An interview with Hanan Ashrawi

H anan Ashrawi, academic and political activist, served from 1996-98 as Minister of Education under the Palestinian Authority. She was educated at the American University in Beirut and got her PhD in comparative literature at the University of Virginia. She’s one of the most well-known representatives of the Palestinian viewpoint. She is the author of From Intifada to Independence and This Side of Peace .

DAVID BARSAMIAN: Palestinians are often described as “refugees,” as “terrorists,” “a problem,” and even for many decades a “question, as in “the question” of Palestine. How do you breathe life and humanity into those sterile reductions?

HANAN ASHRAWI: The important thing is to break through misconceptions, preconceptions, stereotypes, and exclusion because from the beginning we were told that we didn’t exist. The Zionist slogan was: A land without a people, for a people without a land. We were dismissed and cast outside the course of history. So we’ve had to start by affirming our humanity, by defying these terms, and by providing a human narrative that is not so reduced and not just in relation to someone else. It’s been a very difficult struggle because the deck is stacked.

In the many decades of the Palestinian struggle, at least in the United States, it has been difficult for the Palestinians to advance their point of view. Why is that?

For a variety of reasons. First, we were dismissed as if we didn’t exist. Then our existence was recognized only through the terms of reference of the Israelis—the enemy, so to speak. There were other issues. We are the foreign, the alien, the other. We were labeled as the people who speak a strange language, have this different religion. So we were excluded from the Judeo-Christian tradition, even though Christianity and Judaism started in Palestine. Palestine has always been pluralistic. We’ve never been only Christian or only Muslim or only Jewish.

Also, the horror of the Holocaust is still part of Western consciousness and culture and, in many cases, people feel the need to assuage their guilt for anti-Semitism—which is a Western phenomenon, by the way, not an Eastern or Arab one—that Israel’s sins have to be forgiven entirely. That Israel has to be supported blindly and the Palestinians can be conveniently dismissed in order to cope with this painful legacy.

One of the typical arguments that some Israelis make is that there is one homeland for the Jewish people, who have historically suffered persecution and tremendous tragedy, and there are 22 Arab states where Palestinians can go to practice their customs, speak Arabic, eat their food. You’re chuckling. How do you respond?

That’s like telling a French person, “Why do you want France? You have all these countries in Europe and they’re united, so why not give up France and give it to some other people?” We have our identity, our history, and our culture as Palestinians. We can trace our history back at least 5,000 years in Palestine. I belong to the oldest, continuous Christian tradition in the world. So you cannot tell me that we are just a phenomenon on the surface of the earth that can be removed.

The horror of the Holocaust and the suffering of the Jews needed to be dealt with, but not at the expense of the Palestinians, by dismissing us, by saying, “You can conveniently disappear or we can carry out ethnic cleansing or you can live as refugees.” We have now five million refugees who are at the mercy of host countries that don’t want them. The rest of the Palestinians are living under military occupation. Do you tell the Palestinians that for the convenience of the West and the sake of solving the Jewish question, you have to pay the price?

Give people a sense of what daily life is like in the occupied territories. I’ve been to the occupied territories a couple of times. There is a dramatic contrast between the settlements and where Palestinians live.

Many of my South African friends tell me this is much worse than apartheid because we are living on our own land, under occupation, and we have an apartheid system of bringing in settlers with their own laws and privileges and who have the power of life and death over Palestinians. Palestinians are living in a state of siege in isolated towns unable to move, not just from one town or refugee camp to the other, but within our towns and villages because of the curfews. They confiscate our land. They bring in settlers, in countervention of the Fourth Geneva Convention and international law. The settlers come mainly from the U.S. and Russia. They say that God gave them this land so they have more right to it than we do, who own it legally and have been living there for thousands of years. Then they settled there, armed to the hilt, and have to take more land in order to expand—“natural growth” as they say. Then they have to take more land for their industry or agriculture. Then they need even more land to build bypass roads. These are a unique form of racist roads, because they are built on Palestinian land, but are for the sole use of Israeli settlers who use them to bypass the Palestinians.

More recently we have military invasions of cities and towns where the civilians are defenseless. We have house demolitions, constant shelling. We have curfews so for days on end we are prisoners in our own homes. There is the policy of assassinations—activists, political leaders, military people being assassinated by Israel deliberately.

So there is a feeling of fear, insecurity, and a breakdown in our institutions, infrastructure, and services—our roads, electricity, water, even crops and trees have been destroyed and uprooted. The economy is non-existent. About 70 percent live under the poverty level, unemployment close to 67 percent, our health system has fallen apart. For the first time in history we see people suffering from malnutrition in Palestine. The fabric of our lives—human contact, communication, freedom of movement—they don’t exist; communities are separated.

To add insult to injury, we have a Palestinian Authority that is not democratic, to put it mildly, and hasn’t made the right decisions for its people. At the same time, we have some extremists who are reacting to the situation by doing unto others what has been done to them; by carrying out suicide bombings and violent attacks against civilians in Israel. That has created a cycle of revenge and pain that is very hard to break, although we are trying desperately to break it.

The issue of suicide bombers comes up inevitably. “What about the suicide bombers? How do you feel about women and children being blown up? What about the Passover Seder bombing?” How do you provide some context to these horrible events?

The targeting of civilians is inexcusable and cannot be justified. The problem is people feel you’re justifying it when you tell them, “A suicide bomber is not born, he or she is made”—they emerge from a situation of tremendous injustice, or hopelessness, or even extreme ideology. We’ve never had a suicidal culture in Palestine. So this is an aberration. It’s something very strange and very recent, from the mid-1990s. They started as a reaction to the 1994 Baruch Goldstein massacre in the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron. Then there was the assassination of a couple of leaders from Islamic Jihad and Hamas. The worse the situation becomes, the more desperate and hopeless people are, the more extremism gains sway. Extremism on one side feeds extremism on the other.

The difference is that it’s the Israeli army and the Israeli government that does these things to the Palestinians and among the Palestinians the extreme organizations that are doing that are the opposition. Many people describe the suicide bombers as the poor man’s equivalent of the F-16. When they are being bombed by F-16s, they turn their own bodies into weapons. But that’s no justification. I’m saying this to place it in context.

Is there a sense of competing victimization between the two communities?

I’ve seen this in different places in the world: who suffers more? The exclusivity of suffering, a monopoly on pain. I’ve been saying to everybody: just because you have suffered does not give you license to inflict the same suffering on others. The mentality of the victim is not healthy or constructive. It has been exploited repeatedly to carry out actions that are inherently cruel and immoral because somehow you feel holier-than-thou. Your suffering should not make you feel holy, it should make you humbled because you understand the meaning of pain, the meaning of humanity, and you should make sure it does not happen to others.

The Sharon government and its spokespeople constantly say that the Israelis don’t have a negotiating part ner and they are impl e menting these measures purely in self-defense; they’re responding to terrorism. How do you counter that ?

Actually the government that stopped negotiations was the Sharon government. Sharon said he would not negotiate a peace agreement and would batter the Palestinians into submission—and he resorted to violence. This coalition government in Israel is the most lethal combination. It has the worst elements of Israeli society and has undermined the peace camp in Israel that was our counterpart. So it is very clear who doesn’t want to negotiate and who has a militaristic and anti-peace agenda. There was no change in the Palestinian leadership. On the contrary, they were willing to be even more accommodating. So it’s not a lack of partners, it’s a lack of will, vision, and peace.

One of the stories that is told revolves around Camp David in 2000 where Clinton and Ehud Barak, then prime minister, and Arafat were all present. The typical story—as told by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times and on the “ Charlie Rose Show” on PBS and many other venues—is that Arafat got the deal of a lifetime. The Israelis made unprec e dented offers, but Arafat rejected them and the Al-Aqsa Intifada started almost immediately. What’s wrong with that story?

That has very little to do with reality. Sharon and chief of staff Shaul Mofaz and these guys talk about it as if they were at Camp David. Negotiations at Camp David were not finalized. There was nothing in writing. Ideas were being discussed so it wasn’t as if they offered Arafat something that he turned down. I have my disagreements with Arafat, but in all honesty what was being discussed was an end to the conflict, according to Barak, and no further claims for the Palestinians. If we had agreed to this unwritten offer, then they would keep between 10 to 12 percent of the West Bank; they would maintain three big settlement clusters containing 80 percent and they would annex them to Israel; they would control our airspace and our crossing points and many of our resources and we would have to relinquish the right of return for the Palestinians and they would share East Jerusalem with us. This means we would be left with three separate Bantustans incapable of any type of territorial or economic viability and with a new type of occupation and control. But  they didn’t say, “That’s it, we’re going home.” It was Barak who said, “Take it or leave it.”

So those who tell you that in Camp David we were offered the moon and we turned it down, either they’re willfully misrepresenting reality to blame the Palestinians, or they haven’t looked at reality.

President Bush has met with Ariel Sharon at least six times since Sharon became prime minister in 2001. Bush has referred to Sharon as “a man of peace.” How does the average citizen see Ariel Sharon? What is his history vis-à-vis the Palestinians?

The Palestinians know Sharon very well. He is viewed as a war criminal. He was responsible for the notorious 101 Unit that was in charge of terrorizing Palestinian villages and destabilizing the situation. Sharon conducted the Qibya massacre. He was responsible for what they call “the cleansing of Gaza.”  Even the Israeli Kahan Commission found him indirectly responsible for the massacres in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon. Historically, he knows no language except voting against any peace agreements or negotiating process and for resorting to the military options, targeting civilians.

It was astounding that George Bush would describe Sharon as “a man of peace.” The Israelis laughed. They call him “the Bulldozer.” They know he’s responsible for the death of thousands of Palestinians and for his adventurism and his militarism. He’s a real threat because he’s also what they call a fundamentalist Zionist. He wants to complete what he calls “Israel’s war of liberation,” which means annexing the rest of Palestine—the West Bank and Gaza—destroying the possibility of any viable Palestinian state.

Given the history of U.S. support for Israel—billions of dollars in aid and diplomatic and military support as well—why would Palestinian leaders and Abdallah of Jordan and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt call on the United States to negotiate a settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? I don’t understand that.

Most Arab regimes that you mentioned are allies of the U.S. and many of them have a made in the U.S. stamp.

But Arafat is constantly calling for the U.S. to get involved, to take an active initiative.

The U.S. is the only superpower that can influence Israel. Also, there is the assumption in the Arab world, among the Arab regimes, that their source of legitimacy comes from American approval and not from their own people or the democratic representation of their own constituencies.

Can you envision a Palestinian leadership, secular, democratic, beyond Arafat?

I certainly can. Arafat has significance because of his historical, symbolic role. But I believe there is a need for a young, democratic, secular leadership that would really represent the Palestinian people. The old guard and the mentality of the revolution have maintained a stronghold on the nation-building process and on the Palestinian people and have done a real disservice to them.

With Sharon in power, what are the prospects for peace?

Not very good. I don’t think there’s any chance for achieving a negotiated settlement, let alone a genuine peace, with this government in place. We have to work with the Israeli public and the Israeli peace camp. It’s up to the Israelis to change their government. Once they realize that their government has destroyed their security, is destroying their chance of peace, has destroyed their economy, and destroyed the relations and confidence between both peoples, ultimately this government has to be held accountable. It’s a reckless, dangerous government.

We have an ongoing dialogue with Israeli women’s groups and the Israeli peace camp. They’re the ones who have to feel empowered. Unfortunately, the Labor Party joining the coalition government has split and the peace camp is in disarray, but ultimately I think they will reach the right conclusions, that there will be a peace government with a counterpart in Palestine. The only solution has to be a peaceful solution. But the question of security is one that has to be redefined and addressed. It is an outcome of peace, not a prerequisite to peace.

What is the basis for a final settlement ?

It’s very simple and we’ve said it repeatedly. Israel should withdraw from those territories it occupied in 1967—all of them. That’s it—the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war. We’ve agreed that Israel would keep the 78 percent of historical Palestine. We will build our state on 22 percent. The two-state solution is the only solution. We’re not going to disappear. They’re not going to be able to carry out genocide or ethnic cleansing or expulsion. The Israelis are not going to disappear. So let’s work on establishing good neighborly relations by accepting the 1967 lines  and by having a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem. That is a major human demographic problem and it destabilizes the whole region. Once you solve the two components—the land that is the 1967 boundaries, the people, which would include the refugees, and the UN resolutions, you would have it. It doesn’t take a genius to understand that, but it does take a lot of warped minds to try to find ways to prevent such a solution from taking place.

David Barsamian is with Alternative Radio (www. alternativeradio.org) and is the author, most recently, of The Decline and Fall of Public Broadcasting ( South End Press ).