Israel seeks Arab peace ideas

Press, 18 April 1978, Page 8

Israel seeks Arab peace ideas

NZPA Jerusalem Israel has invited Arab States to propose new ideas for a peace settlement that could change Israel’s mind about withdrawing from the occupied West Bank o', the Jordan.

In a four-point policy statement, the Cabinet also explicitly accepted the United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 as the basis for peace talks with Jordan. The statement was viewed by some senior officials as a softening of Israel’s stand, but a Cabinet spokesman, Arieh Naor. said it implied no change of policy. Resolution 242, passed in 1967, calls on Israel to withdraw from occupied Arab territories and for secure and recognised boundaries for all Middle EasternStates. Mr Naor said that Israel still stood by its plan for autonomy for the 1.1 million Palestinians on Jordan’s West Bank and the Gaza Strip claiming the plan was “in harmony” with Resolution 242. The statement said that “if the Arab States present counter-proposals we will discuss them on their merits.”

Publication of the statement as a Cabinet document meant a small victory for the Foreign Minister (Mr Moshe Dayan), who has been urging the Prime Minister (Mr Menachem Begin) to tone down his public stand on the West Bank. Mr Begin once said that Resolution 242 “does not necessarily apply” to the West Bank, a remark that angered the United States and put Mr Dayan in a difficult position explaining Israel’s policy. Israel got a tough, battlehardened paratrooper as its new military chief on Sunday as Israelis took to the streets in the thousands to demonstrate over their Government’s Middle East peace policies. Lieutenant-General Raphael Eytan, aged 48, a dour career soldier who learned to hold a pistol at the age of seven, became chief of staff at a ceremony in the Prime Minister’s office, cutting off the formalities with a one-sentence statement of thanks. “He is a trampling war machine which, once wound up, breaks forward, crushing everything in its way, and cannot be stopped,” an Israeli author wrote of him. A day earlier, 40,000 Israelis rallied in a Tel Aviv square in support of Mr Begin’s peace plan. They sought to counter a movement led by war veterans two weeks earlier when 25,000 rallied in protest against Mr Begin’s refusal to make more concessions for peace.