WORD WIZARDS Moshe Sharon The following article is an edited version of a statement on the alleged changes in the PLO Covenant issued by the BESA Center for Strategic Studies, May 26, 1996. On April 24, 1996, Israel's Independence day, the Palestinian National Council (PNC) assembled to discuss the cancellation of the clauses of the PLO Covenant that call for the destruction of Israel -- at least, that is how the Israeli and foreign media presented it. At the end of the day, the Council adopted a resolution which included two paragraphs: 1) to change the PLO Covenant by amending ("taadil") those articles which contradict the letters exchanged between Israel and the PLO on the 9th and 10th of September, 1993; 2) to order the Legal Committee of the PNC to reformulate the PLO Covenant and to submit this reformulation to the Central Committee of the Council at its first session. This resolution -- which in Israel was hailed as "a historical revolution" -- was dropped from the list of resolutions adopted by the Council which were published in its concluding session. Apparently, the matter did not seem so important in the eyes of the "Palestinians." The truth is that the decision was not "revolutionary," and did not say more than was written in it: the "Palestinians" are word wizards. In Oslo, Washington and Cairo, the PLO had undertaken to cancel the clauses in its Covenant that call for the destruction of Israel, directly or indirectly. The entire Covenant which was adopted in 1964 and amended in Cairo in 1968 calls for the destruction of Israel. But there are in it 17 defining clauses which are the minimum that must be cancelled, and without their complete deletion one cannot consider the Covenant amended. Those clauses could have been listed one by one and declared nullified. But Yasser Arafat decided on a different strategy. He used a fuzzy terminology which left the matter open for discussion and bartering. Thus, the PLO is now free to decide which paragraphs are relevant to the letters exchanged in Oslo. Already spokesmen have said that there is only one such paragraph, or perhaps two. Such a situation serves the "Palestinian" side in the continuing negotiations, because every additional paragraph added to the list for future cancellation will

require an additional Israeli concession. But there is more. The Legal Committee of the Council has been authorized to amend the Covenant. No one knows what the new Covenant will look like -- it is likely to look even uglier. Some defenders of Arafat argue that in passing the two paragraphs concerning "amending" the Covenant on April 24, the PLO kept their undertaking. But were that their intention, the PLO could have adopted an unequivocal resolution stating what their friendly Israeli commentators claim they have said. The reason the Palestinian National Council did not actually adopt such a definite unequivocal resolution is because it has no intention of departing from the central principles that saturate all 33 paragraphs of the PLO Covenant. This can be easily confirmed by looking at the actual resolutions adopted on the 24th of April, the introduction to these resolutions, and Arafat's speech at the opening session of the PNC. In his speech, Arafat talked about the legal and international basis for the demands of the "Palestinians," and said that the final goal was the establishment of the 'State of Palestine' with Jerusalem as its capital. The international and legal basis to which Arafat referred are in the preface to the resolutions of the Council on the Covenant which states its demands rest on "all the U.N. resolutions in connection to Palestine, the refugees and Jerusalem." The first two resolutions mentioned, U.N. resolution 181 (the partition resolution of 1947) and number 194 (the return of refugees to their original places of residence) mean the destruction of Israel. That this was precisely what the Council intended is borne out by the words of the PLO's Dr. Nabil Shaath who said that the "Palestinians" demand the return of the refugees to the land they left in 1948. The fact that this demand appears in the preamble of the PNC's resolution is most significant for understanding the true meaning of the proposed "amendment" of the Covenant. I personally would not have attached much weight to the problems of the Covenant if it had not become such a major issue for Israeli negotiators and for the media. Even if the Covenant were completely cancelled, this would not have much meaning, since the PNC could have reactivated it at the very next session. In the Middle East, it is more common to break agreements than to keep them. The preservation of the PLO Covenant is particularly striking in view of the Oslo agreements, of Israel's retreat, and of the Israeli government's generosity toward the Palestinian Authority. The abrogation of the Covenant should have been a matter of course. Under normal conditions, no negotiations between two sides would have started at all, as long as one of the sides continued to stick to principles that deny the right of the other side to exist. Israel, oddly enough, is willing to pay the PLO a high price for them to say, if only in general terms, that they are willing to express a desire to change the words that are behind their desire to see the end of Israel. This, more or less, is what the Palestinian National Council decided on the 24th of April, 1996. Dr. Moshe Sharon is professor of Islamic Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Outpost               - 4 -               June 1996