The Israel government does not intend to reply directly to the recent Soviet peace proposal for the Mideast. Officials here said last weekend that Foreign Minister Yigal Allon’s speech at the UN General Assembly last Thursday, in which he reiterated Israel’s immediate readiness to return to Geneva with the other original participants, but without the PLO, was an implied reply to Moscow. Israel would make no further reply at the present time, the officials explained, because it did not wish to engage in a dialogue with the Soviets on Moscow’s terms.
The Soviet proposal was published by Tass as a statement 10 days ago and was delivered by a Soviet diplomat to Israel’s UN Mission in New York. This was the first such diplomatic sally by Moscow towards Israel for several years, and it was plain that Moscow hoped for an Israeli response, thereby creating a dialogue.
The Soviet proposal called for a reconvening of Geneva in two stages: the first procedural, at which the agenda for the second, substantive stage would be formulated. The proposal also laid down four basic points for a settlement: total Israeli withdrawal; a Palestinian state; international guarantees for Arabs and Israelis; and an end of the state of war.
Israeli officials explained that they saw no benefit for Israel in entering upon a dialogue with Moscow–as Moscow evidently wished–while the freeze in diplomatic relations between the two countries is maintained by Moscow with full rigidity. Israel would only talk if and when Moscow initiated a meaningful thaw, they said.
These officials pointed out, too, that it had been a cardinal aim of both U.S. and Israeli policy in the Mideast during the past three years, to limit Soviet influence in the area. Moscow’s exclusion from Cairo and its weakening ties with Damascus were measures of the success of that policy. It would thus be inopportune for Israel, responding to the Soviet overture, to help the Soviets climb back to a position of central prominence in Mideast peacemaking, the officials reasoned.
The 1974-1975 situation, in which the Soviets were merely brought into rubber-stamp American-orchestrated agreements, was the best possible for Israel–and there is no reason for Israel to change it without an adequate Soviet quid pro quo in political terms, the officials added.
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