The United Nations Security Council will meet next Monday afternoon, March 26, to discuss the United States request that Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold make a survey of Israel-Arab tensions and report back within a month.
So certain are members of the Council that there will be no opposition to the American plan from the side of the Soviet Union, that Mr. Hammarskjold has already scheduled his departure. Of course, he can change his travel plans, but right now he is understood to be planning to leave for the Middle East on Monday, April 2.
Mr. Hammarskjold conferred briefly today with Arthur C. Liveran, Acting Deputy Chief of the Israel delegation. While neither would discuss the subject of the conference, which lasted only 15 minutes, the Secretary General is understood to have asked Israel not to insist on being heard at the forthcoming Security Council meeting. Similar requests are understood to have been made by the UN chief to the eight Arab delegations here.
Britain’s Sir Pierson Dixon, this month’s president of the Council, backed by the United States and France, is known to desire a brief Council meeting which would offer no opportunity for Israeli or Arab charges and countercharges and thus make it unnecessary at this point for the Council to attempt to evaluate the truth of the various accusations that troops of both sides are being massed with aggressive intentions it is quite certain that neither Israel nor the Arab delegations will oppose these plans.
U.N. CHIEF WILL SEEK TO BRING NASSER AND BEN GURION TOGETHER
Meanwhile, Mr. Hammarskjold is also conferring with Henry R. Labouisse, Jr. director of the UN Relief and Works. Agency for Palestine, which is in charge of relief rehabilitation and resettlement for the 900,000 Arab refugees. Mr. Labouisse came here this week and has thus far avoided seeing any newsmen or discussing his mission here with anyone, except on the highest UN level. However, his presence here, in response to a summons by Mr. Hammarskjold, underscores the fact that the refugee problem will figure heavily in whatever Middle East peace plans Mr. Hammarskjold may be mapping.
While the Secretary General was understood to have been cool to the Western proposal that he try his hand at pacifying the Middle East, he is reported now to be determined to make a very strenuous effort to perform what would be considered by diplomats a “miracle”– to get Egyptian Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser to agree to a face-to-face conference with Israel’s Premier, David Ben Gurion.
Mr. Hammarskjold is understood to have told leading diplomats here after his return from his recent visit to Cairo and Jerusalem that he is convinced that the only solution to the Middle East war tensions is a personal meeting between Col. Nasser and Mr. Ben Gurion without any third party. He is of the belief that while such a meeting cannot be brought about quickly he may be able to persuade Col. Nasser that Egypt should start trying to clear the political paths, internally and in the Arab League, towards such a meeting with Ben Gurion in the not too distant future.
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