Peking Newspaper Says Report of Meeting Between Chinese, Israelis Deliberate Lie

An article in the Peking newspaper, Peoples Daily, this weekend denied that contacts had taken place between the Peoples Republic of China and Israel in order to establish diplomatic relations between the two countries. The article described the reported contacts as “lies deliberately fabricated to confuse public opinion.” On July 27 it was reported by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that repeated contacts between Chinese diplomats of the Peoples Republic and Eli Ben-Gal, representative of the Israeli Mapam Party, had been conducted in Paris. According to JTA, Ben-Gal met various Embassy staff members and that some of the conversations were held at the Chinese own request. At the same time, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Paris, Tsa Kwei Seng, told the JTA that “no member of the Embassy had met Ben-Gal” and asserted that information to the effect that meetings had occurred “is pure fabrication and a provocation. The article this weekend in the Peoples Daily stated that the Chinese government had always supported the struggle of the Palestinian and other Arab peoples and would continue to do so. The article took exception to the fact that reports of the alleged contacts had been repeated by Tass, the official Soviet news agency. This was, in the Chinese view, an attempt to conceal the Russians “own sinister activities” in the Middle East and their “collusion with Israel.”