An Israeli diplomat warned here that to create “a confederate connection between a Palestinian entity and Jordan” would amount to “creating the Lebanon situation on the West Bank.”
Yosef Tekoah, who was Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations from 1968-1975 and is now Chancellor of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba, spoke at the Founders Dinner of the American Associates, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev at the Grand Hyatt hotel Tuesday night. He made no reference however to President Reagan’s September 1, 1982 Middle East initiative which favors a Palestinian entity in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in federation with Jordan.
Tekoah, who also served as Israel’s Ambassador to Brazil and the Soviet Union during his diplomatic career, was sharply criticial of the latest ideas advanced by King Hussein of Jordan and apparently acceptable to the Administration in Washington. This is for a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation to negotiate an Arab-Israeli peace settlement, an approach Hussein said was agreed to by Palestine Liberation Organization chief Yasir Arafat.
WONDERS WHY PLO BEING BOOSTED
But Tekoah said he has “no explanation why King Hussein should feel that he who exiled Yasir Arafat and the PLO 15 years ago in order to insure his own personal future, the future of his regime and his throne, should now become the spokesman for Yasir Arafat and the PLO, to try to build him up once again.”
“No less disconcerting,” he said, is “that our great friends and allies in the United States of America are still probing, as if the problems of the Middle East were not clear after almost 37 years of continuous preoccupation with them. As if it were not clear that to boost the PLO and Yasir Arafat today, when there might once again be a chance to move in the direction of peace between Israel and another neighboring Arab state, is completely wrong.”
He added: “Why should our friends, who for so many years have been working together with us for peace in the Middle East, not understand that to try to receive a Jordanian and Palestinian delegation in which Yasir Arafat’s friends, supporters — even if they do not wear the formal badge of membership in the PLO–would participate, and if what they are demanding today, a confederate connection between a Palestinian entity and Jordan were in fact created, this would mean — let us have no illusions about it — creating the Lebanon situation on the West Bank.”
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