Rabin Rejects Thatcher’s Call for Arab Local Voting

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher continued her visit to Israel on a fractious note Monday, meeting with Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who rejected her proposal that Israel hold municipal elections in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

While describing their brief meeting as cordial, Rabin, a former army general, remarked of her support for greater local self-government by Palestinians:

“I said that it looks very strange that the first place in the whole Arab world that there will be free elections will be under so-called Israeli military occupation, while in all the Arab countries there is not one elected mayor,” Rabin told reporters after the talks.

The defense minister, who is responsible for the occupied territories, also took issue with Thatcher’s remarks during a state dinner late Sunday that Israel should do more to improve the Palestinians’ living conditions.

“I mentioned that Europe is doing very little, practically nothing on their own, . . . in helping improve the standard of living and the quality of life,” he said.

Municipal elections in 1976 brought to power mayors who backed the Palestine Liberation Organization, which Israel regards as a terrorist organization. Many of those mayors, generally moderates who nonetheless supported the PLO, were deposed five years later by Israel for not cooperating with military authorities.

Trip to Desert

Rabin told Thatcher that Israel does not want to repeat the experience, and he urged Europeans to focus their concern for the Palestinians by doing more to improve health conditions and Arab welfare in the occupied areas.

Thatcher also flew by helicopter Monday to Israel’s southern desert region to lay a wreath at the grave of the first Israeli prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, and to visit an arid-zone research center.

Cheered by schoolchildren waving British flags, she toured the port city of Ashkelon to see a community renewal project largely funded by Jews in her home constituency of Finchley.

Thatcher also met with eight Palestinian leaders from the occupied territories, who gave her a petition that demanded that the PLO be involved in Mideast peacemaking and denounced the U.S. raid on Libya.

British sources said she insisted that the PLO first renounce terrorism and accept U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, which implicitly recognizes Israel’s right to exist within secure boundaries. The meeting took place at the British Consulate in Arab East Jerusalem.

‘Against Terrorism’

“We told her she should make another effort to meet the PLO leadership,” said newspaper editor Hanna Siniora, one of the eight moderate Palestinians. “We told her we share her abhorrence of violence, and our leadership also is against terrorism.”

The petition, shown to reporters, said the PLO “must be addressed in any matter concerning the Palestinians.”

Hard-line Palestinians objected to the talks. The Palestinian daily newspaper Al Shaab, for instance, said the British leader “continues her well-known role of serving the White House and its hostile schemes.”

Thatcher, the first incumbent British prime minister to visit Israel, has made it clear since her arrival Saturday that her journey should not be interpreted as a chilling of British relations with Arab states.

On Sunday, she met with Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres for two hours and discussed ways of reviving stalled Mideast peace negotiations. Afterward, she said she plans to discuss the stalemate with King Hussein of Jordan when he visits London next month.

Thatcher also dined at Jerusalem’s King David Hotel on Monday with freed Soviet dissident Anatoly Shcharansky, who now lives in Israel. He thanked her for campaigning for his freedom and for emigration rights for Soviet Jews.