A B’nai B’rith official’s 1500-word memorandum on a secret meeting here Nov. 15 between two Palestine Liberation Organization representatives and five Washington Jews reports that the terrorist organization’s present aims envision its take-over of Jordan and inducing the American Jewish community to move the Israeli government into agreeing to Palestinian and Jewish states “in Palestine.”
According to a copy of the memorandum obtained by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency yesterday, it was prepared on the day after the meeting by Herman Edelsberg, recently retired director of B’nai B’rith’s International Council and now a consultant to it, who was one of those present at the meeting. Edelsberg confirmed to JTA that he wrote the paper. Copies are understood to have been provided to the State Department, the Israel Embassy, the American Jewish Committee and top B’nai B’rit officials.
The meeting here and those by seven or eight Jews with the same PLO representatives in New York and by other PLO officials with non-official Israelis in Paris have been criticized as lending both respectability and credibility to the terrorist organization. The critics pointed out that the Israeli government will not deal with the PLO under any circumstances while the U.S. official position is refusal to have “substantive” contacts with it until it agrees to recognize Israel’s existence and abides by UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338.
IDENTIFY THOSE AT MEETING
The Edelgberg memorandum identified the eight present at the Washington meeting as B. Tartt Bell, director of the International Affairs Seminars of the American Friends Service Committee at whose office-residence the meeting was held;Dr. Issa Sartawi and Sabri Jiryis, both of the PLO in Beirut; Arthur Waskow, Institute for Policy Studies; Max Ticktin, of Breira; Olya Margolin, National Council of Jewish Women; David Gorin, American Jewish Congress; and Edelsberg.
The meeting in New York, held in a private home on Nov. 1, is understood to have been sponsored by a peace group of Vietnam War origin. One of those present was Dr. George Gruen, who specializes in Middle East affairs for the American Jewish Committee in New York. He said the “ground rules” for the meeting included a ban on disclosure of the names of those attending. He stressed, as had others in Washington, that he attended not as an official of his organization but as an individual.
“Dr. Sartawi, fashionably dressed and poised, was the obvious leader of the two-man delegation,” the Edelsberg paper said. “He declined to say what his official position is, but he said he had interned in Cleveland and Columbus hospitals in the sixties. The State Department advises he is a member of the Fatah Revolutionary Council. Jiryis, a graduate of Hebrew University and chief of the American Department of the PLO research office in Beirut, participated substantially.”
According to the Edelsberg paper, “Bell had told us that the PLO representatives were in Washington to explore the advisability of opening an office, but Sartawi said vaguely at the end of the conversation that they already had an office–representative?–in Washington and in other cities as well as the office in New York.”
SEEKING SUPPORT FOR PLO EFFORTS
Sartawi said he and Jiryis “had come to the United States to seek support for the PLO’s present peace efforts,” the memorandum continued. “The PLO, he said, accepts ‘the principle of a Jewish State in-Palestine’ alongside a Palestinian state compared of the West Bank, Gaza, and some small prices of land now held by Syria and Egypt.”
When asked why the PLO doesn’t make public this “official policy,” the memorandum said “Sartawi replied that the recognition of Israel was the PLO’s trump card, and it would not give it up without getting something in return. The PLO was prepared to implement this policy at the bargaining table.”
“I said recognition of Israel was not a trump card; it did not even warrant any Israeli concessions,” Edelsberg quoted himself in his memo- randum. “The real PLO trump card would be the conduct of a future Palestinian entity–would it live in peace or become a revanchist force, first moving against Jordan and then against Israel. Sartawi and Jiryis both made no bones about their purpose to take over Jordan, Sartawi interrupting to say ‘of course Jordan.'”
When the conversation centered on the October meeting in Paris, the memorandum noted, Sartawi said “the PLO has no hope that Israeli doves can influence their government; the hawks are in full control. His hope is that the American Jewish community will do it.” A suggestion that a public declaration by the PLO would help Israeli doves in their campaign “did not seem to impress the Palestinians,” Edelsberg observed.
“Sartawi made an extended statement about the PLO’s desire for peace and the urgent need for peace; otherwise there will be another war,” the memorandum reported. It then said Sartawi added that “the next war will see the introduction of weapons that neither side is prepared for–just as in the (1973) October war, Israel was overwhelmed by new weapons the Egyptians had for which Israel had no defense. ‘Some of my friends who are Israeli officers have admitted that to me,’ and the war after that will probably be an atomic war. Israel already has 14 to 16 atomic bombs.”
When Sartawi was interrupted with the question “Are you threatening another war?” the memorandum continued, “Sartawi replied cooly, “I am not threatening anything. I am analyzing the situation.”
Sartawi suggested as the meeting was breaking up that “he had not found the cooperation he had sought in our meeting,” that “he had had a better meeting in New York with a Jewish group. He was sorry if anything he had said had ‘raised blood pressures.'” Edelsberg, concluding his memorandum, stated “I looked around the room and the only one who seemed to be tense was Sartawi.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
