Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon declared here yesterday that Israel needs supersonic F-4 Phantom jets from the United States as a deterrent against renewed Arab warfare rather than as an offensive weapon. Addressing a Liberal Party meeting here, he said that Israel’s defense budget is the largest in the world on a per capita basis. But, he stressed, at a time when the Soviet Union is re-arming Syria and Egypt and the U.S. and Britain are filling the arsenals of Jordan, Israel has no choice but to equip itself with the most modern weapons.
Gen. Allon said that strengthening Israel’s Air Force with Phantoms would not only increase the nation’s power of self-defense but would deter the enemy from launching another war. “When the enemy despairs of destroying Israel, he may come around to accept our existence.” Gen. Allon said.
(In Washington, a Republican member of the House Armed Services Committee received a non-committal reply from the State Department to his request for action on the sale of F-4 supersonic Phantom jets to Israel which is advocated in the Republican Party’s platform. Rep. Bob Wilson, of California, disclosed he had received a letter from Assistant Secretary of State William B. Macomber. Jr. who wrote that Israel’s request for the Phantoms remained “under active and sympathetic consideration” and was “continually under review, the controlling principle being to improve the stability of the situation in the area.” Rep. Wilson, chairman of the Republican Congressional Committee, charged in a subsequent statement that the Department was ignoring massive Communist penetration of the Mediterranean and said “the least we can do in terms of immediate action is to bolster Israel’s deterrent capacity by selling Israel…Phantom jets.” The Macomber letter disclosed for the first time that Soviet-supplied TU-16 jet bombers have been technically transferred to “UAR (Egyptian) air inventory” and were using Egyptian bases in surveillance operations against the U.S. Sixth Fleet.)
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.
