Security Council to Get U.s.-british Draft Today Against Syria

A resolution which would bring to a conclusion the Security Council’s consideration for the past two weeks of Israel’s current complaint against Syria was expected today to be presented to the Council at a session tomorrow by at least two sponsors, the United States and Britain, with the possible co-sponsorship of one or more of the smaller members. The resolution, it is expected, will definitely name Syria and will probably call on Syria to take action to prevent future raids into Israel of the type of which Israel has complained.

Intense huddling was under way here today among the leading Western members of the Council in an effort to obtain agreement on a text which would, in effect, accept Israel’s thesis that the El Fatah guerrilla raids were not individual incidents but were part of a general organized pattern.

This point is expected to imply clearly that the El Fatah raids can not be viewed in the narrow terms in which they were confined by the report to the Council from Lt. Gen. Odd Bull, chief of staff of the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization. The main concern of those drafting the text is to produce the best possible text which would obtain the widest sponsorship and could be passed by the Council’s necessary majority of nine members. For that reason, it was predicted, the resolution would avoid using the term “condemn” in referring to Syria.

It was understood that the sponsors were more anxious to get the nine votes than they were to avoid a certain Soviet veto if the final text was unacceptable to the Arab-Soviet bloc.

The cancelation of the scheduled Council meeting today was caused by the fact that, without a draft resolution, the meeting today could have resulted only in further “general debate” without any results. There is no likelihood that the Council would reach the voting stage on the resolution tomorrow. At least two or three more meetings will have to be held before voting takes place. One of the first speakers on tomorrow’s list will be Jordan’s Ambassador Muhammad H. El-Farra, the only Arab member of the Council. Thus far, he has not spoken once on the substantive stakes at issue, leading to the belief here that his Government at Amman has not allowed him to take Syria’s side outright in the present dispute.