Egypt Protests at U.N. Against German-israeli Pact

A protest against Germany’s reparations agreement with Israel was voiced today at the United Nations General Assembly by Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Farrag, in the course of a speech delivered during the general debate.

The Egyptian Minister said that pressure had been applied on the West German Government to “acquiesce” to providing Israel “under guise of reparations” with “large monetary funds and enormous quantities of heavy machinery.” This, he observed, “lends no optimism to the prospects of peace and stability in the Middle East.” The Egyptian Government, he added, viewed with “grave concern” the German-Israeli reparation agreement. It was Egypt’s “firm conviction,” he said, that “Israel was in no way entitled to reparations from Germany on behalf of Jews of the whole world.”

The Egyptian Minister criticized the United Nations for not solving the problem of the Palestine refugees, “No plan for the peace and stability of the Middle East will be worthy of attention which does not aim at an equitable and humane solution to such problems, ” he declared, He charged that under the “pressure of world political Zionism, ” about one million Arabs had been “ruthlessly” torn from their homes in Palestine. “For the first time in history an indigenous population of an area are being displaced to accommodate so-called DP’s from other areas,” he said.

(Arab attempts to prevent the ratification of the Israel-German agreement on reparations payments were described editorially by the Manchester Guardian as a “blackmail” effort which is “gathering momentum,” a cable from London reported today.)