U.S. Ought to Criticize Israel, Palestinian Says

A Palestinian Cabinet minister close to President Yasser Arafat urged the United States on Saturday to speak out against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-line policies.

Meanwhile, in a sign of growing Palestinian unease, the militant Islamic group Hamas called for a new anti-Israeli uprising in Jerusalem and the West Bank town of Hebron.

“We don’t hear the U.S. administration talking about the principle of land for peace or the illegitimacy of the Jewish settlements in [the West Bank and Gaza Strip],” Local Government Minister Saeb Erekat said.

Erekat, a senior advisor to Arafat, lashed out at what he called Washington’s “blind bias” toward Israel, three days before Netanyahu’s inaugural visit to the United States.

Netanyahu, who won Israel’s May 29 election on a platform of peace with security, opposes relinquishing land occupied in the 1967 Middle East War and has pledged to strengthen settlements.

Urging Washington to press for a resumption of Arab-Israeli negotiations, Erekat said: “This is the role of a sponsor of peace.”

Netanyahu has promised that his right-wing government will renew peace negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organization but has said he would never agree to the creation of an independent Palestinian state--the goal Arafat has set for so-called “final status” talks.

In a leaflet faxed to an international news agency, Hamas--an opponent of the Israel-PLO peace deals--said it was extending its hand to Arafat’s Fatah faction “to renew the intifada in Hebron and Jerusalem.”

The statement backed Fatah activists in Hebron who have called for resumption of the uprising against Israeli occupation in the town from which Israeli soldiers were supposed to have partially withdrawn in March. The intifada, which began in 1987, largely ended with the signing of the Israel-PLO peace deal in 1993.