The UN General Committee decided today, at the request of the Arab League, to include a new item on the General Assembly’s agenda, titled “Israel’s Decision to Build a Canal Linking the Mediterranean Sea to the Dead Sea.”
The new item will come before the Assembly in about two weeks, after debate in the Special Political Committee. Yehuda Blum, Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, expressed Israel’s objection to the decision today, charging that it is “another demonstration of the total Arab obsession with Israel.”
Appearing before the General Committee, Blum said that the Arabs are “sensitive” about the planned canal because it is designed to produce an alternative source of energy, independent of oil. “It may conceivably serve as a model to other countries seeking a break out of the vise, political as well as economic, forced upon them by the petro-hegemonists and oil extortionists. In brief, it is not a project that the Arab oil blackmailers would wish to go ahead for very sordid and mercurial reasons,” the Israeli envoy declared.
ISRAEL EXPLAINS “IRAQI NUCLEAR THREAT”
In another development here today, Israel submitted to the UN Secretariat a 60-page “White Paper” titled “The Iraqi Nuclear Threat — Why Israel had to Act,” for circulation here as a document of the General Assembly. The document details Israel’s diplomatic effort to prevent the shipment of nuclear arms technology to Iraq and the meetings in this vein between Israel’s Foreign Minister and Foreign Ministers of France, Italy and the United States, before Israel’s attack on the Iraqi nuclear station last June 7. The General Assembly is scheduled to discuss the Israeli attack on Iraq’s nuclear facility on Nov. II.
The Assembly is also scheduled to take up next month two major debates on the Mideast conflict. On Dec. I it is scheduled to start the Palestinian Debate and on Dec. 7 the Debate on the Situation in the Mideast.
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.
