Nikita S. Khrushchev, Prime Minister of the Soviet Union, told Egyptians today, in the presence of President Gamal Abdel Nasser, that Israel is a “menace” not only to the Arabs but to the whole world, according to Cairo dispatches received here.
Mr. Khrushchev spoke to a mass rally at Martyrs Square in Port Said, where he laid a wreath at the foot of the obelisk there, commemorating the 6, 500 Egyptians killed in 1956 during the war between Egypt on the one hand and Israel, France and Britain on the other. In another speech in Cairo last night, he promised Egypt that “if there is a request for arms” from the Nasser Government, “we shall supply them.”
(In Jerusalem, Golda Meir, Israel’s Foreign Minister, reported today to the Cabinet on her evaluation of Soviet Premier Khrushchev’s address in Cairo in which he assailed Israel’s National Water Carrier Project. She also reported to the Cabinet on her meeting on the matter with Soviet Ambassador Mikhail Bodrov.)
Other dispatches received here from Egypt reported that President Nasser has been pressing the Soviet leader, during the latter’s current visit, to join Egypt in an ultimatum to Israel. The joint ultimatum, according to reports in the Cairo press, would warn Israel that she must implement United Nations resolutions and must discontinue its project for drawing Jordan River waters for irrigation of the upper reaches of Israel’s Negev Desert. According to the Nasser proposal, the Soviet Union would threaten that it would sever diplomatic relations with Israel unless the Israeli Government complied with the terms of the USSR-Egyptian ultimatum.
In his Port Said speech today, Mr. Khrushchev also said that “a reasonable and just solution must be found for Palestine. ” Referring to the 1956 Suez-Sinai crisis, he said that the Franco-British goal at that time was the destruction of Egyptian independence. He warned that “the security of the Middle East” could be greatly endangered by the introduction of Polaris submarines into the Mediterranean waters “against the will of the people of that area.”
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