1968_4_arabisraelwar

176 / AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK, 1968
ties cease forthwith.'" The next evening Syria and Israel officially accepted
the cease-fire. On June 12 the Security Council unanimously passed
a further resolution condemning "any and all violations of the cease-fire."
(After the Egyptian sinking of the Israeli destroyer Eilat and the Israeli
shelling of the Suez oil refineries, the Council on October 25 unanimously
condemned "the violations of the cease-fire" and demanded that the states
concerned "cease immediately all prohibited military activities in the area.")
On June 14 the Council also unanimously adopted a resolution designed
to spare the civilian population and prisoners of war additional suffering.
It called on the government of Israel "to ensure the safety, welfare and
security" of the inhabitants of the occupied areas and "to facilitate the return
of those inhabitants who have fled the areas since the outbreak of hostilities."
Addressing itself to all the governments concerned, the Council asked for
the "scrupulous respect of the humanitarian principles governing the treatment
of prisoners of war and the protection of civilian persons in time of
war." (Implementing the resolution, Secretary General Thant, in July, appointed
Nils-Goran Gussing, a Swedish diplomat working for the UN High
Commissioner for Refugees, as his special representative. Gussing travelled
throughout the area from mid-July to the beginning of September and submitted
to the UN a detailed report on September 15. Though Thant interpreted
Gussing's mandate under the resolution to include an investigation
of the treatment of the Jewish minorities in Syria and the UAR, the Arab
states resisted this interpretation [p. 133]).
On the conditions for a peace settlement, the United States and the Soviet
Union were poles apart in June. The United States opposed the Soviet call
for an emergency session of the General Assembly on the formal ground that
the Security Council was already seized of the issue and under the Charter
had the primary responsibility for peace and security, and for the practical
reason, stated by Goldberg, that the imperative need is "not for invective
and inflammatory statements, but for constructive proposals and deliberative
diplomacy." The Soviet Union won sufficient votes to call the Assembly into
session.
United States Peace Proposal
An hour before Premier Kosygin's scheduled address at the UN General
Assembly, on June 19, President Johnson stated the American position in a
televised address from Washington. The United States, he said, was committed
to a peace based on five principles: "The first and greatest principle
is that every nation in the area has a fundamental right to live and to have
this right respected by its neighbors." The second requirement was "justice
for the refugees"; the third, the preservation of "the right of innocent maritime
passage for all nations"; the fourth, "limits on the wasteful and
destructive arms race." Johnson specifically requested that, as a first step, all
UN members report to the UN their arms shipments to the Middle East. To