Wilson Center conference on Israel-Palestine

Yesterday morning I went to a very interesting small conference jointly organized by the Woodrow Wilson International Center and the American Task Force on Palestine. Former PA Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabboo was speaking, and so was former PA Culture Minister Ziad Abu Amr. These are both smart, articulate people whom I’ve known for many years, so I was eager to hear their views– especially on current relationships between Fateh and Hamas.
(I see that the Fateh and Hamas prisoners have just negotiated a joint political platform, which was presented to Abu Mazen. It reportedly included acceptance of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Hamas leaders not in pirson said they hadn’t seen it and couldn’t comment…Anyway, joint political discussions between the two leaderships are due to start in Ramallah soon.)
Ziad and Yasser both gave excellent presentations. Both men are much closer to Fateh than to Hamas, politically. But they both made impassioned pleas to the western nations to end the very harmful siege that has been imposed on the PA-held areas and on the Hamas government. Both said the move made by the Quartet Monday to create a Trust Fund to allow some external funding to go into the PA areas did not go near nearly far enough. Both also argued forcefully that pressure and exclusion would only strengthen the support for Hamas inside the PA areas and the region, and that a policy of political inclusion is the only way to force Hamas to test its political claims and reveal their weaknesses.
Both men pointed with anguish to the terrible, and very humiliating, treatment Pres. Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) has received at the hands of the Israelis and the Americans. They underlined that Hamas has now given Abu Mazen an explicit mandate to negotiate in the peace process, and that support for a negotiated peace leading to a viable two-state outcome remains high among Palestinians.
Ziad said at one point, “Hamas has made it clear that a two-state solution is fine, even though this doesn’t end their more ‘ideological’ or sentimental claim to the whole of the land– which is exactly the same as the Likud or Kadima people say.”
… Anyway, I certainly haven’t done justice there to the presentations those two gave. The other speakers included Nabil Amr, who is more of a Fateh apparatchik, Israeli journo Nahum Barnea, former Israeli Ambassador to the US Zalman Shoval (who gave a speech worthy of the hardline territorial maximalist that he has always been; no change there), and former Foreign Ministers from Israel, Egypt ,and Jordan: Shlomo Ben-Ami, Ahmed Maher el-Said, and Marwan Muasher. Later, Saudi Ambassador to the US Prince Turki al-Faisal gave a “Keynote Address”.
I was particularly interested to hear how Ahmed Maher, Muasher, and Turki spoke about Hamas– since a big part of the US-Israeli campaign against Hamas thus far has concentrated on trying to get the Arab states to joint the economic siege on the Hamas-led government, while the Hamas ministers have had some (limited) success in breaking that aspect of the siege.
Ahmed Maher said he judged that clashes between Fateh and Hamas “are dangerous for the stability not just of the Palestinians but also for Israel and the whole region.” He argued that “Fateh should support– everyone should support– the incorporation of Hamas into the political system. We all need to understand we have no right to choose the leaders of the Palestinians.”
He noted that the US negotiated with the North Vietnamese even before there was a ceasefire. He urged the US to relaunch serious peace negotiations. “So maybe you can’t have direct negotiations, but you should have the Quartet playing an active role in mediation. Hamas has accepted a hudna. It has accepted to let Abu Mazen negotiate. There is something to build on.”
When Muasher spoke, he stressed that it was complete fallacy that Hamas’s electoral victory in January interrupted an ongoing peace process. “There was no peace process!” He also said it was a fallacy that Hamas was elected primarily on the basis of its anti-peace program. “People voted for Hamass mainly because they were dissatisfied with the way the PA had been running before then.” He said the implementation of the unilateral plan described by Olmert would result in the institutionalization of a Palestinian ghetto, and asked whether that could possibly be in Israel’s interest.
He and Prince Turki both laid a lot of stress on the value of the “Beirut Declaration” of 2002 and urged that pushing that forward– including, as an early step, winning Hamas’s support for it– would be the best way forward. (That declaration, which was supported by all the Arab states then and since calls for Israel’s withdrawal from all the land it gained control of in June 1967; the creation in the West Bank and Gaza of an independent Palestinian state; a “mutually agreed” resolution of the Palestinian refugee question on the basis of UN resolution 194; the complete ending of the state of hostility between Israel and all Arab states; the establishment by Arab states of normal peaceful relations with Israel; and the establishment of a regional security order.)
There was some discussion in the conference as to whether the “Road Map” declared by Pres. Bush in 2002 was dead or not. All (except Shoval) agreed that the target dates defined in it needed to be updated if it is to have any relevance. All the Arab speakers stressed the importance of negotiating a final resolution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, even if implementation is in stages; and said that the indeterminacy of the Oslo approach to negoptiations had been a real weakness of it.
Anyway, more on this later…