A State Department spokesman said Friday that the United States was prepared to resume bilateral talks with the Soviets on the Middle East “whenever the Russians wish” despite the Soviet rejection of the last U.S. proposals. The spokesman, Carl Bartch, conceded that no talks were currently scheduled. He said the United States had not yet responded to the Soviet note of Dec. 23 but intended to do so.
The ambassadors of the Four Powers, who met in New York last week, arranged for their deputies to meet on Tuesday to try to detail the points of agreement in the Four Power talks to date, the points on which agreement appears to be fairly close and those on which the Four Powers remain wide apart. The ambassadors will review the results at a meeting on Jan. 13.
Interviewed on NBC-TV’s “Today” show, this weekend, Ambassador Itzhak Rabin of Israel called on the United States and the Soviet Union to declare a “moratorium” on involvement in the Arab-Israel conflict. He said that the people of the Middle East should be allowed to solve their own problems and asserted that if this were done, nothing would “drag” the U.S. and the USSR into a Middle East confrontation.
Gen. Rabin voiced the hope that “the proper circles” in this country would draw the “proper conclusions” from the latest Soviet rebuff on American initiatives for Mideast peace. He said that the results in 1969 demonstrated the failure of efforts to solve the problem through the Soviet Union. The Middle East situation would be resolved, he said, only when the parties to the conflict entered into meaningful negotiations.
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