Mr. Shamir spoke of the Israeli misgivings regarding the very slow pace of the normalization in the relations between Egypt and Israel, in violation of the spirit of the March 1979 Israel-Egypt peace treaty. Excerpts:
Mr. Shamir: We brought up before the representatives of the Egyptian government in all comprehensiveness, seriousness and gravity our view of all the normalization problems, we emphasized the necessity of changing the present situation, and I must say that the response was positive and understanding. We did not spend time over the reasons for the delays and obstacles in the past, but we spoke and reached conclusions on the way to change them in the nearest future.
Q: What is this way?
A: The way is simply that we brought up the points verbally, we will bring them up tomorrow and the day after in writing and we concluded that during September perhaps also in the beginning of October, there will be meetings of all those committees on the specific areas of normalization, and these committees will decide on the practical steps which will immediately be taken.
Q: What are the immediate topics to be dealt with?
A: Well, the matters are known, all the obstacles to tourism and complete freedom of movement, the obstacles put before Egyptians wanting to visit Israel, the difficulties in tourism, increasing air-travel and tourist ties, the various delays in commercial relations: The public sector in the Egyptian economy, which is 85 percent of the Egyptian economy, has till now been closed to us, despite ratification of the commercial agreement between us and Egypt. So when the Committee for Commercial Affairs meets, this obstacle will be removed. As for cultural relations, the committee will be convened which will have to deal with this and decide on inter-academic relations, on exchange of visits of students, etc ... the change in the general attitude in the media was discussed, it was said and concluded that a significant effort would be made to change the existing situation.
Q: And you believe that this will facilitate implementation? More than once these matters have been discussed and agreed upon.
A: We did what we could.