U.S. Satisfied PLO Will Live Up to Promise on Israel, Baker Says

Secretary of State James A. Baker III, brushing aside statements attributed to Palestine Liberation Organization leaders calling for the destruction of Israel, said Thursday that the United States is satisfied the PLO will keep its promise to respect Israel’s right to exist.

Responding to questions from a Senate subcommittee, Baker said that the United States will continue its dialogue with the PLO, despite Israel’s assertion that Chairman Yasser Arafat’s organization has not changed its determination to destroy Israel and create a Palestinian state in its place.

Baker’s remarks underlined continuing friction between the Bush Administration and the Israeli government about Washington’s overture to the PLO. In a Thursday speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir said that Arafat and his aides repeatedly have made clear that the PLO “intended not to coexist with Israel, but to achieve in stages what the Arab states had tried a number of times and failed to achieve all at once: the destruction of Israel.”

At the subcommittee hearing, Sen. Warren Rudman (R-N.H.) read Baker quotes from recent interviews with the PLO’s “foreign minister,” Farouk Kaddoumi, and Arafat’s deputy, Abu Iyad, which implied that the PLO would not be satisfied with a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and would continue to fight for the eventual “liberation” of all of the former British mandate.

Baker said that the quotations, if accurate, are “not helpful. . . . We do look at statements such as that carefully because we want to make certain that our dialogue with the PLO is continued under the ground rules under which it was established, and that is recognition of Israel’s right to exist and a repudiation of violence.

“To date, we are satisfied that the PLO is committed to what it has told us: that is, that it recognizes Israel’s right to exist and has repudiated terrorism in all its forms,” he said.

“I don’t see how you can make that statement,” Rudman said. “They (PLO leaders) say one thing in Arabic and something else in English, as if no one in the world could translate the two.”

The debate over PLO doctrine continued, although indirectly, at the ASNE meeting, where Shamir and PLO official Nabil Shaath were on the program. Shamir, who refused to follow Shaath on the program, spoke first.

Shamir quoted from what he said was an interview that Shaath, the senior adviser to Arafat, gave March 28 to an Arabic language newspaper: “If we will gain independence on part of our land, we will not relinquish our dream of establishing a single, democratic state over all of Palestine.”

But Shaath insisted that the PLO no longer hopes to replace Israel and is prepared to accept a homeland limited to the West Bank and Gaza Strip although this is “a bitter pill for us.”

Shamir said that Israel will never negotiate with the PLO. When a questioner reminded him that peace talks almost always involve parties that have been at war with each other, he said: “You know very well that we prefer always negotiations and we would like always to have negotiations instead of confrontations. But with these people, these people of the PLO, negotiations about peace are useless because you can see from these statements that they are not interested in peace.

“They don’t want peace with us,” he said. “Maybe they want peace, but without us.”

Shamir said that Israel will not go ahead with its plan for West Bank and Gaza Strip elections until the violence of the 16-month-old Palestinian uprising ends. He proposed the elections last week to select Palestinians to negotiate with Israel over conditions for limited self-rule in the occupied territories.

Shaath called Shamir’s proposal for West Bank and Gaza elections “an exhilarating idea.” But he said that Palestinians will not participate unless Israel agrees to international supervision.

Baker said in testimony to the Senate subcommittee that the United States believes Israel should begin at once, before the end of the uprising, to discuss the conditions for the elections with Palestinian leaders.

Baker also implied that there can be no elections without at least the tacit approval of the PLO. He said that U.S.-PLO dialogue “could be usefully utilized” to bring the PLO into the process in the face of Israel’s refusal to negotiate with the organization.

However, in a conciliatory gesture toward Israel, the State Department announced that it has begun a diplomatic effort to prevent the PLO from obtaining membership in the World Health Organization or other U.N.-affiliated agencies.

“The United States is opposed to efforts to grant the PLO rights and privileges exceeding its status as an observer organization within the U.N. system,” the department said in a written statement. “In our view, the self-declared Palestinian ‘state,’ which we do not recognize, does not meet the generally accepted international law criteria for statehood and thus does not qualify for membership in U.N. agencies.”