Premier Golda Meir received a standing ovation at the National Press Club today after addressing 400 news media representatives and responding to a long series of questions on topics including last week’s downing of a Libyan airliner by Israel, her country’s future borders and her recent meeting in the Vatican with Pope Paul VI, The 74-year-old Israeli leader spoke extemporaneously and dwelt at length on Israel’s yearning and quest for peace with its Arab neighbors.
Mrs. Meir arrived at the National Press Club after a 90-minute meeting with President Nixon at the White House in what was described as an atmosphere of cordiality. The President and Mrs. Meir posed for news photographers and engaged in light banter.
The Israeli Premier will attend a dinner at the White House this evening. About 100 people are expected to attend. Nixon told her, “Everybody wanted to come.” The President had words of praise for Israel’s outgoing Ambassador Gen. Yitzhak Rabin, on the occasion of his 51st birthday today. Rabin and his successor, Ambassador Designate Simha Dinitz who is Mrs. Meir’s political advisor, accompanied the Premier to the White House this morning. Dr. Henry Kissinger and his deputy Brent Scowcraft, were present with Nixon.
(See separate story P. 3.)
At the Press Club only one question was given to Mrs. Meir by Press Club president Donald R. Larrabee dealing with the Libyan airliner issue. His single question was a composite of what he said were several others submitted in writing to him from the audience, the standard Club practice. It had been expected that the plane incident would provoke sharp questions from the news representatives.
Saying she was “glad” to have the question, Mrs. Meir detailed the anxiety of the Israelis over the reports her government had received from international police organizations on the Black September gang’s intention to send an explosive-laden plane into an Israeli urban area with a suicidal crew aboard, similar to the type of men who carried out the Lod Airport massacre. She said the failure of the airliner’s pilot to distinguish between Soviet MIGs and American Phantoms and his refusal to land his craft despite receiving all “known international signals” to do so was partly to blame for the disaster. She said the plane did not explode until it hit the ground.
Referring to attacks on Israel over the incident, Mrs. Meir said “It’s unjust to react to this tragedy as if it were almost exactly what we were waiting for.” She added that “everything is at the disposition” of an international body to investigate the tragedy but she decried being “condemned and then investigated.” Israel, Mrs. Meir stated, “can’t be investigated as if we did it with joy.”
RETENTION OF SHARM EL-SHEIKH INDICATED
Responding to a question on Israel’s borders, the Israeli Premier seemed to indicate that Sharm El-Sheikh will remain under Israel’s permanent control. “Egypt must understand Israeli control of Sharm El-Sheikh is to protect Israeli shipping” through the Straits of Tiran to the Far East and East Africa, she said. Mrs. Meir noted that Sharm El-Sheikh, which is at the southeastern tip of the Sinai Peninsula, “was never used by Egypt except to place guns there not to allow Israeli shipping through.” She described the Straits as “a lifeline for us.”
Mrs. Meir also reiterated Israel’s need to control the Golan Heights from which, she said, Syrians had poured gunfire and rockets for 19 years on Israeli settlements below. The Suez Canal, she said, is open for Egypt to use at present. “We understand Egypt’s need for it.” Withdrawal from the Suez area would not be “a final line,” she said, since that “should be negotiated through a peace treaty.”
Reporting on her recent visit with Pope Paul at the Vatican which aroused some acrimony both in Rome and Jerusalem, Mrs. Meir said the “Pope was very, very gracious–very kind. I was glad the Pope said that this was a historic moment…I felt it.” She said they had long and frank discussions “of various problems.” The Pope, she said, “appreciated” Israel’s care of Christian Holy Places since the Six-Day War. “The Pope’s final sentence,” she said was, “this dialogue must continue. I look forward to its continuation in the spirit in which we had spoken,” she said.
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