Israel circles today welcomed a warning by General Abdul Karim el-Kassem of Iraq, who has announced that United Arab Republic intervention in Jordan would result in Iraqi counter-action.
United Arab Republic President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who has in the past spoken out against Jordan and against Israel’s demand for a summit meeting between him and Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, has stepped up his double-barreled attacks against the two countries since his return from recent attendance at the United Nations General Assembly in New York. It was at that Assembly session that Mrs. Golda Meir, Israel’s Foreign Minister, reiterated Israel’s request for immediate peace negotiations with the UAR and with any or all hostile Arab governments, “without any pre-conditions.”
Political observers here recalled today that, in the past year, Israel has also warned that it could not remain passive if foreign intervention were to change the status quo in Jordan. General Kassem issued this warning after Nasser again brought Jordan into his speeches, which he has been making at various large gatherings in Syria in the last few days. In these speeches, the also rejected Israel’s demand for a summit conference as “a proposal aimed only at deceiving world opinion.”
(At the United Nations, this weekend, another Arab spokesman, Fouad Ammoun, of Lebanon, called Mrs. Meir’s request for an Arab-Israeli summit meeting “a link in the chain of Zionist propaganda, worthy of Goebbels.”)
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