Ex-Fighters to Help Greet Clinton

GAZA CITY — Abul Abbas, the mastermind of the Achille Lauro cruise ship takeover, won’t attend. Former airplane hijacker Leila Khaled has sent her regrets too.

Many other former Palestinian guerrillas, however, including one implicated in the Munich Olympics massacre, are expected to be on hand here Monday to greet President Clinton in what promises to be one of the more extraordinary events in the short history of U.S.-Palestinian relations.

The gathering, which is intended to reaffirm the Palestinian commitment to peace, will bring the American president face to face with a deliberately mixed crowd of Palestinian leaders, with the graying guerrillas of the past seated alongside earnest young legislators, dignified patriarchs of powerful Gazan families, and directors of women’s and professional groups.

For Palestinians and many Israelis, Clinton’s very presence in Gaza--its dusty streets now festooned with U.S. flags--will be the essence of the president’s trip, representing what many on both sides view as an implicit endorsement of the Palestinian dream of statehood.

What happens here Monday afternoon, and Israel’s response to it, could make or break the peace process--and embarrass or gratify Clinton as he tries to salvage the land-for-security deal he brokered just seven weeks ago.

“It’s too close to call,” a U.S. official said of Monday’s meeting and its possible repercussions. “We really don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Under the terms of the Wye Plantation agreement struck in Maryland in October, the Palestinian notables and aging guerrillas have been invited to hear speeches by Clinton and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, and to “reaffirm” support for canceling clauses in the Palestine Liberation Organization charter that call for Israel’s destruction.

The agreement says nothing about a vote on the charter, a 34-year-old document that most Palestinians have probably never read.

However, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warns that without some kind of tally, Israel will not carry out the next promised West Bank troop withdrawal.

The Palestinians insist just as strongly that there will not be a vote, and they stress that the gathering’s support for the charter changes will be by acclamation.

The document’s anti-Israeli provisions have been revoked again and again, they say, most recently on Thursday in Gaza at a meeting of the Palestinians’ 120-member central council.

The differences seem unlikely to be resolved before Clinton arrives in Gaza, creating the possibility that his visit, which was intended to celebrate the accord he negotiated, could contribute to scuttling it instead.

Still, with the American president’s arrival imminent, the Palestinians are charging ahead with preparations for the visit, sprucing up the debris-strewn streets of this seaside city and printing thousands of tiny plastic Stars and Stripes to be waved alongside thousands of miniature Palestinian flags.

On display at the PLO Flags Shop one day last week were posters of a pensive-looking Clinton, carefully placed beside others of Arafat in his familiar checkered headdress.

Employee Talal abu Dayyah said the store had also laid in a supply of commemorative T-shirts with the U.S. president’s image on the front and the Palestinian leader’s on the back.

Elsewhere, Palestinian police practiced arrival ceremonies and security drills, deploying armored personnel carriers at key intersections along Clinton’s route. Overhead, U.S. military helicopters buzzed back and forth, and the distinctive official cars of the U.S. government could be spotted throughout the city.

“It’s a new ‘occupation,’ ” a Palestinian security guard joked as he watched one of the giant American vehicles speed past on a narrow Gaza street. “By the Americans, this time.”

“Israel wants to avoid the political significance of this visit, but it’s pretty tough to miss,” said Jihad Wazir, a key organizer of the trip here and the son of Khalil Wazir, the Arafat deputy who was assassinated by Israel in 1988. “President Clinton will be here, and that means American recognition of a Palestinian state.”

The centerpiece of the seven-hour visit will be the gathering of members of the Palestine National Council, the PLO’s parliament-in-exile, which will be asked along with other groups to affirm in front of Clinton that the Palestinians no longer seek the destruction of Israel.

The council, a 700-member group that is the Palestinians’ highest legislative body, voted on the issue once before.

In April 1996, the PNC met behind closed doors in Gaza and resolved, 504 to 54, to throw out the objectionable parts of the charter. The result was hailed by the Clinton administration and by Israel’s Labor Party government.

Netanyahu, however, was elected a month later at the head of a right-wing coalition, and he has insisted that the charter vote was insufficient, primarily because it did not specify which clauses were canceled.

In January, Arafat made a further attempt to resolve the issue by sending a letter to Clinton in which he stated the sections that were covered. However, Netanyahu has said the PNC must reconvene.

At the Wye Plantation talks, Arafat agreed under U.S. pressure to invite members of the PNC, along with other leading Palestinians, to hear Clinton in Gaza and to reiterate their support for the peace process. Organizers here stress that the gathering will not be a formal session of the council but a “popular national conference.”

Israel wants it otherwise.

“We are insisting that a vote be taken and that the purpose of the meeting not be obscured by anything else,” said David Bar-Illan, a senior aide to Netanyahu. “A vote is a vote is a vote.”

It seemed unlikely Saturday that the issue would be resolved. Yet no one here appeared to doubt that the meeting will be a carefully controlled affair, heavily weighted by Arafat with reliable supporters of his peace agreements with Israel.

“There might be a few who don’t agree at the meeting, but they won’t say anything,” predicted Jamil Majdalawi, a Gaza leader of the hard-line Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who will not attend. “Arafat wants a little opposition, like a decoration, to show that he has a democracy.”

Leila Khaled will also boycott the meeting. A member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who hijacked airliners in 1969 and 1970, Khaled, 54, said the gathering does not represent the will of the Palestinian people.

“The [Palestinian] leadership has surrendered the rights of the people to Israel and to the United States,” Khaled said in a telephone interview from Amman, Jordan, where she lives with her husband and two children. “This meeting is illegal and illegitimate.”

Among those expected to attend are Mohammed Daoud Oudeh, known as Abu Daoud, who was implicated by Israeli and American intelligence officials in the planning of the 1972 hostage-taking at the Munich Olympics that left 11 Israeli athletes dead.

Oudeh, who was never charged in the attack and does not acknowledge a role in it, is now a lawyer in the West Bank town of Ramallah. Family members reached at his home last week said he is planning to attend the conference and will vote, as he did in 1996, for the charter changes.

Abul Abbas, who oversaw the October 1985 Achille Lauro hijacking in which Leon Klinghoffer, a wheelchair-bound American, was killed, has long since acknowledged publicly that the operation was a mistake.

Abbas now supports the peace process and voted for the 1996 changes, but he is in Baghdad and will not return in time for Monday’s meeting, his deputy said.

Many others in the audience, however, will be ex-fighters, veterans of what many Palestinians view as a long national struggle to achieve the goal of statehood.

“Really, all of us were fighters, all of us were guerrillas,” said Rashid abu Shbak, the deputy head in Gaza of the Palestinians’ most powerful police force and a former leader of the long uprising known as the intifada. “Now we are meeting the American president.”