Fateful Deliberations Continue by Cabinet on Second-stage Israeli-egyptian Agreement in Sinai

The Cabinet met in special session for nearly three hours this morning and reconvened again this evening to continue what was acknowledged to be fateful deliberations over the next phase of negotiations for a second-stage Israeli-Egyptian agreement in Sinai.

The morning session adjourned at midday to allow Foreign Minister Yigal Allon to attend the funeral of his brother, Mordechai Allon who died yesterday in Binyamina. Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger returned late this evening from a day-long visit to Saudi Arabia where he met with King Faisal. He and his party left Ben Gurion Airport for Jerusalem immediately and made no statements to reporters.

Officials here, said that another negotiating session with Kissinger was tentatively scheduled for tonight provided that the Cabinet concluded its session at a reasonable hour. Otherwise, the Israelis will convey their decisions, if any are reached, to Kissinger at a meeting early tomorrow morning. They ruled out another post-midnight session with Kissinger on grounds that it was undignified and demeaning to Israel in American and Egyptian eyes.

According to nearly all observers here, Kissinger’s current efforts to promote a second-stage Sinai agreement reached a major crisis point yesterday, 13 days after they began The Israeli Cabinet, at its session tonight, will be faced with the need to make crucial decisions that up to now it has sought to defer, sources here said.

The atmosphere in Jerusalem, which has been less than optimistic for the past few days, relapsed into undisguised gloom yesterday after President Anwar Sadat’s press conference in Aswan, with Kissinger, at which the Egyptian leader totally rejected Israeli demands for a formal non-belligerency accord and any moves toward normalizing relations between Egypt and Israel.

NOT BASIS FOR AN ACCORD

A well placed source told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency today that the Egyptian proposals and ideas conveyed by Kissinger, when viewed overall “could not be seen as the basis for an accord.” The source, a middle-of-the-road policy-maker who inclines more to the “doves” than the “hawks,” conceded that he was less hopeful now than at the beginning of the week that a settlement could be obtained. That same source had told the JTA earlier that he rated Kissinger’s chances of success 50-50.

Officials are understandably wary of divulging substantive details of the progress of negotiations so far. It was learned from reliable sources, however, that apart from the non-belligerency issue, the two sides are deeply divided over the time factor of a second-stage accord as well as over the central “components” of non-belligerency.

Israel’s fundamental concern, basic to all of its demands, is to establish whether there is any chance to effect a basic change in Egypt’s attitude toward its conflict with Israel–meaning its willingness to accept the existence of a Jewish State as a permanent feature in the Middle East. So far, evidence of such a change is certainly not visible, this source told the JTA.

Israel, therefore, is faced with a dilemma. It must not permit itself to be seen as the cause for the failure of Kissinger’s mission. On the other hand, all of the government’s leaders agree that Israel cannot retreat from its basic demand that any far-reaching accord with Egypt–one involving substantial territorial withdrawals including the Mitle and Gidi passes and the Abu Rodeis oil fields–must include a fundamental turning point in relations between Israel and Egypt.

OPTION UNDER CONSIDERATION

One possible option presently under consideration, the JTA has learned, is a revival of the “modest” disengagement scenario in which Israel would pull back its forces some 30-50 kilometers without surrendering the strategic Sinai passes or the oil fields. Egypt so far has dismissed that scenario out of hand. Its sole advantage would be that a less significant Israeli withdrawal would require less far-reaching political concessions from the Egyptians. The non-belligerency issue would thus be skirted.

Another possibility at this point, according to some observers, would be for Kissinger to intervene with proposals of his own in an attempt to forge a compromise. A senior U.S. official told reporters on Kissinger’s plane enroute from Aswan to Tel Aviv yesterday that the time was not ripe for the Secretary to introduce initiatives of his own.

(In Washington, a State Department official said today that he had no information on reports that Kissinger would break off his shuttle diplomacy to return to Washington, leaving Undersecretary of State Joseph J. Sisco in the Middle East to continue the negotiations. The State Department also said there was nothing to reports that Kissinger would fly to Vienna over the weekend for a meeting with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko on the Middle East situation.)