Word: arish
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Egyptian President Anwar Sadat got a hero's welcome as he paid his first visit next day to Sinai's "caravan city." After flying to El Arish, he prayed in the sands of the Sinai and placed a wreath on the war tomb in honor of Egyptian soldiers who died in action. Then in a moving ceremony, Sadat kissed a huge Egyptian flag and raised it over El Arish. Shops had been painted, and the fountain in the town square, filled with trash since the start of the Israeli occupation in 1967, had been cleaned and filled with...
...ceremonies at El Arish marked the beginning of an extraordinarily hectic weekend in Middle East peace keeping. With Secretary of State Cyrus Vance participating, talks between Israeli and Egyptian negotiators on autonomy for the West Bank and Gaza began in the desert town of Beersheba, in Israel's Negev area. The opening discussions were slightly clouded by a last-minute dispute between Egypt and Israel over whether the two nations would open their borders immediately, as Israeli Premier Menachem Begin says Sadat promised earlier this spring, or at the end of nine months, as called for by the treaty...
Egyptian and Israeli officers worked amicably together in negotiating the fine points of the transfer of authority over El Arish. "It's easy for each side to get along with each other," said Egyptian Brigadier General Hassan Abdel Fatah. "Some of the Israelis are from Arab countries, and they speak fluent Arabic." On the streets of the city, soldiers of the once rival armies exchanged currency as souvenirs...
...Israeli soldiers, in fact, had far more trouble dealing with their fellow citizens than with the Egyptians. Farmers from the settlement of Neot Sinai, two miles east of El Arish, refused last week to abandon a ten-acre vegetable patch that was part of the land being returned to Egypt. Several hundred militant Israeli nationalists drove into the Sinai to support the angry settlers. When Defense Minister Ezer Weizman visited the community in an effort to persuade the farmers to leave, he was spat upon and called a "traitor" and an "Egyptian agent." After Cairo turned down a last-minute...
Quite clearly, the autonomy negotiations will be long and difficult. For the moment, though, both sides can take legitimate pride that the successful transfer of authority over El Arish was proof the treaty was working. The events, of course, had a special meaning for the people of El Arish, whom a former British governor of Sinai, C.S. Jarvis, once described as "a steady, virile race with a marked propensity for hard work but an extraordinarily crooked, suspicious outlook on life generally." One departing Israeli official noted sarcastically that the biggest Egyptian flags in El Arish last week were flying from...