Netanyahu resigns as U.N. envoy; protests Shultz-PLO meeting

To seek Knesset seat

Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Tel Aviv

Netanyahu resigns as U.N. envoy; protests Shultz-PLO meeting — St. Louis Jewish Light, 6 April 1988 — St. Louis Jewish Light · St. Louis, Missouri · 6 April 1988

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“TEL AVIV (JTA) — Benjamin Netanyahu, who resigned last week as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations in order to run for the Knesset, began his election campaign as a militant Likud-Herut hard-liner only minutes after tendering his resignation to Foreign Minister Shimon Peres.

Dropping his role as diplomat, he launched blistering attacks on the United Nations, where he had served since 1984; on the American Administration, which he accused of active engagement in direct negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organization; on Secretary of State George Shultz’s Middle East peace plan, and on his erstwhile colleague, Yossi Beilin, the political director general of the Foreign Ministry.

Foreign Ministry officials, who are aligned with Peres and his Labor Party, sharply criticized Netanyahu. He only waited a few minutes before changing from the coat of a diplomat to one of a political hack,’ a former colleague said.

He was denounced for his attacks on former colleagues and the surprise and haste with which he quit his U.S. post at a time when Israel has been under constant attack by the Arab bloc and their allies for its policies in the administered territories.

Netanyahu is considered close to Premier Yitzhak Shamir and is very popular among conservative thinkers, particularly those in the Shamir-Moshe Arens camp… While Netanyahu’s entry into the political arena was greeted enthusiastically by Likud Knesset members, some Herut old-timers appeared to resent his instant leadership within the party ‘without having to go through the lengthy term of work in the local [party] branches.’

Netanyahu is likely to get a spot among the first 10 names on the Likud election lists, which virtually assures him of a seat in the next Knesset. Some observers suggested that the haste of his resignation might indicate a Likud decision to call for early elections.

Netanyahu, who said when he announced his resignation that he hoped for a place on the Likud list in the Knesset elections scheduled for next November, charged that Shultz had been influenced by ‘all sorts of Arabist officials in the State Dept.’

He said that the secretary, who is now in Israel to resume shuttle diplomacy in the region, had ‘crossed the Rubicon with his very dangerous’ peace plan and his meeting last weekend with two members of the Palestine National Council which Israel, unlike the United States, does not differentiate from the PLO.

Netanyahu accused Beilin, a close associate of Peres, of drumming up support for the international conference idea which is part of the Shultz plan and is favored by the Labor Party.

He had good words only for former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who he said had warned Beilin that acceptance of an international conference meant shoving Israel back to its pre-1967 borders. According to Netanyahu, Beilin’s response to Kissinger was, ‘So what?’

Beilin promptly denied the charge… The 38-year-old former envoy had high praise for the ‘greatest [American] columnists, senators and the Jewish might’ in the United States who opposed the Shultz peace initiative. Many of those senators and columnists are of a far right-wing, conservative bent.”

Context added by this archive

A Jewish news agency reporting the start of Netanyahu’s domestic political career, and printing the criticism of him from his own foreign ministry.

Cite this clipping

"Netanyahu resigns as U.N. envoy; protests Shultz-PLO meeting," St. Louis Jewish Light, 6 April 1988, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1988-012. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1988-012

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One man, and the position he never changed