Israel Rejects Arab ‘right’ to Return Despite U.N. Adoption of U.s.draft

Israel will not modify its refusal to negotiate a solution of the Arab refugee problem to accord with the Arab claim that the refugees have a “right of return” to Israel territory, Israeli spokesmen declared today. They made it clear that the Israeli stand would not be altered by the resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly’s Special Political Committee last night which reaffirmed a clause in the 1948 General Assembly resolution that the Arabs interpret as giving the refugees the “right” to return to Israel territory or to receive compensation.

The resolution, introduced and pressed through the committee by the United States delegation, despite Israel’s denunciation of the text as “unacceptable,” was carried by a vote of 83 to one (Israel) with 12 abstentions.

The adoption of the American resolution, after a five-hour session of the committee, motivated a call by Italy for the withdrawal of two other draft resolutions before the committee. One of these, sponsored on behalf of the Arab states by three Moslem states–Afghanistan, Indonesia and pakistan–would have called for UN intervention inside Israel on behalf of property allegedly left in Israel by the refugees. It would have also set an October 15, 1964 deadline for a report by the Palestine Conciliation Commission regarding its efforts to “repatriate” the refugees. The other draft, presented by 19 African, West European and Latin American members, called on the Arab states and Israel to “renew” their efforts to solve the refugee problem by direct negotiation.

Michael S. Comay, Israel’s permanent UN representative, explained to the committee immediately after the balloting that he voted “no” on the U.S. resolution because it tied future action by the Palestine Conciliation Commission strictly to “repatriation” or compensation of the refugees, without taking into account alternative solutions of the issue through resettlement of the refugees or their integration into the Middle East economy. He said Israel also opposed another section of the American document which, by implication, blamed Israel for failing to advance the “repatriation” of the refugees. Mr. Comay made it clear, however, that Israel approved those portions of the United States resolution which called for continuance of relief activities on behalf of the Arab refugees.

GOLDA MEIR CALLS RESOLUTION ‘NEITHER JUST NOR MORAL’

Viewing the situation today, Mrs. Golda Meir, Israel’s Foreign Minister, said; “It is no Tisha b’Av (Day of Lamentation) for us.” She noted that “despite immense pressures brought by the United States,” 19 members of the United Nations had persisted until the last moment in co-sponsoring a draft resolution calling for direct Israeli-Arab negotiations on the refugee question. She noted also that, in a separate roll call vote on the central, substantive clause in the American draft, to which Israel objected, 20 members had abstained.

Mrs. Meir also told more than 1,000 women, at a luncheon today of the women’s division of the American Friends of the Hebrew University, that the resolution on the Arab refugee problem was “neither just nor moral.” Asserting that the Arabs have openly proclaimed their intention of coming to Israel “in order to destroy it,” she stated: “Nobody can force a sovereign country to do something which is against its interests, its security and its very life.” She criticized the “very good friends of Israel” who, she said, “find it expedient to join the Arabs in passing a resolution of this kind, even when they know that they have no right to do something that must lead to our destruction.”

Mrs. Meir received the group’s Woman of the Year Award for her “courageous leadership as one of the architects of Israel’s independence and progress.”