How the Israelis See It

Nixon has kept every promise to Israel,” a high foreign ministry official told me the’ day Senator Kennedy was winding up a two-day visit to the Holy Land. Since that day I have had occasion to talk with many leading personalities in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and the occupied territories, with people in kibbutzim, with the man (and woman) on the street, with army privates and officers, tourists (Jewish and Christian), with men high in the Establishment, and with leading members of the loyal opposition in the Knesset (Israel’s parliament). And if a consensus can be arrived at from my conversations it is this:

The only formidable barrier to peace in the Middle East is the Soviet Union —not Egypt, or Egypt in alliance with any of her immediate friends and allies in the Arab world. But the Russians, it is repeated (as if speaking to a dull schoolboy), are America’s problem, basically, not Israel’s. And so long as the United States is headed by a President with a strong anti-Communist record, they feel reassured, although they cannot quite grasp Secretary Rogers’ diplomacy which seems to them a suicidal effort by Washington to impose a precarious “peace” on Israel by offering —as a gift—the Suez Canal to Soviet ambitions in the area.

MG

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Max Geltman

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Nixon has kept every promise to Israel,” a high foreign ministry official told me the’ day Senator Kennedy was winding up a two-day visit to the Holy Land. Since that day I have had occasion to talk with many leading personalities in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and the occupied territories, with people in kibbutzim, with the man (and woman) on the street, with army privates and officers, tourists (Jewish and Christian), with men high in the Establishment, and with leading members of the loyal opposition in the Knesset (Israel’s parliament). And if a consensus can be arrived at from my conversations it is this:

The only formidable barrier to peace in the Middle East is the Soviet Union —not Egypt, or Egypt in alliance with any of her immediate friends and allies in the Arab world. But the Russians, it is repeated (as if speaking to a dull schoolboy), are America’s problem, basically, not Israel’s. And so long as the United States is headed by a President with a strong anti-Communist record, they feel reassured, although they cannot quite grasp Secretary Rogers’ diplomacy which seems to them a suicidal effort by Washington to impose a precarious “peace” on Israel by offering —as a gift—the Suez Canal to Soviet ambitions in the area.