Arafat in Sweden to meet Americans

The Associated Press, Stockholm

Transcribed from the clipping

“STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) — PLO leader Yasser Arafat arrived in Sweden today for a meeting with a group of American Jews arranged by the Swedish government. The five-member Jewish delegation was mostly from the International Center for Peace in the Middle East, a coalition of leftist groups in Israel and abroad. The group’s members urge Israel to negotatiate directly with Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization with a view toward relinquishing at least some of the Arab territory captured in the 1967 Mideast War. The Israeli government refuses to talk to the PLO and has urged its Jewish supporters in the United States not to do so. The international chairman of the peace center is Israel’s former foreign minister, Abba Eban. Its Israeli branch includes prominent members of Eban’s left-leaning Labor Party. The Swedish Foreign Ministry said the U.S. delegation was headed by Rita Hauser, a New York lawyer and chairman of the peace center’s American branch. Other members were Drora Kass, the center’s executive director; executive board member Stanley Sheinbaum, an economist and publisher from Los Angeles; Menachem Rosensaft, president of the Labor Zionist Alliance and chairman of the Network of Children of Holocaust Survivors; and Professor Avraham Udovitch, chairman of the department for Near East Studies at Princeton University. Arafat’s delegation included Mahmoud Darwish and Yasser Abed-Rabbo, both members of the PLO executive committee, his spokesman Bassam Abu Sharif and Akram Haniyeh, a former Palestinian journalist who was expelled by Israel. Arafat, after being greeted at the airport by Foreign Minister Sten Andersson, boarded a helicopter at Arlanda International Airport bound for Haga Palace, a government guest house… The Israeli Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem telephoned the Swedish ambassador to lodge an official protest over the government’s invitation to the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization.”

Context added by this archive

Eleven months after asking what a poet does on an executive council, here he is doing it: Mahmoud Darwish named second in Arafat’s delegation to Stockholm, in a small Illinois daily, in the week before the PLO recognised Israel. Beside him is Akram Haniyeh, identified here as a journalist Israel expelled — and the same man who, twenty years later, sat at Darwish’s bedside in the Houston hospital where he died. The paper’s spelling, negotatiate, is kept.

Cite this item

"Arafat in Sweden to meet Americans," Edwardsville Intelligencer, 6 December 1988. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1988-045. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1988-045

Elsewhere in the archive

Jews Most Trouble For Occupation ChiefEdwardsville Intelligencer · 21 June 1967 · the same newspaper
Gaza Strip: the forgotten stepchildNorthwest Herald · 4 January 1988 · the same year
Israeli soldiers fire on protestersCarroll County Times · 6 January 1988 · the same year
Israel condemns U.N. vote on deportationsThe Birmingham News · 6 January 1988 · the same year

This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American and Anglophone newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1812 to 2022. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.

The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the wire service that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary. The city is derived from the masthead, not read off the clipping.

Something wrong here, or something you know about this clipping? The archive is still being built and corrections are wanted: maria@rozumstudio.com, quoting CP-1988-045.

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