President Anwar Sadat of Egypt made a plea for peace in the Middle East in a BBC Television interview last night declaring, “I am ready for a peace agreement with Israel.” The interview was conducted by Lord Chalfont, a former Times correspondent and Minister of State at the Foreign Office in Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s first administration.
Asked if he was ready to recognize Israel’s right to exist, Sadat replied: “I have accepted Resolution 242, which includes a recognition of the existence of the State of Israel, and this answers your question. I was ready for peace two years ago, and I am ready now. There is only one point on which I must insist. The Palestinians should attend the Geneva conference and have their say there. This is my only condition.”
Asked about terrorism, the Egyptian President replied: “I am against terrorism and violence. But put yourself in the place of the Palestinians. Let us put the real problem on the table and solve it. There are a million Arab refugees living in tents, what do you expect from them in their situation?”
PREVENTED TERRORIST ACT AGAINST QE2
At that point Sadat revealed that because he objected to violence he personally intervened to prevent the Queen Elizabeth 2 from being torpedoed by terrorists last year. The steamship was carrying 590 American Jews to Israel to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Jewish State. “I personally,” he said. “countermanded an order given by an Arab leader. I stayed up until 3:30 a.m. when I was sure that the captain of our submarine, who had the order to torpedo the QE2, had received my order, and the Egyptian submarine was on its way back to Alexandria.”
Sadat did not name the Arab leader, and Lord Chalfont stated here that Sadat had not told him the name of the Arab leader even privately, but most people assumed it was President Muammar Qaddafi of Libya. Sadat added that a solution for the problem of the Palestinians was possible in his view.
During the interview, Sadat claimed that he had never been worried even for a single moment about the presence of Israelis west of the Suez Canal. “This was a propaganda move by Israel,” he said. “I had five divisions on the east bank, and I was not worried at all.” Sadat also explained why he had ordered 18,000 Soviet military advisors out of Egypt in 1972. “The cause of this was that I wanted to tell them by my decision I cannot be a puppet,” he said. “I cannot be an agent, and I cannot also be a weak friend. Either you treat me as a strong friend or no.”
HAD ADMIRED HITLER
Towards the end of the interview, Sadat frankly admitted that he had been an admirer of Hitler: “I was fascinated with Hitler and I admired the way he rebuilt Germany. We believed in a German victory, and we were ready to fight on the side of the Germans. We sent the Germans a plan of British disposition, but it never mans reached them. I was, as a result, sentenced to three years in a British concentration camp.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
