Comité Palestine et Israël Vivront Archives

Period  1977-1996
Total size   1.37 m.
Consultation Not restricted

History

Originated in Paris by a group of people who prepared the meeting of Issam Sartawi, advisor of the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, with Mattityahu (Matti) Peled, member of the Israeli Knesset, in 1982; the Israeli invasion of Lebanon prompted them to found the Comité Palestine et Israël Vivront in the same year; starting with an appeal by leading intellectuals the committee sought to strengthen Palestinian and Israeli peace forces in the hope of achieving an enduring peace in the Middle East; Joyce Blau and Jacqueline Grobéty were important organizing members; the committee collaborated closely with the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace (ICIPP), which was founded in 1975; on 18 January 1983 talks between delegates of the ICIPP, including Uri Avnery and Matti Peled, and delegates of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), including Yasser Arafat and Issam Sartawi took place in Tunis; contacts have been continued since but were given a low profile after the murder of Sartawi in Portugal in 1983; the committee also collaborated with the joint Jewish-Arab Progressive List for Peace (PLP), founded in Israel in 1984, campaigning for an independant Palestinian state and a lasting peace in the Middle East.

Content

Correspondence by Joyce Blau, Jacqueline Grobéty and others with Yossi Amitay 1982, Elieser Feiler 1982-1983, Adam Keller 1984-1985 (-1996) and others; documents concerning the ICIPP, its newsletter The Other Israel, the PLP and other Israeli and Palestinian peace organizations 1980-1996; documents concerning the furtherance of peace initiatives by organizations and persons in Western Europe 1982-1996; documents concerning the contacts between Mattityahu (Matti) Peled and Issam Sartawi, including correspondence, reports of press conferences, statements, clippings and other related documents 1982-1983; clippings on the meeting of Matti Peled, Uri Avnery and Yaakov Arnon with Yasser Arafat, Issam Sartawi and other PLO officials in Tunis in 1983; documents concerning the protests in Israel against the war in Lebanon 1982-1985, the UN conference on the question of Palestine in 1983, other conferences 1985-1992, the meeting of Muhammad Miari, Matti Peled and Yasser Arafat in Tunis 1985, the exclusion of the PLP from the Israeli elections 1985, the trial against Israeli Jewish peace activists for political contact with the PLO in 1986 and other subjects; some manuscripts and typescripts by and other documents concerning Matti Peled 1977, 1982-1984, 1988, 1993 and n.d.; copies of Kav La' Oved (Workers' Hotline for the Protection of Workers) and other periodicals and clippings (1959-) 1980-1996.

Arrangement

The collection of the Comité Palestine et Israël Vivront was acquired by the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam in 1995. It is not only (a part of) the archives of the committee but it contains also documents from other organisations collected by the committee.
The arrangement of the collection is purely chronological because of the entanglement of the documents regarding the Comité Palestine et Israël Vivront, the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace and the Progressive List for Peace and those regarding the activities of the various persons active in these organisations. A further classification of the descriptions could possibly be misleading.

Processing information

List made by Bouwe Hijma in 1996