U.S. Acting to Rescue Israeli-egyptian Treaty Talks Begin Meeting Vance Before Flight Home

The Carter Administration appeared to be putting urgent pressure on Israel to compromise towards at least partial acceptance of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s increased demands on peace terms to save the Egyptian-Israeli negotiations from collapsing. This evolved, in the views of in-formed sources here, as Secretary of State Cyrus Vance engaged in United States activity of an emergency nature that included his extraordinary meeting tonight at the Kennedy Airport in New York with Premier Menachem Begin.

Part of the U.S. “rescue operation” was Vance’s meeting for nearly four hours last night with Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan at the State Department. Their meeting began at 9:30 p.m. and continued until I a.m. this morning. That session followed Vance’s meetings at the Madison Hotel with the Egyptian delegation and later with the Israeli delegation. Afterwards, Special Ambassador Alfred Atherton talked for almost two hours yesterday with the Israeli delegation at their hotel.

In reporting these activities, George Sherman, the State Department official who is the conference spokesman, said here today that Dayan, Israeli Defense Minister Ezer Weizman and other members of the Israeli delegation will fly with Vance to New York for the Begin meeting. Also going with Vance will be Atherton and Assistant Secretary of State Harold Saunders. The meeting was scheduled to take place at about 7:30 p.m. in the King David Lounge in the El Al terminal at the Kennedy airport. Sherman said “because of the size of the lounge,” there “probably” will be no opportunity for photographers to record the scene.

‘NEGOTIATIONS CONTINUE TO GO FORWARD’

Sherman said Begin will make a statement to the media afterwards and indicated Vance might also do so. When Sherman was asked whether the unusual Vance-Dayan session last night related to the West Bank-Gaza and Palestinian Arab matters, he remarked that “the best answer is to repeat and underline” what he said yesterday, that “the parties to the negotiations expect to be successful, determined they will be successful, and negotiations to that end will continue.” He went on to say today “I can answer that negotiations continue to go forward.” When the Jewish Telegraphic Agency observed that Sherman spoke of negotiations going forward rather than progress, despite the many long meetings since yesterday, an authoritative official replied, “Let’s have a little variety.”

Sherman’s statement came as the State Department continued to minimize the remark Friday by a White House official in close touch with President Carter that “for the first time here there has begun to be a gnawing concern about the outcome of the negotiations.” The official made his remark to a few selected reporters at the White House and asked that his name not be used. It followed the public insistence by Sadat that the Egyptian-Israeli treaty include a detailed timetable for ending Israel’s military rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Linkage of any kind of the two accords is not in the Camp David framework.

Israeli and Egyptian negotiators on their treaty agreed on wording in a U.S. proposed preamble that provides a form of linkage. The Israelis reportedly went along with them to please President Carter and appease Sadat’s demands in the face of the Baghdad conference that was designed to persuade Sadat not to go ahead with the treaty. But since then, Sadat has hardened and extended his demands on Israel and has said that if the Washington talks fail, it will be Israel’s fault.

It is understood here by some that Sadat moved toward hardening his demands as a result of an agreement reached in Baghdad by Saudi Arabia and other moderate Arab states with rejectionist states like Iraq and Syria that the Baghdad conference would go relatively light on Sadat while Sadat toughened his public expressions against Israel and appeased the Palestinian Arabs on their concerns.