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February 18, 2011
Abbas to visit Canada
Palestinian leader will meet wixth Jewish groups.
DAVID LAZARUS CANADIAN JEWISH NEWS
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas will visit Canada “within the next six months” specifically to have a “meaningful dialogue” with a cross-section of Canadian Jewry, Liberal MP Irwin Cotler announced recently.
“It is confirmed,” Cotler disclosed in a recent interview at his Mount Royal riding office. “The raison d’être for his visit to Canada is to meet with the Jewish community,” he said. “The idea would be that he would meet with representative groups ... organizational heads, students, academics, business people, rabbinic leaders – a cross-section – for an open dialogue.”
Cotler and his bipartisan House-Senate Committee on Middle East Peace and Reconciliation are officially hosting the meeting between Abbas and the Jewish community. The committee includes Cotler’s fellow Liberal MP Bob Rae, as well as Conservative senators Linda Frum and Hugh Segal.
As part of the visit, Cotler also expects Abbas to meet with “government people, parliamentarians and the like.” The visit was arranged privately between Abbas and Cotler over the winter during one of Cotler’s regular visits to the Middle East, on which he confers with officials in Israel, including Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, as well as with PA officials.
Cotler has kept in contact with Abbas since first meeting him in 1977. Abbas has previously met with Jewish leaders in the United States and France and, when Cotler was in the Middle East earlier this winter, he told Abbas that he wanted him to meet with Canadian Jewish leaders. That meeting, which lasted three hours, also saw Cotler meeting with PA Foreign Affairs Minister Riyad al-Malki in Ramallah.
Cotler said he also spoke with Abbas and al-Malki about the potential to have a Canadian serve as referee in a revived Israeli-Palestinian group monitoring incidences of “incitement,” which are present in PA textbooks, media and mosques. Both men were open to that idea, Cotler said. While Abbas didn’t deny that incitement against Israel takes place, according to Cotler, Abbas also said, “I’m not going to play the blame game. There’s also incitement on the Israeli side.”
Meeting with Netanyahu a week later, Cotler said the Israeli prime minister was also receptive to the idea of reviving an incitement-monitoring group and to adding a Canadian presence. Netanyahu also indicated to Cotler his willingness to go to the PA to speak with groups of Palestinians, as Abbas previously has done with Israelis in Israel.
According to Cotler, Abbas reacted favorably to the idea of designating “one or two” Palestinians to be part of the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism, as well. He said Abbas expressed regret that he couldn’t attend the coalition’s conference last November in Ottawa, although he did send a statement. Similarly, Cotler related that Netanyahu was pleased by the adoption of the Ottawa Protocol at the conference and indicated his desire to attend the next meeting.
Meanwhile, things are “proceeding apace” in efforts by Canada to help reform the PA’s justice sector, Cotler said, adding that he’s pleased to see this continuing under the Tory government. He said he would like to revive the idea of holding a “justice summit” for justice ministers from interested nations, a project he began after becoming justice minister in 2003 but which never saw the light of day when the Liberals were defeated in 2006.
Cotler said he emphasized to both Abbas and Netanyahu the importance of direct negotiations without preconditions on the overriding issues of security and borders when he broached the subject of the peace process. “I said [former Egyptian president Anwar] Sadat and [former Israeli prime minister Menachem] Begin made peace because of direct and sustained negotiations. There were no Europeans, no international community, no Americans.”
A deal was achieved then and is possible now, Cotler believes, because each leader has the capacity to “carry the country” with a deal in hand and is “looking for his place in history.”
For more national Jewish news, visit cjnews.com.
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