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Morale of Palestinians and Israelis Regarding Peace Talks

Edited Transcript of Remarks by Dr. Nabil Abuznaid and Mr. Ori Nir
'For the Record' No. 299 (21 August 2008)

The issue of peace negotiations is constantly present in the media and in political discussions. The current morale and opinions of Palestinians and Israelis regarding this process is crucial to the success of these bilateral and multilateral negotiations. Can the people of either side concede demands for peace? Mr. Nabil Abuznaid, Charge d'affair, PLO Mission Office in the U.S., addressed the Palestinian perspective and Mr. Ori Nir, spokesman for Peace Now, addressed the Israeli perspective of the current status of the peace negotiations process.

The Palestine Center
Washington, DC
15 July 2008


Dr. Nabil Abuznaid:

Thank you for coming and thanks to The Palestine Center for organizing this event. Before I speak on my topic, I would like to tell you a small story that happened with me.

I was flying from Tel Aviv to New York in the beginning of the intifada. We lost our connection to go to Florida from New York, and I met a young Israeli. He was in his early twenties, and it happened that we were continuing together to Florida. So, we talked as we were [going] back to Florida. I gave him my number and said, 'Here is my number if you need anything.' I never looked at him as more than just a human being like me, a good neighbor. He could be a friend. He said, 'Well, thank you, but I have my Israeli friends here. They are willing to help me and I'm going to see them.'  I said, 'That's good.'

So, two days later he called me and he said, 'Well, I need your help to find a place to stay.' I told him, 'Yes, I think we have an apartment for my brother. You could stay with him or share with him until you find your place or where you want to go.' So then, he moved in. Two days later, I saw him. I asked him how it's going and how he's enjoying Florida. He said, 'Everything is great, but my parents are frustrated.' I said, 'Why is that?' He said, 'I told them I'm living with Palestinians. They told me, 'we sent you to the states to get away from the Palestinians.'' I said, 'Just say hello to your parents and tell them that we have one fate, the Palestinians and the Israelis. We have no other choice, except to live together.'

I hope you all didn't come today to listen to something you haven't heard before because I'm not going to be able to offer you that. For all these years, this conflict has continued without a solution not because of the lack of resolutions and ideas, but it's clear that one side is not interested in peace, and I will not tell you which one. I know you are all smart enough to figure it out for yourselves.

After the creation of Israel in 1948 and during the 1950s and 60s, there was a determination among the Palestinians to return back to their homeland, Palestine.  The creation of the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] in 1964 and the foundation of Fateh in 1965 were to achieve the goals of the Palestinians.  During that period, Palestinians firmly believed and practiced an armed struggle in hopes of achieving their goals of liberation. The mood of the people was very much dominated by [late Egyptian] President [Gamal Abdel] Nasser's belief that the only way to liberate Palestine was through force by openly stating, 'That which is taken by force can only be regained by force.' After 1967, the Palestinian's hope of liberation was changed to a new life under the Israeli occupation after Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza in the 1967 war. The Palestinians continued their belief in liberation and also resisted the occupation to protect their Palestinian identity and institutions.

Let me just give you one example from my own experience when I was teaching at Najah National University. In the early 80s, Palestinian students held a national gathering or celebration. The next day I was summoned by the Israeli military headquarters, and I was handed a military order to close down the university for six months. They told me it was three months for each flag that was raised at the university. At that time, two Palestinian flags were raised at the university. That tells you how the occupation is terrible. Sometimes, I think it is bad to live under occupation, but it is worse when you are the occupier because sometimes it is very difficult morally for you, especially if you are a Jew.

The Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation was seen in its best during the 1987 intifada. During this time period, men, women and children took to the streets to protest the occupation. The intifada brought world attention and sympathy to the Palestinians in their struggle for self-determination. Also many Israelis saw this occupation as unjustified or unsustainable. At that time, late King Hussein of Jordan ended all ties with the West Bank, therefore eliminating the 'Jordanian option.' Most importantly, it was also during this time that all political leaflets of the unified command in Palestine talked about ending the occupation and not about liberation. In my view, this is an important change in Palestinian politics and position in the Occupied Territories'to be clear on ending occupation and liberating Palestine. This position also sent a very positive message to the whole world and international community, including Israel, as an indication towards recognition of the State of Israel.  This position along with the King Hussein disengagement worried the Palestinians that a vacuum would occur. For this reason, the PLO leadership at the Palestine National Council Conference held in Algiers in 1988 was influenced to declare a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza with Jerusalem [as] its capital. The proposed state consisted of only 22 percent of what is originally historical Palestine. 

The second most important point was the development of the First Gulf War in 1991 under [former U.S. President] George Bush Senior. To get the Arab support during the war, George Bush proposed a peace conference in Madrid based on the principle 'land for peace' formula [in] accordance to U.N. Resolutions 242 and 338, meaning that Israel would withdraw from Arab lands occupied in 1967 in exchange for Israel to live in secured borders. Unfortunately, nothing was achieved from the Madrid Conference or from the ten rounds of negotiations that took place in Washington, D.C. In my view, one of the main reasons for the failure of the Madrid Conference was because of ill intentions of [Yitzhak] Shamir, who was the Prime Minister of Israel at the time. Shamir first refused to come to Madrid and only participated after U.S. pressure. He came with bad intentions, which were to drag on the negotiations for ten years in order to bring in hundreds of thousands of settlers to the [Occupied] Palestinian Territories. 

The intifada and Madrid really encouraged the Palestinians and the Israelis to search for a compromise or peace. Both sides envisioned the future and determined that things would be a lot worse if they didn't reach a solution to the conflict immediately, especially because of the emergence of Hamas as an Islamic Resistance Movement, which might escalate into a religious conflict which could threaten the existence of Israel. This period of change was lead by two strong leaders at the time, [late Palestinian President] Arafat and [late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin. These two leaders acknowledged that they couldn't change the past but could work on changing the future.

I remember the days after the Oslo Accord was signed where tens of thousands of Palestinians were pouring into the streets to celebrate the signing of the Accord. Also, I saw the Palestinians throwing flowers and rice at the Israeli soldiers as they were leaving Jenin. The Oslo agreement meant to achieve a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.
Oslo was to be implemented in two stages. The first stage focused on Israeli withdrawal from Palestinian cities and to establish a Palestinian Authority as interim government while final issues were to be negotiated over the next five years. Such issues included refugees, Jerusalem, Israeli settlements, borders and resources. But unfortunately, months after the signing of Oslo, an Israeli settler, Baruch Goldstein, went to the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron where he killed 29 people and injured over 100 others as they were worshiping. Shortly after that, Israeli radical, Yigal Amir, attacked and murdered Prime Minster Rabin. These two actions, in my view, destroyed and switched the hopes of peace to a new era of violence and distrust.

The Palestinians believe in peace, but a peace that will achieve their goals of independence'not to live under difficult conditions controlled by check points and walls of separation.  The Palestinian and Arab reactions are affected by the Israeli treatment of Palestinians and the Israeli commitment to peace.
 
Most recently, I was surprised by the mood of the Palestinians and Arabs in the 60th year of al-Nakba, the tragedy, where the mood among the people was extremely low because of the stalemate in the peace process. We are beginning to see the same rhetoric that we had in the 1960s surface again. Because of the lack of movement and achievements on the side of Israel in the peace process, people are losing hope and believing that peace will never be established. And this feeling could only strengthen the opposition led by Hamas who will tell us, 'We told you so from the beginning that you will never get anywhere and will get nothing from Israel!' The new hope to move peace forward from the Annapolis gathering had disappointing results. Not one checkpoint was lifted, Israel continues to confiscate more Palestinian land and the negotiations are getting nowhere.

Ladies and gentlemen, peace can only be achieved by Israeli withdrawal from the lands occupied in 1967, the creation of a viable Palestinian state with East Jerusalem its capital and the right of return and compensation for the Palestinian refugees as stated in U.N. Resolution 194.

Mr. Ori Nir:

Hello everyone.  It is good to be here. My computerized presentation will be focused on trying to give a picture of Israeli public opinion at the moment and, particularly, one very important trend in Israeli public opinion that I think is not being comprehended quite well here and in Israel as well in some sense. You will see what I mean in a moment. Before I start, I would like to thank the Palestine Center for inviting me, Samar and Yasmeen particularly.
 
This first slide'this, you probably recognize from The Little Prince, is the boa constrictor that swallowed the elephant. And why am I bringing it here? Because for many years, Israelis perceived their occupation of the West Bank as being the boa that swallowed the elephant. They can't swallow; they can't throw up; they have to deal with it somehow and have to find some kind of a solution too. Israelis became quite obsessed, if you will, or engaged with this question of what to do with the Palestinian Territories. They were consumed by questions of terrorism, the greater Israel debate, the moral dimension that Nabil mentioned earlier'Israelis being tortured with what it means to be an occupier'their international standing, the economy, how it impacts the economy and finally the question of the Palestinian state. There's a new report, by the way, just published yesterday about the impact of the occupation on Israel's economy. It's very interesting.

So, all of these were burdening Israelis for many years and [now] no more. I chose this to sort of welcome you to a new situation in Israel and in Israeli public opinion where what we have is a temporary victory of the status quo as I call it. What do we have? We have a festering, yet manageable conflict'I will explain in a moment what that means'a paralyzed government and a public that is becoming more and more indifferent. That is what I would like to focus on today'the various ironies in Israeli public opinion.
Most interesting and most, I think, relevant to our question today is that most Israelis do support the two-state solution, but they don't believe it's viable anymore, at least not in the foreseeable future. Most support the agenda of the government but despise the prime minister as a leader and don't trust him. His approval rating now is somewhere around 10 percent, which is in the double digits. For a long time, it was in the single digits. Most want a political settlement and realize the price of a stalemate. However, they prefer the status quo to paying that price, at least for the time being. Most don't feel the pain of the occupation and therefore feel and think that the status quo is sustainable, which makes them aloof to the situation. Most Israelis don't trust the political process, politicians and don't trust politics. I have some recent polling data to sort of flesh out those points that I just mentioned.

The good as I see it is the 70 percent'and this is constant with many polls that have been taken recently'support the two-state solution and support continued negotiations with the Palestinian Authority. This most recent one is from April, and there have been actually more recent ones. Seventy-five percent oppose a bi-national state. It's not only that they support a two-state solution, but they oppose the alternative to that. A majority think that the governments throughout the years have failed in achieving peace. Peace comes first as the most important goal for Israel in the coming decade when Israelis are asked, 'What do you think should be the most important goal of the government in the coming decade?'

The bad, as I see it, is 75 percent of Israelis don't believe that the negotiations with the Palestinian Authority will lead to a peace agreement. The same proportion says that if it does, Palestinians will not see it as end of conflict. Almost the same proportion don't see a peace agreement with the Palestinians in the coming five years and a majority oppose concessions, the most important concession Israel will probably have to make which is in Jerusalem. Fifty-five percent oppose turning over Arab neighborhoods to the Palestinian Authority and 83 percent oppose handing over the Old City to the Palestinian Authority.

We have the good, the bad and the ugly. And the ugly is the rise of basically racism in Israeli society. Sixty-five percent want to see a border between Israel and the future Palestinian state, I think, not only because of security reasons but because of other reasons as well. There is mounting anti-Arab hatred within Israeli society. You can see they paint a pretty ugly picture of what the situation is today. The most important question, I think, today when talking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its future is how badly do Israelis actually care about resolving the conflict with the Palestinians? Polling data can somehow measure it but not that well. There are several indicators in a recent poll that show that there's a sharp decrease in how much Israelis actually care about this issue, and there's a lot of anecdotal evidence that I can share with you later.

Why is it that Israelis don't care so much anymore about resolving the conflict? Obviously, the main reason first and foremost is the drop in terrorism. As a result of the security barrier, the fence, the wall'here is an eye opening table I took from the website of the Israeli Shin Bet. They actually have a website now which shows the drop in Palestinian suicide terrorism: 59 in 2002; only one incident in 2007; one incident in 2008 so far.

The other reason is that the economy is thriving. The shekel is stronger than the dollar. One indication that people use a lot is the new car sales in Israel that are rising. The economy is growing by more than 5 percent. The estimate is that it'll be about 8 percent despite the global recession'a 22 percent increase in exports in the first four months of 2008. The main reason is high tech. I first put a couple of photos here to show you the high tech centers in Tel Aviv and Herzliya but decided not to spend too much time with that.

Another very important reason is this process of depoliticization or anti-politicization in Israeli society. The symptoms: decline in voter turn-out, the public's decreasing identification with political parties; there is an unprecedented upsurge in social civilian organizations. Many people view them as much more trustworthy than the political parties or the political system. There is an increase in public protest and criticism of elected officials, diminishing consumption of political content in the media, people simply read less of the political pages and political stories and even a reduced affinity with the state, the symbols and with its officials, which is something very un-Israeli, but is happening.

There was a question that was asked in the Israeli Democracy Institute poll just recently, what do you feel or think when you hear the word 'politics'? Thirty-three percent think of corruption, deceit or cheating. Twenty-two percent say it makes them physically sick. Only 3 percent say it evokes some kind of positive thoughts in them, positive feelings. Another question that was asked in this poll was do you discuss politics regularly? You can see the decline in this year. This is really a recent process, a recent phenomenon that I'm describing.

Another question was what is more important for the citizens of Israel? Is it individual interests or the collective interests, the interests of the state? And you can see the decline here. This is a little list, self explanatory, but still you can see the green, individual rights, the blue, collective rights, and the purple is both. Israel used to be much more of a collectivist society, if you can say so, and now it tends much more to be kind of an individualist,

Then there is the deep mistrust of the ability of the political process to deliver. There is a deep mistrust in the motives of politicians. [Israeli Prime Minister] Ehud Olmert, of course, is the epitome of this issue. People view politicians as lacking the ability to deliver progress. Politicians are viewed as lacking a political mandate. Olmert clearly is being viewed as having no political mandate now to negotiate and come up with anything in the coming months leading to the end of 2008, which is the self-imposed deadline for an Israeli-Palestinian agreement. Politicians are viewed as abusing peace and the peace process for their personal purposes. That's a very important phenomenon that is now, I think. We see it with Olmert's negotiations with Syria. More and more, people are identifying or making an equation between the corruption of politicians'again Olmert is the personification and epitome of it'and the peace process. There is more and more of an aversion to the peace process because it's being viewed as something that is sort of synonymous with the pathetic effort of a failed politician to hang onto power. And then comes this question, do you trust the office of the prime minister? You see the decline obviously. On the peace process, therefore, what we see is resignation. We don't see rage. We see rage when it comes to the corruption of politicians. Israelis still go out into the street and demonstrate, and they have against Olmert's corruption, but when it comes to the peace process, the picture is very different.

The occupation seems sustainable. The perception is that withdrawing from Palestinian territories will bring about a barrage of rockets, as we see now in Gaza, and overall there is a kind of overall phenomenon of conflict fatigue. People just don't want to discuss it any more. They're not interested. They just lack interest.

One of the anecdotes that I tell in this context is that a few months ago my brother-in-law died in Israel and I went to sit. We sit shiv'ah; we sit seven days to commemorate the dead. I sat seven days in my sister's living room. There were hundreds of conversations, hundreds of people came in and usually what you discuss is the mundane. The idea is to sort of divert your attention from your own grief and talk about current affairs, about daily life. In all these hundreds and hundreds of conversations that were carried out in that living room, not even once was the Israeli-Palestinian conflict mentioned in any way. Once only, there was a guest who came from Sderot who talked about the Qassams and things like that, but that was the only conversation in which the issue was even brought up or discussed. Politics in general were very seldom discussed. So, we go back to the earlier slide of the victory of the status quo, which I described. Fewer and fewer people actually care about this, about the boa that swallowed the elephant, because the elephant seems to be digestible. People think that they can actually live with it.

Where is hope? This is very depressing. I know it is. Hope, I believe, lies in the realization by Israelis of what doom will be and of the realization that we are on our way to doom. There is a gradual realization in Israel that the two-state solution really is the only way to secure the Zionist dream. Nabil talked earlier about the two-state solution being the only prescription for peace. More and more Israelis are actually realizing that the two-state solution is not just that but is also the only prescription for the sustainability of Israel as a democratic, Jewish state. People realize that democracy is a victim of occupation and that the Jewish nature of the state is a victim of demography. You are all familiar with the demographic issue in Israel and how central it is becoming to public discourse. It is a realization that, I think, is creeping in gradually. It is not yet something that is being realized by the overwhelming majority of Israelis, but it is definitely creeping in. If there is something good that Prime Minister Olmert did do was to really underscore this issue and emphasize it. Again, there is a growing realization that the passage of time really is eroding the very applicability of the two-state solution.

What would it take then for Israelis to realize the urgency, to realize that the water is boiling and that the frog at some point will have to just jump out of the pot if it's not to become stew? And we come to the question of what could be opinion changers in Israel? A strong Israeli leadership? How do you say I wish in Arabic, ya rayt. We don't see it. On the horizon, it's just not there. Violence? Yes, that's changed public opinion big time in Israel, but we will always have to realize the type of price that you pay for violence. In other words, it can change public opinion of Israelis wanting to rid themselves of the occupation, but there is a backlash in terms of growing hatred and other things that we're familiar with. I won't harp on that.

The other thing that can change public opinion is some real progress on the peace process. Hopefully that will happen. Again, to suggest that it may happen by the end of 2008 for reasons that I discussed earlier relating to Prime Minister Olmert, I just don't see it happening. And then the other one is advocacy organizations such as ours and the one that we are associated with in Israel, Peace Now. A self serving end to this presentation? Yes, you're right, it is. I really do think that for the time being, given the circumstances that we have now, incremental change can come and can only come for the time being through the work that advocacy organizations do on the ground. Hopefully, when we have a new political era following the elections in the U.S. and the elections in Israel, most likely in the winter, we will have better conditions to reach the peace that we're all hoping for.

So, that concludes my presentation and I believe now we'll do Q&A. Thank you.

 
Dr. Nabil Abuznaid is charge' d'affaires at the PLO Mission Office in Washington, D.C. Mr. Ori Nir is spokesperson for Americans for Peace Now.