THE ISRAEL LOBBY & AMERICAN POLICY CONFERENCE 2019
Delinda Hanley:
I’m Delinda Hanley, the
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs news editor and
executive director of the American Educational Trust.
Dr. Hanan Ashrawi has broken through the glass ceiling that can
prevent women around the world from reaching the top.
She was the first woman to be elected a member of the
Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization in
2009. She served as the
official spokesperson of the Palestinian delegation to the Middle
East peace Process from 1991 to 1993 and participated in the
1991-1992 Madrid Peace Conference.
In 1993, Dr. Ashrawi founded the Palestinian Independent
Commission for Citizens’ Rights, PICCR, to investigate Israeli and
Palestinian human rights violations, recording her experiences in
This Side of Peace: A
Personal Account, which she just signed at lunch time.
In 1996, Ashrawi was elected and subsequently re-elected many times
to the Palestinian Legislative Council.
In 1996, she also accepted the post of minister of higher
education and research.
In 1998, Ashrawi founded and continues to serve in MIFTAH, the
Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and
Democracy. It is not
hyperbolic to say that Dr. Ashrawi has also broken through the
Palestinian sound barrier, the wall of silence in America’s media
which excludes Palestinian voices.
She is the Palestinian Iron Dome.
Whenever Israel sends war planes, troops and weaponized
drones to attack her people, we can count on Hanan Ashrawi to be out
there trying to stop the bombs and the Israeli propaganda.
Her only weapon: her articulate, reasonable voice and demand
for justice and fair play.
She will address the Israel lobby and the peace process.
Welcome, Hanan Ashrawi.
The Israel Lobby and the "Peace Process" from a Palestinian
Perspective
Hanan Ashrawi:
Thank you very much.
Thank you. This is
indeed heartwarming and humbling.
I thank you all for coming.
Thank you, Delinda, for your invitation.
Thank you, Grant.
Thank you, Janet for picking me up also, and all the people who made
this possible. I’m
delighted to be here with you.
I’m delighted to be part of this occasion, this endeavor,
which in many ways is extremely timely.
It does respond to a sense of urgency, really—a need to
intervene and to shape policy and discourse.
And it’s wonderful to hear all these, not just distinguished
people, but very profound and persuasive people and courageous
people, really, who are speaking truth to power and who are standing
up for justice. I don’t
want to waste too much time because I have a lot to say.
So you have to let me know ahead of time.
As you know, this is a very significant occasion, because we’re
talking about 100, 70, 50, and zero:
A hundred years since the Balfour Declaration.
I do hope that the Brits will not celebrate it, even though
Theresa May invited [Binyamin] Netanyahu to celebrate with her.
This is a colonial legacy par excellence.
Seventy years since the partition plan that did partition Palestine
and created the State of Israel, at that time on 55 percent of
Palestine.
Fifty years since the occupation of 1967.
And zero time for the two-state solution.
I’m asked to talk about the Israel lobby and the peace process.
I will focus on the peace process, because you all know that
the Israel lobby is never absent.
Whenever anything happens related to Palestine, it is there.
And when it comes to the peace process, they have always been
a shaping force-intertwining, interweaving, intervening their
presence, and at the same time maintaining their—I don’t want to say
control, but their influence every step of the way.
They play a major role in shaping and influencing U.S.
policy, particularly the peace process.
Since its inception, there’s a sense of ownership, that the
peace process is owned by the Israeli lobby in many ways, because
they’re looking out for the interests of Israel all the time.
There are various components of the lobby.
As you all know, they’re not monolithic.
They all have their impact here and there.
But the most significant impact is for the lobby groups, the
special interest groups that are closest to the Israeli government
in particular. And that
tends to be the more hard-line extremist groups.
Even though there are different voices, but the greatest
impact is by the more extreme voices.
The most influential, of course, is AIPAC and its Washington
Institute for Near East Policy—as you know, a think tank that has
probably had the most direct say in terms of the peace process
itself—and other organizations–the Heritage Foundation and so on.
So you have all these organizations that move from the extreme right
to the center like J Street, as was being discussed before this
talk. They all have a
different set of requirements and different ways of intervening.
There are different fields and players.
There’s a diversity in the pro-Israel lobby.
There’s the private sector.
And as you know [Sheldon] Adelson was trying to buy a
president here, but he’s also buying a prime minister in Israel.
[Irving] Moskowitz, who bought settlements, who built settlements in
Jerusalem. These are
individuals in the private sector who have had a direct impact and
direct intervention using their money.
Haim Saban, as you know, and Brookings, and down to the left,
Danny Abraham, who has accompanied the peace process all along from
a more liberal perspective.
There are institutions and think tanks with individuals feeding into
them. The most
significant and you’ll hear me talk him about often not because I
like him very much but because he has been the most
persistent—Dennis Ross, Martin Indyk and others.
Then you have academic and cultural individuals and spin
doctors who have been a primary force in shaping public perceptions,
including [Charles] Krauthammer, [Alan] Dershowitz, I’m sure you’re
hearing him now, Daniel Pipes.
There are lots of people who are Israeli apologists and spin
doctors.
Then you have religious organizations and institutions,
self-appointed Israeli apologists and defenders who take the Bible
literally, many of them.
And this is the extreme Zionist-Christian organizations.
They are extremely dangerous, in the sense that they do have
a literal biblical exegesis that gives Israel license to do whatever
it wants. And one of
them told me once, Palestinians have no right to exist because
you’re standing in the way of prophecy, the fulfillment of the
prophecy. So I said, “It
doesn’t sound very Christian when you advocate genocide.”
And then there are toxic organizations, as you know.
They have been very effective in distorting the Palestinian
message in reality, like MEMRI.
You know, M-E-M-R-I?
You should be aware of this.
This is a most toxic organization.
It is run by Yigal Carmon, who used to be the adviser to the
military governors, and he became the adviser to Shamir on terrorism
and so on. And he used
to interrogate me once in a while.
But now, he has this organization with tremendous funds.
He monitors everything and then he has access to Congress,
particularly to many decision makers.
He distorts Palestinian utterance and anything that is
published. We can talk
about this later. You
have MEMRI, you have NGO Monitor that attempts to bad-mouth all
Palestinian NGOs. You
have the PM Watch [Palestinian Media Watch], which is also waiting
for any Palestinian to open his or her mouth and they attack.
And then you have publications.
I’m sure you’re hearing more and more about Breitbart, for
example.
Gladstone [Observer].
These are extreme right-wing white supremacists.
Some of them are really anti-Semitic, but Zionists—very
interesting, this combination.
Now, they influenced substance, structure, procedure, and
priorities and objectives in the peace process.
They influenced terms of reference.
And they influenced also the players, and predominantly the
U.S. role in the peace process.
I would like to mention that many of the individuals who are
associated follow what I call the revolving door.
They use the revolving door as a charge against Palestinians,
that when people are arrested, they are released later.
But you have a revolving door in terms of their role.
Many of them were in the State Department.
And it seems that—like Dennis and Martin—that they do go to
the State Department, and then they leave and go to the Washington
Institute or another pro-Israeli lobby.
Then they come back through another door in the State
Department.
Now we have people in the White House who are not only lobbyists and
advocates, but who are active supporters of settlements.
So it’s not enough to have settlers in the Israeli coalition
government. Now you have
settlers in the White House. This is incredible.
So they don’t need to lobby.
They are decision makers.
So that’s what’s happening.
That frames in terms of influence the peace process with this
revolving door. You’ll
be surprised also that ex-[U.S.] Ambassador [to Israel] Dan Shapiro,
for example, decided to stay in Israel.
He’s joined the Institute for National Security Studies,
which is something that also Dennis joined at one point or
another—Dennis Ross.
It’s interchangeable.
Either they are influencing policy or they are making policy.
That’s why American policy was so distorted, because they
played a significant role in framing and defining the discourse and
perceptions, but went beyond that to manipulating the verbal public
space, anything related to the peace process.
And they generated a narrative based on myths, and provided
alternative facts. It’s
not Kellyanne [Conway] who invented alternative facts.
We’ve been victims of alternative facts all our lives,
alternative realities.
They’ve certainly willfully misled public opinion with a fabric-I
don’t want to go into details about the spin, about the
hasbara, as they
call it. But it has been
very active in shaping public perceptions and, hence, attitudes.
A distorted pattern emerged that was totally weighted in favor of
the occupation, generating a cyclical pattern, a vicious cycle, that
totally subverted progress and led to the current impasse, which has
been in the making for quite a long time-since the beginning.
And they ensured that the peace process maintained its
parameters within the domain of Israeli priorities and interests.
Now we are back at the beginning.
I wanted to read you a quotation from a paper in 1991, a
position paper by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
And guess who wrote this?
Martin Indyk.
This is March 4, 1991 just before the peace process started, when
President [George H.W.] Bush and James Baker were preparing for the
1991 Madrid process.
Some of the things he says, I mean, are being said right now.
That’s why I call it a cyclical pattern.
He says, “Israel now has a golden opportunity to deal with an
indigenous Palestinian leadership in the territories before the PLO
phoenix rises again.
It’s true the prime minister leads an unruly coalition of right-wing
and religious parties unwilling to countenance territorial
compromise in the West Bank.
But if there is a genuine offer of peace from the Arab
side”-outside then-“he’s acceptable to delivering a territorial
compromise on the Golan Heights and an interim deal for Palestinian
self-government which leaves open the final status of the
territories.” This is
the ongoing policy. I
mean, all you need to do is go to the Washington Institute website
and you will find all these policy papers.
Now there’s another one.
I’m not going to read all these things, but this one is the
Transition 2017: Toward a
New Paradigm for Addressing the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,
David Makovsky and Dennis Ross, Washington Institute.
This is another blueprint that was prepared to give to your new
President [Donald] Trump—and you have my full sympathy—on how to
progress. Because they want
to confiscate the language once again and confiscate the process
once again and decide how it’s going to proceed.
Anyway, so the peace process, conceptually, the influence was on the
terms of reference. They
made sure it dealt only with [U.N. Resolutions] 242 [and] 338, not
other resolutions.
Because 242 [and] 338 deal with ’67.
They don’t deal with ’48 or the roots of the conflict, if you
call it a conflict. They
also made sure that there was no reference to sovereignty or
statehood for the Palestinians.
No reference to the roots of the conflict, including refugees
and so on, 1948, [U.N.] Resolution 181.
No international law.
It must not apply.
Only what the parties agree to in this asymmetry of power,
where you have occupier and occupied, you go and talk and you agree
and we’ll agree with whatever you decide.
And of course, they used the Egyptian-Israeli Camp David Accords in
order to define Palestinian objectives or rights as autonomous.
We need autonomy, functional autonomy, or self-government for
the people, as though the Israeli control is a given, and therefore
you deal with self-government for Palestinians.
No reference to Palestine as a country or the Palestinians as
a people or a nation.
You’ve had this construct of Israel and Palestinians.
It’s never Israel and Palestine.
It’s never Israel and the Palestinians.
It’s Israel and Palestinians that we found by the wayside.
Again, I mean, look, Nikki Haley at the U.N. voted against Salam
Fayyad, vetoed the appointment of Salam Fayyad as deputy
secretary-general to [Antonio] Guterres.
Why? Because the
appointment had the word “Palestine.”
So we are guilty for existing.
We are guilty because we have an identity.
We are guilty because we are members of Palestine—the
Palestinian nation.
Now of course, you’ve read Uri Savir’s article on Madrid II or Moshe
Ya’alon’s new article on [giving] the Palestinians autonomy, or
Netanyahu’s speeches here and there, particularly in Australia, when
he talked about transitional phases and functional approach.
We will get to that later.
But you have enough literature to see where they’re heading
with that.
On substance, the priority, of course, for the peace process was
Israel’s security. That
was the primary objective.
Israel’s security is defined in military terms and
maintaining military control.
Now, there is doctrine if you want a demilitarized state
minus our entity, then if you want a state minus, then it has to be
demilitarized. Then
Israel has to have full military control, especially control over
the borders, the air space, territorial waters, and with true
presence. And of course,
they want the Palestinian Authority to be the security
subcontractor.
Congress in its overzealousness wanted to cut off all funds to the
Palestinians. There was
a resolution—what’s her name?
I forgot her name.
Anyway, she’s the one who always comes up with these
interesting resolutions about the Palestinian culpability
a priori.
Kay Granger. Any
of you from Florida?
You’re really blessed with two.
Kay Granger and-what’s her name–[Ileana] Ros-Lehtinen.
Yeah, the hyphenated name.
It’s obsessive with them.
Anyway, but they have decided that they should cut off all funds
from the Palestinians.
Then AIPAC went to them and said, no, no, no.
You can’t cut off funds to the security forces.
You have to keep paying the Palestinian security forces,
because they’re good for Israel’s security.
Really. It’s
AIPAC that wanted funding for the Palestinian security force.
They want a subcontractor, and that to them is the primary
function of any Palestinian security force.
But also, finally enough with this, it doesn’t have to do with
security, but I always like to say this.
That the Congress in its overzealousness to protect
Israel-who was it? I
think, Jim [Moran] was talking about it or Nick [Rahall], about how
they are overzealous.
Sometimes they want to outdo AIPAC, Congress members.
Yeah, in their overzealousness to serve Israel and protect
Israel, they took resolutions that gave us enormous power.
They took resolutions that any organization which accepts
Palestinian membership will be defunded by the U.S. and they will
not pay their fees. They
took resolutions that any convention or agreement that we accede to
and so on will not be supported by the U.S.
What’s happening? We
told them, fine, we are going to join all of them.
This means the U.S. will be isolated because it will have to
leave all of them.
[APPLAUSE] So can you imagine what happens when we join WIPO
Intellectual Property?
What will happen to all the patents and intellectual property of the
U.S.? Or when we decide
to join the Atomic Energy Commission?
But they say, if you join these things and if you accede to
any agreement or convention that you will be punished.
We will not fund you.
Well, thank you very much.
Let’s accede and see what happens to the U.S. when it has no
say in any international organization.
Anyway, that’s overzealousness.
Sometimes you go overboard where you punish yourself.
Not only that, but we were supposed to be held-I said this before,
forgive me if I quote myself, it became a famous quote, I think-that
we are being held responsible for the safety of our occupiers.
That the Israeli settlers and the Israeli army can do
whatever they want to us, and we are responsible for their safety.
No Palestinian can react, not even in self-defense.
Because automatically, the terrorist label comes out and like
a Post-It it’s on your forehead, you’re a terrorist.
Because a 14-year-old dared attempt to strike at a soldier
carrying scissors—she was carrying scissors.
But he was on Palestinian land as an occupation soldier
wearing a bullet-proof vest, wearing a helmet, and carrying a
machine gun at a checkpoint on her own land.
But she’s the terrorist.
He’s the victim.
And she was the one who was shot.
Anyway, we are responsible for the safety of our occupiers.
The Israeli army can go into Area A-and I hate this
designation—but Area A, in which they are not supposed to come in.
And they can arrest.
They can blow up homes.
They can do whatever they want at will.
But should the Palestinian security forces try to stop them,
they’re in serious trouble.
They cannot, and they’re not supposed to, stand up to the
Israeli army. Should any
Palestinian react to this intense injustice, then he or she is a
terrorist.
Now, in terms of the regional dimension, of course, it has become
very clear and it has come back to haunt us.
Now it is called the outside-in approach.
And it’s a very sexy term now.
I’m sure you’ve read this in all the new proposed approaches
to peace making, outside-in.
Let’s go to the Arabs.
Let’s go to the region.
Let’s put the API–the Arab Peace Initiative-on its head.
Let’s normalize with the Arabs, and then we can deal with the
Palestinians. This was
from the beginning the Israeli lobby approach.
Two tracks, Palestinian-Israeli track, Arab-Israeli track.
Bilateral track.
Multilateral track.
Normalize. Bring the
Arabs to normalization with Israel and then the Palestinians will
fall in step. Not just that,
but you transform the Palestinian issue into a domestic issue within
Israel. We can
control-we’ll deal with them.
Therefore, it becomes a question of controlling the people in
Palestine. And we are a
domestic issue.
I’m sure many of you have read [Isaac] Herzog’s 10-Point Plan.
Herzog is supposed to represent the more moderate, what has
become the Labor Party in Israel that has been renamed as the
Zionist Camp, because they have to compete with Likud on Likud’s
terms. They have to show
they are more right-wing and hard-liner than the Likud.
Now, he has a plan, a 10-point plan.
Again, functional approach.
Again, gradual approach.
Put the Palestinians on probation.
I will talk about this later.
But this is Netanyahu’s constant hymn-that the Palestinians live in
population centers, fragmented and localized.
Of course, the approach now is back to the Village Leagues
approach. If you
remember, many of you are young enough not to remember, but some of
you are old enough to remember the attempts to establish Village
Leagues, localized communities, community centers, and so on.
But it takes us back even further, where you can find
collaborators who will collaborate with the occupation and then our
lives. It takes us back
to the Balfour Declaration, right?
Didn’t he say they want to establish a national home for the
Jews but at the same time a state? Keeping in mind what the interest
of—the well-being—without prejudicing the non-Jewish communities in
Palestine. We are being
now addressed as the non-Jewish communities in Palestine.
Excuse me. I mean, the
majority and the basis were Palestinian—Christian, Muslim and
Jewish, and some atheist, but they couldn’t be officially atheist.
That’s the majority.
We’re not the exception as being non-Jewish.
Now, it’s the minority that has become the defining factor.
Now, we are the non-Jewish community, so we are back to 100
years ago. Of course,
there were attempts at bringing together some Arab countries, like
the Aqaba meeting, in order to come up with an agreement with
Israel. This time it was
Netanyahu who scuttled it.
The whole approach, of course, is the substance.
It’s not ending the occupation but carrying out
administrative functions, economic ease, the quality of life
argument which is now part of the [Jason] Greenblatt platform.
I remember when they offered us in the early 1980s to run our lives.
They said, you can have all the powers and responsibilities
of the civil administration.
We said no thank you.
We don’t want to work for the occupation.
We want the occupation to leave—then we can run our lives.
So now, this has become another focus.
We are going back to the beginning and even pre-peace
process.
Four, maintain the strategic alliance between U.S. and Israel.
This was a constant focus of the peace process.
It was brought to bear on everything that was done in that
context. It has enhanced
the power asymmetry and the imbalance until now.
The features of this alliance was accommodate Israeli
priorities and demands, adopt their own diction and perspective.
I was going to say fiction.
Yes, most of it is fiction and perspectives.
Always frame the relationship in terms of the Judeo-Christian
traditions–remember-and shared values.
So I keep asking my American friends, what shared values?
The values of occupation, of enslavement of a people, of
impunity, of oppressing a whole nation, of carrying out
extrajudicial executions, of demolishing homes, of stealing other
people’s lands, and so on.
Are these the values you want to share with Israel?
Is this the Judeo-Christian tradition?
I don’t know. I
mean, really. To me,
it’s very strange.
Because automatically, the moment you find this fusion today, you
are excluding Islamic, Buddhist, any other tradition that does not
belong to this club. And
to me, Islam is one of the most tolerant religions, because it
doesn’t deny the existence of the others.
It builds on Judaism and Christianity, while Judaism and
Christianity supposedly cancel each other out, don’t they? Anyway.
Of course, the other myth is that Israel is the only democracy in
the region. You hear
that all the time. This
is part of this alliance.
Even Theresa May talked about this when she criticized John
Kerry for not vetoing the [U.N.] 2334 resolution on settlements.
How dare you criticize the only democracy in the region and
our best friend, our ally?
And the Palestinians, of course, are the alien, the other,
the fearful, the incomprehensible.
And even the orientalist glasses, to quote Edward Said, the
late Edward Said, have come out again.
And of course, there is an automatic linkage between
terrorism and Islam. And
now, it’s becoming much more evident.
Never surprise Israel with any American statement, position, or
document related to the peace process.
This I know from experience, and they will admit it.
The American team, they always coordinated with the Israelis
first on any American position.
They always cleared it ahead of time with the Israelis.
And if you have the Greenblatt-Friedman Plan, also you should
read it, it was called a policy paper for Trump.
He was candidate Trump then and it became Trump’s policy
paper on Israel. You
will see how toxic it has become.
It was read by him as an AIPAC speech.
Again, never allow or express any public censure or criticism of
Israel. That’s why they
reacted in such a hysterical manner.
They waxed ballistic just for the mere fact that the U.S.
abstained on settlements, when a few years earlier they had vetoed a
resolution on settlements, which violate international law and so
on. Therefore, they’re
not used to accepting any kind of criticism or censure, let alone
sanctions.
Always use the positive approach with Israel.
Incentives, rewards, advanced payments, inducements, and so
on. When we started the
talks, they immediately got the Zionism is Racism resolution
nullified. You know
that. And then they got
the diplomatic recognition, trade agreements, and so on.
Another thing, of course—incentivizing Israel, including Europe.
I can give you many examples how Europe used this approach
too. Conversely, you use
pressure, threats, and blackmail on the Palestinians.
Exploit the weakness of Palestine and augmenting Israeli
power and control. Of
course, this was the special contribution of AIPAC, ZOA, and others,
the Council of Presidents [of Major American Jewish Organizations].
And drafting Congressional resolutions that always adopted
punitive measures against the Palestinians especially if we joined
organizations like the ICC [International Criminal Court] and IC3
[Internet Crime Complaint Center].
How dare you hold Israel accountable?
Israel is above the law.
Hence, the Palestinians are always on probation, on good
behavior. We have to
prove that we deserve our rights.
We have to prove that we deserve human recognition.
It’s a test that we have to demonstrate that we are worthy,
the test of merit.
I’m sure you’ve read Dershowitz’s horrible article posted on the
Gatestone Institute website, in which he says, “Palestinians must
earn the two-state solution.”
And of course, he proceeded to give a fake version of
history. I have news for
him, the Palestinians don’t think that the two-state solution is a
fair or just solution.
It was a major painful compromise by the Palestinians.
[APPLAUSE] So it’s not our aspiration to give away 78 percent
of our land. It is a
compromise that we made in order to give our children a future and a
life in freedom and dignity and to exercise our right to
self-determination. Now,
Israel, and probably the world, are not very keen on seeing it
happen. Well, I’ll get
to that later.
Now, always blame the Palestinians in the blame game.
I can give you many examples from the Clinton Parameters,
even when there was discussion in Camp David in 2000.
I was there. We
were told, you will not be blamed.
Give it your best shot.
And I remember Yasser Arafat told them, “We are not ready.
The talks have not progressed enough to have a summit in Camp
David.” Clayton Swisher
is here. I don’t know if
you remember, right? He
said, “We are not ready.”
And both Madeleine Albright and Bill Clinton said, give it
your best shot. We won’t
blame you. What happened
later? The whole mess of
the generous offer. We
were blamed when there was no offer.
I said, “Show me.
Show me a concrete offer on the table.”
There were all these different groups discussing different
issues in a fragmented way, but there was no generous offer that the
Palestinians—and this myth gained a life of its own, actually.
Now every time you hear an Israeli apologist, he or she will say,
you see the Palestinians refused the generous offer.
And we have to earn it.
Always blame the Palestinians.
We said that, again, the roadmap.
Do you remember the roadmap, 2002-2003?
Sharon placed 14 reservations on the roadmap that totally
nullified and negated it.
They came out and said, the Israelis accepted the roadmap.
The Palestinians didn’t.
The Palestinians accepted the roadmap knowing that it’s not
perfect or ideal. But we
knew that Sharon was rejecting it.
So the issue was that Sharon accepted it and not even a
footnote about the 14 reservations.
But the Palestinians didn’t.
I don’t know where they get their version of history.
Again, John Kerry’s initiative on 2014.
You remember when he tried this initiative.
He tried to do more of the same thinking that he will get a
different result, or thinking that he might get one.
Anyway, he promised.
He said that any party that scuttles or undermines or rejects
or whatever the peace talks will be publicly blamed.
So what happened?
The Palestinians dutifully went to these negotiations knowing full
well that we took a decision not to go, frankly speaking, because
there were no terms of reference.
There were no clear objectives.
There was nothing to tell Israel to stop settlement
activities, to respect signed agreements, to release prisoners and
so on. And John Kerry
said, try your best. He
was given a verbal promise, an oral promise by the Israelis that
they will minimize settlements, that they will release prisoners.
What did they do?
Immediately, they escalated settlements.
They escalated violence.
They shot a few people at checkpoints.
And then they refused to release the last installment of
prisoners. So where is
the blame? Both sides.
They’re not ready.
What? The
Palestinian leadership lost its constituency for going to these
negotiations when they weren’t assured of the substance and outcome.
And the Israelis deliberately violated their commitments and
obligations, and they weren’t blamed.
There were some leaks here and there that the settlements
were bad.
In that context, I have to mention this.
It’s a very racist statement that makes me very angry.
Abba Eban said this, “The Palestinians never miss an
opportunity to miss an opportunity.”
It has been used to bash the Palestinians and to feed these
misconceptions and distortions forever.
So every time you hear this, I think you have to reverse
this. It’s the Israelis
that missed historic opportunities to make peace and totally
destroyed the chances of peace.
We’re not on the defensive.
We don’t have to prove that we miss opportunities, because we
never had one.
Of course, the other terms, like the
leitmotifs of our reality, have been shaped by the Israeli lobby.
Like, Hamas rockets raining down on Israeli towns and
villages. Have you heard
this? And it’s repeated
verbatim by everybody in Congress and outside Congress.
Nobody asked how many did they kill, and nobody asked how
many Palestinians were killed by the Israeli army.
And nobody asked about the siege and the assault and so on.
It’s as if people in Gaza decided to wake up one day and
manufactured these homemade pipes and threw them out of the blue
because they’re terrorists by definition.
Again, Palestinian terrorism, incitement, and violence.
Now, you cannot mention Israeli settlements without finding a force
equivalent with incitement.
Palestinians incite.
Palestinians incite to violence.
Palestinians think that their prisoners are heroes, and they
are terrorists. So you
adopt the language of the Israelis that everybody who’s a
Palestinian is a terrorist.
But since 1967, Israel has imprisoned more than 800,000
Palestinians, including myself and many others of my friends.
And so I don’t think there are 800,000 terrorists.
People who did not acquiesce to the occupation or accept to
have their spirit broken—these are not terrorists.
Israel has killed more than 75,000 Palestinians since ’67.
Who are the terrorists?
Now again, there are new preconditions.
The refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish State, that’s our
fault. Either we become
Zionists or we are not fit for human company.
Again, any criticism of Israel is conflated with
anti-Semitism. You’ve
heard this before. So
this is one way of censoring and silencing criticism.
And the Palestinians are not a peace partner.
We don’t have a peace partner among the Palestinians.
I can’t tell you how many types of negotiations there were,
needless negotiations from direct to indirect, to proximity talks,
to bilateral, to multilateral, to long-distance talks, to
exploratory talks. And
at the end, we even had epistolary talks, exchanges of letters.
We’ve been talked out, frankly speaking.
But it was a good peace process because Israel used it as a
cover to create facts on the ground, to negate the very substance
and to destroy the objective of the talks.
So here we are.
Now, while the process is ongoing, never allow any issue critical of
Israel to be brought before the U.N.
This is something ongoing—again, massive lobbying.
I don’t want to give you too many examples, but we don’t have
time. I know I’ve run
over my time. Should I
stop? [AUDIENCE SAYS NO]
Okay.
So use the veto, and at the same time protect Israel’s impunity.
Enable Israel but maintain Palestinian vulnerability.
We shouldn’t have access to international organizations or
international law to protect our rights and our lands.
But Israel has the full right to act outside the law.
No sanctions or punitive measures from any party anywhere, no
accountability and so on. And
this generated a culture of entitlement, exceptionalism,
preferential treatment and privilege in Israel which in itself
justifies the subjugation, discrimination, violence, and total
captivity of the Palestinian people, and especially the continued
military assaults on Gaza.
Palestinian lives in Gaza have been reduced to abstractions.
They are numbers; they’re not human beings.
The murder of civilians doesn’t count.
It’s the fact that there were 70 soldiers who were killed,
that’s very important.
But they [Palestinians] were being attacked, bombed from the air.
Ninety-two families totally obliterated from the population
register. It doesn’t
matter. And yet, you
blame the victim because Hamas was using these people as human
shields. Therefore, they
have the right to kill them.
Of course, the occupier is claiming self-defense.
They are defending themselves against their own victims.
I’ve never heard this logic before in all history.
Then, the structure and participants, the Palestinian-Jordanian
delegation as you know, now it’s back again, the whole issue of the
Jordanian option, the alternative homeland, the confederation, that
it’s a Jordanian issue.
When they said no Palestinians from the PLO and no Palestinians from
Jerusalem, that’s precisely because they didn’t want a national
address for the Palestinians, a localized address.
Village Leagues, communities, and so on, but not the right to
self-determination and not Jerusalem.
Again, there was a division of labor.
I will skip a few things. That
the U.S. is in charge of the political process, but Europe and the
Arabs are in charge of signing checks.
So the political decisions are up to the U.S.
It’s a monopoly.
The others have to work on nation building.
Because you see, we have to prove that we deserve a state,
even though it is a right enshrined in international law—the right
to self-determination.
Again, proof of merit.
Even then, for the U.S. to participate directly in the talks, it had
to get Israel’s permission.
They couldn’t participate unless Israel invited them to
participate or asked them to participate with their approval.
So Israel positioned itself as a gatekeeper to the peace
process. And the
Europeans followed step.
They always had to give them inducements and advance payments and
rewards and so on to allow them to play a role.
If you are the occupying power and you are the gatekeeper,
what kind of peace process is this where you exclude others?
Procedurally, the phased approach, conflict management, open-ended
process—you can look at all these documents I gave you.
And of course, the deal, we had to deal with administrative,
technical, peripheral issues first.
Postpone the real issues and get no guarantees on that.
No mechanisms for arbitration, monitoring and verification,
although all negotiations should have those—even though I still
believe negotiations between occupying and occupied are illegal.
They violate the Fourth Geneva Convention, by the way.
And it has to be done between equal parties.
But when you have a situation of occupation, where one party
exercises total control over the others, any agreement will be
illegal because it will be reached under duress and with undue
influence and force.
And then the whole issue of pocket and proceed.
This is happening with things like the land swaps.
There was never any agreement on the land swap.
But somehow they decided that, yes, land swaps, because they
want to keep the settlement blocs no matter what.
All settlements are illegal, whether they are blocs or
whether they are outposts or whether they are mobile homes or
whatever. They are all
illegal. So we never
agreed to having settlement blocs as being legal or remaining.
Now, they talk about it as a foregone conclusion, or that
there will be land swaps.
It was very difficult to accept the ’67 boundaries.
Now, we have to give away Jerusalem, the Jerusalem
environment, Ariel, Gush Etzion, all this.
So they pocket and proceed, including the issue of refugees,
by the way.
The process is a process for its own sake.
Now, using prolongation and stalling, it is the Dennis Ross
logic, I call it, where so long as there’s a process, God is in his
heaven, all is well with the world.
Let the two parties speak.
And then Israel can do whatever it wants on the ground, which
is an endless process.
It became an abstraction.
It became a tool for Israeli power and expansionism and so
on. And they cover for
the occupation. So
negotiations became an objective, not a tool to get somewhere.
Now, we are back at the beginning, as I said.
At one point, there was one point in which there was talk of
’67 boundaries, two states.
It started with George Bush and Clinton talking about two
states. It wasn’t, by
the way, Obama who was bashed by Israel for mentioning ’67.
It was Clinton and George Bush.
It was George Bush actually who talked about ’67 and the two
states. You’ll be surprised.
And then now, the cycle is completed.
We’re going back to all the issues of the functional
approach, non-sovereign approach, gradual approach, and so on.
With Greenblatt, I just want to mention quickly-there are two things
I cannot skip. The fact
that we are not a demographic problem for Israel, please do not
accept this. [APPLAUSE]
We are a nation with our rights, with our history, with our culture,
and we abide by international law.
I don’t believe any other country in the world is allowed to
discriminate against the people because it wants to maintain the
ethnic or religious purity of its own entity at all.
So we cannot be a demographic problem to scare the Israelis
into giving us our little statelet or state minus, as they say.
Now, they are busy superimposing Greater Israel on historical
Palestine. What are the
options if they destroyed and they are destroying the two-state
solution? Is it the
ongoing state of apartheid that exists?
Of course, again, they waxed hysterical when people described
them as being apartheid.
Note what happened to Rima Khalaf.
Because now, the U.N. is echoing the language of Israel at
the behest of Netanyahu and Danny Danon, and all these people who
formulate that language.
If the situation will continue then it will run its course as an
ongoing perpetual occupation, conflict, extremism.
Or are we going to have a qualitative shift?
Maybe we need to de-Zionize Israel rather than Zionize the
Palestinians.
I have to stop. Okay.
I will talk later about what Greenblatt did.
But I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Thank you very much.
It’s a pleasure.
Thank you.