July 1989, Page 48a

Jews and Israel

By Andrea Barron

Jews and Palestinians Celebrate Friendship on Capitol Hill

The Jewish Committee for Israeli-Palestinian Peace (JCIPP) and Palestinian friends hosted Washington's seventh annual Jewish-Palestinian friendship dinner to promote dialogue and to call for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Over 200 guests-including Palestinian professor Ibrahim AbuLughod and former US ambassador to Tunisia and to Syria Talcott Seelye joined the celebration, which was held May 6 in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill.

Faisal Husseini, a leading Palestinian spokesman from the occupied territories, traveled from Jerusalem to receive JCIPP's 1989 Award of Appreciation. He recently spent 18 months in Israeli administrative detention for speaking out in favor of direct negotiations between Israel and the PLO and for coexistence between Israel and a Palestinian state.

"I came all the way to Washington to accept this award from the Jewish Committee and to bring with me the message of the intifada," he told the audience. "We are struggling to free our people, not to enslave another people. We want to build our own future, not to destroy another state, to build a peaceful future for our grandchildren, not to destroy another community."

Sinai Peter from Yesh Gvul, the organization of Israeli soldiers who refuse to serve in the occupied territories, accepted an Award of Commendation on behalf of his group. Peter was imprisoned last spring after he told his commanding officer he would not carry out his tour of duty in the West Bank city of Jenin. Over 70 Israeli soldiers and officers have been imprisoned for refusing to serve in the West Bank and Gaza.

"This friendship dinner takes place between Yom Hashoa (Holocaust Remembrance Day) and Israeli Independence Day," Peter told the guests. "Forty-one years ago, my people achieved independence. My father, Dani Petersil, was 18 years old when he participated in the March 1948 battle to lift the siege of Jerusalem. In that battle, his arm was hit by an Arab fighter's bullet and was paralyzed. Forty years later, I told my tank unit commander that I would not climb on the military vehicle which was on patrol in the West Bank.

"My father said he would have done the same thing in my place. 'When I served under Yitzhak Rabin in 1948,' he told me, 'I was fighting a fundamentally just war. Yitzhak Rabin was then commander of the just. Forty years have passed and reality has been turned around. The fundamentally just war is being conducted on the other side of the Green Line [the border between Israel and the occupied territories]—this time by Palestinians....

JCIPP also presented an award to the Association of Israeli and Palestinian Physicians, established by more than 150 doctors in March 1988 to protest harassment of Palestinian health workers and cuts in medical care to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. JCIPP member Ellen Siegel, who worked as a nurse in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon during the 1982 Israeli invasion, accepted the award for the association.

Top PLO Official Requests Meetings with Jewish Groups

Salah Khalef, the highest-ranking PLO official after Yasser Arafat, has asked major American Jewish organizations to meet with PLO officials in order to act as a "bridge" between Israel and the PLO.

American Jewish Congress Director Henry Siegman rejected Khalaf's offer, criticizing PLO officials for not "clearly repudiating, in the Arab media as well as in the Western media, statements attributed to them calling for the phased destruction of Israel." Ira Silverman, executive vice president of the American Jewish Committee, responded more positively to Khalaf's offer. "We have no blanket policy against meeting with people associated with the PLO," he said. He made it clear, however, that American Jewish organizations do not and should not represent Israel.

Andrea Barron is a Ph.D. candidate in international relations at the American University in Washington, DC, and is a member of the Jewish Committee for Israeli-Palestinian Peace.