THE newly elected Palestinian president, Mr Yasser Arafat, said yesterday that he hoped to establish an independent Palestinian state within the next 18 months.
Israel has always formally opposed the creation of such a state but the late prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, did not specifically rule it out, and neither has his successor, Mr Shimon Peres.
Under the terms of the Israeli PLO peace accords, the interim rule in the West Bank and Gaza is scheduled to last until May 1999. By this time, it anticipated the two sides would have reached agreement on the final status of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. However, Mr Arafat said yesterday that, with the final status talks set to start in four months time, intensive negotiations could bring about independent statehood far more rapidly, within a year and a half.
Mr Arafat was last night holding his first post election meet in g with Mr Peres on the Israel Gaza border, at which he was to submit a list of names of members of the Palestinian National Council the PLO's parliament in exile whom he wants Israel to allow into Gaza so the PNC can be convened.
The peace accords commit Mr Arafat to ensuring the amendment of the PLO's charter, excising clauses calling for Israel's destruction, no later than this spring. The PNC, as the body that adopted the charter in the 1960s is the only Palestinian forum authorised to amend it.
Mr Peres has made all further peace progress conditional on the amendment or annulment of the charter, and has said Israel will all PNC members to come permit to Gaza for that purpose. Reports yesterday that one particularly notorious PNC member, the Damascus based Mr Nayef Hawatmeh, was contemplating taking up Mr Peres's offer, prompted a chorus of Israeli opposition protests yesterday.
Members of Mr Hawatmeh's Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine killed 25 Israelis in an attack on a northern Israeli school in 1974, in the worst of several attacks on Israeli targets. But Mr Peres was adamant that he would be allowed to return to attend a PNC meeting.
Earlier yesterday, Mr Peres held talks with the mayor of Ma'aleh Adumim, the West Bank settlement to the east of Jerusalem, and pledged that, when the final status talks begin, Israel would insist on its annexation.