A top official of the Palestine Liberation Organization told an audience of Israelis, Palestinians and Americans here Saturday night that the PLO has a “clear commitment” to a two-state solution and to a “final stop to terrorism.”
But he warned Sunday that calling a halt to the Palestinian uprising, part of a reported Bush administration proposal for Palestinian and Israeli moderation, is “impossible.”
“The intifada is the mother of our peace plan and not just a protest movement,” Nabil Shaath, chairman of the political committee of the Palestine National Council, said at the opening of a three-day peace conference at Columbia University.
The conference, featuring PLO officials, dovish Israeli Knesset members and some 40 leading figures from both sides of the “green line” in Israel, was billed as the largest event so far to bring Palestinians and Israelis together to talk peace.
Sponsors of the event included Al-Fajr, the Jerusalem-based Palestinian daily, and New Outlook, a left-wing Israeli monthly.
Columbia University agreed to host the conference, but under extraordinarily tight security that included full body searches of all participants and observers.
Organizers hoped it would be the most visible of a series of such conferences, including recent meetings in Paris, London and The Hague.
FOUR KNESSET MEMBERS
The Israeli participants included four Knesset members, all from small, dovish parties. They were Shulamit Aloni, Ran Cohen and Yossi Sarid of the Citizens Rights Movement, and Yair Tsaban of Mapam, the United Workers Party of Israel.
Palestinian figures included PLO officials and major West Bank personalities. Among the seven PLO officials in attendance were Shaath, a special adviser to PLO leader Yasir Arafat; Afif Safieh, the PLO’s representative to the Netherlands; and Noha Tadros Khalaf, assistant to Farouk Kaddoumi, head of the PLO’s foreign affairs office.
All three were granted visas to attend the conference only last week, along with Faisal al-Husseini, director of the Arab Studies Center in Jerusalem, who was recently released from administrative detention in Israel.
The conference began Saturday night with the boisterous mingling of delegates and audience members, although the Israeli Knesset members were careful to obey Israeli laws forbidding contact between Israeli citizens and PLO members.
Only a Monday session featuring Sarid and Safieh was to feature a Knesset member and PLO official on the same stage.
The carefully screened audience greeted most of the speeches with polite applause, including those that admonished one or the other side in the conflict.
The PLO was exhorted by Israelis and American Jews to make the kind of unequivocal statements that will build trust for their newly moderate positions.
And Israeli leaders and the Bush administration were told to abandon hopes that Palestinians will settle for anything less than a Palestinian state negotiated by the PLO, whom they called their true representative.
LEADERS FROM JEWISH MAINSTREAM
A generally optimistic tone was leavened somewhat by the words of Yehoshafat Harkabi, the one-time hawk who headed military intelligence in Israel. He now argues for a two-state solution.
“Remember,” Harkabi said Saturday night, “the Israeli side here is represented not by mainstream Israelis, but by moderate fringes, while the PLO is represented by its mainstream.”
In order to reach the Israeli mainstream, he told the Palestinians, they must not only make their new positions clear, but explain why they are taking those positions.
“Why do you now accept U.N. Resolution 181” — calling for the creation of separate Jewish and Palestinian states — “when its rejection has been a basic doctrine? Palestinians have to acknowledge the change and explain it.”
Shaath replied by saying the PLO had for too long acted like the mother in the famous King Solomon story, who would rather give up a child than see it split in half.
“Maybe property and land are not like children,” he said. The PLO has come to accept that “we must divide the land so that children can live.”
Among the American Jews addressing the conference were Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg of Dartmouth College and communal leader Esther Leah Ritz. Both declared themselves Jews firmly in both the mainstream and the peace camp.
Ritz, a member of the Jewish Agency Board of Governors and past president of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, said more of the Jewish “silent majority” would join the dovish forces, but they are “concerned that elements in the PLO today see a Palestinian state as a transitional stage to a Greater Palestine.”
No breaches in the conference’s tight security were reported. Fewer than a dozen demonstrators gathered outside the conference hall Sunday, displaying a coffin draped in an Israeli flag to symbolize PLO-sponsored terrorism.
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