Defense Minister Moshe Dayan said in a radio interview here today that Israel could, if necessary, bear the triple burden of waging a new war with the Arabs while combatting terrorist activities and administering the occupied territories for years to come. But, he warned, under such circumstances, Israelis would have to sacrifice their expanding economy and be satisfied with less in order to meet the demands upon manpower and national resources necessary for survival. Gen. Dayan said the Arabs are preparing to renew their war on Israel but would not do so unless they were assured of Soviet backing. He said that a new war, if it came, would not break out in a matter of months.
(Warnings of a new and bloodier Middle Eastern war were reported by the Guardian of London yesterday in a dispatch from its Beirut correspondent. David Hirst. He also reported that any settlement with Israel could bring President Nasser of Egypt and King Hussein of Jordan in collision with the Arab terrorists whose growing psychological impact on the Arab masses, he said, is more important than their military impact on Israel. Mr. Hirst wrote that Mohammed H. Heykal, editor of the semi-official Cairo newspaper, Al Ahram, and a confidant of Nasser, yesterday for the first time forecast a new war with Israel which, he said, would be “much bigger and more dangerous” than the last one. Heykal’s warning, Mr. Hirst noted, was delivered against the background of reportedly conciliatory gestures by Egypt. Egyptian Foreign Minister Mahmoud Riad was quoted last week as having said that Egypt does not necessarily regard an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories as a precondition for reciprocal concessions and would be prepared to discuss a timetable proposed by United Nations peace envoy Gunnar V. Jarring for the application of the Security Council’s Nov. 22, 1967 resolution on the Middle East. Riad also said, according to Hirst, that Egypt would open the Suez Canal to Israel shipping in exchange for a settlement of the refugee problem.)
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