Mrs. Meir, Eban Meet with Barbour on Further Clarifications; U.S. Resisting Pressure

Premier Golda Meir presented last night U.S. Ambassador Walworth Barbour with a list containing the main points on which Israel wants clarification from the Nixon administration before agreeing to return to the Jarring talks. Israel’s Ambassador to Washington, Yitzhak Rabin, was reportedly scheduled to meet State Department officials today on the same subject. The list was drafted in detail by Mrs. Meir and Foreign Minister Abba Eban and was approved in principle by the Cabinet at last Sunday’s session. According to informed sources, the principal point on which Israel wants clarification is its fear of an imposed settlement. President Nixon promised in his latest letter to Mrs. Meir that the U.S. would not interfere in the Jarring talks. But the Israelis have been unable to persuade the Nixon administration to repudiate the territorial map proposed by Secretary of State Rogers a year ago. According to well informed sources, Washington is prepared to stand firm against Israeli pressure to do so. The Rogers plan was presented to a Big Four meeting in New York on Oct. 28, 1969 and was made public by Mr. Rogers last Dec. 9. It called for Israel’s return to its pre-June. 1967 boundaries except for minor alterations of its frontier with Jordan. The Israelis claimed that the Rogers plan amounted to an imposed settlement in advance of peace talks which undercut Israel’s bargaining position. The Nixon administration has reportedly assured Israel it would not press for the Rogers’ map during the early stages of the Jarring talks but refused to abandon it entirely or to pledge not to raise the matter as the talks progressed.

Mrs. Meir’s meeting with Ambassador Barbour was obviously more than a routine meeting between a head of government and a foreign envoy. Mr. Eban and the Foreign Ministry’s deputy director general Mordecai Gazit were present as were the director general of the Prime Minister’s office Dr. Jacob Herzog and Mrs. Meir’s chief political advisor, Simcha Dinitz. Observers here said the Israel government intends to delay as long as possible its decision on the Jarring talks in order to extract as many commitments as it can from the U.S. President Nixon’s pledge of continued arms support in his letter to Mrs. Meir was welcomed by the government but it fell short of the written guarantee Israel wanted. The Israel government has not, however, confronted Washington with hard and fast conditions for its return to the Jarring talks, and the U.S., in turn, has applied no pressure on Israel. Many observers believe that Israel will agree to return to the negotiating table before Jan. 5 when United Nations Secretary General U Thant must report to the Security Council on the progress of Mideast peace talks. Mean-while, political circles here said today that the Soviet Union has not slowed down its arms supplies to Egypt and in fact may be accelerating its shipments. They said that Moscow was agreeing to virtually every Egyptian arms request in order to maintain its influence in Cairo following the death of President Gamal Abdel Nasser. The Egyptians, as a consequence, have helped their arms demands, the circles said.