Issam Sartawi

Dr Issam Sartawi (Arabic: عصام السرطاوي; 1935 – April 10, 1983) was a senior member of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). He was assassinated on April 10, 1983.

Issam Sartawi attended university in Baghdad, graduating in medicine, before specializing in cardiology and getting his MD in the United States.

Sartawi returned to Palestine in 1967, joined the Fatah movement and helped establish the Palestine Red Crescent Society. He quickly rose to become Yasser Arafat's adviser on Europe and North America. In the mid-1970s he participated with other moderate PLO members to the "Paris meetings" with the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peacel of general Matti Peled, under the sponsorship of former French Premier Pierre Mendès France. Sartawi and the senior Israeli negotiator, Aryeh "Lova" Eliav, jointly received the Austrian Kreisky prize in 1979 for seeking an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The meetings between the PLO and the Israel-Palestine Peace Council were detailed in the book '' by the Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery who was one of the negotiators. According to Avnery, Sartawai once told him that a French anti-Semitic leader came to his office in Paris and offered an alliance. Sartawi threw him out. In his view, 'the anti-Semites are the greatest enemies of the Palestinian people'.

Sartawi disagreed with Arafat's rejection of Ronald Reagan's peace plan proposal of September 1982, according to which Palestinians on the West Bank and in Gaza would govern themselves for a five-year period, and then engage in negotiations for an Israeli withdrawal, and, eventually a Palestinian-Jordanian state. Sartawi thought that under Arafat the Palestinian National Council was refusing to be realistic, and that it should have accepted the positive points in Reagan's proposal. He rejected as wishful thinking attempts to interpret the recent defeat in Lebanon in 1982 as a victory, remarking: 'Another victory like this and the PLO will find itself in the Fiji Islands. His position found scarce support, and when Arafat barred him from speaking before the PNC, he put in his resignation. Arafat twice refused to accept Sartawi's resignation.

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