30 Prominent Educators Call on Administration to ‘keep Faith with Israel’

Thirty prominent educators have called upon the Nixon administration to “keep faith with Israel” and take immediate steps to “restore the essential military balance between Israel and Egypt.” The statement, which was transmitted to Henry A. Kissinger, President Nixon’s national security affairs advisor, identified the signers as both hawks and doves “whose views range widely over the political spectrum.” The signers include John Kenneth Galbraith, former Ambassador to India, now professor of economics at Harvard: former Assistant Secretary of State William P. Bundy, now of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Arthur Schlesinger, former Kennedy administration advisor and professor at the City University of New York; and Edward Teller, professor of physics at the University of California. The statement, issued in response to the official U.S. acknowledgement that Soviet missiles had been placed in the Suez Canal standstill zone in violation of the truce agreement, noted that Israel had agreed to the cease-fire only on the basis of U.S. assurances that it would not weaken her security. “We believe it to be the moral responsibility of the U.S., as well as in our national interest, to keep faith with Israel and to maintain the substance of the cease-fire,” the educators said. While they had no specific suggestions, they called upon the administration to take “prompt steps to restore the essential military balance between Israel and Egypt to that obtaining at the start of the cease-fire.” Without such redress, they said. “there can be no fruitful negotiations, no stable frontiers and thus no peace in the Middle East.”