Yost: Israel’s Policy is Unrealistic; Territory Does Not Always Provide Security

Charles W. Yost, who was removed as United States ambassador to the United Nations reportedly because he was “insufficiently pro-Israel,” has written an article in Life magazine calling Israel’s negotiating policy “wholly unrealistic,” Yost, who recently joined the faculty of Columbia University after two years at the UN, writes in the April 9 issue of Life magazine that he rejects Israel’s position “that it will negotiate without conditions but that it will not return to the prewar line even with Egypt, that it must have Sharm el-Sheikh and an access road to it, or that it must have its own forces along the West Bank of the Jordan as the Allon Plan proposes.” Egypt and Jordan, says Yost, “would never agree to these territorial changes,” and thus, “To insist upon these extensive territorial demands, and others, is simply to refuse to make a peace settlement on the only terms on which it can be made, simply to mislead the Israeli people as to what is and is not possible, simply to turn down in effect the long-awaited, fervently desired offer of the Arab states to make ‘a peace agreement with Israel.'”

Last December, Washington columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak reported that “Yost, while never once departing from Nixon administration policies on the Middle East, made no secret of his growing concern over Arab world hostility aimed at the United States because of the increasingly intimate relations between the United States and Israel.” The columnists added that Yost “spoke forcefully and frequently within the U.S. government of his conviction that President Nixon must keep the heat on Israel to withdraw from Arab lands captured in the 1967 war.” In his Life article, titled “Last Chance for Peace in the Mideast,” Yost writes: “It is difficult for a concerned observer, one who from personal experience has a deep admiration and sympathy for both Israelis and Arabs, not to conclude that each is far more likely to find long-term security in an agreement between them guaranteed by the UN and the Big Four than it could conceivably find through any territorial acquisitions, however tempting, which would make any such agreement and guarantees impossible.” For Israel, asserts Yost, “It would be a ghastly mistake, now that (peace agreements) are at last available, to say that they are worthless–and that only more territory can provide security. When in history has territory ever provided security?” Yost also reported his “strong impression” that Arabs have been ready for a year and a half to make a binding peace, to ensure that its territories were not used as a base for hostile attacks against Israel and to permit free passage of Israeli ships through the Suez Canal and the Strait of Tiran.