Mrs Meir Prepared To Go To Jordan

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31942, 20 March 1969, Page 15

Mrs Meir Prepared To Go To Jordan

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter —Copyright?

JERUSALEM, March 19.

Israeli’s new Prime Minister (Mrs Golda Meir) says she is ready to go to Amman for peace talks with King Hussein as she went to the Jordanian capital to meet his grandfather, King Abdullah, 21 years ago.

“It depends entirely upon King Hussien,” Mrs Meir told a questioner at her first meeting in Jerusalem with the foreign press. She told a questioner: “As long as there is no peace there is always a fear of war. But I believe, to the best of my information, that war in the area at present or in the near future is not imminent. “War is talked about a lot, in the hope that perhaps Israel will be pressed to retreat or change her position,”

the battle lines, robed and veiled like an Arab woman, to meet the old King of Jordan.

Mrs Meir managed to reach him, but he was already committed to the invasion of Israel.

“It’s too late,” he told her. Five days later the war started.

Mrs Meir’s reference to meeting King Abdullah goes back to 1948, when she was the heroine of a fateful episode in Middle East history, more like cloak-and-dagger fiction than fact. On the eve of the British withdrawal from the Holy Land, she made a last-minute, but vain bid to avert the Arab-Jewish war. With guerrilla warfare between Arabs and Jews at its height, she set out across