Premier Yitzhak Rabin said last night that recent developments in the Arab world indicated that the Arabs are preparing for a possible new war against Israel rather than laying the groundwork for new peace initiatives in the Middle East.
Therefore, the Premier said, Israel’s policy must be based on rehabilitating its currently strained relations with the United States; preparing politically for new efforts to solve the Israeli Arab conflict by peaceful means and intensifying its military preparedness to meet any eventualities, Such measures, he told an audience of industrialists meeting here on the Export Week program, would allow Israel to exercise independent political, economic and security policies.
Rabin said it was difficult for him to assume that the visit of the Soviet Chief of Staff to Damascus, the tripartite talks between Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia in Riyadh and the Syrian-Jordanian rapprochement were intended to prepare the ground for peace in the Middle East.
He stressed that Egyptian policy had three aims: to isolate Israel by attempting to create a rift between it and the U.S.; to recruit countries unfriendly to Israel to participate in the Geneva conference; and to try to force a change in Israel’s position so that it would agree to the Egyptian demands that it had rejected during the bilateral negotiations conducted by Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger last month.
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.
