Officials here expressed gratification today with the statement by the chairman of the European Common Market’s Council of Ministers that the EEC would enter into negotiations with Israel on future cooperation. Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the West German Foreign Minister, made the statement in Bonn yesterday after the Council of Ministers approved steps to begin negotiations with 20 Arab states on technical and industrial cooperation. The Common Market hopes to recoup at least some of the money it pays for Arab oil from orders and contracts from the Arabs.
The Israeli officials said Genscher’s statement was “not at all unhelpful” in that it envisaged a similar process of negotiation for cooperation with Israel–thereby maintaining the principle of equilibrium upon which Israel had insisted. Obviously–as a West German spokesman commented yesterday–the scope and content of EEC-Israel cooperation would be different from that between the EEC and the Arab states both because Israel has no oil and because Israel is on a different level of technological advancement.
The negotiations between the EEC and the Mediterranean littoral states, including Israel, for a new tariff agreement are still bogged down because of Britain’s demand to re-negotiate its terms of entry. Officials here said the tariff talks were in no way linked to the planned cooperation talks.
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