Achievements and Challenges
Speech delivered
by Afif Safieh
Palestinian General Delegate
to the United Kingdom
I feel honoured and privileged to have been invited for a third time in 8 years to address MAP’s annual dinner, the major social event in London for the Arab community and for our British friends. MAP has undeniably become the pride of us all who yearn to enhance British-Palestinian cooperation.
Secretary of State, I wish to convey to Prime Minister Tony Blair and to yourself President Yasser Arafat’s deep appreciation for your constructive contribution during our multiple recent talks here in London with the Americans and indirectly with the Israeli side. Allow me to express my respect and admiration to all the officials in the Foreign Office that I deal with. They have always shown immense professionalism and profound decency. Allow me also, to welcome my British counterpart and friend, H.E. Robin Kealy, the British Consul General in Jerusalem and his wife Annabel who represent Britain in Palestine with great distinction and dedication.
This year the Israelis celebrated the 50th anniversary of the birth of their State. This year the Palestinians commemorated the 50th year of the loss of our homeland. I do not see this MAP dinner as another Wailing Wall or as an opportunity for self- flagellation. 50 years on, it is time for an evaluation of the achievements accomplished. 50 years on, it is time for an assessment of the challenges that still lie ahead.
Achievements:
I believe that there are 4 achievements of historical significance:
1. Years ago, those who chose to be our enemies, many analysts and commentators predicted that, shattered and scattered to the 4 corners of the earth, the Palestinian people were destined and doomed to evaporate into historical oblivion. Today nobody would disagree that the reemerging national movement, from 1965 onwards, has propelled the Palestinian people to centre stage as an essential component of the regional equation and the international community today recognise the question of Palestine to be at the heart of Israeli-Arab conflict.
2. Having been the Jews of the Jews, the victims of the victims of European history, we the Palestinian people were denied in 1948 our legitimate share of sympathy, solidarity and support. But successive eye-openers created conditions for an improved perception of our unacceptable fate and an improved awareness of our desirable future. Those eye-openers were: the brutal occupation policies that followed the 1967 war, the accession of Likud to power in 1977, the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, our cry for freedom out of captivity and bondage represented by the Intifada, our peace strategy. . . . Today__unlike yesterday __ in the Western world, it is no more politically suicidal to be pro-Palestinian. Today __unlike yesterday __ it is no more electorally rewarding to be anti- Palestinian.
3. I have always believed that the PLO was at the same time an institution and an idea. The idea was simple yet inspiring and immortal : our sense of identity and our ceaseless quest for independence and sovereignty. For the last 4 years this idea has started to become a territorial reality. In political science, a state is defined as "an authority on a demography on a geography" and history will prove that the emergence of the Palestinian entity has been a historical and irreversible turning point.
4. Already for many years, the international community has recognised the legitimacy of our quest for Palestinian statehood. Now unsympathetic yet extremely influential personalities like Henry Kissinger in the States and general Ariel Sharon in Israel admit , yes reluctantly but unequivocally, "the inevitability of Palestinian Statehood". That is a major achievement that we owe to decades of Palestinian sacrifices. Yet we should always bear in mind how Nahum Goldmann once defined diplomacy. He said: " it seems to me that diplomacy in the Middle East is the art of delaying the inevitable as long as possible".
Secretary of State, I believe it to be the noble task of British and Palestinian diplomacy to disallow the attempts at delaying the inevitable and, even better, to usher in the historical short-cuts needed to end unnecessary protracted injustice, unnecessarily prolonged suffering and unending belligerency.
Challenges:
1. Economic success or failure: When the peace process was initiated, knowing how devastating the notion of a " divine mission for a chosen people on a promised land" was, we rebaptised Palestine as " the promising land". Today, because of the unconvincing nature of the process, because of the policy of closures that result in the strangulation of the Palestinian society and economy, we are witnessing dramatic reductions in per capita income, rocketing levels of unemployment and hardly any significant investment. Yet, for every possible reason, we are condemned to succeed in the economic arena.
2. The territorial dimension: Today’s diplomatic impasse that has shattered the little credibility left to the process does not stem from what percentage of withdrawal is required for the long overdue 1st and 2nd and even 3rd redeployments. It is already the battle for final status. Bibi Netanyahu does not conceal his " vision" of returning around 40% of the occupied West Bank. Ladies and gentlemen, I have news for Netanyahu. I fully agree with " his" principle of reciprocity and since the peace process is based on the concept of " land for peace" and since we are in favour of 100% peace, he should not be surprised at all that our expectation is the return of 100% of those territories occupied 1967.
With Netanyahu and most of the Israeli establishment, we seem to have a conceptual difference. They tend to prefer the concept of " territorial compromise", consider the West Bank as " disputed territory" and generously offer to meet us half - way between . . . Jerusalem and Jericho. We, on the other hand, operate on the basis of the search for a " historical compromise", consider Mandatory Palestine to be the disputed territory and offer to meet them along the 4th of June 1967 boundaries in Jerusalem and nowhere else but in Jerusalem.
It seems that Arab realism was misunderstood as resignation. Since the Arab Summit meeting in Fez- Morocco in 1982 and the adoption of the peace proposals of the Crown- Prince Fahd of Saudi Arabia, the message from the Arab world was: " in exchange of Israel’s withdrawal from its 1967 expansion we are ready to recognise Israel’s existence in its pre- 1967 boundaries. That is the only game in town from Morocco to Mascat. That is the only deal in town, from Rabat to Riyadh.
In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the victim has moved faster than the oppressor beyond double negation towards mutual recognition, mutual recognition between Israel and Palestine. I hope that Bibi Netenyahu has not misread our intentions again. We were not in favour of a Palestinian unilateral recognition of Israeli existence. Recognition should be a double- way traffic. Recognition can only be a double way traffic. Secretary of State, if the diplomatic avenue continues to be obstructed, I fear that many from the realist school of thought will be reduced to say: radicalism is too important to be left to the radicals alone any longer.
Former Israeli Prime Minister Ishac Shamir, in his speech at the Madrid Peace Conference of 1991 spoke of "Israel’s hunger for peace". Secretary of State, we can satisfy Israel’s hunger for peace, if Israel abandons its appetite for territory.
3. The need for an improved performance: there is undeniably room for improvement in the Palestinian performance. By the way, Helmut Schmidt is known to have said that "the largest room on earth is precisely the room for improvement". I still believe that we the Palestinian people have still neither the Authority we deserve nor the opposition we need. There is ample room for improvement in both. This criticism also extends to the performance of the Palestinian intelligentsia, the Palestinian business community and to the Palestinian Diaspora.
4. Alienation of segments of our society: With great lucidity, we should admit that the way the peace process was approached, great anxieties surfaced among certain segments of our society. The Palestinian refugee community, still living in sub-human conditions on the periphery of the homeland, feels abandoned, ignored, neglected. We should do our utmost to keep their dossier, which the PLO reluctantly had to accept to see defered to final status negotiations, on the fore front of our agenda. The Palestinians who have succeeded in staying in what became the State of Israel in 1948 also feel that they have been dropped from any vision for the future and that since we adopted the two-States approach. A dynamic strategy based on a triangular Palestinian- Palestinian - Palestinian cooperation, among the Palestinians of the State in the making, the diaspora Palestinians and the Palestinians of Israel, should be initiated. A multi-faceted cooperation, a multi-dimensional interaction, with political, economic, commercial and sociological components that will strengthen our social tissue, our national fabric.
5. Redefinition of roles: During the last years the centre of gravity of Palestinian nationalism has moved back home to Palestine. That was the logical and inevitable evolution in any rational strategic thinking. The reemerging Palestinian national movement was a diaspora phenomenon. It all started in the University campuses of Cairo and Beirut. Its constituency was in the refugees camps, its financial backing was provided by the Palestinian communities in the Gulf. But this development, the shift from the periphery to the centre, from outside to inside, invites us to quickly undertake a redefinition of the respective roles of the different components of our society, not least the more- than- ever decisive role of our diaspora communities mainly in the USA but also in Europe and elsewhere.
Global Tribes:
There is a new concept in contemporary international relations, fashionable yet fully relevant to our Palestinian experience: the concept of "global tribes". The Jews are the global tribe par excellence. But so are the Anglo-Saxons, the Scots, the Chinese, the Indians, the Armenians and the ... Arabs and the Palestinians. We can and should transform our geographic dispersion, from Scandinavia to California, that symptom of our tragedy, into a major source for influence and empowerment. We often diagnose as one of the major causes of our underdevelopment, our inclination to clannish and tribal patterns of behaviour. The challenge and the opportunity for us is to succeed in operating from now on as a tribe, as a modern tribe, as a global tribe. While maintaining and cultivating our intimate interaction with the homeland, we should better integrate and fully participate in the political life of our host countries. The day will come, soon, when here in the United Kingdom we will witness the birth of the British-Arab Liberal Association, the British-Arab Conservative Club and of course, Secretary of State, the British-Arab Labour Movement , becoming no longer an alien phenomenon or a foreign factor but a domestic actor. Ladies and gentlemen, this distinguished gathering tonight can make any Western political party blush of envy.
Ladies and gentlemen,
Not only in Palestine but all over the world
we live today in a transitional period. I have never belonged to a fatalistic,
a deterministic school of thought but to the voluntarist school that emphasises
the importance of the will, individual and collective. Yes, today, and
on a variety of issues, History is undecided. We should shed aside the
psychology of failure, the mentality of defeat, the feeling of impotence
and be confident that we can make a difference.