Israeli Ambassador Yosef Tekoah, in a letter yesterday to Secretary General Kurt Waldheim, repudiated an Egyptian charge that Israel had, in Jan., deported more than 10,000 Sinai inhabitants “and forcibly transferred them from their homes and villages to other areas situated within a triangle near the Gaza Strip.”
Tekoah called the charge “a virtual admission of the pitiful coarseness of Egyptian propaganda,” which “either completely ignores or distorts the statements of fact.” He noted in this connection that Egyptian Ambassador A. Esmat Abdel Meguid, in a March 29 letter to Waldheim, cited as evidence a press report “on the evacuation of a number of Bedouin from a different area–a closed zone in the Gaza-Raffah Strip–for reasons of security.”
Tekoah also scored Dr. Meguid for advising Waldheim that Israeli authorities had destroyed “44 houses in one section of a town.” Tekoah wrote that “in the passion of falsification the letter forgets that this Egyptian allegation refers to 44 houses in all of Sinai,” noting that three paragraphs earlier Dr. Meguid indicated “44 houses in Sinai, nine of which were situated in the main square of the town of El Arish.”
In his letter to Waldheim, Dr. Meguid also charged that “the Israeli authorities have, in fact, reserted to…a campaign of distortions to cover up their inhuman policies and practices, which constitute serious violations of the basic rights of the inhabitants of the occupied Arab territories.”
Dr. Meguid also accused Israel of “refusing” to abide by the Geneva Conventions and United Nations resolutions; trying to cover up the “destruction” of the Palestinians with monetary compensation; seeking to “repress” the “legitimate struggle of the Arab people”; “breaching” law and morality and “threatening” international peace and security.
Egyptian Whitewashes Terrorism
In rejecting the Egyptian charges as “unfounded,” Tekoah denounced what he called Dr. Meguid’s whitewashing of terrorism as “resistance of the people under foreign occupation,” an attempt Tekoah called “arrogant.”
It is, he wrote, “an affront to (anti-Nazi) freedom fighters that Arab leaders and representatives, among them Egyptians and others who had sympathized and even collaborated with Nazi Germany in World War II, now harboring notorious Nazi criminals on the territory of their states and still supporting the Nazi attitude toward the Jewish people by such acts as the printing and dissemination of Hitler’s racist ‘Mein Kampf,” should compare killers of women and little children with the underground movement that had resisted and fought the Nazi war machinery.
Tekoah also referred to the “reign of terror and oppression” in Gaza Strip during the 19-year Egyptian occupation, citing in comparison a recent comment by the renowned Egyptian writer Tewfik al-Hakim that Israel’s presence in the Sinai was less objectionable than the earlier British rule. The Israeli concluded: “Boisterous and perverted propaganda has never been a sign of a responsible and constructive attitude. The Egyptian government would be well advised to abandon it in its pronouncements at home and abroad.”
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