A specific demand for the withdrawal of Israel’s forces from “all occupied territories” is included in the joint Franco-Soviet statement signed last week by Soviet Communist Party Secretary Leonid Brezhnev and President Georges Pompidou but released in full for the first time today. The part of the joint statement dealing with the Middle East also includes a demand for the implementation of Security Council Resolution 242. That resolution, adopted Nov. 22, 1967, did not, however, call for withdrawal of forces from “all occupied territories” but “from territories occupied in the recent (1967) conflict.”
The Pompidou-Brezhnev statement noted that no progress has been made toward a political solution of the Mideast conflict and called for a resumption of Ambassador Gunnar V. Jarring’s Mideast peace mission in order to implement Resolution 242. The joint statement, which repeated almost word for word Resolution 242, added that France and the Soviet Union “will go on searching energetically for the means to arrive without delay to an arrangement in the Middle East, these means including specifically Four Power talks. During such talks, the principles of mutually acceptable guarantee systems must, most particularly, be considered attentively.”
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