“Moscow is waiting patiently for the Arab nations to unite behind a ‘reasonable’ rather than ‘extremist’ policy towards Israel.” the Christian Science Monitor reported today from Moscow.
The report said that Western diplomats in the Soviet capital believe that “reasonable” means some acknowledgment by the Arabs that they are not out to annihilate Israel as a state. “Moscow could then call on Washington to use its influence to obtain Israeli withdrawal from occupied Arab territories, thus opening the way to a negotiated settlement of the Arab-Israeli war.” the report states. It adds that “Moscow has brought no overt pressure on the Arabs toward taking the first step in this hoped-for process. But the Soviet press has made it abundantly clear in the past few weeks that if the liquidation of Israel remains an Arab goal, the Kremlin will have nothing to do with it.”
With regard to the Moscow attitude on the Suez issue, the Moscow report says that the Soviet press has several times cited the Treaty of Constantinople of 1888 as giving Egypt the right to ban belligerent shipping from the Suez Canal. “By implication, nonbelligerents should be permitted to use the canal,” the correspondent emphasizes.
“From these and other comments.” the Christian Science Monitor report states. “Western diplomats here have the impression that the Kremlin desires normalization of the Middle East situation and rejects the extremism represented by Algeria and Syria. Soviet goals in the Middle East, these diplomats believe, include the following; to replace Western influence among the Arab nations with its own — but not at the risk of a major war; to strengthen “progressive” Arab regimes — but not at the cost of Arab unity as a whole.”
(Pravda Ukrainy, the official organ of the Communist Party in the Ukraine, referred in an article yesterday to the Arab call for the destruction of Israel as “ultra-nationalist hysteria” and insisted that no responsible Arab leader favored that objective, it was reported here today from Moscow. The article conceded that such Arab “public figures” as Ahmed Shukairy, head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, did call for the liquidation of Israel.” Most of the article attacked Zionism as a movement to make the Jews of all countries “instruments of imperialist policy.”)
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.
