Note: The translations of articles from the Hebrew press are prepared by the Government Press Office as a service to foreign journalists in Israel. They express the views of the authors.
THE REAL TERRORISM BASE IN SUDAN
(Commentary by Haggai Huberman, "Hatzofeh", Aug 24, 1998, p. 7)
If the president of the United States were truly interested in dealing
with the international terrorist infrastructure, he would not stop with a
chemical production plant in Sudan -- problematic as it may be -- rather,
he would order his planes to search for one of the central terrorist sites
there: the joint Hamas-Fatah training base, which has been operating in
the Sudanese capital for the past seven years.
In 1991, an agreement was signed between the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and
Fatah, as a result of which a joint military training base was established
in Khartoum for both organizations. The agreement also includes exchanges
of military information and joint military groups. In that same year, when
Arafat crashed in the Sudanese desert en route to Tunisia, and went
missing for about two days, the Palestinian leader was returning from a
ceremony inaugurating this training base in Khartoum. More than a few
Palestinian policemen employed by the Palestinian Autonomy's police force
in Judea, Samaria and Gaza trained at this base, alongside Hamas
members.
In August 1994, a short time after the establishment of the PA, Radio
Monte Carlo quoted from the text of a letter Arafat had sent a week before
to Fatah leaders in Sudan and to the heads of PLO representative offices
in Arab countries.
Yehoshua Meiri, an Israel Radio journalist who lived in Cairo for many
years and who has followed events in the Palestinian camp for a long time,
managed at the time to get the full text of the letter, in which Arafat
wrote the following: "There are times in the struggle of a people when it
must lower its profile and acquiesce to agreements that will ultimately
lead it to the hoped-for breakthrough. The Palestinian people deserves a
Palestinian state, and the state of Palestine deserves to receive the
entire Palestinian people. I will never lend a hand to the canceling of
any article of the Palestinian National Charter."
It is also worth mentioning that in his new book, The Process, Uri Savir
writes, as an aside, that "several of our senior officers told Arafat that
he is permitting his people to emphasize too much their talks with the
Hamas leadership, which were held with our approval in Sudan." It appears
that while Yitzhak Rabin was still trying to convince the Israeli public
that Arafat would take care of Hamas "without the High Court of Justice
and B'Tselem," his representatives were holding -- with the approval of
the Israeli authorities -- secret contacts with Hamas activists at their
training camp in Sudan.