Palestinians’ Charter Clouds Peace Yet Again

A political storm has erupted here between Israelis and Palestinians, and between the Israeli government and its right flank, over the 3-decade-old Palestinian charter, just days after a Palestinian promise to amend the document was included in the new interim peace accord.

The heavily symbolic issue of the charter seems unlikely, on its own, to scuttle the deal signed at last week’s Wye Plantation summit. But on Tuesday, no one was seeing eye to eye on what had been decided there, any more than there is agreement on the nature of the charter itself.

To Palestinians, the constitution of the Palestine Liberation Organization adopted in 1964 by their parliament-in-exile is an obsolete but historically important reminder of their long struggle for independence and liberation.

To Israelis--even the most left-wing--the same slim document is a clarion call for the destruction of their state and a hateful rejection of its founding ideology.

The emotional subject of the charter, a 33-article paper that many Palestinians have never read, has bedeviled Israeli-Palestinian relations ever since the two sides launched their official peacemaking effort in 1993.

Contributing to the political turmoil, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday postponed a Cabinet session to ratify the Wye accord, citing expected Palestinian delays in providing plans to meet the security aspects of the agreement.

Again, there was disagreement about what actually was negotiated during the Wye talks. A Netanyahu aide said that a “working plan” was supposed to be completed within a week, and that it had become clear that the Palestinians were going to break that deadline. A senior Palestinian official said no such timetable had been set, and indicated that the move could be a stalling tactic.

The Clinton administration, which brokered the negotiations, said it was confident that the dispute would be short-lived and would not imperil the Wye agreement.

Israeli critics of the accord say the charter provision reached at Wye will not bring about the formal revocation of the anti-Israeli clauses that Netanyahu has always demanded. Netanyahu says it will.

Palestinian and Israeli officials also disagree--at least in their public statements--on what, precisely, the charter provision means, and on the appropriate nature of a December gathering of the Palestinian leadership in the Gaza Strip, which President Clinton has promised to attend.

The session promises to be an extraordinary event, with the U.S. president extending implicit recognition to a meeting of hundreds of Palestinian leaders. Those in attendance are likely to include the authors of numerous acts of violence carried out by the PLO.

The meeting will be a “festival,” Nabil Shaath, a Palestinian Cabinet minister who took part in the Wye negotiations, told reporters after returning home to Gaza. “It will be a popular demonstration to show support for the peace process.”

There is no need for a formal session, the Palestinians say; the necessary changes were made at a meeting two years ago.

Israel disagrees and believes that the gathering should be a “sober, serious [parliament] session” to reflect on and renounce the violent history of the PLO, said David Bar-Illan, a senior aide to Netanyahu.

At the heart of the current Israeli debate is a question about the Hebrew translation of a single word in the Wye agreement: whether the accord calls on Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat to “invite” or “summon” members of the 700-member Palestine National Council to the Gaza meeting.

The English text, which is the official version, says that Arafat and other top Palestinian officials will “invite” members of the council, the PLO’s highest body, along with Palestinian Cabinet ministers and many other leaders, to a meeting to “reaffirm their support” for the peace process and for the changes in the charter. Israel says the amendments, announced in April 1996, have never been completed.

A Hebrew summary of the agreement, distributed by Cabinet Secretary Danny Naveh to Israeli Cabinet ministers after the negotiators returned from Maryland, uses the word “lezamen,” which means to summon or convene a meeting.

Netanyahu contends that a 1996 closed-door vote by the council, which was accepted by the United States and by the Labor Party government of former Prime Minister Shimon Peres, did not go far enough. In terms of importance to Netanyahu’s government, the covenant issue became second only to that of security in negotiations with the Palestinians.

The 1996 vote of 504 to 54 was more than the two-thirds of the total council membership required, and it amended the charter by canceling all articles that contradicted the letters of mutual recognition that the PLO and Israel signed in their 1993 peace accord. The specific clauses, such as those that call for the “elimination of Zionism in Palestine” and “armed struggle to liberate Palestine,” were not listed.

In the vote, the council also asked its legal committee to draft a new charter to be presented to the group’s central committee within six months. That has not occurred--partly, Palestinian officials say, because it would be pointless to write another PLO covenant when they hope before long to be able to adopt a constitution for their own independent state, and partly because Arafat considered the council an unpredictable body that might try to undermine his leadership.

That is considered less of a danger with the dilution of the council with the addition of other, more reliable groups, Palestinian analysts say.

In January, in another attempt to resolve the issue and revive the deadlocked peace negotiations, Arafat gave Clinton a letter in which he detailed the 26 clauses covered by the council vote.

“All of the provisions of the covenant which are inconsistent with the PLO commitment to recognize and live in peace side by side with Israel are no longer in effect,” he wrote.

Netanyahu said that still wasn’t enough. He wanted the council to repeal the articles line by line.

At Wye, he compromised, as did the Palestinians, who had said they would not call the council back into session to repeat what it had already done. Under the agreement, the 18-member PLO executive committee and the 120-member central council will reaffirm Arafat’s letter to Clinton, and then various groups, including the 700-member National Council, will be invited to hear Clinton and to reiterate their support for peace and the earlier changes.

But several right-wing Israeli legislators immediately seized on the translation difference and other discrepancies as deliberate attempts by the government to mislead potential opponents of the accord. Michael Kleiner, a Gesher Party legislator and the leader of the rightist Land of Israel Front, told reporters Tuesday that the wording meant the meeting would have no legal standing.

Binyamin “Benny” Begin, a Likud Party member and the son of former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, also insisted that the charter will remain intact and that the festive gathering the Palestinians have in mind will not constitute an official convening of the council.

“Arafat got off the hook at Wye with the consent of the Israeli delegation,” Begin said in a telephone interview. “This charter, which calls for our destruction, is the raison d’etre of the PLO. They will never abolish it.”

But Natan Sharansky, an Israeli Cabinet member and former Soviet refusenik who made an emotional plea to Clinton for the new formula at last week’s summit, said that is not the point. What matters, he argued, is that Arafat, in the most public way possible, address his people in Arabic and tell them that the official Palestinian attitude toward Israel has changed.

The charter “is not important as a juridical issue,” Sharansky said Tuesday in a meeting with a small group of foreign reporters.

“It’s important as [a symbol of] the acceptance of the Palestinian people that they will not destroy the state of Israel. It’s most important, not what Arafat says in English to President Clinton and not what he says in Hebrew to us. It’s what he says in Arabic to every Palestinian.”