Foreign Minister Yigal Allon left Ben Gurion Airport this evening for London and the United States where he will address regional meetings of the United Jewish Appeal and hold a possibly fateful meeting with Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger in Washington at the end of this week. It will be the first high-level contact between Israel and the United States since the failure of Kissinger’s mediation efforts between Israel and Egypt last month and the start of America’s reassessment of its Middle East policy, ordered by President Ford.
Allon, who attended the weekly Cabinet meeting only hours before his departure, told reporters at the airport that “Israel remains prepared to reopen, through the good offices of Dr. Kissinger, the negotiations broken off by Egypt on March 22.”
But he made it clear that Israel has not retreated from the position it held on that date and stressed that pressure could not bring Israel to compromise beyond what it had offered during the ill-fated bilateral talks conducted by Kissinger. “Any compromise that Israel would not allow itself to make from the defense viewpoint will not be made under pressure,” Allon declared.
He told reporters, “I am not carrying any new instructions or limitations since the Cabinet adopted no new decisions and since no new developments have taken place.” The Cabinet, which met in closed session as a ministerial security commit-
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