Israel’s Arrest of Arab Tied to Plan for West Bank State

Last week’s controversial, pre-dawn arrest of a prominent Arab activist here was linked to a dramatic plan to issue a “declaration of independence” asserting a Palestinian claim to lands effectively renounced by Jordan’s King Hussein, Arab and Israeli sources revealed here Saturday.

Police confiscated documents related to the plan in the Jerusalem office of Faisal Husseini, a member of one of the area’s oldest and most prominent Arab families and director of the Arab Studies Center, Israel Television confirmed in the lead report of its main evening news program Saturday.

Palestinian sources had told The Times earlier that a “working paper” outlining the bold proposal has been circulating among activists of several different political streams on the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, with hopes of issuing the declaration publicly within a month.

Such a declaration, which is being promoted especially by underground leaders of the eight-month-old anti-Israeli uprising in the occupied territories, would be a bid to win sufficient international recognition for the Palestinians that Israel would have to accept them as an equal partner in peace talks. The proposed declaration is understood to have high-level backing within the Palestine Liberation Organization, although it has not been formally endorsed by that group.

It is not clear whether Israeli police had found an actual copy of the working paper or only related documents during their raid last Sunday on Husseini’s office.

Husseini was put under six months’ administrative detention, and his center was closed for a year on the direct order of Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin. While Husseini is being held without trial and without formal charges, a government statement accused him of “subversive, hostile activities” on behalf of Yasser Arafat’s mainstream Fatah faction of the PLO.

Widely Condemned

The summary arrest, which occurred only four days after Husseini had spoken out publicly in favor of a historic compromise between Israelis and Palestinians, was widely condemned both here and abroad.

The proposed Palestinian declaration of independence, which was first reported in The Times on Friday, also involves an implicit acceptance of Israel’s right to exist in a clear bid to address a perennial Israeli and U.S. concern that the Palestinians’ real goal is an end to the Zionist state.

In the first official Israeli comment on the plan, a spokesman for Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir late Saturday described it as a “crazy dream that will never be fulfilled.”

According to additional details reported by Israel Television, which claimed Saturday to have a copy of at least one version of the plan, the Palestinians would unilaterally declare the West Bank and Gaza Strip to be a Palestinian state--albeit, one under occupation.

Simultaneously, they would name a government that would include Arafat and other top PLO leaders and declare their readiness to negotiate with Israel over boundaries and the future relationship between the Jewish and Palestinian states.

The plan also calls for a national council of West Bank and Gaza Strip residents to act as a form of internal Parliament and for expansion of so-called popular committees to take over certain administrative functions formerly handled by Jordan or Israeli military authorities, Israel Television said.

“The originators of the idea estimate that such a move will push Israel to the wall and that Arafat may manage to quickly gain the recognition of many governments,” Ehud Yaari, state television’s Arab affairs correspondent, said.

Territorial Aims

Palestinian sources told The Times on Saturday that the proposal envisions as a maximum territorial goal the proposed boundaries of the 1947 U.N. partition plan for Palestine. Those borders would include some areas within Israel’s pre-1967 borders, before it captured the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the 1967 Six-Day War.

The policy-making, 450-member Palestine National Council is expected to take up the proposal at an emergency meeting within the next month, probably in Baghdad, Iraq.

Proposals for a unilateral Palestinian declaration of independence and formation of a government in exile are not new. This time, however, they come on the heels of King Hussein’s landmark decision to sever Jordan’s legal and administrative ties to the occupied West Bank lands that it ruled from 1948-67.

In the latest of a series of moves toward that end, Jordan on Saturday announced that it had abolished the Ministry of the Occupied Territories, a Cabinet-level department. The ministry’s functions were shifted to a Department for Palestinian Affairs within the Foreign Ministry. The former Jordanian minister in charge of the West Bank, Marwan Dudin, was given the Labor Ministry portfolio in Hussein’s Cabinet.

Also, Hussein disbanded the Higher Committee for West Bank Affairs, a top-level coordinating group formed in 1980 to set general policy toward the occupied territories.

Earlier, Hussein had canceled a five-year, $1.3-billion development program for the territories and ordered an end to salaries and stipends for about 23,000 West Bank civil servants who had continued, despite the Israeli occupation, to be on the Jordanian payroll.

Power Vacuum

Hussein’s dramatic policy shift, which took many Israelis, as well as Palestinians here, by surprise, has left a vacuum that local Arab activists see as an opportune opening to advance their dream of a Palestinian state.

Jordan’s actions have transformed what was formerly an academic discussion into a practical one, said Sari Nusseibeh, a Bir Zeit University political scientist.

“I think personally that we have a rare opportunity now being presented to us,” Nusseibeh explained in an interview. “We’ve been saying we want to rule ourselves; well, this is the chance for us to do it. . . . I think the best thing from a theoretical point of view would be to have a declaration of independence with the establishment simultaneously of a transitional government which is partly in exile and partly here.”

Nusseibeh described such a declaration as “sort of a middle stage between the uprising/civil disobedience stage and the international conference/negotiating stage.”

The proposed declaration appeared to be the primary topic of conversation in mostly Arab East Jerusalem on Saturday, where all of the major Arabic-language papers displayed articles about it on their front pages.

“This is very, very, very serious,” said one prominent Palestinian, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “And it’s very, very, very dangerous,” both because of the danger of Israeli repression against Palestinians involved in the plan and because of possible internal struggles among various Palestinian groups.

“For us, this is our life and death,” a Palestinian editor said. Referring to the declaration’s implied recognition of Israel, he added, “It’s our last card.”