Kissinger looks for peace by week-end

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33539, 21 May 1974, Page 13

Kissinger looks for peace by week-end

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright) JERUSALEM, May 20. The United States Secretary of State (Dr Henry Kissinger) returns to Damascus again today in an accelerated attempt to achieve a separation of Syrian and Israeli forces by the end of the week.

The principal problem, where the actual line of disengagement should be drawn, appears to be virtually solved.

Israel’s Minister of Information (Mr Shimon Peres) who has described the line as “the key to a disengagement agreement,” said after yesterday’s talks with Dr Kissinger that the line being proposed by the United States could be accepted by both sides. Dr Kissinger will have with him a number of Israeli ideas from his discussions yesterday including a late night private session with the Prime Minister (Mrs Meir) and the Minister of Defence (Mr Moshe Dayan). Statements from both the Americans and Israelis suggest that the discussions are down to fine geographic details for drawing the map of disengagement, including defining details for a United Nations buffer zone. .

Despite earlier fears, the guerrilla attack on the northern Israel town of Ma’alot last week in which 25 persons, mainly children, died, did not appear to upset the momentum of negotiations.

Israel’s gunboat attack yesterday on an alleged guerrilla base near Tyre, in Lebanon, was apparently being treated as nothing to do with the Syrian-Israeli front. The raid was seen here as part of a general attempt to dissuade the guerrillas. It came on top of Israeli air strikes against several of their camps two days previously. Mrs Meir was rebuffed on Sunday by her ruling Labour Party, which endorsed Mr Yitzhak Rabin’s plan to become her successor at the head of a coalition Cabinet that would exclude Israeli’s religious parties for the first time in almost 20 years. Labour Party sources say that Mr Rabin will present his proposed Cabinet, which will count on a razor-thin, one-vote majority in the Knesset, to President Ephraim Katzir and have it sworn in by the end of the week.

The Labour Party’s central committee, its chief policymaking body, voted to bring the small anti-rabbi Citizens Right Movement into the coalition and to abandon further efforts aimed at an agreement with the National Religious Party.

Mrs Meir, in an angry

i, confrontation two weeks f ago, urged the party to leac e a minority coalition come manding only 58 votes in the 120-member Knessel rather than include the

:s C.R.M., which has three d Deputies in the Legislature i- and is led by another n woman and bitter personal >t rival of Mrs Meir, Mrs le Shulamit Aloni. .