Israel’s new U.N. ambassador says ‘Arab decade’ in Middle East is over

Frank P. L. Somerville, Religion Editor of The Sun

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“The new Israeli ambassador to the United Nations told applauding Orthodox Jews at a convention in Baltimore yesterday that a dramatic shift in United States Mideast policy had resulted from the attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Beirut.

‘The Arab decade is over,’ Benjamin Netanyahu triumphantly told his audience of nearly 1,000 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, where the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America has been meeting since Thursday.

Security considerations prevented him from being specific about new ‘strategic’ measures for the ‘common defense’ of Israel and the U.S., Mr. Netanyahu said. But he assured his listeners that ‘important things are happening.’

The ambassador said three major shifts in the Middle East during the last two years, largely brought about because of the strength and stability of Israel ‘in the shifting sands’ of that turbulent region, are now having profound effects on international policy in Washington, London, Tokyo, the capitals of Africa and elsewhere.

These changes, he said, were: ‘The decline of Arab oil.’ The Arab oil countries, facing the pressures of international conservation efforts and competition, were done in ‘by their own greed,’ he said. African nations which were once ‘seduced and intimidated by the Arabs’ are ‘coming back to Israel through the back door.’

‘The decline’ of the Palestine Liberation Organization. This ‘did not happen accidentally,’ Ambassador Netanyahu said. ‘We smashed the PLO.’

One important result, he said, is that ‘no longer is the PLO able to say it represents the Palestinian Arabs’ — a fact, he suggested, that ‘bodes well’ for the future of relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors. And most important of all, ‘the shift that has taken place in U.S. policy in the Middle East.’

Although the United States ‘unintentionally became exposed — as a country — to Arab terrorism’ in Lebanon, the ambassador said, the ‘tragic attacks’ on the American embassy in 1983 and 1984 have taught the Reagan administration a valuable foreign-policy lesson: that such terrorism is not aimed exclusively at Israel… At least privately and seriously, according to the Israeli ambassador, ‘no one at the U.N. talks about Israel as a pariah state any more.’”

Context added by this archive

Netanyahu in Baltimore in 1984, saying the PLO can no longer claim to represent the Palestinian Arabs. The page around him sells table pads, stacking stools and Ralph Lauren sweaters.

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"Israel’s new U.N. ambassador says ‘Arab decade’ in Middle East is over," The Baltimore Sun, 26 November 1984, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1984-002. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1984-002

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One man, and the position he never changed