world today is threatened by an Arab world “which uses oil as a dagger thrust into the hearts of civilized societies, even while it blocks the development of new nations faced with famine and backward economies.” Some hope for the Jewish people may be restored, he added, “when the world realizes that the threats are not removed by sacrificing the State of Israel on the altar of Arab ambitions.”
AIDING LOW INCOME FAMILIES
Israel Kessar, treasurer of Histadrut in Israel, said that the labor federation was “acutely aware of the special problems of low income families in Israel and was acting to alleviate their plight. He
Kessar, who was born in Yemen 41 years ago and was brought to Palestine by his parents at the age of two, noted that Israeli youngsters, and among them young Oriental Jews, “played a crucial role in the defense of Israel in all is wars of survival. These young people of the mental communities rightly feel that they are entitled to share more evenly in the general welfare and the wealth of the nation. If they are equal in the army, says Histadrut, they must have equal opportunities in civilian life.”
At the conclusion of the convention today the delegates approved an $11 million fund-raising effort for 1975 for a series of health, educational and social welfare programs in Israel. Bernard B. Jacobson, executive vice-president of the NCLI reported that the group had raised $4.4 million for similar programs last year through the Israel Histadrut campaign, of which $1.5 million had been contributed by the trade unions.
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