Golda Meir to Head Israel Delegation at U. N. General Assembly

Foreign Minister Golda Meir will leave for New York toward the end of next week to head the Israel delegation to the forthcoming United Nations General Assembly. Her leadership of the delegation is temporary and its duration is indefinite; she will decide the length of her stay in New York, the Foreign Ministry announced tonight.

Since the Ministry has insisted for weeks and continues to state even now that no major issues involving Israel are expected to arise at the Assembly, Mrs. Meir’s decision to fly to New York came as somewhat of a surprise. It has been indicated unofficially that Mrs. Meir will take advantage of the large number of foreign ministers at the UN for the opening of the Assembly to press a series of private talks with various statesmen.

It is anticipated that Premier David Ben Gurion will act as Foreign Minister in Mrs. Meir’s absence, as he has in the past. Next Sunday’s Cabinet meeting will probably set the composition of the delegation. Meanwhile the Cabinet discussed the Syrian situation and the agenda for the forthcoming United Nations General Assembly meeting. The discussion was led off by Mrs. Meir reporting on her Ministry’s evaluation of Syrian developments and the conclusions reached in conversations between Abba Eban, Ambassador to Washington and Israel’s permanent delegate to the UN, and top Ministry aides.

While the Middle East does not feature prominently in the debates so far shaping up at the UN, observers in Jerusalem do not exclude the possibility that one of the great powers, very likely the USSR, will inject the issue at some stage in the international meeting this fall Israel is expected to stress, in any Middle East discussion, the basic tension-building role of continued Arab belligerency.