Israel today completely rejected the report by the special Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, which in effect recommended that the Security Council adopt the Palestine Liberation Organization’s program for a Middle East settlement. “Israel rejects outright the report of the so-called “Palestine Committee’–just as it rejected General Assembly Resolution 3376 which created it,” Israeli Ambassador Chaim Herzog said in a statement this afternoon. “Alongside Israel, the free countries also did not support the resolution because it was considered wholly one-sided, unbalanced and biased,” Herzog declared.
He noted that the 20-member committee included 16 countries that “do not have diplomatic relations with Israel and some even deny to this day Israel’s right to exist. Moreover, not a single free country of standing agreed to take part in the work of the committee, so utterly prejudiced was it considered to be.” Herzog said. The Israeli envoy charged that “The PLO was dominant in the drafting of the committee’s report and in keeping with the PLO’s declared aim. The committee’s recommendations are in effect a calculated formula for the destruction of the State of Israel. There can be no doubt about this end, even if it is designed to be achieved in stages. Accordingly, neither Israel –nor any free country–will have anything to do with it or anything which flows from it.”
The committee’s report, which will go to the Security Council for debate sometime this month, calls for Israel to withdraw unconditionally from the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem within one year. Palestinians would then return to these areas under United Nations jurisdiction to be followed by a PLO takeover of the area from the UN and the creation of “an independent Palestinian entity.”
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.
