Premier Golda Meir said tonight that at present there is no sign of American pressure on Israel to make concessions to the Arabs and that after having met with President Nixon three times since she assumed the Premiership three years ago, she felt that the US would never “squeeze Israel to do what Sadat wanted.” Mrs. Meir made her remarks in a television interview on the eve of Independence Day that covered a wide range of subjects from the political situation to religion, Soviet Jews and Israel’s social problems.
Mrs. Meir claimed that Israel desires peace but its neighbors are not ready for it even if they were to put their signatures on a peace document. “The solution is to grow stronger from the social, economic and military points of view until our neighbors are prepared to live with us–not to make peace but simply to live with us,” she said. “They must reach this conclusion not out of love for us but out of their inability to throw us into the sea and to understand that they have no choice but to live with us,” Mrs. Meir asserted.
She repeated that Israel will never return to its pre-June, 1967 borders and dismissed demands for the rights of the Palestinians by President Sadat of Egypt and El Fatah leader Yassir Arafat as meaning only that Israel must cease to exist.
EMIGRATION BASIC FOR SOVIET JEWS
Mrs. Meir supported the line of the World Zionist Organization when she contended that the survival of Soviet Jewry could be assured only by emigration, not by asking for their civil rights in the Soviet Union. She said she was sure that hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews would come to Israel if they were permitted to leave.
Mrs. Meir said her government was aware of Israel’s social and economic gap long before the Black Panthers dramatized the issue. Months before their advent there was an advisory council of professors established to recommend a policy to the government to deal with the social gap, she said. Mrs. Meir noted that the council was continuing its work and will soon submit a report of its findings.
The Premier conceded that the military and financial burdens Israelis bear are probably the heaviest in the world. She said Israel could not have held out “without the support of the Jewish people in the world such as the Jews of America who have consistently supported Israel.”
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