What was Egypt’s peace proposal in 1971-1973?
After the War of Attrition was ended by a US-brokered cease-fire agreement, Egypt expressed its willingness “to enter into a peace agreement with Israel” in a February 20, 1971 letter to the UN Jarring Mission, by then almost moribund. But this seeming moderation masked an unchanging Egyptian irredentism and unwillingness to accept a real peace, as shown by the letter’s sweeping reservations and preconditions. In fact, Sadat, very new as Egypt’s leader, was primarily motivated by a need to placate Egyptian opinion. He later recalled:
- I believed that as military action was ruled out at the time, a diplomatic offensive had to be launched: the broad masses wanted to see action being taken at the time.
- Arab policy at this stage has but two objectives. The first, the elimination of the traces of the 1967 aggression through an Israeli withdrawal from all the territories it occupied that year. The second objective is the elimination of the traces of the 1948 aggression, by the means of the elimination of the State of Israel itself. This is, however, as yet an abstract, undefined objective, and some of us have erred in commencing the latter step before the former.
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