Political sources here expressed astonishment today at a policy statement by the Mapam Party — a member of Premier Levi Eshkol’s coalition government — expressing “concern over the possibility of escalation on the Syrian border.” The statement expressed opposition to use of Israel’s air force to silence Syrian gun positions when Syrian fire was “not directed against villages themselves.”
The sources indicated inability to understand the phrasing of the statement in view of Syria’s continuing aggressiveness and the fact that, as a member of the coalition, Mapam participated in approval of the operation last Friday in which Israeli jets shot down six Syrian Soviet-made MIG-21 jet fighters.
Mapam also called on the Israel Government to make every effort to obtain resumption of the meetings of the extraordinary meeting of the Syrian-Israeli Mixed Armistice Commission which was convened for the first time in years on the initiative of United Nations Secretary General U Thant. The session has been in suspension since February 2 because of Syrian insistence on broadening the agreed-upon agenda to cover issues other than land cultivation rights in the demilitarized zones on the Syrian-Israel border, the only item on that agenda.
However, Moshe Dayan, a leader of the opposition Israel Workers Party (Rafi) formed by former Premier David Ben-Gurion, upheld the Government’s action against Syria. He told a meeting of the Students Union at the Haifa Institute of Technology that the air strike “was the right answer to the Syrians.”
Gen. Dayan also said that Israel’s reaction to aggression of any kind should be immediate counterstrikes with no qualitative or borderline limitation. He added a caution that considerable care must be taken so that counterblows, though “tough and rapid,” did not exceed the limits of a local counteraction so that the Syrians would have the opportunity to retreat and not be forced to a fullscale confrontation with Israel.
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.
