RIGHTS-PALESTINE: New Hopes from London Summit

By Sanjay Suri Reprint | | Print |

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Jan 4 2003 (IPS) - New hopes for a Palestinian homeland are being given shape in a little office behind a motor garage in London.

Palestinian representative to Britain Afif Safieh is engaged in talks with the British Foreign Office on a summit on the Palestine issue to be held in London mid-January. "We are looking ambitiously at this conference," Safieh told IPS in an interview in his office. Not the most diplomatic looking of environments, but diplomatically perhaps the hottest room in London today.

The conference has been called by British Prime Minister Tony Blair. "Britain wanted to give a helping hand to the moribund peace process," said Safieh. To the Palestinians, British intervention in that process is deeply significant.

"Britain was the former mandatory power that was present at the creation of the Palestinian problem," Safieh said. "It is a permanent member of the UN (United Nations) Security Council – and we believe UN resolutions should be the guiding compass in any search for peace. It is a major part of EU (European Union) which is our most important interlocutor in the international arena, and it has a special relation with the U.S."

There are domestic pulls within Britain that raise new hopes from the London summit, Safieh said. "Two different opinion polls have shown 2:1 support for the Palestinians," he said. "Today the pro-Palestinian people in Britain are not a marginal minority, they are the comfortable majority."

In debates in the House of Commons the support for the Palestine cause has been 4:1, Safieh said. "At Tony Blair’s speeches at the annual party conference over the past two years, the paragraph on Palestine was the most massively applauded," Safieh said. "We hope that British foreign policy will reflect the depth of feeling in the country, and that it will capture the national mood that is extremely supportive of the end of occupation and the birth of a Palestinian state."

Britain is "big enough to be a desirable partner and no more strong enough to become a threatening interlocutor," he said. "The fact that they are not Americans makes them even more desirable – on condition that they continue emphasising their distinctive nature."

Members of the Quartet group who have been discussing a Palestinian settlement- the U.S. the UN, EU and Russia – have been invited to the conference. Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan have also been invited. The London summit is expected to make Palestinian reforms a precondition for progress in achieving a comprehensive settlement.

The U.S. will not participate, but Blair made it clear that the U.S. will remain involved. He told the House of Commons that Palestinian reforms must succeed "so we can make a reality of President George Bush’s vision of two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security."

Palestinian leaders aim to put their views across firmly. "We hope to explain the Israeli impediments to the Palestinian institutional reform programme," Safieh said. "Reforms are a Palestinian expectation, a Palestinian aspiration, and not something the external world is intending to inflict on us," he said. Safieh acknowledged that "we have a degree of corruption that we need to get rid of" but that "transparency and efficiency are also Palestinian aspirations and Palestinian rights."

Safieh said: "We will try to interact with our interlocutors on how they can be helpful in reassembling the conditions in which institutional reforms can occur – meaning Israeli withdrawals."

Israel occupies the entire West Bank, "imposing curfews, strangulating society and suffocating the economy," he said. "There is no freedom of movement from city to city, city to village, or even within certain cities. What remains as the Palestinian National Authority works from a bulldozed, destroyed presidential compound."

Safieh said it was unfortunate that the U.S. administration had caved in under pressure from Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. "Sharon has lobbies successfully in convincing the U.S. administration to shelve their roadmap for a solution till at lest after the Israeli elections (due later this month)," Safieh said. "In doing so we feel the Bush administration has given direct, explicit support to the Sharon re-election campaign."

Today the Palestinians are "cornered between Israeli democracy and American mediocracy," Safieh said. "I have rarely seen an American administration throughout history as unsophisticated as this one."

But Safieh warned that the Palestinian National Authority and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation were both an institution and an idea. "When an institution and its symbol are under attack, the idea gets even stronger," he said. "Nobody can expect us to undertake institutional reforms when an entire society of 3.5 million is under house arrest."

Safieh set out the Palestinian position on the so-called roadmap being spoken of as a solution to the problem. "Up to now there is no endorsed roadmap, but only some drafts," Safieh said.

"The EU see a speedier roadmap with faster interim arrangements. The Americans see it as something looser and slower. The Israelis would like to dilute it to the extent of leaving it open-ended, with no deadline or time limit. In this peace process, if Israel were compared to a tortoise it would look like Speedy Gonsalves."

There are two clear schools of thought around the roadmap – the "sequential" and the "parallelist" schools, Safieh said. "The Israelis prefer – and unfortunately they have persuaded the Americans to align themselves with their thinking – the sequential path which means security must be restored first before any progress is made," Safieh said. "Unfortunately this is a shallow, superficial school of thought because all factors are linked and interlocked."

The parallelist school believes that "Palestinians should deliver better on security, but that they can only do so if this is coupled with Israeli withdrawals, removal of checkpoints and curfews and the liberation of urban centres," Safieh said.

In today’s environment "the Palestinian National Authority does not have the means to stop suicide attacks," Safieh said. "Israel has destroyed the security pillars of the PNA. At the same time the Palestinian mood is one of anger. Israel has massively and indiscriminately bombarded civilian society, and we have four to five times the number of civilian casualties as Israel. And it is Israel that occupies Palestine, not Palestine that occupies Israel."

Safieh said: "The world should not deal with our casualties as though they were just numbers, as though our dead were motherless, fatherless, childless, nameless, worthless. Yet I, for one, favour a Palestinian popular, non-violent confrontational resistance."