Leaders of the pro-Moscow Rakah Communist Party and representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization met in Prague last week. Their meetings, held on Tuesday and Wednesday in the Czechoslovakian capital, were the first official contact between an Israeli political group and the PLO.
Although there have been previous, meetings between Rakah and PLO people in Moscow and New York as well as meetings in Paris last year between PLO representatives and members of a non-Communist leftist Israeli group headed by Gen. (Res.) Matityahu Peled and Arye Eliav, none of these contacts was ever acknowledged by the PLO.
This time, however, the PLO news agency in Beirut announced the meeting. Its communique said “The Prague meeting was arranged in accordance with resolutions of the Palestine National Council,” which endorsed contacts “with democratic and progressive Jewish forces” both inside and outside “the occupied homeland.”
The Rakah participants in the Prague meeting were Dr. Wolf Ehrlich, head of the faction’s internal control committee; Emille Touma and Uzzi Bernstein of Rakah’s political bureau; and Ali Ashour, a member of Rakah’s central committee.
The PLO representatives were Majid Abou Sharar, director of the El Fatah terrorist organization’s revolutionary committee; Issam Abu Latif, of the Democratic Front group’s political bureau; Abdallah Horani, director general of the PLO’s cultural and information division; and Arabbi Awad, a member of the Jordanian Communist Party.
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