Sir: The Rev Tony Crowe, of Charlton Parish Church of
St Luke, quotes the report of Le Monde that General Dayan asserted in Tel Aviv that "peace with the Arabs is not the primary objective of Israel ". Mr Crowe, incidentally, quoted this same Le Monde report in the correspondence columns of the Tribuhe.
According to Mr Crowe the report was published on February 17. This is wrong; It was published in the edition of February 18-19. There were some curiosities about this report. It carried no ' attribution' whatever, although subsequent inquiries have revealed that it came from the Agence France Presse correspondent in Israel. The sentence quoted from it by friends of the Arab cause was also used as the headline for this unsigned, non-attributed article.
The sentence was, moreover, an exactly wrong misquotation. What Dayan in fact said was: "Peace with the Arabs, or progress towards such a peace, even by stages, constitutes our supreme objective ". Dayan was correctly reported by UPI and Reuters, and In leading newspapers all over the world. Le Monde published a ' correction ' in its edition of February 25-26, but the paper compounded its first error with a second, possible more serious one. It indicated that the original sentence appeared under the headline 'Peace, our primary objective, stated Dayan.' The operative words " n'est pas," which were included M the Le Monde headline of February 18-19 were this time left out.
In London, this would be a matter for the Press Council. But in Paris no directly similar body eixists. It would, however, be no bad thing were the Press Council to examine this matter, for Le Monde is distributed in this country and claims readers like myself and Mr Crowe, even though the latter seems to have forgotten on which day he read the original, diametrically wrong report.
Apart from this aspect of a curious affair (Mr Crowe must surely have read the Le Monde correction?), may one be clear about one salient fact? General Dayan said that peace with the Arabs is Israel's "supreme objective." So it should be; so it is.
Terence Prittie Britain and Israel, 15 Uxbridge Street, London W8
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