Land for words

Regarding “Gov’t accuses PA of torpedoing peace after vote to not recognize Israel” (JPost.com, October 30), most people do not realize that the PLO never ratified the Oslo Accords when the PLO was supposed to have recognized Israel in the first place.

Pinchas Inbari, one of the few Israeli correspondents covering the PLO in Tunis at the time, writing for the left-wing Hebrew newspaper Al HaMishmar, broke the story that Arafat announced in Tunis that he could not get a quorum of the Executive Council of the PLO to ratify the Declaration of Principles of the Oslo Accords.

Al HaMishmar ran a headline story on October 7, 1993 that confirmed that the PLO did not ratify the peace accord that Arafat and Abbas had signed together with Peres and Rabin only a few weeks before, with US and Russia as co-signers. The rest of the Israeli media, however, did not report that the PLO never ratified the accord.

Why is this important? According to Israeli law, since the PLO never ratified the Oslo Accords or renounced terrorism, the PLO and Fatah were not stricken from Israeli law books as “terrorist entities,” a status that the PLO received on March 1, 1980. If you check the law books today, you will find that the PLO is still defined in Israeli law as a terrorist entity, because the PLO never ratified the Oslo Accords.

The same goes for American law. In March 2002, the US government designated the Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades of the Fatah as a terrorist organization. That terrorist designation was never changed. Under US law, any government that aids and abets an organization defined as a terrorist organization will forfeit US foreign aid assistance. DAVID BEDEIN Director, Israel Resource News Agency

The decision of PLO Central Council to suspend its recognition of the state of Israel underscores the recklessness of giving away real assets, such as land, for agreements and promises that can be revoked at any time by the other side.

Egyptian president Anwar Sadat said it best. Incredulous that Israel was willing to give up the entire Sinai – three times the size of Israel, including an oil field with vast untapped reserves – Sadat is reported to have gleefully remarked, “Poor Menachem. I got back the Sinai and the Alma oil fields, and what has Menachem got? A piece of paper.” FAY SULLIVAN

Beit Shemesh