Citing an escalation of terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians and an attempt on the Life of Secretary of State George Shultz in Jerusalem last week, Israel accused the Palestine Liberation Organization Tuesday of trying “to murder the idea of peace” in the Middle East.
The accusation was contained in a letter from Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Benjamin Netanyahu, to U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar. It was dated March 7 and circulated Tuesday to the Security Council as a U.N. document for the record.
Netanyahu said that the terrorist hijacking Monday of a bus in the Negev, which resulted in the deaths of three Israelis and the wounding of 10 others, and other recent attacks were part of a PLO campaign “not only to kill Israelis and to annihilate Israel, but to murder the idea of peace itself.”
He noted that all of the attacks were carried out by Al Fatah, the main branch of the PLO headed by Yasir Arafat; “all were directed against civilians in the heart of Israel; all were timed to scuttle progress toward peace negotiations, as is readily apparent by the attempt to murder Secretary Shultz.”
Netanyahu was referring to a booby-trapped car discovered last Friday near Shultz’s hotel in Jerusalem. It was safely dismantled. He also referred in his letter to an attempted car-bomb attack March 3 in the Israeli town of Kfar Saba.
He noted that three PLO terrorists were intercepted two weeks ago on their way to murder civilians in the city of Netanya. A similar gang was waylaid Monday on the way to Malkiya in Galilee, near the Lebanese border, to seize hostages, Netanyahu claimed.
The Israeli envoy recalled in his letter that only last week, addressing the General Assembly, he contrasted the PLO Charter with the United Nations Charter. “Such an organization and such a program has no place in the U.N.,” Netanyahu wrote.
He spoke in the General Assembly last Wednesday just before that body voted over-whelmingly for two resolutions aimed against a U.S. order to close the PLO’s United Nations observer mission in New York.
Netanyahu said at that time that the question is not closure of the PLO mission, but rather “whether the PLO should be in the U.N. in the first place.”
He said the principal idea of the PLO is in sharp contradiction to the basic principles of the U.N. Charter, which calls for nonviolent solutions to all conflicts.
“The PLO is constitutionally incapable of nonviolence and reconciliation,” Netanyahu told the General Assembly.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
