Few diplomats can match the credentials of Palestinian Ambassador Afif Safieh. Having spent his youth as a political activist—as chairman of the Palestinian Student Union first in Belgium and then in France –Safieh went on to represent the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) as head of Palestinian diplomatic missions in the Netherlands, Holy See, London, Washington and finally Moscow.
Today, the 60-year-old Safieh serves as a Palestinian Roving Ambassador for Special Missions, based in London, with frequent trips to the West Bank after having been elected to the Fateh Revolutionary Council in 2009.
In recent times, Safieh has turned much of his attention to documenting his 30-year-long diplomatic journey and is currently working on his memoirs, entitled, Anatomy of a Mission. As a prelude to his memoirs, however, Safieh has recently published another book, entitled, The Peace Process: From Breakthrough to Breakdown (Saqi, 2010), comprising a collection of lectures and speeches that he had given at different stages throughout his career. The book covers a wide range of topics, including Israeli and Palestinian domestic politics, Palestinian-Arab relations and Palestinian-American relations. Given the recent reports by AlJazeera, in which the station purports to have uncovered documents revealing undisclosed concessions by the Palestinian Authority to Israel, the book is particularly timely in retracing the evolution of Palestinian political thought and the unfolding of the peace process negotiations, which now seem to have reached a dead end.
The Majalla met with Ambassador Safieh in London and had the following interview.
Q: Having recently revisited you’re lectures and speeches given in the last 30 years of your career, what would you say were the major flaws of the peace negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians?
Afif Safieh, "The Peace Process: From Breakthrough to Breakdown" (Arabic)
I think the major flaw was that the Americans adopted the preferred Israeli negotiating approach, which was in part based on the strategy of “let’s make them an offer that they can’t refuse.” Up to today, too much has been left to the local belligerent parties to sort out, and as we are dealing with two asymmetrical players, the Israelis have always been tempted to dictate the conditions for negotiations. Any Israeli compromise was, therefore, seen as a halfway compromise between their two domestic poles: Labour/Likud, Shimon/Sharon, Bibi /Barak, Livni/Lieberman etc. With this approach the Israelis always felt entitled to set the ceiling of the permissible and dictate the pace of the process.
The result has been a static process that is made of a succession of spectacular non-events. We see a lot of agitation but no movement to the extent that observers have become bored by now.
As for the Arab world, the official strategy has for too long been to wait for the Eisenhower moment, by which I am referring to events in 1956 after the Suez War when it took US President Eisenhower 24 hours to obtain an Israeli withdrawal out of the Sinai. Unfortunately, though, that Eisenhower moment has not rematerialized.
Q: What approach do you think would have been more conducive to the success of the negotiations?
I would have preferred what I call the “de Gaulle” approach, through which the international community would tell the local belligerent parties what the world expects from them on the basis of international law. The Israelis would then be made to understand that they do not have much of a choice. That it’s not through their regular elections that they can decide on how much territory they want to condescendingly withdraw from. Peace is too important to be left to the Israelis to decide on. Today, it is manifested that it is territory rather than terrorism that is the obstacle to peace. Israeli territorial appetite is the guilty party. And with the Arab Peace Initiative now on the table for more than a decade, it’s clear that the impasse is not due to Arab rejection of Israeli existence but the Israeli rejection of Arab acceptance—because they do not accept the territorial prerequisite, which is withdrawal.
Q: Why do you think that the Eisenhower moment has not been forthcoming from the American side?
There is a debate within Israel on the wisdom of keeping the hilltops of the West Bank, but what is America’s interest in Israel keeping those hilltops? I believe none. There is an expanding constituency in America among decision makers and academics that increasingly believes that it is Israeli obstinacy and the perceived American collusion that has put America on a collision course with much of the Arab and Muslim world. Israeli obstinacy is today destabilizing and delegitimizing a profoundly pro-American regional system.
The problem we have is the interplay between domestic factors in America and the formulation of American foreign policy. There are many in the USA now for whom it is clear that American foreign policy in the Middle East has been hijacked by the very powerful Israeli lobby. (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu knows that, and when speaking to his immediate entourage, boasts that he is stronger than (US President Barack) Obama in Washington, and he behaves on that assumption.
And it appears that he is right, for in the three political battles—the confrontation of wills between Obama and Netanyahu—Obama lost all three.
The result of all of this is that each time we are promised American pressure on Israel it appears that the world’s remaining super power has the political weight of Luxemburg or even Liechtenstein.
Q: There have been some significant changes in the political activism of Jewish Americans. What do you make of the rise of some groups such as J Street, for example?
I believe that this is incredibly significant, and if I had one criticism of Obama, for whom I have a very favorable opinion, it is that he was unaware when he came to power of the enormous shift that had taken place within American Jewish public opinion. He therefore, unfortunately, relied too much on the old rather new forces emerging out of that community. This is demonstrated, for example, in the disproportionately important role that he granted to Denis Ross in the peace process, which has been extremely detrimental.
I believe that the majority of Jewish Americans today would welcome an assertive American role, and many increasingly perceive Israel’s behavior as a source of embarrassment that they are keen to distance themselves from.
Jews as a minority in many countries were at the forefront of the battles for Human rights and civil rights, in America and elsewhere. But in America during the last 40 years because of their connection to Israel, and their unwillingness to criticize it, they were reduced to defending the indefensible, until today, when they have begun to view Israel as a major source of embarrassment and anti-Jewish sentiment.
Q: How can the Palestinians then capitalize on that development?
I think it is one of the great sources of optimism and one should not see it as static. All those interactions are extremely dynamic and I am in favor of intensifying and deepening Palestinian-Jewish dialogue around the world. In so doing, however, we must choose the right interlocutors. It’s not with AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee] that we will make history but with organizations like J Street, which is an authentic Jewish American movement that has opted for a critical approach.
Q: In recent months we have seen a number of moves by the Palestinian Authority to proactively communicate with Israelis, including a public relations campaign that was launched in Israeli media and a meeting at the PA headquarters in Ramallah in which several Israeli politicians were invited outside of the framework of peace negotiations. What do you make of such moves?
That is the right direction and we have to increase the frequency and pace of these types of initiatives. I am in favor of intensifying the dynamism of the Palestinian national movement and that includes engaging in dialogue not only with the Israeli political establishment but also with public opinion makers and shakers which is what the recent PA moves have sought to do.
I am not expecting a dramatic shift in getting a majority in Israel in favor of what we would consider minimally acceptable, but we have to help expand the minority of Israelis who are today uncomfortable with the status quo.
Historically, we have neglected two sociological components of Israeli community; one was the Orientals and two were the new arrivals from the former Soviet Union. These two components make up 60 to 65 percent of Israeli society. They were the least permeable to our intellectual input, and we have in my opinion to increase the interactions and target these two constituencies for dialogue and the exploration of new modes of cohabitation within the framework of the two state solution.
Q: You mention in your book, at different stages, that Israel is in crisis. Do you still see that?
Israel is actually in a comfortable strategic situation. Their economy is extremely vibrant and their military capabilities are superior to all their neighbors put together. But Israel has a moral, political and existential crisis.
There is an intense debate within Israeli society on what it is to be Zionist or even to be Jewish. The question that is being asked today is not only how appetizing is Israel for the world but also how appetizing it is for Jewish communities themselves, and I believe that Israeli migration out of Israel/Palestine is important to trace.
Many Israelis are becoming increasingly uncomfortable with their own society. Take West Jerusalem, for example, where many liberal Israelis are moving out because they find the atmosphere there suffocating with religious fanatic regressive schools of thought, dominating not only the discourse but the way of life. Israel is becoming increasingly uncomfortable to those segments of their society that are supposed to be the most creative, inventive and modern.
The Israeli government has not seen the gravity of this problem because it continues to bring in new settlers from countries that are economically disadvantaged, as long as they are not Arabs. This why we hear, every now and then, about the discovery of Chinese and Indian Jews, or even more recently it is said that the Pashtuns of Afghanistan are one of the last Jewish tribes. In effect, Israel wants to continually seek demographic reservoirs elsewhere to compensate for Israeli emigration and a continuous rise in the Palestinian population.
All this is mutilating Palestine because we are going to end up with too much demography on that limited geography.
Q: Throughout your public presentations starting from the 1980s you often mention that the political discourse on Palestine/Israel was improving. Many today repeat the same notion, citing recent shifts in American rhetoric on settlements, for example, to be a source of optimism. To what extent to do you think that Palestinians can hedge their fortunes on improving rhetoric or discourse?
I think it is extremely important. I always say that Palestinians were subjected to three denials: We were denied our mere physical existence; our rights and our suffering. This is not the case today, and I believe that the discourse and media coverage of the conflict have indeed improved. It is still not fair or even handed, but it improved nonetheless.
In the past, commentators were content with only having an Israeli opinion on matters of importance, but from the start of the peace process onwards there was a heartfelt need to hear the other side of the coin.
I believe that this will continue to assist us especially with technological breakthroughs, such as the internet, which in the USA, for example, has resulted in a parallel flow of information that is compensating for the uneven coverage by a mainstream media that is controlled by pro-Israeli commentators.
Q: Do you think that this parallel information flow has led to any real shifts in US public opinion?
Yes. During my three years in Washington there were many opinion polls that revealed broad non-endorsement of Israeli behavior in the 2006 war in Lebanon, for example. This did not translate on Capitol Hill, which one can consider as another Israeli occupied territory which needs to one day be liberated, but there was a majority in the public who were condemning Israel’s massively disproportionate retaliations on Lebanon. There was also the discovery of the American Lebanese community which was sympathizing with their country of origin.
Q: Many today are disappointed with Obama’s presidency that had promised so much to the Palestinians. Given the absence of what you referred to as the Eisenhower moment even under a president who seemed so attuned to Palestinian aspirations, what is the future of Palestinian-American relations?
Chomsky recently wrote about the affinity of America with Israel because Israel is replaying the American itinerary.
I say that there are two Americas. There is the America of the early European settlers that had resulted in the almost total extermination of the indigenous population, the America that had expanded shamelessly at the detriment of Mexico, and the one that had institutionalized slavery. That’s the America that Israelis would like to engage and make an alliance with. When Israel refers to shared values with the USA they probably speak of that common experience of confronting indigenous population and elastically expanding settlements.
But I think that fortunately for us there is another America. This is the America of the Founding Fathers that revolted against the colonial power, the America of Abraham Lincoln which courageously undertook a civil war to rid his country of slavery, the America of Woodrow Wilson who came to the Versailles conference after WWI, upholding the principle of self-determination.
And that’s the America that we want to make an alliance and engage with, and I believe that Obama represents that other America.
Now we have a choice for tomorrow. Would we like to have an Obama second mandate however disappointing the first mandate was with its undelivered promises? Or should we expect a Sarah Palin-like candidate?
I will not conceal that I am in favor of Obama having a second mandate, because I believe that he has the intellect and ethics needed.
I joked once that the ideal American president for us in the Middle East would be one that combines the following three prerequisites. He would have the ethics of a Carter, the popularity of a Reagan and the strategic audacity of a Nixon. And I said that God forbid that one day we have an American president who has the ethics of a Nixon, the popularity of a Carter and the intellectual agility of a Reagan.
Q: In recent days we saw the publication of the so called Palestine Papers on AlJazeera. Where do you think these papers leave the peace process?
I was unaware that there was a peace process. Anyway, I believe that we can have peace without negotiations because all concerned know what is the desirable, the possible and the acceptable. Negotiations and diplomacy so far have been the best way of delaying the inevitable as long as possible—the inevitable being ending the occupation and the birth of Palestinian statehood. What is lacking is the political will. I have always believed that a territory that was occupied in six days in 1967 can also be evacuated in six days so that the Israelis can rest on the seventh day and we can finally engage in the fascinating journey of state building and economic recovery.
Q: What good, if any, could come out of the release of these papers?
I have been reluctant to get absorbed in the brouhaha of this debate. I do not think that the leak and the spectacle of poor taste that was shown on TV were motivated by patriotism or altruism.
I am sad to note again that we the Palestinians these days indulge too often in political masochism and show a pronounced politically suicidal propensity. All Palestinian political parties should become aware of the increasing disenchantment of Palestinian public opinion with all the factions.
Undeniably, we should do some soul searching and we need to rebuild a damaged political system through internal dialogue and reconciliation. We should also show more cohesion and accountability in the future. We should aim at a future government of national unity, yet avoid what was previously called in Palestinian circles the “paralytic consensus.” Some believe that we are condemned to have either unity but no strategy or a strategy but at the expense of unity. I believe that we can achieve both.
