Israeli circles have reacted with “disgust” and disbelief to virulently anti-Israel remarks attributed to Egyptian Deputy Premier Hassan Tohamey in an interview published in the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Siyassa. Egyptian-diplomats presently in Tel Aviv seeking premises for their Embassy, were embarrassed and suggested that the comments, reported by Haaretz yesterday may have been taken out of context.
Israeli political circles said Tohamey’s remarks were “foolish and incredible” and in no way reflect the views of the Egyptian President and government as Israel knows them. Tohamey, a long-time friend of President Anwar Sadat and an early participant in the Egyptian-Israeli peace process, was quoted as predicting the imminent collapse of that “semi-state, Israel.”
According to the interview, he said he deduced from conversations with Jews and from Koranic references that the end of Israel is near. He accused Israelis of besmirching his name and claimed that Jews were “traitors and hypocrites and had been portrayed as such in history books.”
Tohamey is a Moslem fundamentalist who has been close to Sadat since the pre-revolutionary times in Egypt. He met with then Israel Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan in Morocco before Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem in November, 1977 and was the No. 2 man in the Egyptian delegation to the Camp David conference in September, 1978. He worked on the peace frameworks at Camp David and later publicly advocated piping Nile waters to Israel to help make the Negev bloom.
However, he has been an Islamic zealot with respect to the future of Jerusalem and once spoke of organizing a march of 1 million Moslems to wrest the city from Israeli control. Although he is rarely seen in public of late, observers here believe it would be premature to discount him as an influential factor in Cairo.
Hassan Abdul Samad Kamel, the Egyptian diplomat who heads the delegation now seeking quarters in Tel Aviv, said he had not seen the Al-Siyassa interview but knew that Tohamey was giving a series of interviews to Kuwaiti newspapers to correct quotes attributed to him by three Israeli journalists in a book on the peace process, “Year of the Dove.”
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