Hanan Ashrawi - which side of peace?

July 1999

IMAGE & REALITY
Hanan Ashrawi - which side of peace?

By Daniel Mandel

The Madrid peace conference in December 1991 made Hanan Ashrawi’s reputation in the way no amount of distinguished work as an academic could have done. It was here, as a member of the Palestinian delegation, that she became known and admired internationally. She proved to be a winning combination – Palestinian, Christian, female, educated, plausible and articulate. Like the Israeli leader she detests, Benjamin Netanyahu, she is telegenic. In fact, both have been criticised by their respective detractors for possessing in expression what they lack in substance.

The success of Hanan Ashrawi also owed something to the fact that she was not Yasser Arafat: in other words, that she was not a shadowy, khaki-clad, kfir-wearing former terrorist chieftain. Far from it. The daughter of a wealthy physician, she was educated at the American University of Beirut and the University of Virginia in the United States before becoming a faculty member in the English Department and eventually Dean of the Arts Faculty at Bir Zeit University on the West Bank. In fact, her career has been remarkably similar to that of the man she describes as her "friend and mentor", the Palestinian-American Professor Edward Said. Both were born in Palestine, are Christian, were educated in the best schools and colleges outside it, and have made their names in the cause of Palestinian activism. There are further similarities, but these can be left to later.

At the time of Madrid, the Palestinian delegation was clearly but only informally linked to the PLO. Not that this mattered: her views were orthodox. In her memoir, This Side of Peace: A Personal Account (1995), Rabin was "the bone-breaker"; Arafat, in contrast, was merely "portrayed" as a terrorist.

The Israeli-PLO agreement, reached in Oslo in 1993, ended a two and a half-year period in which Ashrawi was de facto spokesman for the Palestinians. "I am not a politician by choice," she wrote later, so the transition to a different form of public life ought not to have been difficult.

Moreover, when she set up as the Commissioner-General of a newly-formed Independent Commission for Citizens Rights, the hope was that she might become just what the Palestinians needed: a fearless independent activist of democratic and liberal inclination whose international reputation would make Israelis and Palestinians responsive to her voice. "We are the watchdog of the government, we cannot be formed by it and we cannot be subject to it, but we are subject to the law." That Arafat had authorised the establishment of the Commission did not seem to matter. At first, she was forthright. When Arafat closed down two Palestinian newspapers in Gaza and Jericho in July 1994, Ashrawi said, "We cannot accept a collective punitive measure that suppresses publication or distribution of a paper."

Would Ashrawi be a voice of reason and moderation? Palestinian society had spawned Hamas and Islamic Jihad; two Islamist groups committed to Israel’s elimination and the use of indiscriminate terror. Yet, in response to a journalist’s question at an October 1997 press conference, Ashrawi said she believed that, "politically Hamas has the right to express its political opinion, and it has the right to be part of the fabric of society." That opinion consists of eliminating Israel by diverse forms of violence.

This is no isolated example of being unwilling to disown multiple murder. Some years ago, the British journalist Barbara Amiel pointed out to Ashrawi that the Zionists in pre-state days had eventually turned in their own terrorists and that such a development had been a turning point in Jewish nation-building: would Ashrawi turn in a member of a terrorist group? Her reply: "No. The Jews killed their own. I could never turn in a Palestinian to the Israelis, never." So much for individual accountability and national responsibility.

Ashrawi might have, of course, inhibitions about judging her own side. But where does this leave her advocacy of human rights within Palestinian-controlled territory? When the veteran Palestinian journalist, Daoud Kuttab, simply broadcast a session of the Palestinian Legislative Council which included criticism of Yasser Arafat, he was gaoled. Ashrawi never protested this authoritarian act. When the Palestinian human rights activist, Dr Saraj, was imprisoned by the Palestinian Authority, Ashrawi neither protested the arrest nor visited the man in jail (though other Palestinian human rights activists did). She can no more defend a human rights activist than turn in a terrorist. Inhibited indeed.

Such, perhaps, was the institutionalised impotence of a human rights body at once notionally independent yet brought into existence by the people it was suppose to watch. Ashrawi implicitly accepted this verdict by forswearing her earlier distaste for politics and joining Arafat’s Cabinet as Minister for Higher Education, a post from which she subsequently resigned in August 1998.

However, the fact remains that, like her "friend and mentor", Edward Said, Ashrawi combines a voice of measured sophistication with a quite unyielding and irredentist extremism. Perhaps Said’s copious and withering critiques of Arafat, which have latterly replaced his earlier adulation of the man, got to her. Said of course, is free to cogitate harmlessly on Palestinian affairs from New York. Ashrawi is at the coal face, and finds the job of criticising a peace process she is prevented from openly opposing more difficult. Her stated reason, one which is unarguable, was corruption in the Palestinian Authority. Her resignation appeared the day after Arafat retained three ministers accused of corruption. "It’s time for us to begin the practice of democracy," was her comment and veiled challenge, as such things must be, to Arafat.

In addition to a staunchly hostile appraisal of Israel, Ashrawi has tried to airbrush Jewish history from the Middle East. She is not alone in this: Arafat once talked of all Palestinians being descended from a wholly imaginary Canaanite king named Salem. She claims that "the land of Israel" has no basis in history and that Jesus was a Palestinian. Doubtless, it must be difficult for a Christian Palestinian to concede that the founder of her faith is a Jew. Be that as it may, the consistent effort to efface the Jewish connection to the land is all of a piece with the dogmatism of early Palestinian nationalism which in its inflexibility ensured the first Arab-Israeli war.

The 1956 Suez war, for Ashrawi, is the "Triple Aggression", a reference to the combined Israeli-British-French attack upon Egypt. She does not mention the hundreds of Israeli casualties produced by Egyptian-sponsored terrorist raids into Israel that preceded that ill-starred venture. The 1967 war, which was wholly the result of Egypt’s miscalculated sabre-rattling, is also Israel’s fault. She claims that war was preceded by Israeli "border attacks", which it was. These too, however, were preceded by Syrian border attacks over a period of nearly twenty years, to say nothing of Egypt moving 100,000 troops into formerly demilitarised Sinai. The 1973 war is even more mystifying in origin. It is, says Ashrawi, "a closed book".

With denial goes demonisation. Ashrawi has alleged that Israel kidnaps Palestinian children suspected of stone-throwing for the purposes of extortion: As she told Barbara Amiel: "It’s kidnapping. They are taking them hostage for ransom money." In fact, as Amiel pointed out at the time, Palestinian children caught creating disturbances are put on bail, which is later refunded with interest if the child remains out of trouble for a year.

In March 1996, the Palestinian Authority voted to rescind the clauses of the Palestinian Charter calling for Israel’s destruction. Ashrawi opposed the vote. Her stated grounds were that rescinding the Charter represented too big a concession at that time to the Israelis. What she did not say was that the recision of the Charter was a commitment made by the Palestinians at Oslo three years earlier.

With demonisation goes distortion. "In general, Hamas has struck out in response to Israeli provocations," asserts Ashrawi. So far, the biggest Israeli provocation has been to engage the PLO in talks, for terrorism was nothing like what it became after 1993. Appearing last year before the National Press Club in Washington at the time of Israel’s 50th anniversary, Ashrawi saw the significance of the moment in these terms: "a whole people were slated for national obliteration." Absolutely true, except that the people in question were the Jews.

In April and May 1948, although the United Nations had approved the partition of Palestine into two states, one for each of its peoples, attempts were made to cancel partition and impose an international trusteeship on the country. Had that effort succeeded, the Palestinian Arabs, as the majority in Palestine, would have wrested domination over the whole country, an intention they stated repeatedly. In fact, the British left and the Palestinians did not set up their own state; they busied themselves rather, with their Arab brethren, in preventing the Jews from setting up their own. Just why the Palestinians threw away statehood is the sort of question Ashrawi has never answered except to say that the Palestinians are an all-or-nothing people. "We are different from the Jews. There is a purism and idealism in our approach which is based on principle." The purism of her description involves an unappeasable disinclination for accommodation. Why should Palestinian nationalism be consigned to sterile inflexibility? Doubtless because, in some important way, like the war of 1973, it is still "a closed book".

In light of these attitudes, it is little wonder that her reaction to Oslo was "one of shock" when she learnt of the text of the agreement. She engaged in spirited debate on the subject with the PLO negotiator, Abu Mazen, thinking a better job should have been made on the issues of Jerusalem and Jewish settlements. She mentions that her friend, the poet Mahmoud Darwish (who is most well known for a poem exhorting the Israelis to disappear), resigned from the Palestine National Council in protest. The truth is, as the memoirs of Shimon Peres confirm, she and the other members of the Palestinian delegation had been left in the dark. Later, in extended interviews with Barbara Victor, (reproduced in Victor’s Hanan Ashrawi: A Passion for Peace, 1995), Ashrawi conceded she could not have won some of the concessions secured by the PLO at Oslo.

Ashrawi, together with Saeb Erakat and Haider Abdul Shafi, her delegation colleagues, nonetheless resigned in protest. Ironically, their resignations were an important step in the peace process. As Peres recounts, "Arafat was unmoved, and Rabin began to believe that he meant business." Since those days, her biggest claim to fame where peace making is concerned has been to oppose the revision of the Palestinian Charter and, last May, any postponement of a declaration of Palestinian statehood. The title of Ashrawi’s memoirs is an intriguing one which fails, however, to satisfy: This Side of Peace. One wonders which side.