Hanan Ashrawi Delivers Distinguished Lecture at Inauguration of UCSB’s Middle East Center

By Pat McDonnell Twair

“Our only guilt is to refuse to die in silence.” So said Hanan Ashrawi before an audience of 750 at the inaugural Distinguished Lecture of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

The pre-eminent orator of Palestinian issues was in California April 8 to present a landmark speech for which she received several standing ovations. Dr. Ashrawi discussed the oppression of the Palestinians under the world’s longest military occupation, flaws of the failed peace process and the need for Palestinians to be under international protection.

Under the theme “Palestine: The Dual Challenge of Nation-Building and Making Peace,” the University of Virginia-educated scholar said that, in 1991, Palestinians were under the assumption that a new paradigm for peace could be created on the basis of equality and nation-building.

However, Ashrawi said, from the onset of negotiations the Israelis claimed the Fourth Geneva Convention (on the inviolability of civilians and their property while under military occupation) did not apply to Palestinians because they are not a state.

“This is ridiculous,” she stressed, “since this reasoning did not apply to stateless Holocaust victims.

“Never mind that U.N. Resolutions 242 and 338 called for a withdrawal to the 1967 borders, restoration of East Jerusalem and refugees—the Israelis wanted to renegotiate even these resolutions,” she said. “Then, as Israel continued to carry out collective punitive actions of siege and closure of Palestinian communities, they were not held to any standard of accountability.

“When we protested to the United Nations, we were slapped by a [U.S.] veto,” she stated.

With the break up of the Soviet Union, the peace process became the monopoly of the U.S., and Ashrawi said she found herself negotiating with U.S. representatives more than with Israelis.

“The Israelis would accept a measure we proposed,” she recalled. “Then the Americans would tell us the same thing was unacceptable to the Israelis. Gradually, the Palestinian leadership was asked to sign agreements that violated Palestinian human rights. Our weakness was exploited.”

Ashrawi also addressed the issue of the fragmentation of the Palestinian people and their land.

“For centuries, we gave proud names to the places we lived,” she said. “Then our place names were replaced with letters of the alphabet: Area A, Area B or Hl or H2 in Hebron. Israel was to create settlement clusters that would separate and divide Palestinians living in the West Bank.”

The ongoing Israeli refusal to implement signed agreements was another nail in the coffin of the peace process. “Not one agreement was implemented on the date it was specified to be, and every agreement was re-opened for further modification,” she stated. “Finally, the process had no touch with reality. The Palestinians were disillusioned. The process was seen as an isolated entity that could only be approached from the perspective of what was good for Israel.”

Security, she said, was applied only to the Israeli side: “There was no approach to human-based security and there was a denial of Palestinian human rights and security.”

Ashrawi received a round of applause when she stated: “The idea that brute force and military assaults will lead to Palestinian capitulation will not happen.”

Commenting that Israel’s friends in the U.S. Congress regularly come up with bills that give away East Jerusalem, label Palestinians as terrorists or call for an end to aid to the Palestinians, Ashrawi said Washington gives Israel $6 billion each year, compared to the $100 million it agreed to pay the Palestinians. She received her second ovation when she noted, “We can live without that aid.”

Another fallacy, she pointed out, is the belief that Palestinians will accept the notion that U.N. resolutions will not be implemented.

“The acquisition of land by war is inadmissible,” she averred. “Now the Israelis want to renegotiate 242. In the same spirit, Israel refuses international peacekeepers because it says their presence would violate Israel’s sovereignty—but we are talking about peacekeepers on occupied land, the West Bank and Gaza.”

Distortions manipulated by the occupier cannot be overestimated, she warned. “The Israelis expel [Palestinian] civilians, demolish their homes, imprison them,” she said, “and if Israel agrees to give back a fraction of what belongs to the Palestinians, they should be grateful.”

Ashrawi scorned the Israeli claim that Palestinians are “push-button” people who rise up when Arafat pushes a rebellion button and become calm when he presses another button.

Spinmasters charge that the Israelis feel besieged. It is not Palestinian tanks and helicopters, however, that are attacking cities, she noted.

At this point, a heckler shouted: “Stop killing our babies.”

In true statesmanlike fashion, Ashrawi calmly continued, without losing a beat: “I am amazed that our children have died so quietly—with the exception of Mohammed al-Durra—but when one Jewish child was shot and killed, moral outrage was voiced globally. How come the world doesn’t object to state terrorism?”

When the applause ended, she continued:

“This is not a war situation. Israel claims rules of engagement apply and it uses its formidable arsenal against an entire civilian population.”

Stating that no arms were used by the Palestinians during the first days of the al-Aqsa intifada, Ashrawi said that when Palestinians began to shoot bullets, Israel insisted it had the license to bombard neighborhoods with heavy artillery.

The only solution, she said, is for Israel to remove its tanks and stop the strangulation of the Palestinians.

Referring to the Israeli government under Ariel Sharon as a “strange creature made of right-wing extremists and extreme religious fundamentalists under the cover of Shimon Peres as its apologist,” Ashrawi predicted this “lethal combination” will be locked in a perpetual crisis.

“We may be the weaker party, but we must have equal rights,” she said, to another round of applause. “At the very least, this [Sharon] government must not be allowed to wreak permanent damage on the peace process.”

Such willful destruction, she warned, allows no room for neutrality: sides must be taken—and, unfortunately, people all too often take the side of the stronger combatant.

“We have the moral and legal argument. It is cowardly to be neutral,” she argued. “There is room for a two-state solution, but Zionism, if taken to extremism, can self-destruct. The Zionists can’t destroy all of us. If it wants our land then it will have to take us, too, and have a bi-national state.

“Ultimately,” she concluded, “we are locked into this fatal embrace and it may take two generations or more in a tragic loss of life.”

During the question-and-answer session, one audience member asked why, if the U.S. is a biased supporter of Israel, the World Court couldn’t exact justice for the Palestinians

“This depends on the will of the Europeans,” Ashrawi responded, “who so far have not wanted to compete with the U.S., which has set itself up as the sole sponsor of the peace process. The U.S. doesn’t consider the U.N. to be neutral, yet the U.N. was formed to pursue peace. I would like to see the U.N. playing a part.”

When queried as to the tangible goals of the Palestinian Authority, Ashrawi replied:

“I am not a member of the PA [round of applause]. I told [PA Chairman Yasser] Arafat that I couldn’t be used as a token woman. We need a powerful change from outside the PA. Part of the problem is that the PA doesn’t have a strategy. The responsibility of every leader is to protect the lives of his people. First, the siege must be lifted. We must have the creation of a national unity government. Only when we have our own house in order and are a democracy can we face external challenges. We will be used as target practice by the Israelis until we have reform and accountability.”

In response to a question as to whether the Palestinians could achieve more through nonviolent protests, Ashrawi said the first intifada was totally nonviolent, yet she repeatedly was beaten and interrogated by Israeli authorities, who killed and imprisoned hundreds of Palestinians.

“The occupation army won’t throw flowers at nonviolent crowds,” she said. “People have the right to resist occupation. The only language the Palestinians are hearing is violence. You must understand the atmosphere.”

When asked about historical parallels to the Palestinian struggle, she noted: “We have much in common with South Africa, but ours is not an internal issue inside Israel. We are the only country in the world where there are exclusive roads for the occupying settlers. There are some similarities with the Bosnians, but we don’t want to secede, we want an end to occupation. As for the Kosovars, Clinton insisted that the Kosovars must return to their homes, but we are told it is unrealistic for Palestinian refugees to return home. We are the only people remaining under military occupation, and have the largest refugee population.

”If our occupiers had been Chinese, Turks, or any other group of people,” Ashrawi concluded, “I do not think the world would have remained silent over what has been done to us.”

SIDEBAR #1

UCSB’s Middle East Studies Center Geared to Inform Public

The University of California at Santa Barbara has long been acknowledged for its scholars of Middle East history and its musical ensemble which has performed throughout the state. Both disciplines have been united in the Center for Middle East Studies, which officially opened Aug. 15, 2000.

Prof. Dwight Reynolds is the director of the center, which drew international attention when it invited Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, the founder of MIFTAH, the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy, to deliver its inaugural Distinguished Lecture on April 8.

At a dinner following Dr. Ashrawi’s lecture, Professor Reynolds noted that the Middle East has made invaluable contributions to world civilization. The Center intends to inform and help educate Americans about the diversity of the Middle East, as well as offer outreach to public schools.

Of a core faculty of 20 academics serving the Center, five are recipients of UCSB’s most respected teaching awards. All conduct research on the Middle East that has been published and recognized internationally, the director noted.

Professor Reynolds himself holds a Ph.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania. His dissertation research was conducted in the village of al-Bakatush in Egypt’s Nile Delta, where he lived and worked with families of hereditary poets who sing Sirat Bani Hilal on the rabab. His experiences studying with master poet Shaykh Taha Abu Zayd, whose version of the Sira was nearly 140 hours long, are chronicled in his book, Heroic Poets, Poetic Heroes, published in 1996 by Cornell University Press. He also is the co-author and editor of Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Tradition, to be published in May by the University of California Press.

Additional information about the Center is available at its Web site: <www.cmes.ucsb.edu>.

—P.M.T

Pat McDonnell Twair is a free-lance writer based in Los Angeles.