U.S.-PLO talks encouraging terrorism, Israeli says

The Associated Press, Jerusalem

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“JERUSALEM — Israel’s deputy foreign minister Thursday sought to tie the PLO to the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 and blamed the U.S. decision to talk to the guerrilla organization for encouraging international terrorism.

The statement by Binyamin Netanyahu, a leading member of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s Likud bloc, follows repeated Israeli criticism of the United States for including Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization in the Middle East peace process.

Talks ‘sending message to PLO’. ‘By having these kinds of talks . . . you are sending a message, a very clear message, that terrorism pays,’ Netanyahu said. ‘The American talks with the PLO have seriously weakenened the American effort against terrorism.’ He said suspicion in the Dec.

21 Pan Am bombing focused on groups experienced with the type of explosives used in the blast, including the PLO and Syria. However, he said he had no firm information on who was to blame for the bombing, and an Israeli security expert said Arafat’s mainstream PLO faction was ‘not a likely candidate.’

Netanyahu’s comments echoed Shamir’s, who suggested Tuesday that Washington’s decision was encouraging renewed infiltration attacks along the Israeli border. Shamir said the American move ‘encouraged the tendency of violent acts against Israel.’

Israel hopes talks canceled. A government source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said this week that a major Israeli foreign policy goal would be to reverse Washington’s decision to talk to the PLO. On Thursday, Netanyahu called the PLO ‘the foremost practitioner of aviation terrorism.’

It was responsible for the first airliner hijacking, the first destruction of a passenger plane in flight and the first gun and grenade attack on passengers, he said. ‘I say the PLO, I mean Fatah, I mean Arafat,’ he said, referring to the PLO chief’s mainstream guerrilla group…

Expert doubts Arafat involved. Ariel Merari, an Israeli terrorism expert, told reporters at the news conference that he doubted the mainstream PLO would have carried out the attack when Arafat is making statements about peace with Israel. ‘I don’t think the present political situation is such that the PLO would sponsor such an attack,’ he said.

‘My guess is at least for a while they’ll refrain from international terrorism because it is politically counterproductive.’ Merari, director of a project on terrorism at Tel Aviv University, said earlier he believed the Pan Am attackers probably were radical PLO factions opposed to Arafat’s more moderate stands.”

Context added by this archive

The accusation and the Israeli expert’s doubt about it, at the same news conference, in the same story. “Weakenened” is the paper’s.

Cite this clipping

"U.S.-PLO talks encouraging terrorism, Israeli says," The Palm Beach Post, 30 December 1988, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1988-036. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1988-036

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