Newspapers around the world are paying notably little attention to the Middle East debate taking place in the United Nations General Assembly, according to a press survey by Israeli diplomatic missions abroad released today. Except in the countries directly concerned, reports of speeches by Egypt’s Foreign Minister Mahmoud Riad and Foreign Minister Abba Eban of Israel have been relegated to the back pages and were very brief. Radio and television news programs hardly mentioned them at all, the survey indicated.
Observers here said that Egypt which had asked for the debate was bitter over its taking second place to the Indo-Pakistani war. The shifting of the latter issue from the Security Council to the General Assembly reduces the propaganda value of the Middle East debate to near zero, Israeli observers said. They predicted that if the General Assembly adopted an anti-Israel resolution through the sheer weight of Arab and Soviet bloc votes, it would be ignored by most of the world which is watching the Indian subcontinent.
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