It's time for U.S. to broker Mideast peace, says Palestinian leader

Hanan Mikhail-Ashrawi tells Osama bin Laden he does "not have the right to use" the Palestinian plight "for your ends."

By Gary Kamiya

Nov 6, 2001 | Hanan Mikhail-Ashrawi, a longtime Palestinian leader and spokesperson for Yasser Arafat, called Monday on the United States to immediately broker a peace settlement between the Palestinians and the Israelis. Asserting that the unresolved plight of the Palestinians was "one of the major causes of extremism in the world," she asked, "How do we move beyond the pain of the moment towards an American involvement that is positively intrusive?"

In a speech and subsequent question-and-answer session hosted by the Commonwealth Club here, Mikhail-Ashrawi -- who is in the United States to meet with Secretary of State Colin Powell and the National Security Council, as well as to publicize the Palestinian position -- said that the Palestinian Authority was prepared to sit down with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon at any time. She forcefully denounced Israel's 33-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and its ongoing military incursion and, with equal force, condemned the recent "horrific" terrorist attacks on the United States. Disavowing Osama bin-Laden's repeated invocation of the Palestinian cause, she said "Our cause is not up for grabs. You do not have the right to use it for your ends. We have been victims all our lives and we do not condone the victimization of others."

Mikhail-Ashrawi became familiar to Americans when she began appearing on programs like ABC's "Nightline" in the late 1980s. Her image as a reasonable, female (and, anomalously, Christian) spokesperson for the PLO has given the organization a much-needed P.R. boost. Opening her remarks by expressing her "sincere condolences and our total identification with the victims" of the Sept. 11 attacks, she said that what was needed was a "global campaign to prevent the causes" from continuing. "I've been encouraged by the fact that most Americans have gone past the immediate need for revenge," she said, noting that there was an "unprecedented enrollment in classes on the Middle East. Our greatest enemy is ignorance, our greatest ally is the truth. We must deal not just with visceral reactions but the underlying causes of conflict ... We are part of a global human community. We are our brothers' and sisters' keepers."

Mikhail-Ashrawi, who in addition to being a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council and commissioner of information for the Arab League is a professor of English at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank, described at some length the actual experience of living under occupation. "I live in Ramallah [in the West Bank] and have an address in Jerusalem," she said. "For the last two weeks we've had tanks on the streets down from my house. We regularly hear gunfire and the vibrations from the tanks. You rarely have a full night's sleep. You cannot walk out and assume you won't be killed. One friend of mine was killed while shopping."

On the way to work, she said, she had to pass through two different checkpoints -- "at one of them, Calandia checkpoint, there are always shootings and confrontations. Quite often I have to duck bullets or run through clouds of teargas. There's nothing that you can take for granted -- that you won't be stopped and humiliated by an 18-year-old soldier who feels that he has a God-given right to humiliate you."

Mikhail-Ashrawi, who has been involved in all the major Israel-Palestinian negotiations in the last decade (her contacts with Israeli moderates proved instrumental in starting the 1992 back-channel discussions that led to the 1993 Oslo agreements), blamed Israel for the ongoing deadlock and, by extension, for the continuing terror attacks against Israelis. "The occupation has been allowed to continue for too long," she said, clearly referring to America's refusal to pressure Israel to pull out of the West Bank and Gaza. "The Palestinians are still languishing under the most brutal siege ... Every single Palestinian feels personally targeted."

Starting in Madrid in 1991, and continuing through the present day, Israel has turned the search for peace into a "punitive process," Mikhail-Ashrawi said. "As the mentality of occupation continued, there was ongoing unilateralism -- ongoing settlement activity, bypass roads, blockades ... Instead of getting dividends from the peace process, we paid a price." As a result of these provocative Israeli actions -- and of the Bush administration's withdrawal from the negotiations -- the Palestinians ceased to believe that the peace talks were anything more than a "cover" for continuing Israeli territorial expansion and occupation, she said.

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