Israel Foreign Minister Mrs. Golda Meir outlined here today the three major aims of the Israel Government in the present conflict with Egypt They are, she said:
1.There must be “real assurances” for Israel against aggression; 2. Israel must be given free passage through the Suez canal and the Gulf of Akaba; 3. There must be no possibility whatever of Egypt threatening or conducting hostilities against Israel from the previous positions occupied by its armies.
The United Nations, she declared, was in a position to assure “these legitimate aims” of approaches the problem “in a constructive spirit,” She also called for a permanent Arab-Israel settlement emphasizing that it would be the most effective contribution on the part of the United Nations if it called on the Arab states and Israel to conduct direct peace negotiations. She spoke at the National Press Club.
“If the United Nations will merely clear the way for Nasser to return to Sinai and Gaza with new fury, new resources and vastly greater outside aid, if it will attempt to restore the resumption of the blockade in the Suez Canal and the Gulf of Akaba to Israel ship stand the shipping of other nations trading with Israel, then the setting will merely have been created for a conflagration far graver than the last, Mrs. Meir warned.
She served notice that Israel “will never be a passive victim.” She told the members of the National Press Club. “I would remind you here that in the long history of the Jewish people, from the days of antiquity until Hitler, we have found ourselves too often the object of physical holocaust and thereafter the subject of moral eulogies. Now, having been in trusted by our people with responsibility for the integrity of the state and the security of its people, we were determined that our state should live, and decided to act for our survival today, not wait and provide a subject for a postmortem tomorrow.”
Israel, she pointed out, solved the Jewish refugee problem and the Arab refugees continue to suffer because of the Arab governments. “It is because we wanted to solve the Jewish refugee problem and the Arab leaders do not want to solve the Arab refugee problem, “she declared.
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.
