Dayan May Not Go to Washington for Disengagement Talks Unless There is Some ‘movement’

Defense Minister Moshe Dayan is reconsidering his planned visit to Washington to convey Israel’s position on disengagement on the Syrian front to Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency learned tonight from a source close to the Defense Minister. “If there is no movement he won’t go,” the source said. He refused, however, to define what was meant by “movement” but indicated that the steadily deteriorating situation on the Syrian front was a factor in Dayan’s re-evaluation of his Washington mission.

(In Washington, Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban said this afternoon after a one-hour meeting with Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, that Dayan will be coming to Washington March 29. See Separate story.)

The Defense Minister was named by the Cabinet Sunday to be Israel’s chief negotiator in the disengagement process with Syria, But he was reported subsequently to have expressed doubts as to whether the proposed “disengagement proximity talks in Washington” would contribute to the progress of disengagement.

Dayan’s doubts were said to stem from the fact that while he was invested with authority to negotiate substantively, the Syrians might send an envoy without such authority to engage in preliminary talks with Kissinger. In that case, another Kissinger visit to the Middle East would be called for and no apparent purpose would be served by preliminary talks in Washington, Dayan reportedly believes.

PESSIMISTIC ABOUT DISENGAGEMENT

Addressing a United Jewish Appeal delegation from the U.S. here last night, the Defense Minister expressed doubt that a disengagement accord could be reached with Syria unless Damascus dropped what he called its extremist and far-fetched demands. He said he hoped the Syrians would display a more realistic approach toward the talks and that they would indeed take place.

The government today denied a report by Maariv’s Washington correspondent that Dayan had favored a token Israeli pullback from the 1967 Golan Heights lines that Kissinger suggested might be accepted as a gesture of good will by the Syrians. Maariv claimed that Dayan was the only Cabinet minister who supported the idea and therefore it was dropped. Today’s communique denied that the Cabinet had ever discussed the subject or that Dayan or any other minister had suggested a pullback from the 1967 lines.

Dayan told his UJA audience that a final peace settlement would have to be negotiated with all of Israel’s neighbors. He said that Egypt, for example, could not progress to the next stage of negotiations unless Syria made a first step toward peace talks. He said that in any event, a settlement would be reached in gradual stages and between each stage a new pattern of relations would evolve between Israel and its neighbors, leading to the next stage.