Ajcongress Given Signs of Hope After Mideast Meeting with Baker

The 10-point proposal of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to advance Israel’s peace plan is one of the signs of hope that progress is being made in the Middle East, Secretary of State James Baker told leaders of the American Jewish Congress last week.

“This does not mean the United States subscribes to the 10-point program,” Robert Lifton, president of the AJCongress, said after the 30-minute meeting at the State Department on Sept. 13.

“But it does mean that a country like Egypt has accepted as a basic premise the concept of elections.”

The Bush administration has supported the idea of elections, which would allow Palestinians to elect representatives for negotiations with Israel on autonomy in the territories.

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, in proposing the idea to Bush last spring, promised that after a period of autonomy, there will be negotiations for the final status of the territories.

Lifton was accompanied to the meeting by Henry Siegman, executive vice president of the AJCongress; Phil Baum, associate executive vice president, and Mark Pelavin, the organization’s Washington representative.

Also present were John Kelly, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs, and Dennis Ross, the State Department’s director of policy planning.

“We came out of the meeting with a lot more hope than we had when we went in,” Lifton said. “It is very easy to be pessimistic about the situation.”

Lifton said the AJCongress delegation also expressed opposition to granting PLO chief Yasir Arafat a visa to enter the United States to address the upcoming meeting of the U.N. General Assembly in New York.

Arafat should not be “rewarded with a visa” since the PLO had not made any progress in moving forward in the peace process, Lifton said.

But Baker maintained that there had been no application from Arafat for a visa and it was therefore premature to discuss the issue, Lifton said.