Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir proposed limited elections in the Palestinian territories as a step toward Middle East peace. That is not how the Palestinians there regard it. Last week more than 80 leaders from the West Bank and Gaza issued a statement rejecting the proposal as "a maneuver for the media" designed to sidestep the Palestine Liberation Organization and "ignore our political legitimacy as well as our legitimate aspirations."
Elections would be acceptable, they said, only as part of a defined process leading toward Palestinian independence. The statement was also intended to remind exiled P.L.O. leaders, who had avoided an...
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