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Should Israel Negotiate With the PLO?
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16935 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1990 |
2,840 Words |
| Author
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Morton A. Kaplan
Editor and Publisher |
Although negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) are a necessary step if peace is to be achieved, such talks should only be approached with caution. It is quite possible that the PLO's goal remains the destruction of Israel and that the organization's apparently reasonable current negotiating position is an evolutionary development designed to achieve the same end by means that arouse less suspicion.
Some suspicions were aroused when shortly after his December 1988 speech recognizing UN Resolution 242 and Israel's right to existence - a position PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat confirmed for French President Francois Mitterrand - Arafat denied the interpretation of his words that he had offered Mitterrand. These suspicions were strengthened when PLO broadcasts in Arabic throughout the Middle East stated that the destruction of Israel was still the PLO objective. Such doubts were further reinforced after reading a speech of Nabeel Shaath, chairman of the Political Committee of the Palestine National Council and Arafat's adviser, which was presented at the sixth United Nations meeting of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in September 1989 and approvingly reprinted in Israel & Palestine Political Report, a publication that is printed in Paris by Israeli émigrés.
Although it is possible that Shaath is a very naïve man, it is perhaps as likely that PLO representatives have learned how to use rhetoric to mislead naïve Westerners. If that is the case, the conflict within the PLO is not between those who want to make peace with Israel and those who want to destroy it, but rather between those who differ over the best means of achieving the destruction of Israel. Portions of the speech that seem to be
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