Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations expressed confidence this week that world condemnation of Israel’s expulsion of more than 400 Palestinians to Lebanon would soon blow over.
Once the Middle East peace talks resume, the deportations will be regarded as “marginal,” Ambassador Gad Yaacobi told B’nai B’rith leaders here Monday.
Speaking to the organization’s international board of governors, Yaacobi called the deportations a “short-term issue,” and said he was “hoping for the best” concerning Israel’s relations with the incoming Clinton administration.
The envoy said he did not see “a real change in U.S. policy” toward Israel with the incoming administration. He said he planned to meet later Monday with incoming U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine Albright, and expressed hope that his relations with her would be as good as those with the current envoy, Edward Perkins, and his predecessor, Thomas Pickering.
Yaacobi said the deportation issue should be viewed in the context of the rise of Islamic fundamentalist movements like Hamas.
These fundamentalist groups have supported terrorist attacks in the Middle East and are “semi-Nazi” in that they not only reject the State of Israel, but “see every Jew as a personal enemy,” he said.
Yaacobi said he believed all the parties in the peace process, including the Palestinians, would stay in the negotiations.
PLO SAYS TALKS ARE SUSPENDED
But in Cairo, the Palestine Liberation Organization said Monday that it had suspended Palestinian participation in any talks with Israel until the deportees were returned.
The announcement came at an emergency meeting of Arab foreign ministers in the Egyptian capital.
On the other hand, the Syrian foreign minister was quoted as telling his Arab colleagues that the Israeli deportations should not impede the bilateral peace talks Israel has been holding with Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and the Palestinians.
“If we have to suspend the negotiations, let us start by suspending the multilateral negotiations, in which a number of Arab nations are taking part,” Farouk al-Sharaa was quoted as saying.
“This would definitely be a bigger blow to Israel than suspending the bilateral talks,” he added.
Sharaa pointed out that boycotting the bilateral talks would frustrate the Arabs’ goal of getting Israel to give up land it captured in the Six-Day War of 1967.
But here in Washington, Ambassador Yaacobi said that as far as the Gaza Strip was concerned, it would not so much be giving up as “getting rid of.”
Peace, he said, is “not just about security.” If peace were achieved, he said, Israel would have a “better quality of life,” and higher levels of economic growth.
The ambassador said that Israel now has relations with 119 of the 179 U.N. member states, and once the two halves of the former Czechoslovakia are seated, the total will be 120 of 180, or two-thirds.
Instead of defensively viewing the United Nations as a “dangerous place,” he said, Israel now sees the world body as an opportunity to create closer relations with other countries.
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