Former Premier Edgar Faure, who is presently Minister of Agriculture, implicitly criticized President de Gaulle’s one-sided lifting of France’s Middle East arms embargo in favor of the Arabs when he declared in an interview with the weekly magazine Paris Match today that “it seems desirable that the embargo should apply to all parties or to none.”
Mr. Faure, who has apparently been under pressure to renounce de Gaulle’s anti-Israel policies, said, however, that while the Egyptian blockade of the Gulf of Akaba which sparked the war last June was “regrettable,” that act “could have been solved by a juridical procedure and France’s position at the U.N. follows the logic of such a policy.” Mr. Faure declared that “even for the friend of Israel that I am, there is no reason why I should have resigned.”
In another development, the Emir Bedhir Khan, foreign representative of the Kurdish people, a separatist minority in Iraq, addressed an open letter to President de Gaulle today protesting reports that Franch will ship Mirage jet fighter planes to Iraq.
Meanwhile, Pierre Vianson Ponte, political editor of the newspaper, Le Monde, warned that “de Gaulle’s recent declaration on Israel and the Jews may well leave a deep and lasting scar on France.” He said that numerous leaders of the Gaullist movement were prepared to join the opposition as a result of the General’s remarks.
The committee of intellectuals for a negotiated solution to the Israel-Arab conflict was also critical of de Gaulle’s statements at a meeting here today. The committee approved the British sponsored Security Council resolution on the Middle East as encouraging negotiations but thought that the refugee problem should be first on the agenda.
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.
