Talks Shift to Washington

The talks which Israeli and Syrian representatives are to hold with Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger in Washington this month have been compared by well placed observers here to the separate visits to Washington by Defense Minister Moshe Dayan and Egyptian Foreign Minister Ismail Fahmy in Dec. prior to the Israel -Egypt disengagement talks. Dayan at that time presented an outline plan to the Secretary which later served as the basis of the negotiations.

The Washington talks, in other words, are to be seen as very preliminary. They will be followed–according to Kissinger’s plan–by a further visit by the Secretary to this area on his way back from Moscow towards the end of March. By then he hopes to have evolved, from the Israeli and Syrian ideas, some sort of scheme which could be the basis of direct negotiations between the two parties.

The preliminary talks in Washington will not take the form of direct negotiations. The two representatives will not meet but Kissinger will see each of them separately and bounce the ideas he hears from one off the other. It has not yet been decided what level of representative will be sent to Washington. Israel’s choice will inevitably be formed by the internal political problems.

(Observers in Washington viewed the Israeli-Syrian meetings here with Kissinger as another move to limit the Soviet Union’s role in the Middle East peace talks and disengagement procedures. At the same time they expressed the view that by holding these talks here, Washington could exert sufficient pressure on Israel and Syria to speed up the disengagement process. Meanwhile it was announced today in Washington by the White House that King Hussein will meet with President Nixon on March 12 to review the Middle East situation. This visit is in place of the one Hussein was to have made Feb. 8 but was postponed because of unrest in the Jordanian army. A White House spokesman noted that Hussein’s talks with Nixon will take place during the King’s private visit to the U.S.)

NOT PERTURBED BY WIDE GAP OF IDEAS

Well placed Israeli sources reported today that Premier Golda Meir was informed that the 65 POWs in Syria had been visited by the Red Cross before she began Friday’s talk with Kissinger in Tel Aviv. Officials here stress that Israel thus adhered to the end to its declared position that it would only begin substantive talks on disengagement after the POW lists had been released and the POWs visited. The sources would not say how the news of the visits had reached Mrs. Meir, but said she learned of them just before Kissinger’s plane touched down from Cairo Friday morning.

There was no immediate confirmation of a report this weekend that Kissinger asked for and received the list of the 65 Israeli POWs from Syrian officials in Washington the week before he left for the Mideast. According to the report the only American officials who knew he had the list were Undersecretary of State Joseph J. Sisco and one of his personal assistants. The report also stated that Kissinger informed Mrs. Meir, through Israeli Ambassador Simcha Dinitz, that he had the list and asked Dinitz not to tell other Israeli officials. The report stemmed from details given to newsmen traveling with Kissinger this weekend.

U.S. sources say Kissinger was well pleased by his achievements of last week. They are not perturbed by the wide gap between Israel’s and Syria’s “ideas,” and they recall they always predicted a longer drawn-out negotiating process than was needed with Egypt. While refraining from revealing his own ideas, Kissinger is said to want to attain from Syria what he got for Egypt: a piece–albeit a small piece–of the land conquered in 1967. U.S. officials who accompanied him described the town of Kuneitra, in the pre-1973 Golan, as “Syria’s Suez Canal,” referring to Syria’s insistence on receiving Kuneitra as part of a disengagement accord.

Israel argues that the parallel with Egypt is unreal, since there was no Syrian achievement in the October war–only a crushing defeat. Furthermore, Israel’s military-strategic position in the north at present is not comfortable, as was its position west of the Suez Canal before disengagement with Egypt. Premier Meir is believed to have stressed these points to the Secretary in their two meetings last week when disengagement “ideas” were discussed.