The PLO Goes Nuclear With Bassam Abu Sharif Article

By Richard H. Curtiss

"One of the most important documents in the tormented history of conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has just been published. It is by Yasser Arafat's press spokesman and close adviser, Bassam Abu Sharif.. What it represents ... is the most explicit and articulate endorsement so far by the Palestinian mainstream of a two-state solution: a Palestinian state living in peace alongside Israel. " —Anthony Lewis, New York Times, June 23, 1988.

Mordechai Vanunu, who claimed that Israel may already have as many as 200 nuclear warheads, received remarkably little publicity. When he was lured from England by an American Mossad agent, then seized in Italy and smuggled by sea back for a secret trial in Israel, the US press was reluctant to cover what would have been a sensational story had it involved any other nation.

The reason is that Israeli development of nuclear weapons should trigger an automatic cutoff by the US Congress of more than $3 billion in annual US government military and economic aid to Israel. By seldom, if ever, mentioning Israeli nuclear weapons, pro-Israel publishers and editors hope to avoid embarrassing the US government into enforcing its own laws.

Bassam Abu Sharif's bomb demolishes Israeli claims that the PLO will not accept resolution 242's land-for-peace formula, mutual recognition, and direct talks between the PLO and Israel.

US media treatment of Bassam Abu Sharif's article is similar to the hands off treatment accorded Israel's nuclear program. In its own way, the Palestine Liberation Organization has gone nuclear with its spokesman's carefully crafted refutation of virtually every claim upon which America's Israel lobby bases its campaign for continued US support of the Jewish state. Those claims begin and end with the statement that since the Palestine National Charter calls for dismantling Israel, the PLO will settle for nothing less.

Bassam Abu Sharif's bomb demolishes Israeli claims that the PLO will not accept UN Security Council Resolution 242's land-for-peace formula, mutual recognition, and direct talks between the PLO and Israel, or accept international supervisory forces to secure an Israeli-Palestinian peace. For those Palestinians who understand that only the continuance of the US economic and military lifeline makes continued Israeli intransigence possible, the Bassam Abu Sharif statement, therefore, is the ultimate weapon.

The battle to keep the statement out of mainstream US newspapers has been almost as dramatic as the battle to get Mordechai Vanunu back to Israel. It illustrates that most US editors recognized instantly how dangerous the PLO spokesman's article is to Israel, and were prepared to use extraordinary means to keep their readers from learning about its contents.

It appears that Bassam Abu Sharif first wrote his article in response to an invitation by Washington Post Managing Editor Benjamin Bradlee to submit an article for the Post's editorial page. What the Post received clearly shocked the editorial page staff. It confirmed the moderation that Palestinian-American intellectuals in tune with the PLO and teaching at US universities have been trying to explain to Americans ever since Yasser Arafat's Cairo declaration in late 1985. The Abu Sharif article was not printed in the Washington Post.

Statement Is Initially [pored by US Press]

The article instead was published in London by the Arab Mirror, which has virtually no circulation in the US. Fortunately, it also was put into a PLO press kit provided to all of the English-speaking journalists attending the Algiers summit conference. One correspondent, Geraldine Brooks of the Wall Street Journal, filed on June 8 from Algiers a short but accurate account of the article which was printed on page one. The next day the Christian Science Monitor referred cryptically to the extreme moderation voiced by the PLO at Algiers in one line of an editorial about Secretary of State George Shultz's unsuccessful peace plan.

Then silence. However, the US Embassy in Algiers, which also noted the significance of the statement, had sent the entire text by cable to the State Department in Washington. Elated Arabists at State, who have had nearly eight ' lean years throughout the Reagan administration saw the statement as earth-shaking in terms of US public opinion, and said so privately to journalists. The official State Department spokesman's office insisted, however, that the statement contained "nothing new." Copies of the unclassified State Department cable containing the full text nevertheless found their way around Washington.

The story next appeared on page one of the June 14 Washington Times, owned by the Rev. Sung Myung Moon's Unification Church and edited by Arnaud De Borcligrave, who is almost pathologically pro-Zionist. Happily, the desire of the financially strapped Washington Times to whip up a circulation-building feud with the Washington Post outweighed De Borchgrave's desire to protect Israel from embarrassment.

"This is our war of independence. Yet at the same time we are extending the olive branch."

James Dorsey, a Washington Times writer and former Middle East correspondent for United Press, not only broke the story about the Bassani Abu Sharif article, but also revealed that it had been requested by Bradlee and then shelved by Steven Rosenfeld, the Post's deputy editorial page editor.

Up to this time there had been not a line on the subject in either of America's "newspapers of record," the New York Times and Washington Post. Finally, on June 23, 14 days after it was covered in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post ran an Associated Press story from Cyprus. The report was not based upon the existence of Abu Sharif's remarkable statement, but instead upon the fact that the Abu Musa and four other Palestinian fringe groups had rejected it. The story went so far as to attribute current fighting in Beirut between Arafat loyalists and Syrian-directed Palestinians to differences over the statement, minimizing the fact that they have been fighting almost steadily since April and off and on ever since Syria used Abu Musa in 1983 to front for its own military drive to oust the PLO from Lebanon. The Post article was followed the next day by a critical editorial column by Rosenfeld dwelling upon rejectionist statements rather than the contents of the Abu Sharif article.

A Rare Example of Balanced Coverage

The New York Times coverage at least struck a balance, with a news report on rejectionist criticism of the report near the front of the newspaper, and a summary of the PLO spokesman's major points on the editorial page. The Times also printed a laudatory article, from which the quotation at the top of this article is drawn, by syndicated columnist Anthony Lewis. Lewis, who is Jewish, is the only consistent critic of Israel whose writing appears regularly in the Jewish-owned New York Times.

Although the excerpts in the New York Times were selected to cover Abu Sharif's main points, at this writing the full text of the Bassain Abu Sharif article apparently is available to American readers only in the July issue of the monthly Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

The article echoes what Palestinian Americans like Professor Edward Said of Columbia University, Hisham Sharabi of Georgetown University, and Walid Khalidi of Harvard University have been trying to explain to Americans on television, radio, and through personal appearances over several years.

Telling It to American Audiences

PLO supporters from the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem have been making the same points to American audiences. Describing the current uprising to a National Association of Arab Americans (NAAA) audience in Washington May 23, Al Fajr Editor Hanna Seniora explained: "This is our war of independence. We are telling the world that we want freedom. Yet at the same time we are extending the olive branch...Our goal is implementation of the rights of all of the people of the area."

The Palestinians Have Decided

Former Labor Coalition Knesset member Mohammad Darawshe, after telling the same audience that "the Palestinian people have decided" that the PLO will represent them, went on to affirm that "Israel has the right to exist and the Palestinians have the right to exist and both peoples have the right to fulfill their national aspirations."

It was the knowledge that PLO leaders in statements from Tunis, Baghdad, and Algiers; West Bank leaders in statements made both inside the occupied territories and out; and PLO-sympathizing American academics have all made these individual points that prompted the first State Department "official" reaction that the Bassam Abu Sharif article contained nothing new.

When that wore thin, State Department spokeswoman Phyllis Oakley said on June 22, "We note the constructive tone which the article conveys in general, as well as some positive points ... The question is, is that statement authoritative?"

In posing the question she ignored the fact that the PLO spokesman had explicitly endorsed a two-state solution and had explicitly accepted resolutions 242 and 338, explaining that the PLO's only reservation is that the two resolutions do not provide for Palestinian self-determination. Further, Abu Sharif has challenged Israel and the United States, if they question the PLO's mandate to speak for the Palestinians, to hold an internationally supervised election in Israeli-occupied areas to determine who should represent the Palestinians. Further, when asked in what capacity he issued the article, Abu Sharif said he did so as the official spokesman for the PLO.

It has the power to blow away the American lifeline to an intransigent Israel.

Abu Sharif, educated at the American University of Beirut, originally came to Arafat from George Habash's left-leaning Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, one of the groups which has rejected the Abu Sharif article, rather than up through the ranks of Arafat's own Al Fatah organization. Abu Sharif suffered grievous facial injuries some time back from the explosion of a letter bomb, presumably sent to him by Mossad. He is traveling, at this writing, with Yasser Arafat as Arafat's official spokesman.

This boldest statement ever made by the PLO has reduced George Shultz's State Department to contradicting itself, arguing first that the statement contained nothing that hadn't previously been said by Palestinian leaders, and then arguing that the statement may not actually be supported by Palestinian leaders. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir bluntly dismissed it at "nothing new." It reduced pro-Israel publishers in the US to a vain attempt at censorship to keep their readers from becoming aware of the statement's bombshell contents.

It's the same media treatment accorded Israel's nuclear bomb, which has the power to deter an Arab attack against Israel, but which cannot be used offensively. This Palestinian nuclear bomb, on the other hand, is an offensive weapon in the world of ideas. Properly nurtured by the Palestinian leadership, and defended from its rejectionist detractors, it has the power to blow away the American lifeline to an intransigent Israel.