Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban, strongly defended President Nixon’s order for a worldwide United States military alert shortly after the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War. The action by the President, taken as a counter to threats of Soviet military intervention in the Middle East, has been criticized as an over-reaction linked to the President’s Watergate problems.
Eban, addressing a Commonwealth Club luncheon yesterday, said that the Soviet Union was testing the reliability of U.S. commitment, “inspired perhaps by circumstances within your own country.” This was understood to be a reference to the crisis stemming from the Watergate scandal. Eban said that if the United States response “had been any less clear, lucid, resolute, courageous and daring than it was, I would not be speaking to you today.”
The Israeli diplomat said that, without that response, “Israel and all the Middle East would have faller under the dark domination of forces and ideologies utterly alien” to the “spiritual message” of the Middle East. Eban charged that the Soviet Union had brought the world to “the brink of nuclear catastrophe” by its Oct. 25 “challenge” to the U.S. and added that the American-Soviet detente was not yet a reality.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
