Hammami and the PLO

Edward Mortimer

He wasn't a maverick. He wasn't an outsider. He had more courage than the rest of us.' That was the tribute paid to Said Hammami last Sunday by Dr Issim Sartawi, the man who already in his lifetime had taken over much of Hammami's role as 'the moderate face of the PLO'. In fact it is arguable that in the last few months Sartawi has shown even greater courage than Hammami. Since 1976 he has been the main figure involved in the PLO's semi-official contacts with Israeli moderates, and last month he was the only figure within the PLO hierarchy to speak up publicly in defence of Sadat's peace initiative.

As Sartawi put it to me on Sunday, 'Said was a dedicated and committed Palestinian patriot and freedom-fighter who had the physical and moral courage to pioneer and preach a course of action long before it

became a reality.' Already in the early

'seventies Hammami was arguing that the PLO should be prepared to accept an inde pendent state in only part of Palestine as part of a general Arab-Israeli settlement, and then carry on its struggle for the reunifi cation of the country by political rather than violent means. He saw this as the logical application of the political programme of a 'democratic state' in which Jews, Christians and Muslims would eventually live as equal citizens — a programme officially adopted by the PLO in 1971. If the Israeli Jews were no longer to be sent back to their countries of origin, but accepted as full citizens of Pales tine, then they had not to be terrorised by violence but won over by political persuasion.

When Hammami first put forward these ideas in Beirut, virtually no Palestinian was prepared to support them, and it was partly to get him out of the way that Arafat sent him to London in 1972. But the situation changed after the 1973 war, when it began to look seriously possible that the great powers would impose a settlement involving Israeli withdrawal from the territories occupied in 1967. Egypt was clearly willing to accept such a settlement and Syria, on past form, would be likely to follow suit after token grumbling. If the PLO stayed out of it the West Bank would be handed back to King Husain, whom after 1970

many Palestinians regarded with greater venom then Israel itself. Moreover, if Egypt

and Syria dropped the PLO, the chances were that Lebanon would also feel strong enough to clamp down on it. Confronted with this scenario many of the PLO leaders, and Arafat in particular, began to see that Hammami's proposed strategy might well represent a lesser evil. Without ever clearly committing himself to it, Arafat encouraged Hammami to start venting his 'personal' views in public, not

ably in two articles in The Times in

November and December 1973, while himself working to adapt the PLO's official phraseology so as to make Hammami's views at least a possible interpretation of it. Thus in June 1974 the Palestine National Council staked the PLO's claim to establish an 'independent national authority' on any liberated Palestinian territory, and in due course the 'national authority' became an 'independent state'. Also, while rejecting the Geneva Conference in its original form based on Resolution 242, the PLO made it clear that this was essentially because the resolution did not mention the Palestinians by name, only as 'the refugee problem'.

Implicitly, and to an increasing extent explicitly, the PLO expressed willingness to negotiate on the basis of an amended resolution recognising Palestinian national rights. In November 1974, after the 'independent national authority' formula had been endorsed by an Arab summit at Rabat, Arafat addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations, sticking to the 'democratic state' programme but describing it as his 'dream', with the clear implication that in the short term it might well be necessary to settle for something less. Soon after this Hammami wrote another paper, again intended as an article for The Times but eventually published in Middle East International and delivered as a paper to a seminar in London in March 1975. This was still officially a personal statement, but spelt out at greater length than before the 'Palestinian Strategy for Peaceful Co-existence'.

Hammami's statements attracted a lot of interest in what is loosely known as the 'peace camp' in Israel — essentially those who, while wishing to preserve Israel as a separate Jewish state, favour withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders and recognition of a Palestinian nationality with the right to a state of its own. Accordingly a number of such moderate Israelis came to London to contact Hammami, who was authorised by the PLO leadership to see them so long as ' they defined themselves as opponents of the existing Israeli government. It was largely as a result of these contacts that some of them formed the 'Israeli Council for an Israeli-Palestinian Peace' in the autumn of 1975.

But when, in 1976, Arafat decided to enter into more formal discussions with this body, he did it not through Hammami but through another, more mobile troubleshooter — Issam Sartawi. Sartawi had no past record as an advocate of the 'miniPalestine' but had been involved in contacts with anti-Zionist Jews in Europe and also in persuading Arab governments to make statements welcoming any Israeli Jews originally from their countries who might wish to return. In the late summer of 1976 Sartawi had the first of a series of meetings with members of the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, in Paris.

It was also Sartawi who went in the autumn of 1976 to the United States with Sabri Jiryis — a former Israeli Arab who shared Hammami's views. It was hoped to install Jiryis as the PLO's first official representative in Washington (a role previously promised to Hammami itself) but this plan went wrong when the Israeli Embassy got wind of it and protested to the State Department. Henry Kissinger, then in his lame duck period as Secretary of State, had apparently been willing to connive at the PLO's move, but lost his nerve and had Jiryis deported, ostensibly because of a technical error in his passport. Hammami, who was clearly piqued at being left out of this episode, subsequently criticised Sartawi and Jiryis for rushing ahead too fast rather than waiting for a new Administration with greater political confidence to take office. Certainly the Carter Administration, to most people's surprise, was more conciliatory towards the Palestinians in its first year in office than any previous US Administration had been. By recognising their need for a homeland, and then in October referring for the first-time to their 'legitimate rights', Carter drew public, if cautious, praise from the PLO. But he insisted on acceptance of Resolution 242 before he would have any direct dealings with the PLO, and this Arafat could not persuade the Palestinian Central Council to accept, partly at least because Syria threw her weight on the other side. This was clearly one of the things that caused Sadat to lose patience with Syria and the PLO and to move ahead in the peace process on his own.

This in turn has rebounded against the moderates in the PLO, including Arafat himself, who had identified themselves too closely with Egyptian policy. Does it mean the PLO as a candidate for inclusion in a peaceful settlement is now finished? Will the Palestinians now have to look for an alternative 'moderate' representation? Sartawi believes not. In his view 'the PLO and the Palestinian people cannot be divided from each other', because the PLO is 'the instrument of Palestinian social institutionalisation'. I heard similar views in less fancy language from moderate Palestinians on the West Bank. They disagreed with some of the PLO leadership's policies,

but did not see that as a reason to disregard the PLO as such — any more than ohe can.

negotiate with an alternative Russian gov ernment because one happens to dislike the present Soviet regime. This argument, they said, was valid even if the PLO leaders were not democratically elected; but certainly no Arab government could afford to cast stones at the PLO on that score.