Mrs. Meir Tells Hebrew University Group That Prospects for Middle East Peace Are Dim

Israel’s former Foreign Minister Mrs. Golda Meir said here yesterday that prospects for peace in the near future were dim. In the absence of a Middle East settlement, Israel must depend on her own military forces to maintain her security, she said. Addressing a dinner of the American Friends of the Hebrew University. Mrs. Meir based her pessimism on Egyptian President Nasser’s vision of “glory in destroying Israel,” a recent agreement between Jordan’s King Hussein and Palestinian commandos, and the Soviet Union’s Middle East policy which is hostile to Israel. She said that Israel cannot entrust its security to a United Nations force, recalling the UN Emergency Force’s pull-out from Sinai preceding last year’s Arab-Israel war. No nation can guarantee that a peace agreement signed by the Arab countries would be an “iron-clad guarantee” that Israel would not be attacked again, she said.

Avraham Harman, president of Hebrew University and former Israel Ambassador to Washington, told the audience that the old university facility on Mount Scopus is being reconstructed and repaired for use beginning next February. He said the campus would prepare for entry into the main university, in West Jerusalem, former soldiers, new immigrants and Arab students from East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Mr. Barman and Mrs. Meir both spoke of the symbolic importance of Mount Scopus to Israel in the light of the liberation of Jerusalem from Jordanian occupation during the Six-Day War. The American Friends presented the Scopus Award, the organization’s highest honor, to Max M. Low, an industrialist and philanthropist, for humanitarian work in Israel and the United States. Mr. Low is a founder of the Harry S. Truman Center for the Advancement of Peace at the university. The American Friends conduct an education-information program in the U.S. about the university.