Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasir Arafat has suspended talks with Jordan on the composition of a joint Palestinian-Jordanian delegation to negotiate with Israel, according to reports Thursday from Tunis.
As a result, the Palestinian political community in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip has been unable to decide on a position with respect to their participation in the regional peace conference the United States is trying to arrange.
The PLO’s executive committee was meeting Thursday in Tunis on precisely that issue. Attending the meeting were leaders of the rejectionist camp, which opposes any Palestinian participation in the peace process.
Arafat, who heads Al Fatah, the PLO’s largest and strongest faction, is bitter over what he considers to be a U.S. surrender to Israel’s demands, the reports from Tunis said.
Arafat wants the PLO to choose who will represent the Palestinians in any peace negotiations.
Israel insists on the right to decide who will not represent them.
The Israelis want to exclude residents of East Jerusalem, any Palestinians living outside the West Bank or Gaza Strip and anyone connected with the PLO.
According to Arafat, the Americans have yielded to Israel’s position.
He described Dennis Ross, head of the State Department’s policy planning staff and a close adviser to Secretary of State James Baker, as “more Likudnik than Likud.”
Arafat quoted Philip Wilcox, the U.S. consul in East Jerusalem, as telling Palestinian activist Faisal Husseini last week, “You are defeated. You have lost your strategic depth in Iraq, and therefore your demands should be modest.”
Arafat charged in a Radio Monte Carlo interview aired Wednesday that the U.S. plan “ignores the Palestinian people’s rights and completely leaves out the question of East Jerusalem.”
According to observers here, no authentic Palestinian delegation from the territories will negotiate with the Israelis without the PLO’s blessings.
An idea floated to solve the problem is to have a former resident of East Jerusalem be a part of the Palestinian delegation, someone like the Jordanian minister of justice, Taysir Kan’an, for example.
Palestinian representation will be the focus of talks when Israeli Foreign Minister David Levy visits Cairo next week.
Levy told the semi-official Egyptian daily Al Ahram, in an interview to be published shortly, that he hopes to return to Jerusalem with an invitation in hand for Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to meet Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
The absence of such invitation has rankled Shamir ever since he became prime minister.
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