Who’s to blame for the violence and carnage in the Middle East today? Well, the answer all depends on where you stand — inside the Sir Francis Drake Hotel or out on the pavement.
At least, that was the case last Friday in San Francisco. In a speech before an audience of several hundred, Nabil Sha’ath, the Palestinian Authority’s minister of planning and international cooperation, accused Israel’s Likud government of sabotaging the peace process in the 1990s. And he blamed former Prime Minister Ehud Barak for lying about the terms of the 2000 offer he made at Camp David. Sha’ath further claimed that Barak’s so-called “generous offer” was really never even on the table.
Outside, however, 80 to 100 pro-Israel activists accused Sha’ath, an adviser to Yasser Arafat since the 1970s, of doing nothing to halt violence and terror against Israelis.
The hotel’s signature Elizabethan-garbed doorman seemed out of place opening cab doors and hoisting bags amid the flag-waving pro-Israel demonstrators and a dozen members of Jewish Voice for Peace, who protested Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza across the street from the hotel.
“The fact is, [Sha’ath] represents an organization that supports terror and suicide bombings and that is totally unacceptable,” said Avner Even-Zohar, the director of campus programs for the Israel Center of the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation.
“He works very closely with Yasser Arafat. Israel found documents in which Arafat personally allocated money to suicide bombers. Instead of taking the resources he’s got and investing them in health care and education, he’s built an empire of terror and evil. It’s a shame for Palestinians as well as Israelis.”
Inside the hotel, Sha’ath, whose speech was sponsored by the Arab Cultural and Community Center and the World Affairs Council, made no mention of Arafat’s alleged financing of terror as voiced by protesters outside (and, in recent weeks, by former Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas as well).
Sha’ath said the crushing reality of the first intifada in the late ’80s led Palestinians to “abandon their goal of liberating all of Palestine that was occupied by Israel in 1948,” and to concentrate on establishing a state in the West Bank and Gaza.
He praised Abbas, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and others for negotiating the 1993 Olso accords, and painted the early 1990s as a period of growing friendship and optimism.
“Israel and the world recognized [the Palestinians] not as destitute people or hopeless fighters, but as statesmen building an independent state, starting to build the Palestinian economy for the first time,” he said.
The period “began in euphoria; Palestinian kids stuck carnations in the barrels of the guns of the Israeli occupation forces and wrapped their shoulders with kaffiyeh. Friendships were being created and it looked like this was the road to peace.”
So what went wrong? Sha’ath piles a good portion of the blame at the feet of Barak. The sides simply weren’t ready to make a final, permanent peace at Camp David in 2000.
“Most Palestinians and Israelis there were committed; we wanted to come up with a peaceful resolution. [But] when you do an interim agreement you say, ‘If I made a mistake, I can fix it next time.’ But with a permanent agreement you worry a mistake will make you an enemy in the eyes of your people forever,” he said.
“Mr. Barak says he gave the Palestinians the most generous offer he could and they walked away and didn’t take it. That’s what he said to the world. But when he was back in Israel he said he gave the Palestinians nothing; he went to Camp David to prove Arafat is not a partner and Israel has no partner.”
In reality, claimed Sha’ath, Barak never made a formal offer, and instead had President Clinton relay offers to the Palestinians so he could claim he never made them. Sha’ath also claimed that Barak never mentioned the handing over of 97 percent of the West Bank, but is “inverting the numbers” of the total he suggested: 79 percent.
Barak, according to Sha’ath, was “scared to death anyone in Israel would even hear about Jerusalem being discussed in Camp David.”
Sha’ath said Barak leaned on Clinton to blame Arafat for the breakdown in negotiations in order to stave off the possibility of a right-wing government booting Barak and trashing the peace process.
Peace, according to the Palestinian leader, was also derailed by plain old bad luck. No one could have predicted Rabin’s assassination and the subsequent electoral victory of Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud Party, which Sha’ath accused of undermining the Oslo accords.
The Bush administration’s “road map” was a positive and workable solution for the Palestinians, according to Sha’ath. Yet, he pointed out, the Israelis wrote 14 points of objection to it.
Unlike Israeli-sponsored “front-loaded” agreements forcing the Palestinians to make concessions prior to Israeli actions, Sha’ath relished the “parallel, mutual” aspects of the road map. Unfortunately, Bush now has “other business to deal with” — Iraq, a line that drew loud laughter from the crowd.
Sha’ath called for U.S. engagement in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, or, failing that, an international peacekeeping force.
“One refuses to call all legitimate resistance terror, and one cannot call terror legitimate resistance. Terror is the use of violence against civilians for a political objective, whether it’s done by an individual, group or state,” he told the crowd, referring to violence committed by both sides.
“When done by a group it is condemnable and rejected, and when done by a state it is equally rejected.”