Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir has publicly criticized President Reagan’s planned meeting later this month with Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Egyptian Foreign Minister Ismat Abdel Meguid. Peres is Shamir’s rival in the Nov. 1 election here.
The meeting reportedly will take place on Sept. 26 in New York, where Peres, Meguid and Secretary of State George Shultz will be attending the United Nations General Assembly. President Reagan is to host the meeting himself.
The Israeli premier charged Thursday that President Reagan’s personal involvement, so close to the Israeli election, is “not a usual thing.”
The meeting itself, Shamir told an Israel Radio interviewer, is unlikely to produce any progress in the peace process, especially since it is a one-time conference between the three countries. “You can’t expect miracles from one meeting,” the premier observed drily.
Shamir invited Israeli citizens to “take account of the circumstances” in which the meeting is to be held and “not pay too much heed” to what would be, after all, merely a corridor encounter on the margins of the General Assembly.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
