Not in the U.S. Interest

Congress is getting ready to vote on a State Department funding bill that has been amended to require closing the Palestine Liberation Organization’s offices in Washington and at the United Nations in New York. The ostensible reason for these actions is that the PLO is affiliated with terrorism, though the PLO offices themselves have never been accused of any criminal activity. Whether Congress suspects the PLO of being any more closely identified with terrorism today than it was 13 years ago, when it was given observer status at the United Nations, or nine years ago, when it opened its Washington information office, isn’t clear. What is clear is that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a lobbying group which enjoys considerable influence in Congress, has made closure of the PLO offices its legislative priority for this year, and has been cheering its achievement.

Organizations are free to lobby for whatever they want, of course, but Congress still has the heavy responsibility to weigh the objectives of such special-interest efforts against other considerations. The solemn imperatives of the law, for one.

The effort to shut down the PLO offices conflicts directly with at least two legal obligations. Trying to put the Washington office out of business is a flagrant violation of First Amendment guarantees to free speech--not just the right of the Americans who staff that office to propagate a point of view, but the right of their fellow Americans to hear what they have to say. The move to shut down the PLO’s U.N. mission is on its part a clear violation of a 40-year-old host-government agreement that the United States signed with the United Nations, spelling out the conditions under which the world organization would function in New York.

Last September, in an effort to forestall congressional action against the PLO’s U.N. office, the State Department reluctantly ordered the PLO’s Washington office to close its doors. But, as Secretary of State George P. Shultz tried to tell Congress at the time, the move was largely meaningless. The State Department acted on the ground that the office was a “foreign mission,” subject to the foreign-policy authority of the President and the secretary of state. But, as Shultz noted, there is nothing to stop the office from being reconstituted as a strictly American entity, identifying itself with the PLO cause and carrying out the same functions as before, but unambiguously protected by constitutional guarantees. Meanwhile, the office remains open as a legal challenge to the department’s order works its way through the courts.

A legal challenge can certainly be expected to follow final approval of the measure calling for the closure of the PLO’s U.N. office. In the meantime, though, the United States--and specifically its Congress--would have been made to appear before all the world not only as mean-spirited and pusillanimous but also as utterly contemptuous of the very respect for the rule of law that its statesmen talk so eloquently about upholding. That’s a heavy price to pay just so that Congress can try to satisfy a special-interest group.