The Soviet press, led by Izvestia, the Government organ, and Pravda, the publication of the Soviet Communist party, is charging Israel with aggression in the recent fighting in the Suez Canal which brought to a halt plans for freeing 15 stranded foreign merchant ships and backing completely Egypt’s claim that Israel has no rights on the Canal.
Pravda asserted that no agreement exists under which Israel has the right to supervise everything that is going on in the Suez Canal and Egypt was right in rejecting the “irrelevant claims of Israel.” It charged that Israel “continues deliberately to aggravate the situation in the Middle East.”
Izvestia called Israel’s warnings that the clearance agreement did not cover the northern sector a “maneuver aimed at misleading the world public.” Ignoring the confirmation by U.N. Secretary General U Thant that the agreement covered only the southern canal sector, the Government newspaper declared that Egyptian clearing boats were fired on when they set out for the northern sector “under an agreed timetable of work.”
Sulskaya Shizn, official publication of the central committee of the Soviet Communist Party, assailed the “double-faced adventurist policy of the present rulers of Israel.” Skulskaya Zhizn’s commentator, Andrei Baturin, charged that Gen. Moshe Dayan, Israel’s Defense Minister, “openly supports the scheme of accelerated preparations for a new war against the Arab countries.”
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.
