Jackson meets with Arafat

Associated Press

Transcribed from the clipping

“BEIRUT, Lebanon (AP) — The Rev Jesse Jackson and PLO leader Yasser Arafat met and embraced Saturday and held talks that the U.S. black activist leader said ‘could very well establish a beachhead’ for official U.S.-PLO discussions. ‘It was a very effective and free and serious interchange.

I have reason to believe that we are very close to making some real progress,’ said Jackson. The two men, accompanied by Jackson’s wife, Jacqueline, were scheduled to talk again late Saturday night.

‘For two hours we were grappling with some critical issues, dealing with reassessment, dealing with fundamental issues about the quest for self-determination for the Palestinian people,’ Jackson said after the first meeting at the headquarters of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

He reiterated that the United States must rescind its five-year-old pledge to Israel not to talk with the PLO because, he said, the promise prohibits the United States from resolving the Mideast crisis.

‘Our discussions tonight could very well establish a beachhead for our government to see whether there is a possibility for it to assume its responsibility — which is in fact to open up talks and reconcile America’s several interests in the Middle East,’ Jackson added.

‘We have national interests here, we have moral interests here, we have economic interests here — all three of those interests must converge and not collide.’

Posing for photographers before the meeting began, Arafat told Jackson that Palestinians struggling for a homeland were dealing with the same problems American blacks faced during the civil rights movement in the United States. ‘We are very happy you are here to give us strength and power for our struggle,’ Arafat told Jackson.

Palestinians, Arafat said, ‘suffered from the same attitude, the same circumstances’ as American blacks. But, added Arafat, quoting from the song known as the theme of the U.S. civil rights movement: ‘We shall overcome.’

Jackson, whose Mideast mission went first to Israel and Jordan and goes to Egypt Sunday after a visit here, has repeatedly spoken of the need for Israeli security and Palestinian justice. He has urged the PLO to recognize Israel and vice versa. And he has called on both sides to end the ‘cycle of terror’ in the Mideast.

Earlier in the Rashidiyeh refugee camp outside the southern Lebanese city of Tyre, throngs of Palestinians lifted Jackson onto their shoulders, shouting ‘Welcome brother, welcome brother.’ The crowds shouted ‘Jackson, Arafat, brothers in the struggle for freedom’ as Jackson sat on their shoulders, resting his palms on their heads.

Jackson, head of the Chicago-based PUSH, People United to Save Humanity, promised the refugees he would try to talk the Carter Administration out of a commitment to Israel which keeps U.S. officials from meeting with PLO leaders.

And he pledged to try to convince President Carter to hold a new peace conference that would take into consideration all parties in the Mideast dispute. Jackson met with President Carter Sept. 21 before beginning setting out on his Mideast tour with a 17-member delegation of black and white religious leaders.”

Context added by this archive

Arafat quotes the American civil rights anthem back to an American delegation: Palestinians, he says, ‘suffered from the same attitude, the same circumstances’ as American blacks, and then — We shall overcome. Three papers carried this meeting on 30 September 1979 under three different headlines.

Cite this item

"Jackson meets with Arafat," The Times, 30 September 1979. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1979-013. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1979-013