Assa Kadmoni, who received Israel’s highest award for bravery for single-handedly holding back hundreds of Egyptians who were crossing the Suez Canal during the Yom Kippur War, has returned the medal to the government in protest against the proposed interim agreement.
In a letter to Premier Yitzhak Rabin, Defense Minister Shimon Peres, and President Ephraim Katzir, Kadmoni said he was returning the decoration “because I follow with increased bewilderment and astonishment the yielding of the government to foreign dictates to withdraw from Sinai without any political achievement in return.
“We did not fight to get more medals and citations in more wars. We were fighting to bring peace nearer. But your planned withdrawal. without anything political in return, perpetuates the war and pushes peace still further away.”
Kadmoni, who was one of the leaders in the protest movement shortly after the Yom Kippur War, charged that the government is giving in to pressure from Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger who “has buried Formosa, South Vietnam, Cambodia and is now beginning to carry out Sadat’s Egyptian policy against Israel.” He declared that “this government has no democratic mandate, nor a moral one, to give up even one kilometer in Sinai without getting some political achievement in exchange.”
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