High official circles expressed optimism today that the meeting between Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan and top U.S. officials Friday will lead to a settlement of the disengagement issue at the Geneva talks by the end of this month. Dayan will be meeting with Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger and Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger.
A White House spokesman in San Clemente and State Department officials here both announced Dayan’s unexpected visit. In San Clemente, a spokesman said that the Dayan-Kis-singer conversations will be on the Geneva conference with “emphasis on the subject of disengagement of forces.” Both Egypt and Israel, he said, feel it is “important to have their positions coordinated” as the Geneva conference moves into “a more active phase.” White House sources said that an agreement on disengagement of forces on the Suez was likely this month but declined to be more specific.
Dayan, who met here Dec. 7 with Kissinger, Schlesinger and other top American diplomatic and defense leaders, was reported by White House officials as meeting again with Schlesinger on “technical questions regarding disengagement.” Kissinger was pictured by American sources as brimming with optimism over the progress between Egyptian and Israeli military officers in Geneva regarding separation of forces and that he was also cheerfully surmising that the Arabs might lift the oil embargo in the near future, too.
Kissinger has been in San Clemente for the past two days with Nixon and is expected to return to Washington tomorrow. The Dayan-Kissinger meeting, Department spokesman George Vest said, was arranged prior to Monday’s Israeli elections. Western diplomatic sources told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the Dayan visit is to explore further problems of disengagement with Kissinger and Schlesinger. An Israeli source said the meeting was by “mutual agreement” but it was understood elsewhere that it had been suggested by American leadership to help speed the disengagement process.
U.S. officials declined publicly to comment on the results of the Israeli elections but privately they welcomed the retention in power of Prime Minister Golda Meir’s party and its allies. The feeling is that Mrs. Meir and her top lieutenants will be more amenable than the rival right-wing array in political opposition in Israel towards concessions to the Arabs, particularly the Egyptians, in bringing about steps towards a settlement in the Mideast.
An “interim agreement” between Israel and Egypt which would reopen the Suez Canal has long been seen in American circles as a decisive first step towards the full settlement. That seems to be the prospect now in Geneva. (By Joseph Polakoff.)
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