Israel assured the President of the United Nations General Assembly today that it would not initiate any debate on Middle East issues in the Assembly session that resumed this afternoon because of its belief in the need for all to cooperate with Ambassador Gunnar V. Jarring, UN special representative for the Middle East. Ambassador Yosef Tekoah. head of the Israeli delegation, told Foreign Minister Corneliu Manescu, president of the General
Assembly, that Israel believed public debate on the Middle East at this time would be harmful to Dr. Jarring’s peace-seeking mission. The question of the Middle East is one of three items on the agenda of the continued session.
Mr. Tekoah told M. Manescu, however, that if a full scale debate should be opened in the Assembly on Middle East issues, Israel would take the opportunity to inform the United Nations and world public opinion of the grave responsibility that rested on the Arab states for having maintained a state of war against Israel for 20 years and for having blocked all efforts to establish a just and lasting peace in the Middle East.
The Israeli envoy made it clear that if debate on the Middle East were opened, Israel would pull no punches in placing responsibility for the present situation on the Arab states and would reveal in detail desecrations and discriminations perpetrated by the Arab regimes in the territories they had seized in 1948 and which Israel had occupied last June. Mr. Tekoah’s notice to the General Assembly president followed by less than 24 hours Israel’s accusation against the Arab states of conducting “active warfare” by supporting and directing terror and sabotage and by stationing regular army units on the east bank of the Jordan.
(In London, Minister of State Lord Chalfont said in the House of Lords that the Government would support any proposal to station United Nations observers along the Israel-Jordan demarcation line if it were practical. “But in the absence of an agreement on both sides it would not be practical and that agreement has not been reached,” he added. Lord Chalfont spoke in response to a suggestion by Laborite Lord Rowley that UN observers be stationed between Israel and Jordan in view of their success in maintaining quiet along the Israel-Egyptian and Israel-Syrian cease-fire lines.)
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