Activist due to meet U.S. aide arrested

Robert Ruby, Jerusalem Bureau of The Sun

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“JERUSALEM — Israeli authorities arrested a Palestinian activist yesterday hours before he was to attend a meeting between Palestinian leaders and a visiting State Department delegation. Ghassan Al Katib, a political-cultural studies at the Zeit University, was arrested by soldiers and security police at his home in the West Bank city of Ramallah at 2 a.m.

He was one of six Palestinians who had been invited by U.S. officials to a meeting later in the day to discuss Israel’s proposal for holding elections in the occupied territories. Mr. Al Katib, 37, is regarded as being close to the Palestine Communist Party, which is widely regarded as the most moderate of the major Palestinian factions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

It has supported the Palestine Liberation Organization’s recognition of Israel and its renunciation of terrorism.

Israeli authorities told U.S. officials that Mr. Al Katib was arrested for ‘security reasons.’ Israeli authorities told U.S. officials that Mr. Al Katib was arrested for ‘security reasons’ but gave no other information, a knowledgeable official said.

The five other Palestinians showed up as scheduled for a meeting with Dennis Ross, chief of the State Department’s policy planning staff. Mr. Ross, who had returned to Israel after talks with Egyptian and Jordanian officials, commented only that he hoped there would be more meetings in the future.

‘Each of the Palestinians offered their own separate opinion,’ he said. As expected, the Palestinians expressed objections to the election plan offered by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and approved by Israel’s Cabinet on Sunday. Mr. Shamir’s proposal rules out the eventual creation of a Palestinian state or talks between Israel and the PLO.

It offers a sketchy outline for elections in which Palestinians could choose representatives to negotiate limited self-rule and, eventually, to negotiate the permanent status of the territories. A’zedin Arian, head of the West Bank’s Red Crescent Society, Arab equivalent to the Red Cross, said that Mr. Shamir’s plan reserved all decision-making for Israel.

‘Democratic elections mean that we shall be the ones to determine the form of the elections, where they should take place, when, who shall be elected and who shall have the right to elect,’ Mr. Arian said. ‘We are not in favor of elections just for the sake of elections.’”

Context added by this archive

A man arrested at two in the morning hours before a meeting with American officials, and the reason given for it, printed as a pull quote in the middle of the story.

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"Activist due to meet U.S. aide arrested," The Baltimore Sun, 17 May 1989, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1989-007. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1989-007