The Middle East situation will again come to the forefront of the United Nations General Assembly tomorrow when UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold reports on his recent mission to the Middle East.
Mr. Hammarskjold’s report will be identified as an interim summation and will be circulated to Assembly delegates. Thus, the Secretary General will not actually address the Assembly, However, after the report has been formally filed, it is expected that many of the delegations will discuss the document in “general debate” –a procedure whereby delegation chairmen or Foreign Ministers outline the principal foreign affairs policy of their government.
Israel’s participation in the general debate will not take place until some time next week. Mrs. Golda Meir, Israel’s Foreign Minister, had been scheduled to deliver her formal foreign policy address on Friday of this week. Today it was learned, however, that Mrs. Meir has postponed her speech, and it was believed that the reason for the postponement is that Israel wants to hear formal reactions of other governments, including the Arab states, before formalizing its own attitude.
Mrs. Meir will confer with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in Washington on Thursday. Today she conferred with a number of Foreign Ministers, including Selwyn Lloyd, Britain’s Foreign Secretary. She also conferred with United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold. It is understood that they discussed Mr. Hammarskjold’s recent trip to the Middle East and his forthcoming report to the General Assembly on his achievements there.
It was learned today that one of the Big Power Foreign Ministers who will discuss Mr. Hammarskjold’s report in the general debate will be the Soviet Union’s Andrei A. Gromyko. A Soviet delegation spokesman said today that Mr. Gromyko is not yet leaving for home, implying he is remaining in order to discuss the report.
Aside from the general Middle Eastern debate, Israel’s next item of special interest in the Assembly is not scheduled to come up until about the middle of next month. The Assembly’s Special Political Committee will convene October 10, and one of its most important agenda its will be a discussion of the Arab refugee problem.
It was learned today that a friend of Israel, who is a member of this year’s United States delegation to the Assembly, will represent the United States on that committee. He is George M. Harrison, president of the Brotherhood of Railway Clerks and vice-president of the AFL-CIO. Mr. Harrison returned recently from a visit to Israel.
ISRAEL DELEGATE ELECTED RAPPORTEUR OF U.N. TRUSTEESHIP COMMITTEE
Over the strenuous objections of Arab delegates, including a threat to walk out, Arieh Eilan, First Secretary of the Israel delegation to the United Nations, was elected to the UN Trusteeship Committee. He was named rapporteur of the body.
The election was the first time since the creation of the United Nations that an Israel delegate has been named to any office of the important Trusteeship Committee. It was also the first time in three years that an Israeli delegate has been elected to any office in the General Assembly.
The election of Mr. Eilan followed strong Arab efforts to obtain Afro-Asian and Latin American votes for an opposition candidate. Only one of the delegates, that of Ceylon, declined to reject the Arab appeal but when the election was held, the Ceylonese delegate withdrew his candidacy and Mr. Eilan was elected unanimously. His candidacy was sponsored by Costa Rica, seconded by Austria and supported by Liberia.
Hashim Jawad of Iraq, addressing the General Assembly, claimed that the “main source of danger to the peace in the area” was Israel. He charged that Israel was not created solely as a new home for the Jews but primarily as an instrument to impose the will of some big powers against the rising nations of the Arab East. Israel’s role “as a willing tool of imperialism,” he alleged, was demonstrated when Israel “played as the spearhead of the tripartite aggression against Egypt, and more recently by her ill-concealed threats to take over the western bank of the River Jordan.”
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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.
