Politics
Sartawi returned to Palestine in 1967, joined the Fatah movement and helped establish the Palestine Red Crescent Society. He quickly rose to become Yasser Arafat's adviser on Europe and North America. In the mid-1970s he participated with other moderate PLO members at meetings of the Israel-Palestine Peace Council. Sartawi and the senior Israeli negotiator, Aryeh "Lova" Eliav, jointly received the Austrian Kreisky prize in 1979 for seeking an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The meetings between the PLO and the Israel-Palestine Peace Council were detailed in the book 'My Friend, the Enemy' by the Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery who was one of the negotiators. According to Avnery, Sartawai once told him that a French anti-Semitic leader came to his office in Paris and offered an alliance. Sartawi threw him out. In his view, 'the anti-Semites are the greatest enemies of the Palestinian people'.
Sartawi disagreed with Arafat's rejection of Ronald Reagan's peace plan proposal of September 1982, according to which Palestinians on the West Bank and in Gaza would govern themselves for a five-year period, and then engage in negotiations for an Israeli withdrawal, and, eventually a Palestinian-Jordanian state. Sartawi thought that under Arafat the Palestinian National Council was refusing to be realistic, and that it should have accepted the positive points in Reagan's proposal. He rejected as wishful thinking attempts to interpret the recent defeat in Lebanon in 1982 as a victory, remarking: 'Another victory like this and the PLO will find itself in the Fiji Islands. His position found scarce support, and when Arafat barred him from speaking before the PNC, he put in his resignation. Arafat twice refused to accept Sartawi's resignation.
Read more about this topic: Issam Sartawi
Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“Politics is repetition. It is not change. Change is something beyond what we call politics. Change is the essence politics is supposed to be the means to bring into being.”
—Kate Millett (b. 1934)
“When feminism does not explicitly oppose racism, and when antiracism does not incorporate opposition to patriarchy, race and gender politics often end up being antagonistic to each other and both interests lose.”
—Kimberly Crenshaw (b. 1959)
“One might imagine that a movement which is so preoccupied with the fulfillment of human potential would have a measure of respect for those who nourish its source. But politics make strange bedfellows, and liberated women have elected to become part of a long tradition of hostility to mothers.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)