Arafat Orders Aide to Boycott Signing of Israel-Jordan Pact

Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat on Saturday ordered his foreign affairs chief to boycott the signing ceremony for the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty, a senior official said, while in Tel Aviv, about 5,000 Israeli opponents of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s peace policies rallied at the site of a bus bombing that killed 22 people Wednesday.

At the weekly Cabinet meeting of his government in the Gaza Strip, Arafat ordered Farouk Kaddoumi, the PLO’s foreign affairs chief, to turn down an invitation to the signing ceremony, a Palestinian official said on condition of anonymity. Arafat himself has not been invited to the ceremony.

Arafat has called the treaty with Jordan an “outrageous infringement” of the agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. The pact calls for negotiations on the final status of East Jerusalem, which the Palestinians want as their future capital. But the treaty with Jordan assures a special role for Jordan’s King Hussein as guardian of the Muslim holy places there.

Jordan and Israel are scheduled to sign the treaty Wednesday in a ceremony to be attended by President Clinton.

In his annual speech from the throne Saturday, Hussein told the Jordanian Parliament that Jordan “will never relinquish our religious responsibilities toward the holy sites under all circumstances.”

Israel, which captured the eastern half of Jerusalem from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East War, claims the city as its eternal, indivisible capital, but Jordan has continued to maintain the Islamic shrines.

About a dozen Palestinians gathered in East Jerusalem shouting, “No to King Hussein” and burning pictures of the Jordanian monarch.

The crowd at the Saturday night Tel Aviv demonstration, which was organized by right-wing groups, filled Dizengoff Street shouting “Death to the Arabs,” and memorial candles covered the pavement at the spot where 22 people died in the suicide bombing claimed by the Islamic extremist group Hamas.

Demonstrators, some holding signs saying, “Rabin is a traitor,” stood for a minute of silence and then heard opposition politicians call on the government to halt talks with Arafat aimed at expanding Palestinian autonomy.

A day earlier, angry Israelis tried to break up a demonstration on Dizengoff, Tel Aviv’s main commercial thoroughfare, by left-wing groups calling for a continuation of peace efforts with the Palestinians.