Israel Critical of Thant’s Request That Israel Withdraw As Minimum Condition for Peace Mission Renew

Israel has again criticized Secretary General U Thant for his renewed request for a change in Israel’s position on withdrawal from the occupied territories as the “minimum condition” required for reactivating the peace-seeking efforts of Swedish diplomat Dr. Gunnar V. Jarring. The Secretary General warned that “new fighting will break out sooner or later” in the Middle East if the impasse on peace talks continued. He made the statement in his annual report on the work of the UN, issued in connection with the opening today of the 26th General Assembly.

Last February, Dr. Jarring asked Egypt for a commitment to a peace agreement and asked Israel to commit itself to withdrawal from the entire Sinai Peninsula once the agreement was reached. Egypt agreed and Israel did not. Israel then said that it remained willing to resume talks without prior conditions and expressed criticism of Dr. Jarring for going beyond his mandate under Resolution 242 in asking for a withdrawal commitment. In his report, Thant observed that “until there has been a change in Israel’s position on withdrawal, it would serve little purpose to reactivate the talks” by Dr. Jarring.

Thant added that if Israel continued to refuse to accept that condition, steps must be taken by the Security Council and its members “with influence on the parties concerned.” In regard to Israel, this was understood to mean the United States. Thant dismissed the United States effort for an interim Egyptian-Israeli agreement on reopening the Suez Canal–which brought about a cease-fire in August, 1970–with the comment that “the information so far available does not indicate that an agreement” on an interim pact “can be reached in the near future. But time is of the essence.”

Dr. Jarring and the Big Four foreign ministers, as well as of the Arab countries and Israel, are expected at the UN this week, to make both their annual addresses to the General Assembly and for behind-the-scenes consultations. The Secretary General said that if such consultations failed to produce some movement, “the United Nations and particularly the Security Council will have to review the situation once again and find ways to enable the Jarring mission to move forward.”

TALKS MUST BE FREE NEGOTIATIONS

A spokesman for Israel’s UN Mission said there was “nothing new” in the Secretary General’s comments, in his annual report, on the Middle East, adding that his views “are well known.” The spokesman said that “it is also well known that no peace talks can be effectively conducted and that any talks would be emptied of all meaning if they were turned into an attempt to impose pre-conditions on the parties.” The statement added that “demands for preconditions are a sure way to block progress and create deadlocks in any type of negotiations, especially peace talks.”

This, the statement asserted, “is precisely what happened with the Jarring talks. The way to overcome the deadlock created in them is not by solidifying it further through insistence on the very preconditions which brought the deadlock about, but by ensuring that the talks are pursued in the normal manner of free negotiations in which neither party insists upon forcing its diktat upon the other as a condition for continuing the exchange of views.”

Observers here noted that in effect, Thant had called both on the US and on the Security Council to exert pressure on Israel to agree to withdrawal from the Sinai. Dr. Jarring’s “aide memoir” of Feb. 8, which Israel had rejected, in effect embodied a policy statement by US Secretary of State William P. Rogers, issued in Dec. 1969, calling on Israel to return to the pre-Six-Day War armistice borders, with “unsubstantial modifications,” a position which has remained the basic view of the Nixon Administration on what Israel must do to make movement toward a Mid-East settlement possible.