Sadat Warns Egypt Will Go to War if Israel Refuses to Withdraw from Occupied Areas

President Anwar Sadat of Egypt said today that he would go to war if Israel refused to withdraw from occupied Arab territories when the Middle East peace conference is resumed in Geneva. He made the threat in the course of a pre-recorded interview broadcast on the ABC-TV “Issues and Answers” program. Sadat said Egypt would return to the Geneva talks once a disengagement agreement has been worked out between Israel and Syria.

“I am not going to discuss withdrawal in Geneva, I’m going to discuss peace,” he said. But, he added, “Let us say that they (the Israelis) will say we shall not withdraw. This will mean war because it means that they did not digest the lesson of the sixth of October,” the Egyptian leader declared. Questioned about Egypt’s newly resumed diplomatic ties with the U.S. and its apparent cooling toward the Soviet Union, Sadat said he wanted to have a “balanced relationship” with the two superpowers but believed that the U.S. has the best chance of achieving a peace settlement in the Middle East at this time.

According to reports from Cairo yesterday, Sadat sent a message to Soviet Communist Party Secretary Leonid I. Brezhnev assuring him that Egypt wanted the Soviet Union to play an active part in the quest for peace in the Middle East.

Sadat’s message was in reply to one he had received from Brezhnev last Wednesday expressing the Soviet Union’s interest in a stable peace in the region and offering an active Soviet role to achieve that end, the reports said. Sadat’s prompt reply to Brezhnev was seen as an indication that he wants to maintain cordial relations with Moscow even though he seems intent on pulling Egypt away from the Soviet orbit, observers said.