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. That is how he described it in a 1987 interview with the Golda Meir Institute. According to him, 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” (in the site’s translation).
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 and his interpretation sixteen years later, from the vantage point of someone who took part in the events and in the arguments around them. The full transcript, with its context and its blunt phrasing, is open at the Golda Meir Institute.[H2]