Meeting Between Left-wing Zionists, PLO Reps Stirs Protest, Defense

The organized Jewish community in Holland has strongly condemned a meeting last week between three leftwing Zionist youths and two visiting representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The contact was publicly denounced by The Netherlands Zionist Organization, the Jewish Students Organization and the Executives of the Ashkenazic, Sephardic and Liberal congregations.

But their protest was excoriated by a Jewish member of the Dutch Parliament, Harry van den Bergh, the Dutch Labor Party’s foreign affairs expert and its international secretary. Van den Bergh, a former member of The Netherlands Zionist Organization, supported the three young men in an article published in the Jewish “New Israelite Weekly.”

He disclosed that he himself had participated in a “frank and sharp discussion meeting” with the two PLO emissaries when they met last week with a delegation of Dutch members of Parliament and journalists. His article was quoted yesterday in the Protestant daily Trouw.

Last Friday, Dov Kalman, 18, a member of Habonim, a Labor Zionist youth group, and Maarten Jan Hijmans and Martin Syes, members of the recently formed Socialist Zionists, met for 90 minutes at The Hague with Ezzedine Kalag and Naim Khadaer, representatives of the PLO’s Paris and Brussels offices, respectively. The meeting was arranged by two Dutch members of the Euro-Arab Parliamentarian Union, Klass de Vries, of the Labor Party, and Johan van Elsen, a former Christian Democrat MP. They were reportedly the initiators.

The three youths said first that they had participated as representatives of their organizations. Later they claimed that they met with the Palestinians as individuals, representing no group. The meeting was widely reported in the Dutch press.