Awarding prize to Ashrawi blots process and ignores genuine candidates

Gedaliah Afterman

Canberra Times - 3 November 2003

If the notion of a Palestinian pacifist is an oxymoron, as Joseph Wakim wrote (CT, October 29), then peace in the Middle East has no hope. Fortunately, though, he is incorrect.

Dr Hanan Ashrawi, the chosen recipient of the Sydney Peace Prize, is hardly a pacifist or an advocate of the compromise that alone can lead to a genuine peace.

However, there are many other Palestinians (as well as Israelis) who have genuinely dedicated themselves to reconciliation and working toward a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and therefore deserve an award which "highlights the philosophy, language and practice of non-violence" as the Sydney Peace Prize is designed to do.

Take Mubarak Awad, a Palestinian activist now living in the United States.

During the first intifada of the late 1980s, Awad espoused a philosophy of non-violent civil disobedience and became known as a leader of non-violent protests and tax strikes.

He envisions a Middle East where Jews can safely purchase property in Damascus or Baghdad, much as Arabs today can legally purchase land in Israel.

He envisions a unified Jerusalem under a joint Jewish-Christian-Moslem jurisdiction and bristles at anti-Jewish trends now in fashion in the Arab world.

Another suitable Palestinian candidate for the peace prize would have been the long-time human-rights campaigner Bassem Eid.

Many Westerners know Eid from his work with Human Rights Watch and the Israeli human-rights organisation B'tselem.

After the creation of the Palestinian Authority in 1994, Eid left B'tselem to form the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group and he proceeded to challenge both the Palestinian Authority and its leader, Yasser Arafat, on human-rights abuses.

Since then, because of his criticisms of Palestinian authorities, he has landed in Palestinian jails several times.

He has criticised European and left-wing Israeli "blind faith" in Arafat, and called on Palestinians to learn from the democracy they have witnessed in Israel for the past 35 years.

Rather than "against Israel", Eid has acted only to create a democratic and peaceful Palestinian state alongside Israel.

A third Palestinian candidate for the peace prize could have been Al-Quds University president Dr Sari Nusseibah, who has engaged in considerable dialogue with Israelis, consistently opposed terrorism and called on Palestinians to make compromises, particularly on the so-called "right of return" of refugees, for the sake of peace.

Unfortunately the committee ignored these people and selected instead Ashrawi. She might be an eloquent and effective spokeswoman for the Palestinian cause, but she is no peacemaker.

In fact, while Nusseibah was calling for Palestinians to give up the "right of return", Ashrawi took a donation from Canada to promote peace and used it to produce a booklet arguing that this legally unfounded right - a demand to destroy Israel by flooding it with millions of descendants of the refugees from the 1948 war - must never be compromised.

Not only has Ashrawi done nothing to advance peace between Israelis and Palestinians, she has excused and supported acts of terrorism and violence against innocent civilians.

She has argued repeatedly that Palestinian terrorist acts are the inevitable result of Israeli policies.

One example occurred after one of the most notorious events of the early days of the intifada, the barbaric lynching by a Palestinian mob at a Palestinian police station of two Israeli army reservists who lost their way while driving in the West Bank and accidentally ended up the middle of Ramallah.

Ashrawi, at the time in Washington, said that the two were part of Israeli "death squads" and were in Ramallah to kill Palestinians, therefore defending the murderers who, after lynching them, went on to desecrate their bodies.

She was still making this argument a month after the incident, when evidence clearly showed it was not true.

Ashrawi argues that a two-state solution is not "moral" and has repeatedly opposed any Palestinian compromise for the sake of peace.

Given her record and the existence of far more suitable Palestinian candidates, not to mention Israelis and others, who have done far more to promote peace, it is simply difficult to understand why the Sydney Peace Foundation felt Ashrawi was the most suitable recipient.

However this odd and erroneous decision was reached, it cannot be seen as anything other than a blot on what should otherwise be a prestigious award to promote peace.

Gedaliah Afterman is a researcher at the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council.