Office of the Historian

184. Memorandum of a Telephone Conversation Between the Secretary of State and the French Ambassador (Alphand), Washington, March 3, 1957, 6:30 p.m.1

Washington, March 3, 1957, 6:30 p.m.

Ambassador Alphand said that he had received from M. Pineau the following suggestion of a formula which was based on a conversation which he had had with the Israeli Ambassador to Canada.2 It would be somewhat as follows:

(1)
France understands (or assumes) that the United Nations will take exclusive responsibility for the civil and military administration of the Gaza Strip until there is either a general peace settlement or settlement with respect to the area.
(2)
If the United Nations abandons this responsibility to Egypt, then Israel would be entitled to exercise the rights specified by Foreign Minister Meir in Paragraph (c) of her statement of March 1.3

JFD4
  1. Source: Eisenhower Library, Dulles Papers, General Telephone Conversations. Secret; Personal and Private.↩
  2. Michael Comay.↩
  3. Another memorandum of this telephone conversation by Proctor is in the Eisenhower Library, Dulles Papers, General Telephone Conversations. According to Proctor’s version, Alphand also said that the suggested formula was “something which would not be published but would be said to the Israelis” and that Pineau had “wanted it stressed that the important thing was abandonment of responsibility of administration, not merely abandonment of administration of the area.”↩
  4. Macomber initialed for Dulles.↩