RAMALLAH, The Palestinian National Council (PNC), the parliament in exile, denounced today in a statement the call by the recently-declared Palestinian Popular Conference to convene conferences for the Palestinian communities at home and in the diaspora and considered these conferences an attempt to circumvent the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and efforts to unify the Palestinians.
It accused the conference organizers of perpetuating division, stressing that it does not serve the national interest and consensus.
It said that as the Palestinian people are facing “a fierce war waged by the Israeli extremist right on our Palestinian cities, the settlements that are snatching our land, Israel’s daily massacres against our people, and desecrating Al-Aqsa Mosque every day at the hands of extremists and settler gangs,” and as the Palestinian people “are in dire need of strengthening national unity,” the Palestinian Popular Conference plans to hold conferences at home and in the diaspora, “which will divide the ranks, destabilize national unity, and try to circumvent the Palestine Liberation Organization, the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and the unifying house of all Palestinians.”
The PNC accused the Popular Conference of “consolidating the Palestinian division and does not serve the national interest, national consensus, and a unified resistance of the Israeli scheme.”
It called for perpetuating national unity, not division and rupture, promising that the Palestinian people who protected the PLO “will foil all conspiracies to create alternatives to the Palestine Liberation Organization, just as it foiled all previous attempts to impose guardianship, dependency, containment and control over the independent Palestinian national decision.”
The organizers of the Popular Conference were planning to convene it today in Ramallah, but an official ban was issued against it on the ground that it is an attempt to create a substitute for the PLO.
Source: Palestine News & Info Agency