Preparations are in full swing for Premier Menachem Begin’s trip to Washington next week for discussions with President Carter on the autonomy negotiations. Senior officials have been meeting at the Prime Minister’s Office to draft the position papers on which Begin will rely in his talks with Carter. The Cabinet is scheduled to hold a foreign policy debate tomorrow and the hard-liners are expected to prevail in light of yesterday’s terrorist assault on Kibbutz Misgav Am.
Begin will be accompanied in Washington by Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir and Interior Minister Yosef Burg, head of the Israeli negotiating team in the autonomy talks. Begin met today with U.S. Ambassador Samuel Lewis to review the status of the negotiations. The American envoy will leave for Washington shortly to help in the preparations there for Begin’s visit.
Shamir appeared before the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Security Committee today to brief its members on the autonomy talks to date. He said the last meeting of the principals in Alexandria showed that differences exist on “almost every issue except for the election modalities for the administrative council,” the proposed self-governing body for the Palestinians. He refused to discuss details of the upcoming talks in Washington before the Cabinet takes up the matter tomorrow.
Committee chairman Moshe Arens expressed concern that if external and internal pressures on Egypt persist, President Anwar Sadat might recall his Ambassador to Tel Aviv before 1982 when Israel’s withdrawal from Sinai is to be completed.
NO KNOWLEDGE OF A SODAT VISIT TO JERUSALEM
Meanwhile, government officials said they had “no knowledge” of an impending visit to Jerusalem by Sodat to address the Knesset on the Palestinian issue. Various media reports this week claimed that the Egyptian leader, now meeting with President Carter in Washington, hoped to make such a visit if an invitation was extended by Israel. According to one news source, Egyptian officials traveling with Sadat confirmed this.
But a source close to Begin said Israel has been given no hint that Sodat has such intentions in its most recent contacts with Cairo. The source observed that it has been 21/2 years since Sodat addressed the Knesset and in that time no invitation has been forthcoming for Begin to address the Egyptian parliament.
Begin told on American Jewish Congress leadership mission, “We are negotiating the sec and phase of the Camp David agreement. We want them (the talks) to prosper and they can if everybody is as faithful to the second phase as we have been to the first which concerned the treaty of peace between us and Egypt.”
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.
