The Jarring file: his testimony in retrospect

His part: At the end of 1970, at Golda Meir’s request, Gazit coordinated the teams preparing Israel for negotiations, and was in charge of the Jarring file.

At the end of 1970, Golda Meir asked Foreign Minister Abba Eban that Gazit — then the Foreign Ministry’s deputy director-general for North American affairs — coordinate planning teams to prepare Israel for negotiations. The teams included Meir Shamgar on the treaty team, Aharon Yariv heading borders and security, Yaakov Herzog heading Jerusalem, and Moshe Sanbar heading refugee compensation. In those years, he said, “I was then in charge of the Jarring file”.

Gazit was sharply critical of the envoy’s method. In his view, the Swedish ambassador Gunnar Jarring was bound to fail because he worked at too low a level. He met neither Egypt’s President nor Israel’s Prime Minister and settled for exchanges of documents, while continuing to serve as his country’s ambassador in Moscow.

Gazit proposed bringing Jarring to Jerusalem to talk with Golda Meir, which happened in January 1971. He also proposed a more flexible draft of Israel’s reply; it was rejected by Meir, by Eban and by the Foreign Ministry’s Director-General, Gideon Rafael.

He said he warned Eban that the word “agreed”, in “secure, recognised and agreed boundaries”, would be read in Cairo as a territorial claim and rejected.

The interview took place amid a public debate — prompted in part by Yossi Beilin’s writing — over whether Golda Meir had missed a chance for peace in 1971. Gazit disputed the claim sharply. In his view, Egypt’s reply to Jarring included conditions, among them the refugee question, that broke the rules the envoy himself had set.

The UN report did not blame the failure on Israel’s reply. And the statement that Israel would not return to the June 1967 lines reflected a cabinet decision and a position that predated Meir.

He also recounted that in August 1970, when Egypt moved its missile batteries towards the canal as the ceasefire took effect, Moshe Dayan pressed to resume fighting, and Meir refused.

He described Arab diplomacy in those years as “diplomacy by automation”: holding to a fixed formula, without real negotiation. These are his words sixteen years later: the testimony of someone who was in the room, and who went on arguing about what happened there. The full interview, in its blunt phrasing, is open at the Golda Meir Institute.

In his testimony to the Agranat Commission, the inquiry into the Yom Kippur War, in December 1973, Gazit described the period in his own words: “I coordinated quite a number of teams; I was a kind of coordinator of teams”. One team, under Moshe Sanbar, dealt with compensation and refugees. A second, under Major General Aharon Yariv, dealt with borders, and a third with the legal side of a peace agreement. A fourth, on the holy places, did not operate.

His working file from those months is kept at the State Archives (HZ-5980/7) and was read here in full. In December 1970 he reported to the Foreign Minister on the Ministry’s working group ahead of the Jarring talks, signing as “the undersigned (chairman)”.

Submitting its ideas on 3 January 1971, he wrote that they had been worked out “without an explicit directive”, “to a large extent, in a vacuum”. A year later, on 6 December 1971, he wrote to the Minister without softening it: “I have been arguing for many months that Jarring has shown very little diplomatic talent (and that is an understatement).”

It was an internal memorandum, written while Israel was speaking of a return to the talks, and he saw it as his duty to tell the Minister plainly what he thought. It ends with a practical proposal: “On no account should we settle for passivity and a method of ‘trust Gunnar’” (site translations).3 sources+

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