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Romania Middle East
The Middle East situation posed a dilemma for the
Ceausescu
government, which sought to maintain relations with both
sides of
the conflict. In 1969 Romania announced an agreement to
elevate its
relations with Israel to the ambassadorial level, while
continuing
to voice support for "the struggle of the Arab people to
defend
their national independence and sovereignty" and calling
for a
negotiated settlement of the conflict.
The Ceausescu regime maintained good relations with
both Egypt
and Israel and played an intermediary role in arranging
Egyptian
President Anwar as Sadat's visit to Israel in 1977. In the
following years Romania maintained contacts with all
parties in the
conflict and cautiously endorsed the Camp David Accords,
in
contrast with the Soviet Union and other East European
countries.
In later years, Romania called for a global approach to
the Middle
East crisis that would involve all interested parties,
including
the PLO. Ceausescu offered to act as an intermediary and
met
several Arab leaders including PLO chairman Yasir Arafat.
Some
observers believed Ceausescu's intermediary efforts were
designed
to gain access to new sources of Middle East oil to
compensate for
the suspension of Iranian oil deliveries.
After the late 1970s, Romania advocated a peace plan
featuring
four points: Israeli withdrawal from all Arab territories
occupied
from June 1967, including East Jerusalem and southern
Lebanon;
establishment of an independent state governed by the PLO;
guarantees for the security of all states in the region;
and
convocation of an international peace conference, with
representatives from the PLO, the Soviet Union, and the
United
States. Although Israel rejected all four points of the
plan, it
continued to maintain good relations with Romania.
After 1985 relations with Israel gradually
deteriorated.
Although the countries continued to exchange high-level
visits,
they failed to make major breakthroughs. Romania continued
to
insist on Israeli concessions, including direct
negotiations with
the PLO. In August 1987, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir of
Israel,
after nine hours of talks with Ceausescu in Bucharest,
reported no
progress on the issue of Middle East negotiations. A few
months
later, Ceausescu invited representatives of the PLO and
the
Israeli-Palestinian Dialogue Committee to a meeting in
Romania, but
that discussion too bore no fruit.
Relations with the PLO were generally good, and Arafat
and
other high-ranking PLO officials frequently travelled to
Bucharest.
The Romanian media described Arafat as a personal friend
and
comrade of Ceausescu. Between November 1987 and December
1988,
Arafat met with Ceausescu five times. The PLO opened one
of its
first diplomatic offices in Bucharest, and several
bilateral
agreements were concluded, some of which reportedly
offered the PLO
educational and even military training facilities in
Romania.
Data as of July 1989
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