An American Middle East expert has charged the Nixon Administration and Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger with willingness to “brutalize” Israel so that a demoralized Jewish State would be willing to make concessions leading to a piecemeal withdrawal to its pre-June 1967 borders which, under 1974 conditions, would make for an even more dangerous situation in the Mideast. According to Prof. Gil Carl AIRoy, of the Middle Eastern Studies Department at Hunter College, Kissinger, during the Yom Kippur War, forced a halt to Israel’s “rapidly accelerating devastation of Egypt’s military might” which caused Israel to be “both frustrated and demoralized…to a degree that has made her more amenable to demands for concessions.”
Prof. AIRoy made his charges in an article in the inaugural issue of the Bulletin of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, a group headed by political scientist Hans Morgenthau. He contended that Kissinger’s forced concessions from Israel seem to satisfy pressures on the Nixon Administration by appearing “to win Arab good will; save detente with the Soviet Union; alleviate the energy crisis; narrow disagreements with Europe and Japan; and shield the President from domestic woes with triumphal tours of the Arab world and otherwise.”
Kissinger’s “stoppage” of the Yom Kippur War, according to Prof. AIRoy, “simply meant that Israel could neither finish the war by finishing off the Arabs nor finish it by sending her troops home.” Israel then had to pay the price of concessions in order to end the war of attrition and bring her troops home, the writer said.
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.
