Britain Says PLO Will Have to Be Involved in Mideast Peace Process

Britain is now giving its full support to the claim of the Palestine Liberation Organization to take part in a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict. This emerged in a speech by Douglas Hurd, the Foreign Office Minister in charge of Middle East questions. He told a luncheon of the Middle East Association last week that while Britain did not regard the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, “no one should doubt that the PLO will have to be involved in the peace process.”

Britain is doing so with the blessing of powerful forces in the ruling Conservative Party, led by former Prime Minister Edward Heath. In a lengthy foreign affairs debate in Parliament last week, Heath insisted that the key to the Middle East was the settlement of the Palestinian problem and he bemoaned the fact that “Europe has done absolutely nothing about it.”

Heath, while expressing “full support” for the Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement, said he regretted that the Middle East negotiations had been removed from the Geneva sphere, because there the Soviet Union was represented. Eventually it would be necessary to return to Geneva and obtain the commitment of the Soviet Union, he said.

Hurd’s statement come little more than a month after he and Sir Ian Gilmour, the Deputy Foreign Minister, had met Farouk Kaddoumi, the PLO’s foreign affairs spokesman, at a reception in the Syrian Embassy in London. That meeting led to protests from Jewish organizations which Hurd brushed aside, saying the meeting had been “the story of a cocktail party.”

In fact, it is symptomatic of the increasingly pro-Arab course which Britain is steering as it tries to woo the whole Moslem world in the aftermath of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan.

OLD PLAN IN NEW GARB

More precise advise to the British government came from Denis Walters, another Conservative MP, long known for his pro-Arab sympathies. He is also a close colleague of Gilmour and his suggestions are unlikely to fall upon deaf ears.

Describing American partisanship for Israel as “wrong” and “dangerous,” Walters said that “something must quickly replace the Camp David initiative quickly when it peters out on 26 May.”

He added that possible European initiatives should include reviving the plan for a period of international control of the West Bank and Gaza, put forward in 1979. The final transfer of power to a “fully independent Palestinian government” could be associated with Jordan and the ending of the period of international trusteeship would be conditional on the new government acceding to the peace settlement entered into by Israel and other Arab States.”

Walters even suggested resuscitating the 30-year-old Palestine Conciliation Commissions consisting of the U.S., France and Turkey.

It remains to be seen how far Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher will allow her government to go along the present pro-PLO course. On the international level, she will be most reluctant to irritate or embarrass President Carter. She is also a tough opponent of terrorism and is sensitive to the views of Jewish voters in her North Finchley, London, constituency.

However, she has delegated a large degree of say over foreign policy to Lord Carrington, the Foreign-Secretary, who is in the forefront of the Foreign Office’s pro-Moslem campaign. In the foreign affairs debate in the Commons, Mrs. Thatcher herself, while playing on the need for rapprochement between the West and Islam, mode no reference to the Arab-Israeli conflict.