368. Editorial Note
In a letter to President Eisenhower, dated August 25, King Saud acknowledged receipt of Eisenhower’s letter of July 10 (Document 354) and the U.S. Aide-Mémoire of July 12 (Document 355) and expressed his regret at the U.S. position on the Gulf of Aqaba contained in these documents. Saud reminded Eisenhower of the latter’s promise that he would not reward an aggressor for his hostility and noted that the two documents were tantamount to a confirmation of rights which Israel did not possess prior to the conflict. (The Saudi Embassy delivered Saud’s message to the White House on August 27. An English translation supplied by the Saudi Embassy is in the Eisenhower Library, Whitman File, International File; the Embassy in Jidda also transmitted the text of the message to the Department of State in telegram 222, August 28; Department of State, Central Files, 683.00/8–2757.)
On September 9, Azzam Pasha handed to Rountree a Saudi Foreign Office note concerning the Gulf of Aqaba, written in response to the U.S. Aide-Mémoire of July 12. In it, the Saudi Government expressed its regret at the position taken in the Aide-Mémoire and offered the following responses to the four suggestions contained in the note: (1) The Saudi Government rejected the idea of taking the problem to the International Court of Justice because it had never known a country to appeal to the court in order to establish its sovereign rights over its own territorial waters; (2) the second United States suggestion had not gone far enough, because Saudi Arabia had been issuing a categorical protest against all of Israel’s attempts to exercise the right of passage through the Straits and into the waters of the Gulf of Aqaba, and not merely against the transit of naval vessels; (3) the third United States suggestion, that it might request masters of vessels of U.S. registry to avoid Saudi territorial waters within the Gulf, was again off the mark, because Saudi Arabia maintained that the Gulf was a closed Arab Gulf with a Saudi-Egyptian entrance, and that there existed only Arab sovereignty over the territorial waters of the Gulf and its entrance; and (4) the Saudi Government also rejected the fourth suggestion, that the pilgrim question be referred to the Security Council, because Saudi Arabia could not entrust such a religious task to any international body. (An English translation of the Saudi Aide-Mémoire of September 9 is attached to a memorandum from Rockwell to Becker, November 4; ibid., 974.7301/11–457; the memorandum of the conversation between Azzam and Rountree on September 9 is ibid., 980.74/9–957.)