President Carter’s Middle East policy has come under severe attack from the Democratic Party’s Senate whip while a leading Republican Senator warned that “There could be a crunch coming in U.S. -Israeli relations relative to the Geneva conference.”
Sen. Alan Cranston (D.Calif.), his party’s second-ranking member in the upper chamber of Congress, declared in a speech it would be “changing the rules in the middle of a life or death game” to expect Israel to give up territory on the West Bank for the creation of a Palestinian state.
He said that “No such development should be expected from a reconvened Middle East peace conference in Geneva.” A “PLO-dominated Palestinian state on Israel’s border would be a loaded gun aimed at Israel’s head at point-blank range,” Cranston said.
SUBSTANTIVE DISAGREEMENTS NOTED
Javits addressed the 11th annual dinner Sunday night of the Yeshiva Toras Chaim Talmudical Seminary in Denver, Colo. He said “Substantive and procedural disagreements” surfaced between Israel and the U.S. during the bargaining that led to the U.S. -Israeli working paper on reconvening the Geneva conference.
He added that the United States “has every right to try to persuade Israel to agree to peace terms which the President may believe quite sincerely are in Israel’s as well as the U.S. best interests. But I do not believe that the President of the U.S. has the right to force Israel into agreements which Israel believes to be incompatible with its national security.
“It would be morally wrong for the U.S. to impose terms upon Israel which Israel in good faith considers suicidal, under the threat of being cut adrift and abandoned by the U.S., even if the President were fully convinced in his own mind that the terms posed no basic threat to Israel’s survival.
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.
