PNC Vote Affirms Arafat Leadership Of Diaspora Palestinians

by Richard H. Curtiss

“We will stop claiming all of Palestine if they do, too.”An Nahar (Palestinian) newspaper, East Jerusalem, April 23, 1996.

Increasingly the split among Palestinians over whether to support or reject the Oslo accord signed by Yasser Arafat on Sept. 13, 1993 has seemed to be a battle between the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank, for whom it is bringing liberation from Israeli occupation, and the Palestinians of the 1948 diaspora who charge that it is losing for them the right of return. From this perspective, Arafat’s overwhelming victory in the January 1996 Palestinian elections meant little because only actual residents of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem were eligible to vote.

A more accurate test of Arafat’s support, some exiles said, would take place at the first meeting since 1991 of the Palestine National Council, the parliament-in-exile of all the Palestinians, when it was called upon to vote on revoking clauses in the 32-year-old Palestinian National Covenant calling for the destruction of Israel.

Such a vote, to be held no later than two months after the inauguration of the Palestinian Legislative Council elected last January, was specified in the second Oslo accord signed last Sept. 28 by Arafat and the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Unless the meeting was held, and the vote was favorable, vowed Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, Rabin’s successor, the peace process was over.

For those who saw the entire Oslo process as a trap to scuttle the cause of Palestinian independence and blame the Palestinians themselves for its failure, there was much initial evidence to vindicate their suspicions. The Israelis guaranteed safe passage for all 669 PNC members, not just the 98 newly elected Palestinian legislators who automatically became PNC members as well. But by the time the delegates had assembled in Gaza on April 23 for a two-day meeting, residents of the West Bank and Gaza had been suffering under seven weeks of severe restrictions imposed by Israeli authorities after four suicide bombings in Israel in March, and in Lebanon Palestinian refugee camps and guerrilla headquarters had been attacked as part of Israel’s ongoing “Operation Grapes of Wrath,” which eventually took 162 Lebanese lives.

Nevertheless, hundreds of delegates arrived for the meeting of the PNC, whose members include not only leaders of Yasser Arafat’s mainstream Al Fatah, but also of such rejectionist groups as George Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Nayef Hawatmeh’s Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), Ahmad Jibril’s PFLP-General Command, and Mohamad Abul Abbas’s Palestine Liberation Front.

“I’ve always said you can depend on Arafat.”

Of these rejectionist leaders only Mohamad Abbas came, with the others among the 97 PNC members who stayed away. Another absentee was former PLO “foreign minister” Farouk Kaddoumi, who broke with Arafat over the Oslo accords. Among the arrivals, however, was Leyla Khalid, the daring and glamorous PFLP activist who successfully hijacked a TWA commercial airliner in 1969, and later was imprisoned after a second, failed hijacking until her release in a prisoner exchange.

The delegates assembled in Gaza’s spectacular Showa Cultural Center, built for his city by a member of one of Gaza’s leading families, where they heard Palestinian National Authority President Arafat demand on April 23: “Make up your minds. Are we going to have a Palestinian dream or not? We don’t want to go astray again. We don’t want to begin again from less than zero.”

And, when it came time to vote, they were presented with a resolution that would have done credit to the most astute politician from Israel, which often gets credit for complying with the forms of international agreements without actually making concessions on substance. The resolution, drawn up by Arafat and his staff after the first day of discussion, called for appointment of a seven-member committee to draft changes in the 33-article Palestinian National Covenant, which had been adopted upon the PLO’s founding in 1964 and amended in 1968. The resolution specified that the committee was to change provisions in the charter calling for the destruction of Israel or denying Israel’s right to exist. The resolution followed to the letter Palestinian obligations under the second Oslo accord, but did not spell out the substance of the changes. Instead it called also for a new charter still to come.

The resolution was, therefore, approved by a vote of 504 in favor, 54 against, and 14 abstentions—well over the two-thirds majority needed for adoption.

For and Against

Among those voting for the resolution were Mohamad Abul Abbas and Saleh Ta’ameri, a Fatah member and former guerrilla fighter who was captured by the Israelis in Lebanon in 1982 and subsequently released in a prisoner exchange. He had returned from Washington, DC, where he lived for many years, to Palestine in 1994 and last January ran as an independent and won a seat as a Bethlehem delegate to the Legislative Council. “We cannot go into the 21st century with a charter written in the language and thinking of the ’60s,” Ta’ameri told the Washington Post.

Leyla Khaled abstained. Among those who voted against the resolution was Hanan Ashrawi, considered a moderate’s moderate by most Americans. Maintaining the distance from Arafat she established at the time the first Oslo accord was negotiated behind the backs of the Palestinian delegation to the Washington peace talks of which she was a member, she said that the resolution “will appear to be a succumbing to Israeli dictate.”

Ahmed Tibi, an Israeli Arab who is Arafat’s personal physician and who often acts as his spokesman, put his own support for the resolution more pragmatically: “We are entering an era in which the Palestinians are not providing their [Israeli] counterparts any excuses.”

When he received news of the vote while attending an Israeli Independence Day celebration in Tel Aviv, Israeli Prime Minister Peres hailed it as a breakthrough: “The decision of the Palestinian National Council this evening to cancel the Palestinian Covenant may be the most important ideological change in this century,” he said. “I’ve always said you can depend on Arafat, and here it’s clear that Arafat is fighting terror and changed the covenant just as he promised.”

The PNC vote, which gives a strong boost to Peres’ re-election prospects, was reciprocated within hours. Still on the same day the Palestinians adopted their resolution, a committee from Peres’ Labor party completed drafting the platform upon which the Labor party intends to run in the May 29 election. From that platform all of the former language rejecting statehood for the Palestinians had been removed.

The Oslo accords specify a May 3 meeting of Palestinian and Israel representatives to begin three years of final implementation talks on the hard issues still to come—Jerusalem, water, Palestinian refugees, Israeli settlers, and final borders. Thanks to the PNC vote, the Palestinian representatives now are fully empowered to negotiate a settlement to their half-century-old dispute. They will have to wait until after May 29, however, to learn who their final Israeli counterparts will be, and whether they will be prepared to negotiate at all.