Seven Jewish peace group joined here last week with some 80 organizations — including Palestinian advocacy groups — to hear speeches praising the Palestinian intifada, criticizing Israeli behavior in the occupied territories and scorning Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s peace initiative.
The symposium was designed for grass-roots organizations to influence United States policy in support of Palestinian rights.
It was the sixth such gathering sponsored by the U.N.’s “Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People,” a group made up of 23 U.N. member countries.
Israel’s acting ambassador to the United Nations, Johanan Bein, has called the symposium part of ongoing “anti-Israel activity” at the U.N.
Speakers at the symposium included Palestinians, Israelis and Americans.
Israeli peace activist Matityahu Peled said Thursday that the 18-month-old intifada represented “legitimate resistance” and was therefore “enjoying moral support all over the world,”
“Israel’s intransigence leads even its strongest supporters to doubt its desire for peace,” said Peled, a former general in the Israel Defense Force and a former member of Knesset in an Arab-Jewish coalition party.
Peled advocates an international peace conference as a means of solving the Arab-Israeli conflict, as did most of the speakers at the symposium.
In his address, Peled called the recent Shamir initiative, which proposes elections in the West Bank and Gaza, “muddle-headed.”
A statement by Yasir Arafat, read by Zehdi Terzi, the PLO’s observer at the United Nations, reiterated the position that elections should occur only after Israeli forces are withdrawn from the occupied territories.
Members of the organizations participating in the symposium also participated in how-to panels on generating popular support for the Palestinian cause.
The Jewish groups that took part in the symposium were American Jewish Alternatives; the International Jewish Peace Union; the Jewish Committee for Israeli-Palestinian Peace; the Jewish Peace Fellowship; Jewish for a Just Peace; New Jewish Agenda; and the World Organization of Jews from Islamic Countries.
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