Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and the delegation accompanying him were inadvertently enveloped in a Jewish and Israeli “atmosphere” during their three-day official state visit this week. The delegation stayed in the city’s “Israeli hotel,” the Bristol, where two Israeli Premiers have stayed during their official visits to Paris; Mrs. Jehne Sadat was accompanied on one of her tours by the French government’s only Jewish Minister, Mrs. Simone Veil who is the Minister of Health; and several of the leading officials of some of the French arms manufacturing firms with whom Sadat met are also Jewish.
The Bristol Hotel, small and relatively unknown, situated practically across the street from the Elysee Palace and the Hotel Marigny where Sadat stayed, in the past quartered both David Ben Gurion and Levi Eshkol when they came to meet President Charles de Gaulle. The hotel management told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the Arab suite, which included three Cabinet Ministers, was the same as that occupied by the Israelis. “It is the best for security purposes,” a hotel spokesman said.
During Sadat’s talks with the presidents of “Dassault-Breguet,” “Matra,” and the “SNECMA Works,” which produces jet engines for war planes, French television reported that the Dassault representative who met with Sadat was none other than the company’s owner, Marcel Bloch-Dassault, a French Jew who was a friend of Israel when the Israeli Air Force was one of his main customers for Mirages before the Six-Day War. Other sources told the JTA that Sadat met with Benno Valliere, the company’s managing director, also a Jew, who visited Israel frequently in the past.
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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.
