Shimon Peres delicately fields a suggestion from a Palestinian teen-ager
BY NADINE BROZAN | The teen-age Palestinian boy from Ramallah on the West Bank, who presented an award to SHIMON PERES at the Regency Hotel on Thursday, certainly knew how to seize the moment.
“Thank you for putting an end to the bloodshed,” the youth said to Mr. Peres, the Foreign Minister of Israel, speaking before a crowd at a Seeds for Peace benefit dinner. “Now I hope we can have our own state with our own capital: East Jerusalem.”
Mr. Peres smiled and accepted the sculpture handed to him by LAITHE, whose last name was withheld for security reasons, and put his arm around him. “I am very grateful for this,” the Foreign Minister said. “Whether I agree with every word you said doesn’t matter.” The audience, a mix of Jewish and Arab leaders and diplomats, roared.
Awards were also presented by the organization to M. NASSER al-KIDWA, the chief representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s observer mission to the United Nations and nephew of Yasir Arafat, and to NABIL al-ARABY, the Egyptian Ambassador to the United Nations.
Seeds of Peace was founded a year ago by JOHN WALLACH, the foreign editor for the Hearst newspapers, to bring Israeli and Arab teen-agers together. Last year, 46 of them spent three weeks in a summer camp in Maine before touring the East Coast.
Coincidentally, the teen-agers were in Washington last year on Sept. 13, when the preliminary peace accord was signed on the White House lawn, and they attended the ceremony. Four of the boys returned for the dinner last week.
In the spirit of the evening, new alliances were made. MENACHEM ROSENSAFT, a lawyer, introduced URI SAVIR, Director General of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, to Dr. al-Kidwa.
Though both men were posted in New York in recent years, they had never met, because, as Mr. Rosensaft explained, “When Savir was Consul General in New York, it was illegal under Israeli law for any Israeli citizen to have contact with any official of the P.L.O.”
Mr. Savir said, “But we have friends in common.”