French, British Embassies Get Aj Congress Petitions Protesting Drift Toward Accommodating the PLO

In petitions deposited with the British and French embassies, the American Jewish Congress called on the governments of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President Giscard d’Estaing” to repudiate the drift toward accommodation of the PLO and the PLO’s purpose of destroying Israel, all too evident in recent statements and actions at the United Nations and elsewhere.”

The petitions, signed by all 300 delegates to the organization’s national biennial convention here, stated in part:

“We… deplore any flirtation with recognition of the PLO or any efforts to supersede or change Resolution 242. These smack of the kind of appeasement which the peoples of England and France must remember only too well from the period of the 1930s. A self-destructive policy of appeasement did not work against Hitler. It will not work against Arafat…. We waited too long in the 1930s to condemn and reject the terrorism of that time. Had we done so, we might have prevented the terrible war which appeasement made inevitable. We must not wait too long in the 1980s.

“We call upon your government to repudiate the drift toward accommodation of the PLO and the PLO’s purpose of destroying Israel, all too evident in recent statements and actions at the United Nations and elsewhere. The mistakes of history are too tragic and too costly to repeat.