CARTER: Absolutely. I was at home and they told me at first that Sadat had only been slightly wounded. So I prayed that he would recover. And then they called me back within the hour to say that Sadat had been killed. It was like losing my own brother because Sadat was the closest of all foreign leaders to me. He was the boldest and most courageous and most effective I’ve known.
Obviously he parted ways with a fringe element of fanatics who later assassinated him. But behind the scenes, other Arab leaders gave me every encouragement for the peace treaty and the Camp David accords. And that included Saudi Arabia, Jordan and some others who later, because of a desire for unanimity among the Arab League, boycotted Sadat. I don’t think that he was ahead of the vast majority of his people.
Well, that’s not exactly true. When I was over there in the early ’80s, I went up the Nile and visited the ancient sites. There was a vast array of Israeli tourists. But I don’t think there ever has been a reciprocal visitation among Egyptians into Israel.
Well, the Israelis invaded Lebanon in ‘82, and they stayed there for 18 years. You have to remember that the Camp David accords made some very substantial demands on Israel: that is, Israel agreed to withdraw its political and military forces from the West Bank and Gaza. And it agreed for the Palestinians to have full autonomy, and so forth. Begin also agreed at Camp David to forgo the building of further settlements. Those agreements have obviously not been honored.
Yes. We have a series of unequivocal and undeviating standards based on United Nations Resolution 242, which Begin accepted without question, every word of it: that is, the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force and the pledge to withdraw from occupied territories. That’s still the basis of all the agreements–Camp David, Oslo, the so-called Roadmap.
I wouldn’t say anger. I would say that in the last 30 years or so one of my main commitments in life has been to bring peace to Israel. But I am frustrated when terrorist activities cause a serious setback as they have among the Palestinians, and by Hizbullah and the reluctance of Israel to withdraw from occupied territories. All those things concern me.
