Bill seeks to reinstate prohibition of speaking to PLO

Bayit Yehudi MK says the bill is "meant to remove the mask on Abbas's face" and to show that he supports terrorism.

By LAHAV HARKOV
Abbas looking unhappy 370 (photo credit: REUTERS/Mohamad Torokman)
Abbas looking unhappy 370
(photo credit: REUTERS/Mohamad Torokman)
A pre-Oslo law barring Israelis from meeting with PLO officials will be reinstated if a bill proposed by MK Nissan Slomiansky (Bayit Yehudi) is reinstated.
“This bill is meant to remove the mask on [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s] face,” Slomiansky said on Saturday. “He tried to present himself as a man of peace, while at the same time he incites terrorism and supports it.” The PA is an organ of the PLO, and Abbas is also chairman of the PLO.
Slomiansky added that the Fatah-Hamas reconciliation agreement, signed last week, “proves that Abbas is the same thing as Hamas.”
The bill copies the exact language of article 8 in the Law to Prevent Terror, which passed in 1986, declaring it a crime to meet with representatives of terrorist organizations.
The article, nicknamed the Meetings Law, was, ironically, proposed by then-prime minister Shimon Peres’s government with the explanation that “recently, many Israelis made contact with activists or official representatives of terrorist organizations. This seriously damages Israel’s diplomacy and security and we cannot accept this phenomenon.”
The article was canceled in January 1993, months before then-foreign minister Peres secretly signed an agreement with the PLO in Oslo.
Still, the explanatory portion of the 1993 bill canceling the Meetings Law emphasized that the government still “sees the PLO as a terrorist organization and rejects negotiations with it and its participation in peace talks.”