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Should Israel Negotiate With the PLO?
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16935 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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4 / 1990 |
2,840 Words |
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Morton A. Kaplan
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Although negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) are a necessary step if peace is to be achieved, such talks should only be approached with caution. It is quite possible that the PLO's goal remains the destruction of Israel and that the organization's apparently reasonable current negotiating position is an evolutionary development designed to achieve the same end by means that arouse less suspicion.
Some suspicions were aroused when shortly after his December 1988 speech recognizing UN Resolution 242 and Israel's right to existence - a position PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat confirmed for French President Francois Mitterrand - Arafat denied the interpretation of his words that he had offered Mitterrand. These suspicions were strengthened when PLO broadcasts in Arabic throughout the Middle East stated that the destruction of Israel was still the PLO objective. Such doubts were further reinforced after reading a speech of Nabeel Shaath, chairman of the Political Committee of the Palestine National Council and Arafat's adviser, which was presented at the sixth United Nations meeting of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in September 1989 and approvingly reprinted in Israel & Palestine Political Report, a publication that is printed in Paris by Israeli émigrés.
Although it is possible that Shaath is a very naïve man, it is perhaps as likely that PLO representatives have learned how to use rhetoric to mislead naïve Westerners. If that is the case, the conflict within the PLO is not between those who want to make peace with Israel and those who want to destroy it, but rather between those who differ over the best means of achieving the destruction of Israel. Portions of the speech that seem to be understanding and conciliatory may, indeed, be deceptive.
Shaath begins by stating that the PLO originally wanted a democratic secular state in all of Palestine - there is no model anywhere in the Arab world for either a genuinely democratic or a genuinely secular state - but now recognizes that the Israelis cannot accept this out of "fears of the Israelis created out of a long history of oppression at the hands of many peoples, but particularly of the Europeans." This fear, he says, was transferred, to the Palestinians and has to be recognized. He does not specifically refer to the persecution of Jews in Arab lands, the Palestinian programs of the 1930s, or the fact that the then Palestinian leader, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin elHusseini, was in Berlin during World War II in support of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. But perhaps it is understandable that he would not want to stress wrongs committed by the Arabs against the Jews.
Shaath further says that even though Palestinians are naturally resentful of the ideology of Zionism, ideological beliefs are not a fit subject for peace negotiations. This seems eminently reasonable. But then comes the joker:
“Any solution of the Palestinian problem leading to real peace must be based on a solution that encompasses the whole five and a half million Palestinians inside and outside Palestine. There are today about 1.8 million Palestinians in the occupied territories and about 750 thousand Palestinians in Israel,…There will be…at least a million Palestinians who choose to go back to the Palestinian state. That should be absolutely non-negotiable…. [But] there will be Palestinians who want to exercise homes in Jaffa and Haifa from
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