Israeli Foreign Ministry Denies Reports of Meetings Between Allon, Eban and Hussein

The Israel Foreign Ministry and Kol Israel today denied newspaper and press service reports that Foreign Minister Abba Eban and Deputy Premier Yigal Allon held separate meetings with King Hussein of Jordan in recent months. It was also reported that a third Israeli, who was identified only as a “senior official,” also had participated in the talks on the Arab-Israel deadlock. (A United Nations source said that Mr. Allon and King Hussein had met at night in a tent near the Israel-Jordan border near Eilat.)

Observers here deemed it unlikely because of the sensitive nature of the subject, that Israel or Jordan would admit that such conferences took place. King Hussein has been under strong pressure not to make a deal or hold to meetings with the Israelis. His grandfather, King Abdullah, was assassinated on July 20,1951 after meeting with Israeli officials, including the present Premier, Mrs. Golda Meir.

Reports of a Hussein-Eban meeting in the Dorchester Hotel in London have been circulating for months. On Feb. 21, the New York German-language weekly newspaper Aufbau published a report on the purported meeting by its correspondent Richard Yaffe. During his recent visit to the United States, Mr. Eban was asked about the Dorchester rumor on the nationally televised program “Meet the Press” and denied that he and Hussein had met. It is widely reported that contacts have been maintained between the Israeli Government and Amman since the Six-Day War through West Bank Arab “notables” who have carried messages back and forth.

The New York Times carried a Washington report today citing “reliable sources” as saying that King Hussein and Mr. Eban have held at least two secret meetings in recent months to try to arrange a settlement but that “their efforts were unsuccessful.” Reporter Hedrick Smith said that the “neutral sources disclosed that King Hussein was dissatisfied with the terms that Israel had offered and had broken off the meetings for the sake of Arab solidarity. “He is understood to have insisted from the outset that any tentative understandings would have to be made known through Dr. Gunnar V. Jarring of Sweden, the United Nations representative for the Middle East, to insure that other Arab governments would be properly informed. But this never became necessary.”

Mr. Smith said his sources reported that the King and Mr. Eban met “in London one or more times last fall…and again in January.” He reported also that Yusuf Khamis, an Israeli Arab and onetime Knesset member, told an audience at Chicago City College on Feb, 26 that he had been present when the two leaders met in the Dorchester last January. “Western diplomatic specialists were skeptical that either government would have included a minor politician in such sensitive talks,” Mr. Smith wrote. Mr. Khamis said that King Hussein had initialed an agreement that would have granted Jordan access to an Israeli Mediterranean port and that would have left Jerusalem under Israeli control but would have given King Hussein custody of the Islamic Holy Places. According to the earlier Yaffe report, Jordan would have also been given use of Kalandia airport in northern Jerusalem. Israel was said in the Times report to have demanded the right to keep military settlements along the Jordan River. Mr. Yaffe, citing his source as an “extraordinarily well-informed and dependable” Israeli, said that under the agreement Jordan would get the port of Gaza and that the West Bank would be demilitarized and returned to Jordan.