Peacemaker's death:
Hirschfield, Robert
Issam Sartawi, R.I.P. PEACEMAKER'S DEATH DIALOGUE & DETERMINATION The EXTREMISTS in both camps can breathe easily: Dr. Issam Sartawi is no longer in the world to terrorize them with his longing...
...He never knew where or when or under what circumstances he would be met by Abu Nidal's assassins...
...The Fez plan, which was backed by moderates and hard-liners alike, recognizes the right of all states in the region to exist, implicitly including Israel...
...Within the PLO, Sartawi was both insider and outsider...
...It was at the Damascus PNC meeting in 1981 that Sartawi, hoping to address his comrades on the progress of his talks, was initially silenced...
...He wanted the PLO to announce openly and unequivocally that it was willing to recognize the state of Israel...
...His contacts included Uri Avnery and General Matti Peled of the Israeli peace party Sheli, with whom he developed close personal and political ties...
...Sartawi was known to have been planning to excoriate the hard-liners from the podium...
...He died in a hotel lobby in Al-bufeira, Portugal, far from his family, with five bullet holes in his body...
...He was afraid that the hard-liners, whose support he needed (and got), would be provoked into a split with his moderates that would have thrown the meeting into chaos...
...It was only at this year's PNC meeting in Algiers that a decision was reached to pursue contacts with all "democratic and progressive" Israelis, as Sartawi had been urging...
...Yet at the last two PNC meetings he was prevented from speaking...
...Arafat did not allow Sartawi to address the PNC...
...But if Beirut was a victory, then all we need is a series of such victories and we will be holding our next national council meeting in Fiji...
...Exactly a year later, Avnery, Peled, and Yaakov Arnon, also of Sheli, met with Arafat in Tunis just prior to the start of events in Algiers...
...That was not the only time a controversial measure proposed by him was eventually acted upon...
...They are the words of a man to whom the spectacle of revolutionary pretense was more to be feared than the slender thread by which his life was hanging...
...Both times, Arafat refused to accept his resignation...
...A peacemaker's death...
...Both times, he resigned in protest...
...That was as far as the PLO has ever gone towards recognizing Israel...
...The PLO executive seemed to have had second thoughts about the dialogues it had endorsed...
...The PNC resolution endorsing the Fez plan was, despite everything, a partial victory for Sartawi...
...It moved to bar any further talks with all but "anti-Zionist" Israelis, which rendered Sartawi's mission irrelevant...
...The terrorist group known as Abu Nidal has finally made good on its threat to kill its number-one enemy, the man who served as Arafat's representative in Europe and who was his chief contact with the Israeli peace camp...
...But he hoped his policy would enventually win over the Israeli people and, more immediately, gain support for the PLO in Washington...
...He was a member of the PNC (Palestine National Council), the PLO's ruling body...
...Undeterred, he teamed up with General Peled, a left-wing Zionist, together with whom he addressed the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in Geneva...
...If the doctor did not share with his people their poverty, he did share with them their radical insecurity...
...In Algiers, Sartawi had devastating words for those who boasted about the PLO's phantom victory over Israel...
...I bow my head to the courage of the people who fought there...
...He realized of course that such a bold move was more likely to confound Begin than to convert him to the Palestinian cause...
...A fighter's death...
...In an interview with Eric Rouleau in Le Monde in January, 1982, he stated that his dialogue partners should have been invited to Beirut to meet with Arafat...
...In the mid-seventies, Sartawi was authorized by the PLO to hold secret talks with Israeli doves...
...It was a martyr's death surely...
...In so many senses, a Palestinian death...
...ROBERT HIRSCHFIELDRT HIRSCHFIELD...
...He blossomed into a man whose loyalty to the cause of peace was to come into conflict with and even at times eclipse his loyalty to the PLO...
...It was outrageous," he told reporters, "that all of the secretaries general of the different PLO organizations painted a picture of Lebanon as a glowing victory...
...Issam Sartawi is no longer in the world to terrorize them with his longing for peace, with his dialogues of reconciliation, with his insistence that the PLO recognize Israel and that Israel recognize the PLO...
...Lebanon was a disaster...
...In an organization built around the sanctity of armed struggle and the elevation of the fallen into martyrs, the doctor's dedication to making peace with the enemy was seen by many as out-and-out treachery...
...But for Sartawi it was not far enough...
Vol. 110 • May 1983 • No. 9
