A high State Department official said last night that one purpose of Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger’s Milwaukee speech was to warn the United Nations General Assembly against any attempt to oust Israel next fall. Although in his address yesterday to the University of Wisconsin’s Institute of World Affairs. Kissinger did not mention Israel by name, the official, briefing reporters here, noted that the Third World or non-aligned nations succeeded in suspending South Africa from the General Assembly last year and was considering similar action against Israel this year.
Kissinger was clearly referring to such moves when he warned that “If the UN begins to depart from its charter where suspension and expulsion are clearly specified prerogatives of the Security Council, we fear for the integrity and the survival of the General Assembly itself and no less for its specialized agencies.”
At another point in his speech, Kissinger observed that “the coerced are under no compulsion to submit. To the contrary, they are given all too many incentives simply to depart the scene….Such incentives are ominously enhanced when the General Assembly and specialized agencies expel member nations, which, for one reason or another, do not meet with their approval.”
SEEN AS REASSURANCE TO ISRAEL
Although the Secretary’s warning was an oblique one, it was seen by many observers as constituting a reassurance to Israel of continued American political support, especially as Kissinger spoke barely three days after his meeting with Israeli Premier Yitzhak Rabin in Bonn. Israel is known to be seeking commitments of American political, economic and military assistance as part of the quid pro que for the territorial concessions the U.S. is urging it to make in the interests of a new interim settlement with Egypt in Sinai.
Kissinger was sharply critical of UNESCO, which voted sanctions against Israel and excluded it from its regional groupings and of the International Labor Organization (ILO) which has recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization. He did not refer directly to those actions. However, he spoke of those agencies as having been “heavily politicized” and diverted from the constructive tasks for which they were created. He came down hard on the UN-sponsored World Food Council in Rome “where the very nations who desperately need and would most benefit from food assistance threatened to abort its work by disruptive tactics unworthy of an international organization.”
Kissinger also assailed the “lopsided, loaded voting, biased results and arbitrary tactics” which threaten to destroy “the utility of the General Assembly both as a safety valve and as an instrument of international cooperation.” The Secretary delivered his speech against a background of growing concern at the United Nations in recent weeks that an Arab-led move to suspend Israel could bring about an end to the UN in its present form.
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.
