Mrs. Golda Meir, Israel’s Foreign Minister, held today her first conference during the current United Nations General Assembly with United States Secretary of State Dean Rusk. The conference lasted a full hour and was termed by Mrs. Meir as a “good discussion.”
They reviewed the various problems in the Middle East including those affecting Israel directly and Mr. Rusk interpreted for Mrs. Meir the current United States positions on various vital world problems, such as the situation in Viet Nam and the Indian-Pakistani conflict.
Mrs. Meir empha sized for Mr. Rusk Israel’s view of the gravity of various recent incidents especially on the Jordanian border and the serious view Israel takes regarding Arab intrusions into Israel which have caused casualties and damage. She referred especially to the two latest incidents of aggression near Petach Tikva and the shooting of Israeli civilians near Ein Geddi. Mrs. Meir emphasized also the depredations by El Fatah terrorists.
Mrs. Meir was accompanied to the Rusk conference by Avraham Harman, Israel’s Ambassador to Washington, and Ambassador Michael S. Comay, Israel’s Permanent Representative here. Mr. Rusk and Mrs. Meir also exchanged the evaluations by their respective governments of the recent Arab summit conference at Casablanca. It was understood that the Israelis felt that regarding current developments in the Middle East, the U.S. and the Israeli points of view were almost identical.
DISCUSS JORDAN WATERS ISSUE AND ARAB REFUGEE PROBLEM
Among other subjects brought up was the problem of Arab efforts to divert the headwaters and tributaries of the Jordan River. The Israelis and the Americans discussed also the problem of the Arab refugees which will be debated in the current Assembly and the efforts to be made by the Arab delegations to inject into the refugee debate a full-scale discussion of “the Palestine question” and all the Arab-Israel conflicts from 1947 to date.
The Arab refugee question was believed to have come up in another of Mrs. Meir’s high-level conferences today when she met with Rene Chalmers, foreign minister of Haiti. The Assembly’s Special Political Committee in which the Arab refugee debate is to be held is headed this year by M. Auguste, a member of the Haitian delegation.
Mrs. Meir was hostess today at a luncheon for 50 foreign minister and permanent heads of delegations to the United Nations. She is scheduled to deliver her annual major foreign policy address at a plenary session of the Assembly on October 7. She may return for a brief visit to Israel shortly after that date, but it is possible that she may have to return here before the end of October to participate in the annual debate of the Arab refugee problem. Originally, the refugee debate was to have taken place some time in November. However, a number of states, most of them African, would like to move the Arab refugee debate to an earlier date.
As the 20th session of the General Assembly, now underway, concluded its organizational phase today, Israel emerged with not a single office either in the Assembly itself or in any of its seven standing committees. In the Administrative-Budget Committee today, one member of the Israeli delegation, Teddy Miron, was nominated by Liberia and seconded by Iceland for the post of vice chairman. A member of the Colombian delegation ran against Mr. Miron. With the support of the Soviet and Arab blocs, the Colombian won the vice chairmanship by a vote of 64-44.
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.
