Protest forces backroom meeting with Israeli MPs

By SIMON COLLINS

Protesters forced a mayoral reception for visiting Israeli MPs to move to a back room at the Auckland Town Hall yesterday.

Mayor Christine Fletcher moved the reception out of the council chamber into a small office because she did not want to have to shout over a megaphone used by Palestinian human rights campaigners.

City Councillor Maire Leadbeater boycotted the reception and stood outside with the protesters because she regards Palestine as "an occupied country" and found it "very difficult to meet socially representatives of a Government that is perpetrating that occupation".

A spokesman for the 30-strong group of Palestinian Human Rights Campaign protesters, David Wakim, said New Zealand should refuse to host Israeli MPs just as it had banned contact in the past with politicians from Fiji and South Africa who had denied democratic rights to ethnic groups.

But he and Maire Leadbeater accepted an invitation from Mrs Fletcher to present a letter to the visiting MPs.

The chairman of Israel's ruling Likud-Labour Coalition, Ze'ev Boim, who leads the five-member delegation, at first objected to the protesters' allegations that the MPs were "war criminals" and declined to meet the protest group.

But he later shook hands with them and accepted their letter.

Foreign Minister Phil Goff and Speaker Jonathan Hunt have also agreed to meet the MPs in Wellington today..



All five MPs, who span the Israeli political spectrum, said there could be no peace agreement in the Middle East until the Palestinians gave up the right of return to Israel for Arab refugees whose families fled to neighbouring countries when the Israeli state was created in 1948.

A member of the left-wing Meretz Party and a founder of the Israeli peace movement, Professor Naomi Chavan, said the key stumbling block was the Palestinian demand for the right of 4 million Palestinian refugees to return to their original family lands in Israel.

"Full implementation of the Palestinian right of return eventually means the destruction of the state of Israel, and no Israeli Government can accept it."

Palestinian Tuma Hazou said he should have the right to go back to Jerusalem, which he fled with his family in 1948.

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