Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said here last night that negotiations were still possible with Syria for the withdrawal of foreign forces from Lebanon and that King Hussein of Jordan remains Israel’s most likely negotiating partner on the future of the West Bank.
Kissinger expressed his views in the course of delivering the Yigal Allon Memorial Lecture at Tel Aviv University. Allon served as Foreign Minister in the Labor-led government headed by former Premier Yitzhak Rabin. He died in 1980.
Kissinger said, “I have the impression that the Syrians have not closed their minds to some kind of negotiations on withdrawal from Lebanon. Meanwhile, the opportunity should be taken to discuss with them the possibility of partial withdrawal, on military, not political grounds, ” he said, adding, “Such partial withdrawals should be by both sides, the basis must be one of reciprocity.”
PLO CONCERNED WITH SURVIVAL
Kissinger said that Syria’s actions against the Palestine Liberation Organization leadership has forced the PLO to concern itself with its own survival and paves the way for Hussein to negotiate on the future of the West Bank. “I think what Syria is trying to do is to get the Palestinians more under their — or at least a veto over the actions of the Palestinians, parity to avoid Palestinian participation in West Bank negotiations which Syria cannot veto. But I do not think they want the Palestinian movement completely split, ” Kissinger said.
“My estimate would be that they will be more careful in military action under Syrian control but more intransigent in political action. The question is, whether other Arab states will make it possible for other Arab negotiators to emerge,” he said.
According to Kissinger, a territorial solution for the West Bank can be reached only by compromise because Hussein cannot achieve Israel’s withdrawal to its 1967 borders and Israel cannot annex the entire territory. But until Hussein decides to negotiate on behalf of the Palestinians and the other Arab states, Israel and the U.S. should hammer out an understanding between them on how to proceed, Kissinger said.
The American diplomat spoke warmly of his 20 years of friendship with Allon who once took a course under him at Harvard. He also recalled affectionately the late Premier Golda Meir. “She gave me a hard time, but I understand she sometimes gave her Cabinet colleagues an even harder time,” he said. Referring to the negotiations of 1974-75 for an Israeli-Egyptian agreement in Sinai, he said the Israeli negotiators “sometimes drove me to distraction, but their attitude was based on faith in their cause. We would have liked a more pliant and submissive Israel. Nevertheless, if these people had behaved differently, we could not have achieved together the successes we did accomplish, ” Kissinger said.
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