Platform Now Also Provides
Details of Arafat’s Incitement
NEW YORK – The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) has strongly praised AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) for its decision to formally renounce the use of the term “occupied territories” in reference to Judea, Samaria, Gaza, the Golan Heights and eastern Jerusalem.
In response to a resolution proposed by the ZOA at this week AIPAC’s annual policy conference, in Washington, the delegates voted to include in AIPAC’s 2002 Action Agenda (its policy platform) a clause stating that in the coming year, AIPAC will be
Urging the administration to stop using the inappropriate and inaccurate term “occupied territories,” and begin referring to those areas as “disputed territories.”
In another significant decision at the conference, the AIPAC delegates decided (again at the suggestion of the ZOA) that a draft proposal urging Yasir Arafat to “end incitement” was too brief and vague. They voted to expand the clause to read:
halting payments to imprisoned terrorists and families of terrorists, and ending the promotion of hatred and violence against Jews in the Palestinian Authority’s official media, school textbooks, summer camps, and speeches by PA officials.
ZOA National President Morton A. Klein, who is a member of the AIPAC Executive Committee and proposed the resolutions on these issues which were adopted by the delegates, said: “AIPAC’s leaders, including President Tim Wuliger, Executive Committee Chairman Paul Miller, and Executive Director Howard Kohr, deserve praise for significantly strengthening the AIPAC platform on these important issues. The term ‘occupied territories’ falsely suggests that the territories belong to the Arabs, when in fact it is Israel which has the strongest legal, moral, historical, and religious claim to the disputed territories of Judea, Samaria, Gaza, Golan and eastern Jerusalem. Even the very word ‘Jew’ derives from the term ‘Judea’—a fact which is striking evidence of the ages-old connection between the Jewish people and those territories.”