If a provision in the Palestine National Council’s 25-year-old charter calling for the destruction of Israel is truly “null and void,” then the PNC should prove it by removing the clause from the document, both the State Department and the American Jewish leadership said Wednesday.
“Such a statement, if backed up in word and deeds, is step in the right direction,” State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler said in response to comments made in Paris on Tuesday by Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasir Arafat.
“We see this as a reinforcement of his prior statement acknowledging Israel’s right to exist.”
Tutwiler added that “a decision by the Palestine National Council formally amending or abrogating the charter would be the kind of action we would certainly applaud.”
In New York, meanwhile, the chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations criticized Arafat’s statement as “meaningless.”
Seymour Reich said the covenant remains in force and can only be repealed by a vote of the PNC. He met Wednesday with France’s consul general in New York to express the conference’s “bitter disappointment” with the meeting between Mitterrand and Arafat.
“Last December in Algiers, the council had an opportunity to change the covenant, but refused to do so,” Reich said he told Consul General Benoit d’Aboville.
“It is clear that Arafat’s statement was designed to give President Mitterrand some comfort for embarrassing himself and France by receiving with honor the world’s ranking terrorist.”
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