Newspaper
La Capital
Rosario, Santa Fe – Sunday, November 1 of 1992
A YEAR AFTER PEACE NEGOTIATIONS
Intifada will stop with “the liberation of Palestine” (view)
By Jorge Ferrari
A year ago, the world attended the beginning of peace negotiations between Arabs and Israelis. The US president, George Bush; the nearly unremembered president of the former Soviet Union, Mijail Gorbachov; and the Prime Minister of Spain, Felipe Gonzalez, were respectively the primary organizers and hosts of the first deliberations at the Moncloa Palace.
From that moment, there have already been seven meetings, where the interested sides – before finding out concordance points - made accusations against each other about the incidents which took place in the past. In a second publication about this ticklish and millenary problem, LA CAPITAL maintained that you did not commit the skepticism sin when you thought this situation would not be resolved in a short time.
Actually, according to what the protagonists and international politics annalists released, reaching a solution will maybe take more time than many people expected. Maybe, the ending of this so-called biblical conflict is around the street, in a city highly distanced from the great worldwide power centers. This street has not been seen at the Land planisphere yet as a result of the enormous interests which surround its protagonists.
In this first report – the next one consists in interviewing the Israeli Ambassador in our country, Yitzhak Sheffi – La Capital interviews the director of the Palestine Liberation Organization Office (PLO) in the Argentine Republic, Suhail Hani Daher Akel:
What evaluation can you made of this first year of meetings between the parts in conflict?
A year after the opening of the Peace Conference in Madrid and as the seventh round of negotiations is taking place in Washington, there have been few progresses and the Israeli intention of denying our national rights gets worse. The new Rabin’ s Administration – without forgetting he was a general during the Palestine occupation in 1967 and he was an architect of the repression which took place at the beginning of Intifada in 1987 – did not cause expectation and hope, since we considered that he had received a vote for peace by his people. However, up to now, his expansion and occupation policy of the Palestinian territories is similar to the one of the previous administration of Mr. No (Yitzhak Shamir).
According to you, there are no visible progresses in negotiations. Who are the persons that hamper them? In what way are negotiations hampered?
Up to now, Israel is the one which does not allow us to make positive progresses on dialogue. It continues ignoring and not respecting the United Nations resolutions 242, 338 and 194 of 1967, 1973 and 1948, respectively. And it continues ignoring and not respecting the resolution which allowed it to establish its own creation over our land. The disposition 181 of 1947 foresaw two States: this impunity makes it responsible for putting the zone at risk and the present peace process in danger.
How much time can our people live under the military occupation? We live under 2,500 military decrees which practically ban everything. Now at the Israeli concentration camps, there are 75 thousand prisoners subjected to tortures and ill treatment and they are under administrative prison of six renewable months, without sentence and trial. Our people not only are victim of the army, police and intelligence groups “Cereza”, “Sanson” and “Shim Bet”, among others, but also of Jewish settlers who carry war weapons and freely kill, protected for a law recently passed by the Israeli Knesset (national Parliament).
What are the steps Israel should take to initiate the path towards an endless peace?
Our first aspirations do not go beyond a fair and genuine peace for both people and States. That is why we demand to have an autonomy supervised by the international forces. It must allow us to have a legislative assembly consisting of a minimum of 180 members; democratic and free elections; development of our own international relations; control of our land and water in order to converge in the independent Palestine State in an immediate future.
What should Israel specifically do in order to achieve a fair and endless peace with Palestine and Arab countries it possesses frontier conflicts with?
Specifically, if Israel desires to achieve a real and endless peace, it will have to leave its occupant role out and accept the UN resolutions. That is, it will have to withdraw from the Palestinian territory and from the occupied territories in Syria and Lebanon.
Recrudescence of Intifada
It is seen a recrudescence of Intifada (People’ s fight for the liberation of the occupied territories), according to the latest information coming from that zone in Middle East. Is it true? Which are the reasons?
Over 15 Palestinians have been killed and a hundred have been injured since the assumption of the new administration. Unfortunately, Israeli violence is a constant sign in our land. On the other hand, Intifada is in force and, from its beginning, everyday at midday, Palestinian occupied territories are paralyzed by means of a general strike against occupation, while our people withstand the attacks of the Israeli army by means of stones.
There are UNO resolutions such as 23/40 of 1982 which reassure People’ s legitimate in their fight for independence. You, Argentines, did not produce an Intifada – at viceroyalty times – throwing boiling water and stones at the English occupation troops, in the same way that the United States got ride of the English yoke and the Spanish-speaking countries fought for liberating themselves from the Spanish crown?
According to this, I do not see why Palestinians would not have right to fight for liberating themselves from the Zionist colonialism and the Israeli occupation. There are no doubts that our Intifada will not stop until the liberation of Palestine.
What do you think of Juan Pablo II Pope’ s visit to Israel, just as it was recently informed?
With regard to the invitation the Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs made the Pope, the Vatican has not confirmed the acceptation of the invitation. The following day of that interview, the Vatican met with our Palestinian representative, Faisal Al Husseini.
It is necessary to remember that East Jerusalem was occupied and annexed by Israel in 1967, illegally declaring it as capital in 1980. On that year, UNO resolution 478 urged Israel not to modify the status of Jerusalem and it requested member states not to recognize this decision.
Meeting between Arafat and Rabin
Is it possible to carry out a meeting between Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin, just as the maximum leader of the PLO publicly requested it?
Israel cannot continue negating the Palestinian representation or looking for the creation of alternative leaderships which are not authentic to the settlements of our people, while – with fleeting irony - its delegation sits with our delegation consisting of OLP member at the Peace Conference. Inviting Israeli prime minister Rabin one time more, the Palestine State president, engineer Yasser Arafat, is again giving our hands in order to look for ways of peace. Sincerely, we expect that Rabin bravely accept the invitation of our President in order for both countries to have the opportunity of sitting down face to face at the grandee table and dialogue without intermediaries and protection, and thus, putting an end to so many years of suffering and grief of both people. In this manner, a new De Gaulle (heroic general of the French resistance in the Second World War and President of France later) would arise from the figure of the Labour leader Rabin.
Is there consent among the Arab parts with the position of the Tel Aviv government with regard to individually look for a solution to the issue?
Now, there is an Arab common front at the Peace Conference. It urges Israel to withdraw from the Arab occupied territories in Palestine, Syria and Lebanon, as well as, it claims that all parts in conflict sign an endless peace. However, Israel continues looking for separated accords or new Camp David, which did not brought a solution but impaired the situation manifested during the different wars. Israel must not forget that the spinal column of the Israeli Arab conflict is the Palestine issue. An endless peace is not going to be reached, unless justice again reigns in Palestine.
Photo 1- Israeli soldiers prepare their weapons in order to fight Intifada in the Palestinian occupied territories
Photo 2- The director of the PLO Office in Argentine Suhail Hani Daher Akel said that “there have not been so much progresses” in the seven meetings carried out since Madrid.