A British Foreign Office spokesman said today that no decision was taken on Middle Eastern arms talks in Paris involving Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd, and French Foreign Minister Christian Pineau.
The spokesman said Britain would continue sending strictly controlled arms shipments to the Arab states and Israel in line with the 1950 Tripartite Declaration. This was in comment on reports that M. Pineau said in Paris yesterday that France supports Soviet suggestions for an international arms ban applied to the Middle East.
The British Government was pressed in Commons today off why it had not recently raised the issue of the Suez Canal blockade of Israel shipping with the Egyptian Government. The question was raised by both Conservative and Labor MP’s. When Anthony Nutting, Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, answered a question about discussions concerning the future of the canal by noting that the canal convention will be up for negotiation again in 1968, the MP’s refused to be put off and insisted that the real issue was the Nasser regime’s halting of Israeli shipping.
Mr. Nutting insisted that the best way to settle the Suez Canal question was through a general Arab-Israel settlement. He refused to say whether the British Government would raise this question when the Security Council meets to consider UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold’s report on his Middle East mission. He did express the government’s support of Mr. Hammarskjold and Gen. E. L. M. Burns, UN truce chief, in their work in Palestine.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
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.
