Two prominent French personalities, former Premier Pierre Mendes-France and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, appealed yesterday to Israel to recognize the Palestinian people. Mendes-France, who was in Israel last month during the visit of President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, said in an interview with the Socialist weekly Le Nouvel Observateur that Israel should grant the Palestinian people the same rights Israel has.
The French Jewish elder statesman urged Israel not only to make concessions but to “make them fast.” He said this was necessary to enable Sadat to tell other Arab countries, “I am advancing. I am obtaining something.” He noted that “it might be difficult for Israel to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization but can accept to let the Palestinians freely express their desire. Israelis want to be free citizens, they cannot refuse this to others.”
Sartre, a near recluse who has not appeared or spoken in public for several years, made his appeal to Israel to recognize the “Palestinian nation” on the front page of Le Monde. Sartre, who never uses his academic titles and who turned down the Nobel Prize, signed on appeal “to my Israeli friends” with his title of Honorary Doctor from Hebrew University to emphasize that his words were said on Israel’s behalf. The need for a Palestinian state, he stressed, “is to enable the Palestinians to live” as a people and to determine their own future. Sartre concluded that since Sadat’s visit to Israel “everything has become possible.”
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