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Washington Report, January/February 2006, pages 72-73 Waging Peace Update, Assurance From Saeb Erekat
FRESH from a Nov. 29 meeting with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, chief negotiator for the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Dr. Saeb Erekat spoke with reporters and the public at the Palestine Center in Washington, DC. “My message,” Erekat said, “is that we are holding our legislative elections on Jan. 25, 2006, and we want the United States to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with us to ensure these elections take place.” Erekat celebrated the recent U.S. third-party role in negotiating a border crossing between Gaza and Egypt at Rafah, and asked for continued support in holding the Israeli military at bay. “Nothing should sabotage these elections,” he insisted. “We are not telling you that democracy cannot be imposed from the outside. Impose it on us! Please help us! All you have to do is just convince the Israelis to keep their noses outside of our elections....All you have to do is to guarantee that Israel will not go around assassinating our candidates, or arresting them, or preventing certain candidates from going place to place.” Optimistic about the progress of negotiations and seemingly responding to his critics, Dr. Erekat stated that “We have been negotiating since 1990, and I don’t think we have wasted a single minute of these negotiations.” Despite his optimism and commitment to negotiations, Erekat expressed concerns about negotiating from a point of powerlessness. “The road map,” he said, “is done in parallel, not sequentially. Israel has no right whatsoever to condition the implementation of the road map on me. I have an obligation of having one authority, one legal gun, the rule of law. I am going at it in parallel in the three stages, but that doesn’t mean that Israel should stop and watch me as I sweat and finish everything. “The second thing,” he continued, “is that Israel should not tie my hands, tie my legs, blindfold me, and throw me into the sea, so a correspondent here and there will tell me, ‘Oh, look at these people! He’s drowning! He’s no good as a partner. He’s not swimming, you see?’ Putting us in this dilemma by destroying our command centers, our communication centers, our vehicles, confiscating the pistols and the guns we have and…arresting our police—and then to say how come you’re not doing enough? “It’s fashionable to tell Palestinians what to do,” Erekat observed. “They treat me like a superpower, and they tell me that I should do one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. And these ten people don’t know that a single Israeli officer can prevent me from leaving my home in Jericho if he chooses to.” Outlining the PLO’s negotiating platform, Dr. Erekat said that “we offer the Israelis today—my generation—a two-state solution: a Palestine on the ‘67 border, with East Jerusalem as its capital, next to a state of Israel, which we have already recognized…The policies of settlements, walls, and dictation—rather than negotiation—lead in one direction…a one-state solution from my home town in Jericho on the Jordan River to the Mediterranean. Call it ‘Israel,’ but I want to be equal. Once I say this, they say ‘Oh! Look at these Palestinians; they want to undermine the Jewish nature of Israel.’ Well, make up your minds…this story must come to an end.” If not a two-state solution, or a democratic secular one-state solution, Erekat warned, “the third option that is happening today on the streets of the West Bank is not something that anyone—and of all people, not the Jews—should be proud of. It is the creation of an apartheid system worse than that of South Africa.” Clearly defining negotiating goals and assuring the Palestinian people that their trust in him is not misplaced, Dr. Erekat said that “the peace process, as specified in the road map, is to end the Israeli occupation that began in 1967. Israelis can build settlements, can make incursions into my home town of Jericho with tanks, and do whatever they want. We have no army, no navy and no air force. But trust me, this Palestinian pen will only sign on something that will be doable and satisfactory to the Palestinian people, and that is what is defined in the international legitimacy codes and resolutions.” The complete transcript of Dr. Erekat’s remarks can be found at <www.thejerusalemfund.org/images/Erekat_Transcript.pdf>. —Matt Horton |
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