Conversation with Hanan Ashrawi: Reflections on Palestinian Politics and Society

 
Video and Edited Transcript 
Dr. Hanan Ashrawi
Transcript No. 457 (April 18, 2016)  

 

Zeina Azzam:
Good afternoon everyone and welcome to the Jerusalem Fund and our educational program the Palestine Center. My name is Zeina Azzam and I am the Executive Director here and I am delighted to see all of you here. Welcome also to our online audience. I am so honored to be welcoming our distinguished guest today, Dr. Hanan Ashrawi. We have all been in awe of her tireless efforts on behalf of the Palestinians over the last few decades; and also of her most articulate and sage presence on the international scene as a representative of Palestine and an advocate of Palestinian rights and the application of international law in this context. Our format today is a bit different from usual, in that I will be asking Dr. Ashrawi a few questions rather than have her give a formal address. Afterwards, I’ll open the floor for discussion so the audience can ask questions as well. Our audience watching the livestream online can tweet questions to us afterwards @PalestineCenter, and if you, here or online, want to participate in the conversation on Twitter, we have a special hashtag today, it is #Ashrawi_PC. So Dr. Ashrawi of course needs no introduction, but let me however offer a few pieces of information about her before we start our conversation.

Hanan Ashrawi is a distinguished Palestinian leader, legislator, activist, and scholar. She is currently a member of the PLO Executive Committee and the Palestinian Legislative Council, and head of the PLO Department of Culture and Information. She served as spokesperson of the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East Peace Process beginning with the Madrid Peace Process in 1991. She was appointed as a Palestinian Authority Minister of Higher Education and Research in 1996. She resigned from that post in protest at the non-implementation of reform plans in the Governance and Peace Talks of 1998. Prior to that she was Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Birzeit University and Head of its Legal Aid Committee since the mid-1970s.

Dr. Ashrawi was elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council representing Jerusalem in 1996. And she was re-elected for the Third Way Block ticket in 2006. Making history as the first woman to hold a seat in the highest executive body in Palestine, she was elected to the executive committee of the PLO in 2009.

As a civil society activist, in 1999 she founded Muftah, the Palestinian initiative for the promotion of global dialogue and democracy and continues to serve as the head of the board of directors. In the same year, Dr. Ashrawi founded the National Coalition for Accountability and Integrity. She is also the founder of the Mission for Human Rights and has served as commissioner since 1994.

The awards she has received are too numerous to say, but from all over the world, she has received many. She is the author of many books, articles, poems, and short stories on Palestinian politics, culture, and literature. Her book, This Side of Peace, earned worldwide recognition. She has BA’s and MA’s from the American University of Beirut and a PhD. in medieval and comparative literature from the University of Virginia. She is the recipient of eleven honorary doctorates from universities in the U.S., Europe, Canada, and the Arab world.

So with that to start our discussion today, I will start with a question about your organization Muftah, Dr. Ashrawi. I know you have started three civil society organizations of which I am sure you are very proud. When I looked at the Muftah website, I noticed an emphasis on civil society, good governance, and citizenship and also a focus on the work of women and youth. Can you tell us a little bit more about Muftah, its programs, and its role in Palestinian society?

Dr. Ashrawi:
Thank you, Zeina. Can I say a few words of my own before I answer your question? I am really very grateful for your invitation. I’ve always had a special place in my heart for the Palestine Center. I’ve been a frequent guest here, if any of you have seen me or heard me, since the ‘80s, I think. It’s been quite a while. It’s okay George, my age is the worst kept secret in history, and I am fine with it because I tell them that I’ve earned my white hairs. They didn’t just happen by themselves. I worked very hard to get them.

Anyways, this is like a gathering of old friends. I particularly asked Zeina to have this type of exchange, this type of interactive approach because I felt [that] lecturing at people, and although I’m an academic with the propensity to lecture at people, I still would rather have this type of interactive, intimate approach because we are all old friends. Zeina kindly obliged to prepare a few questions to get the discussion going, and then we can have an open discussion because I’m sure you have specific questions that you wish to raise or questions you would like us to discuss. Zeina has been a very gracious host, thank you very much. I am sure that the Palestine Center is doing great work and will flourish under your leadership and guidance. Thank you, Zeina.

The first question had to do with civil society. Everyone knows that my real sense of belonging and commitment is to civil society. I am sort of one person who resisted political office and official positions for a long time. The only reason I accepted the PLO Executive Committee appointment was because I was elected, I wasn’t appointed. I was elected as a result of the mutiny of the women. It is a famous story where all the decided factions and parties met and chose a list of men, and they brought this list of men to the Palestine National Council. They said, “This is the list, and they all agreed by default so there is no need to vote,” but the women said “No. We want women. We want consensus women.” Some people nominated a couple of men in order to challenge my nomination, but it didn’t work out. So the women, in spite of the instructions of their parties and factions, decided to vote for me as their candidate. Of course, some of the younger generation and the reformers, which meant that this was a new face in the history of the PLO. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. Anyways, I am still there, but I am trying to make myself not irrelevant but part of the past rather than the future because I think the future should be shaped by the younger generation. As you know, the PLO is certainly geriatric to put it lightly.

Civil society, I think, is a sure safeguard for democracy, for people’s participation, for a system of checks and balances, for good governance. As you know, historically, NGOs and civil society worked to maintain Palestinian cohesion and Palestinian society under direct occupation of Israel, (now we have an indirect occupation) where the military ran our lives. We built our institutions, we built our universities, and built our NGOs and called them all a form of resistance, a form of challenging the control of the occupation in order to build your own authentic indigenous institutions as an expression of will and spirit of the people. That’s where I felt that I belonged in my life.

Muftah is the second institution that I built. The first one was the independent commission for citizens’ rights and later on became the national human rights commission in Palestine acknowledged by the Paris Protocol and so on. Muftah is a civil society institution that I established, like you said, in 1998, actually as a forward-looking institution. First of all, I felt that we had a leadership crisis. You cannot keep saying that we need new leaders. You have to help them, prepare them, support them, give them a platform and support systems. Muftah was one [such platform], particularly [for] women and youth. We were one of the first to start training women and youth, and also training the media how to go to women and youth in order to get information from them, how to establish support systems for them, how to support them, how to run for elections, how to break through barriers. Many people, I said this before and I will quote myself a few times so you will forgive my sin, in the [United] States say that you have glass ceilings at home. Well, many have brick walls, not just glass ceilings. It’s very hard to break through, so you need real support systems and solidarity systems. Muftah did that and is still doing that. We have a network of women leadership. By the way, once I establish an institution, I don’t stay with it. I get it going, it has a structure, it has bylaws, then it has efficient people and they continue to work with me on all of my jobs that are titular and voluntary because they are my children. I want to make sure that they will continue and thrive, and they are.

Muftah also ensures that we work on good governance; therefore, I established the coalition for accountability and integrity, which is an anti-corruption coalition and later became the Palestinian chapter of Transparency International. Before this it was very popular to talk about anti-corruption because we felt that we had to have a built-in system and to have homegrown initiatives as authentic by the Palestinian people to ensure we do have good governance, we do have accountability, we do have integrity. It is our job to do it. We shouldn’t wait for anybody to tell us or for outside forces to tell us. So, these institutions are still working.

In Muftah, we have a network of women who ran for elections. For example, women leadership, they’re just not in cities. They’re not just in Ramallah or Jerusalem. They’re in villages and remote areas. There are women who challenge because of our drive for affirmative action. We have now [a] quarter system. We have 20 percent, which is not enough. But at least by law, we’re trying to raise this 20 percent, especially in local government elections. So, you have women running in villages and challenging the men in a patriarchal society. It’s not easy at all. In some cases, I mean, there were women mayors elected also. And we feel it’s not enough to help them to their position, we have to have to help them succeed in that position, to make a difference. So we help them prepare proposals, prepare plans, prepare systems and structures and so on. And we help them when the men, for example, tried to hold meetings in very conservative areas late at night. So, the woman wouldn’t be able to leave her house at night or they wouldn’t have them in an official place; they’d go to somebody’s house. So, you couldn’t go to somebody’s house alone late at night. Or where the man would say, ‘“give me your vote and I’ll go and vote on your behalf.” Things like that. So, they need… We need to ensure that women who make it, by addressing the power imbalance in our society and inherited injustice done to the Palestinian women, that once they are in office that they will make a difference and succeed. And that it’s not something just symbolic to have your symbolic women and that’s it, and so on. And Muftah is doing very well. We receive delegations. We send delegations. We started also with the congress last year and this year we are having a congressional delegation for the first time, which is very nice. It’s coming at the end of May, late May. So this is part of it, and part of the ongoing dialogue. We believe we have to present the Palestinian narrative in an honest and persuasive way. And of course, we have to receive guests and so on and try to make them part of the understanding of the Palestinian realities on the ground. And we continue to be, as always, troublemakers, when it comes to the Palestinian leadership. I have always been a troublemaker and I will continue to be one, but it is important that you always question and challenge. If there is anything that you think is going wrong, you should be the first to point it out and try to deal with it. That’s why now there are some problems between civil society and the government and so on, but we’re hoping that we can undo a bit of the damage that was done.

Zeina Azzam:
Thank you. I would like to turn to the larger situation in Palestinian society right now and invite you to look back at the last twenty years or so and offer reflections on post-Oslo life in Palestine. Can you assess the experience of the generation born after the Oslo Accords and how is their experience of the Israeli occupation from their parents’ experience and how is it being manifested now in Palestinian society?

Hanan Ashrawi:
Well Zeina, we need a couple of hours and we will talk about the post-Oslo period. Actually, I don’t even like to call it Oslo, I call it the DOP, the Declaration of Principles. It is an agreement that was signed in 1993 in Washington as a result of secret, back-channel talks and which, at a certain point, Yasser Arafat, President Yasser Arafat, recognized Israel’s right to exist in safety, and recognized boundaries and Rabin recognized the PLO as the representative, legitimate representative of the Palestinian people…which was not a very equal recognition, because we wanted the Israelis to recognize our right to self-determination, and to freedom and to sovereignty on our own land.

Anyways, within this agreement, the DOP, there were lots of built-in weaknesses and flaws and problems. And what we are seeing now is the “chicken is coming home to roost.” All the problems within the DOP, and all of our worst expectations, have really materialized and have come back to, not just to haunt us, but actually enhance the power, dis- equilibrium, the control of the occupier vs. the occupied, and to buy Israel more time to create more facts and to act unilaterally and with full impunity without any kind of intervention or curbs. So, we saw, after this great sense of hope and euphoria, and people felt that with the signing of the DOP this was a new phase in history, this is a real paradigm shift – that this is the beginning of the devolution of occupation, the evolution of statehood – you have heard me talk about this. Now we have reached out to our occupier and our oppressor and we said “we will make peace with you” and we accepted the 67 boundaries, which was a major and painful compromise by the Palestinians. Not even the 48 boundaries or the partition plan and so on. We went from all or nothing to 22 percent and we thought the whole world and Israel would sit up and take notice and see this as a major opportunity. So there were tremendous expectations. Many of you were there and many of you remember the sense that now the occupation will end, there will be a real solution, that you will have Palestinian statehood. But unfortunately, we ended up with a process for its own sake, with no relationship to reality, [that] did not influence the behavior of the Israeli occupation.

On the contrary, as I said, it bought it more time, more cover – legal, political, economic – to pursue its policies without any curbs and to continue entrenching the occupation so to speak; it re-invented itself. I said that at one point, when we talked about devolution of occupation, evolution of statehood. We ended up with the occupation de-inventing itself as a system of control. And the statehood, in a sense, being undermined entirely by these agreements that maintained Israeli ability to control our lives and to extend the transitional phase forever. We are a people living in a state of transition. That’s it. Where the talks should have ended, and the Palestinian state should have been declared as an independent, sovereign state by the year 2000, we are still in a state of transition. Once you accept the whole principle of phases, it means Israel can extend the phase forever, that’s it. Especially when they do not recognize that there is any binding timeline or commitment. When you do not, when you can renege on signed agreements and get away with it, and there is no accountability, of course you are going to do what you want, because you are the powerful one. When the third party engaged in this process that has been ongoing, brings its strategic alliance with Israel to bear on the talks, like the U.S. did, then of course you are not going to hold them to account and you are not going to end the policies and measures that are destroying the two-state solution systematically and willfully, and so on. When you grant Israel legal cover, when you become its advocate internationally, how do you expect to have any kind of justice in a situation like this, where the powerful party is allowed to use the full force of its power against a vulnerable population without any kind of protection?

And then we were subject to all sorts of blackmail and so on, I do not want to talk about all the problems, we can later on, what went wrong with the DOP and the agreement signed in ‘93, but we’ve reached a stage where Israel has used the process in order to create these detrimental facts, leading to the point where the very objective of the talks is being undermined. The process became an end unto itself, the objective of peace based on [the] two-state solution and international law and so on, is no longer an objective: there is no binding timeline, there is no arbitration, nothing. And so, it went on and on, where Israel, now, we started the talks where we had 100,000 settlers, now you have 650,000 settlers. The settlements now are about 200 settlements throughout, not just Jerusalem and settlement blocks—by the way do not believe that there are legal and illegal settlements, all settlements are illegal, all settlers are committing war crimes. So, the settlements have expanded, now Israel wants to control 64 percent, which is Area C. I do not want to go through all that, but look, in Palestine we have always lived in a place with ancient names, with a deep rooted, long history and culture and so on, and with the signing of the Interim Agreement we ended up living in the letters of the alphabet: Palestine became Areas A, Areas B, Areas C. And the fact that Areas C is more than 60 percent, Israel has full control over Area C, it started behaving as though it belongs to Israel.

Jerusalem was annexed illegally, and there is a systematic policy and plan of ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem, creating demographic changes, transforming the very culture, the very identity of Jerusalem. Those of you who have been there will have seen it change over the years. Many people don’t even recognize it as it is, and Jerusalem is surrounded by three sieges, we call them. One is the military checkpoints that isolate Jerusalem from the rest of Palestine, and no Palestinian can go to Jerusalem unless he or she has a Jerusalem I.D. So West Bankers, Gazans, and so on, cannot go to Jerusalem. So they have isolated it and surrounded it with military checkpoints at every entrance, and these are really horrific checkpoints, made in order to ensure that Palestinians are humiliated at every checkpoint, and delayed and so on. And surrounded also by three rings of settlements that isolate Jerusalem from its environment, the Gush Etzion in the South, the Maale Adumim in the East, and the Ariel in the North, so you have Jerusalem totally cut off and surrounded by settlements. And then you have the apartheid wall, I am sure you have seen it, you have seen pictures of it. That wall is also meant to cut off Jerusalem, as well as most Palestinian towns and cities from each other, not even from Israel and Palestine.

So, all these things, all the power systems that Israel had at its disposal, it used since what you call the Oslo, since ‘93 until now. So all the expectations, all the hopes were dashed, the sense of euphoria was totally lost and now we have reached a point where people not only have lost faith in the process itself, but they have no trust whatsoever first with the Israelis, because now it is very clear that this Israeli occupation is busy entrenching itself as a system of control, land confiscation, with what Ilan Pappé calls the “displacement-replacement paradigm”. Displacing a whole people, a whole nation, replacing it with another. Including the culture, including the naming of places and so on. So that’s happening. At the same time, they are very happy to continue talks forever.

Among the Palestinian youth now, they don’t remember anything except the occupation and except occupation on the rampage, and except more systems of control, and now Israel [has] not just escalated, stepped-up its campaign of settlement activities, it also resorted to using live ammunition again, the shoot-to-kill orders, the home demolitions, different forms of collective punitive measures, house demolitions, now expulsions of people – whole families are being expelled. So, all matters have come to a head and this has undermined—it is not just lack of trust in Israel, and the Israeli occupiers, and the term even “bilateral negotiations” or “negotiations” has become a dirty word in popular language. People don’t want negotiations at all, or bilateral talks. And they feel that without international intervention, there is no solution, and it is no secret [that] what is happening now is that people know what Israeli intentions are. Israel is busy super-imposing “Greater Israel” on historical Palestine and we see it happening every day, every day. Palestine is changing. Israel is destroying the chances of having a viable, sovereign Palestinian state. It has already annexed Jerusalem and transformed it. It refuses to deal with anything related to the issue of the refugees and at the same time it is busy bringing in settlers and building more settlements and confiscating more land, to the point where it carried out an ethnic cleansing of Area C, even projects and so on that were built by the European Union and the Europeans and so on, because Israel wants to empty out 64 percent and maintain Israeli settler presence and economic projects in the Jordan Valley because it is a very fertile area.

So here we are. And, some people say that their response is that there is a sense of despair, or anger, or a sense of hopelessness, they do not see a political horizon. Yes, there is no political horizon. American standing certainly has been undermined, the American credibility has been undermined. People don’t believe that the U.S. can be, in any way, an even-handed peace broker, and they see its collusion with Israel and they are very unhappy. And of course, now with the Obama Doctrine, which we can talk about, it was very clear that it is a typical dilemma, “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” If the Americans intervene then they weigh in on behalf of Israel. If they don’t intervene, they leave a political vacuum that Israel fills with violence and extremism and so on. So the situation is extremely critical and people feel that among the young, there is a sense of yes, hopelessness and despair.

But there is also a sense that they have lost faith in their own leadership; that your agenda, your peace agenda has not worked. Political settlement has not worked. You are using the wrong instruments with the wrong people. Israel understands, many say, the language of violence. Or Israel will not listen unless it has something to pay. There is a price to be paid, but you cannot constantly reward Israel, you cannot. In the last meeting of the Central Council they said “You cannot continue to be bound by agreements that Israel has totally violated.” Why should we be bound by agreements when Israel has not been bound by any article it has signed? It goes ahead and does what it wants. So there is this sense, a sense of anger and frustration, loss of hope, loss of faith, total distrust in the Israelis and the Americans; and there are, of course, people who are desperate enough to commit desperate acts. I mean, people talk about these individuals who go out, what they call the…. They cannot control them because these people, these young people who have the sense of anger and resentment are not being regimented. They are not following orders. They are going out on their own to avenge the killing of [a] relative, cousin, sister, brother or friend or something or they feel they have to do something about this occupation. And, of course, they know that they’re going to be shot and killed. I mean, look, this 14 year old girl, you know, with scissors, how much of a danger did she represent to a soldier wearing [a] bulletproof vest, helmet, carrying a machine gun? You don’t have to shoot to kill, which they do regularly. The settlers have created really a reign of terror, mainly in villages and isolated areas where they challenge, where they destroy, where they kidnap, where they kill, where they destroy crops, where they steal crops. The olive trees are being destroyed also. They act with impunity because the impunity that Israel practices as a state outside of the law has been internalized where its own citizens enjoy impunity. They are not held to account by any law. They can get away with killing Palestinians, as you know. Look at what happened to the killer of the Dawabsheh family and the killer of Abu Khdeir and so on. So there is a sense that you can do whatever you want to the Palestinians and get away with it.

That’s why these young people now feel they need an outlet. They need a way to express themselves. Now, it could be as revenge, it could be despair, it could be hopelessness, it could be there’s no way out or so on. Or it could be that the young are also telling us, especially those who are university kids and so on, who go out and face the Israelis at checkpoints. I remember when we used to face Israelis army all the time. It was an assertion of will, a statement of resistance that “We are not afraid of you, that we will stand up to you.” We used to get beaten up and shot at and imprisoned and so on because we were expressing the fact that our spirit is not broken, that we are courageous enough to stand up to the army and to say it’s time to end this occupation. They are doing what we did, those who are going to the checkpoints. We didn’t use weapons. We didn’t have weapons. We firmly believed in nonviolent resistance all our lives and that’s what, in many ways, got the world to pay attention to us. And these are the young people who are saying the same thing we told our parents, “You failed, you didn’t liberate Palestine, it’s our turn,” now it’s their turn to tell us, “You failed, you didn’t liberate…” Maybe we did something incrementally, but still, they feel a tremendous sense of letdown.

Now another factor you talked about, elections. I don’t see why elections should be ten years apart. We had elections [in] ‘95, ‘96, and 2006, and I promise you I will not run in 2016. No, we need to have elections. This division and this rift is also another debilitating factor, another source of real resentment and anger, and if you look at public opinion polls, the young are discouraged. They really don’t have much faith in their elders, in the existing political system. We need the rejuvenation and re-legitimization of elections, and we need to heal the rift. If we do not heal the rift, we cannot have elections, or we make sure it remains forever. So we need to reunify Gaza, West Bank, PLO, Fatah, and Hamas. We need to make sure that we safeguard a pluralistic, inclusive, democratic system, and we have to have elections in order to make room for the young to participate, and make room for the public as a whole to hold its leadership accountable, and to elect new ones, for heaven’s sake! And for them to run also, because many of them feel that we skipped even a generation. There’s a generation that did not have its day, and now you’re looking at the young kids in their 20s, and teenagers, and early 30s, who say it’s their turn when the people in their 40s and 50s who say they haven’t had their turn yet. So a political system that maintains itself as it is, in many ways, loses its vitality in addition to its legitimacy, in additions to the checks and balances of being held to account by people who can either elect it or not elect it.

And that’s why I believe, now, with matters coming to a head, with Israel escalating these policies, destroying the two-state solution and so on, we are being asked to think of new and creative ways of dealing with the situation. And to me, it’s an international issue. It is not a bilateral issue; it is not a Palestinian solution. We did not choose to have Israel build on our own land, created in Palestine. We did not wake up one day and decide we don’t like Israel. Israel was brought in and imposed on Palestinian land, and that is what generated all this conflict and violence and so on. So what do you propose to do about it? You cannot keeping telling the Palestinian side to be more flexible, more creative, and more flexible, and show goodwill—we’ve been on probation, on good behavior all our lives, to prove that we deserve those things that other people take for granted. I think it’s our right to live in peace, in dignity, in freedom, on our own land, and we’re perfectly capable of building our own state and building a model state, if you will. But unfortunately we’ve been prevented, so this is the sense of the young generation, disenfranchised in many ways, excluded in other ways, the oppression of the occupation being felt by every single one of us and of them at every point, but yet feeling a sense of helplessness that the leadership has not found a way out for them. Now even if by miracle they end up we have elections and they end up taking over their country and inherit a very difficult solution, our job is to be there and give them support, not to usurp their role.

Zeina Azzam:
Well, speaking of the international arena—my understanding is that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is now in France, he’s going onto Russia and Germany, and then to the U.S. He’s speaking in France with President Hollande to discuss France’s initiative to start peace negotiations and also to introduce a UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem. Can you tell us a little bit more about these initiatives?

Hanan Ashrawi:
Yeah. Actually the French initiative came about as a result of a political vacuum. And when the U.S. withdraws from the scene, there is a political vacuum and the dynamic on the ground has become very destructive, very toxic, so the French felt that they should do something about it, take a political initiative. For years we have been telling the Europeans that “You cannot be the designated signer of checks while the Americans take all the political power,” that “If you are signing checks for nation-building you should play a political role for peacemaking or ending the occupation.” The EU has many excuses all the time, I don’t want to go into that, however, let’s say, under Hollande, and particularly Fabius. It was the French foreign minister Fabius who came up with the initiative that he won. He feels that it should be an international solution, that the same old pattern of bilateral negotiations between occupier and occupied is not going to work, so he suggested a three-phased approach. First, he’s consulting and consulted with the parties, and they went around individually consulting with all the different, not just Palestine and Israel, but all the Arab countries, the French European countries, the US and so on. They finished this first phase of consultation. The second phase is to convene a meeting of the support group. As you know, part of the plan is to have an international support group, not just the quartet. We suggested the “P5 + 1”, “plus”, because we like the model of the “P5+1”. But “plus” means other Arab countries, other countries, maybe the BRIC countries and so on, so that you will expand the participation.

We don’t believe in an American monopoly, we don’t believe in bilateral talks, we believe that there should be a greater participatory presence including Europe, including… And not just the Quartet which became utterly useless. The Quartet was entirely useless all these years. It was picked up when the U.S. needed it and it was put back in the freezer when they didn’t want it and so on, so it had no will of its own, actually. So this kind [of] set-up to us is important. They set up this support group, and then in July, they’re supposed to have an international conference. Now our issue is not technical. We told them it’s not a series of meetings, it’s not a series of buddies. You have to look at the substance, you have to look at the terms of reference. So to us, any initiative must be based on international law, as you rightfully said. It has to have clear terms of reference, you cannot violate international law. All settlements are illegal regardless, you cannot start by talking about swaps. Why? Did we sign away any of our land? We didn’t. You cannot start with any basis that violates UN resolutions about the illegality of the annexation of Jerusalem, or about the rights of the refugees, and so on.

So we want to make sure that the terms of reference do not erode international law and international humanitarian law. This is one. Two, we need a binding timeline. You cannot go on an open-ended fishing expedition, as [?] used to say. It’s not open-ended and it’s not something that can go on forever and ever. Either you have a binding timeline or there’s no sense in doing more of the same, hoping for a different result, which Americans keep doing over and over again, and they get the same result and they’re surprised. I mean, John Kerry was surprised that they didn’t succeed. We told them, anybody could have predicted that. So anyway, a binding timeline, and we wanted, first of all, terms of reference, a binding timeline, and clear, defined objectives: ‘67 boundaries, two-state solution, Jerusalem as the capital, and so on, equitable solution of the refugee question. These are clear objectives, and then you need concrete steps. You cannot also talk about it in the abstraction, yes we want… What are the borders? Clearly. The capital. You need concrete steps to begin the dismantlement of settlements, within this binding timeframe. And then you need the timeframe for ending the occupation, not for the talks. Everyone talks about timeframe for the talks. No. I mean people have talked forever, I also will quote myself by saying we’ve invented more ways of negotiations than anybody on earth. Really. We’ve had proximity talks, and close-up talks, and direct talks, and indirect talks, and bilateral talks, and multilateral talks, and exploratory talks, and epistolary talks, and track one and track two and track three talks, and we ended up recently with Twitter talks. People are sending each other tweets. Khalas! We’re all talked out. Either you have a serious multilateral discussion on the issues, with binding timelines, with concrete steps: begin the dismantlement of the occupation. Remove the settlements. Let’s move quickly before it’s too late, because there are people who believe the two-state solution is over already. And if it’s already too late, what do you propose in its place? That’s the real question. A de facto one-state is not in the making right now. It’ll be a problem in the making after generations, but that gives Israel more time to do more damage, but anyway we’ll discuss that later.

So, the French initiative, we’re trying to give it substance, we’re trying to give it teeth, we’re trying to get the international criminal team to get involved in an effective way, and not just in a symbolic way, like the Quartet. A real way within a binding timeline, which requires also mechanisms for arbitration, which never existed, because no one wants to hold Israel accountable, which includes Israel, by the way. And not just arbitration, but also mechanisms for monitoring and verification, because when Israel violates agreements, no one says anything! Should the Palestinians, heaven forbid, say we want to go to the UN, we are punished. Right? “Why should you go to join the ICC, that’s end of the world. [Exceed their own stature,?] that’s a nuclear weapon.” What about… I mean, really it’s incredible how the Palestinians are being pressured and blackmailed and so on in order not to pursue their rightful path, and the Israelis, who violated every single agreement and every single law and has been acting outside the law, is never held to any account. And you remember when I talked about accountability and protection, when we started the talks, we said we need two things: protection for the Palestinians because we’re under occupation and vulnerable, and accountability for Israel because it’s a strong occupying power that has been using power without any checks.

Until now we don’t have that. So that’s why we talk about accepting the French initiative. It falls within our new approach, to go the multilateral way, to end the American monopoly, to bring to bear international law, to have binding timelines and concrete steps and so on. Maybe there is a chance. Maybe. But if you block off all avenues for the Palestinians’ non-violence—you know, the Israelis invent language. Netanyahu, he’s so used to terrorism and using the word terrorism, that if we have protest marches and so on, he calls it popular terrorism. If we go to the UN, he called Mahmoud Abbas engaging in popular terrorism. I said, “You use the word over and over and over again and it loses meaning. So what? Everybody’s a terrorist?” Anyway, you don’t block all peaceful means of resistance for the Palestinians and then legal means, political means, human means, popular means—all these are a no-no? What happens? You leave us only with violence! Does that mean we should go back to armed struggle? That’s the real issue, that the Palestinians have tried every single responsible moral human way of trying to tell the world, “Look, this is an abnormal situation, it’s a toxic situation, it’s unjust, it’s unfair, do something about it,” and no one wants to do anything about it.

So the French initiative, maybe, but ultimately Israel is bent on destroying the two-state solution and the difference is that now they make no secret of it. Now it’s our turn in the open. All you need to do is read their statements, read their pronouncements, read what they say – Netanyahu and everyone else. This coalition, government coalition, in Israel is the worst in history, really. It’s the most hardline, extreme ring-wing, violent, militaristic, racist, overtly racist government in the history of Israel. That’s it. They don’t hide their objectives. Now in my time, he says, “We’re going to live by the sword.” So, he’s willing to use violence; he’s willing to kill as many Palestinians as it takes to break the will. But, no army no matter how strong, has ever succeeded in breaking the will of the people, especially people who are bent on getting their own freedom, their own dignity, their own independence.

Zeina Azzam:
I have a whole lot, lot more questions to ask you about Obama and U.S. elections and many other things. I am going to ask one more question and then open the floor for the audience. So, my last question is kind of the vein of the non-violent resistance and international pressure on Israel. It’s been a little more than ten years since the formation the BDS movement, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movements by Palestinian civil society, of which the larger aim is to make Israel to abide by international law. If you could, talk about the BDS movement, assess where it is and its successes and kind of current position internationally.

Hanan Ashrawi:
Ya, no that’s a very important question because the BDS movement is a civil society initiative, as you know. It’s a very important initiative with remarkable historical precedence. It started in South Africa, as a way of challenging [the] apartheid regime in South Africa. And it really made a strong difference. It forced the white regime in South Africa to pay attention. And of course, it created internal dynamics against apartheid and against discrimination because they found themselves isolated and losing. They couldn’t participate in any sports competition and any academic, so on. Anyway, so to Palestinian civil society, this was an initiative [that] not only should be emulated, but should be developed because [if] the whole world refuses to hold Israel accountable, then it’s up to civil society and individuals and people around the world to hold Israel to account.

And this provides people with the opportunity to act as ethical consumers, as ethical investors, to take up certain instruments that are available. You choose not to buy settler products, or you choose not to buy Israeli products. This is a matter of individual choice. It’s a democratic choice. It’s a free choice. And there are many people who do not want to violate international law and international humanitarian law and the rights of Palestinians and want to send a clear message to Israel that we have the right to hold you to account. Now, what’s happening is that Israel waxes hysterical. It decided that this is delegitimizing Israel. This is isolating Israel. And what’s worse, the people who more hysterical than Israel are the Congress. Wow. I mean, really. They are criminalizing BDS and they threaten to punish anybody in the world, even in Europe, not just in the U.S. that decides to adopt BDS as a means of holding Israel to account. They are willing to violate democratic rights of their own citizens in the same way as we told the Brits. The Brits adopted a law that says to their local governments that chose to divest from Israel that it’s illegal to divest and to boycott and so on. Why? I said you are willing to violate. Local governments are a sign of democracy. They chose, they voted, they decided that they don’t want to invest in Israel or import. Why should they violate their own rights to choose how to be consumers, or how to invest, or what of academic relationships they want and with whom? And they’re willing to do that in order to defend Israel and Israeli criminality. It’s not defending Israel. It’s defending the occupation. And as I tell many Israelis, “We are not delegitimizing you. The occupation is.” And if they persist like this, they can no longer do things in the dark.

Remember 1948? It was all in the dark. We had to wait for about what 30 years. Before the new historians, before people like Avi Shlaim and Ilan Pappe and to certain degree, Tom Segev, all these guys decided to expose once the intelligence archives were opened, to expose what really happened in ‘48. The ethnic cleansing, the terrorism, the massacres, the forced expulsion, and so on. Before, it was the usual narratives, “Oh the Palestinians ran away at the behest of their leaders.” The truth came out. Now, we have social media. Now, we have witnesses. Now, people have access to the truth and they know what’s happening. And they want to exercise their right. You cannot deceive people all the time. So, there is a change. There is a shift. And having witnessed that, people hear like [ inaudible] and so on. They’re not only satisfied with buying a president. They also want to fight BDS everywhere. Hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent not just only on Congress to criminalize BDS, but to recruit people even in universities because universities have been outspoken in criticizing violations and criminality. I don’t know whether they can do that in churches, but church groups were certainly among the pioneers of ethical investment and of divestment.

So, now they’re trying to prevent not just the American people of organizations in participating, they’re also trying to intimidate everybody else including the Europeans. They said we will not or anybody in the world, we will not have any trade agreements with any country that practices BDS. So if you want to protect Israeli impunity, if you want to maintain Israel as a rogue state because Israel is a rogue state, it lives outside the law. And it claims preferential treatment. It claims a sense of exceptionalism and entitlement. It claims that the law does not apply to it.

If you want to apply the law like the very modest way that the Europeans decided to, I’m sure you’ve heard of the guidelines and the labelling. Europe decided to label settlement products, as being made in settlements and not in Israel. Isn’t this what everybody does? The origin, you need a certificate of origin, what you’re being, where does it come from? The fact that they said settlement products have to be labelled in terms of where they come from, “This is anti-Semitic!” Why? I mean, you go buy something in the supermarket, you want to know where it was made, that’s your right. You want to know, was it done by slave labor? Was it done on stolen land? You want to consume ethically, you want to be an informed consumer or investor or partner or whatever. But Israel is not used to any kind of accountability, even a minimal, hesitant accountability. So they refuse this. And, of course, who jumped to defend Israeli criminality and impunity? Congress. I don’t want to go into Congress. Yeah, but maybe their own people will hold them to account one day, maybe the public should also elect officials, and I’m glad that there are people like Bernie Sanders, who can stand up and speak out.

And speaking of elections, I will go ahead just to vent. Allow me to vent, please. Who was it, Henry Siegman, I think had an article about Clinton, “the panderer-in-chief”? Yeah, he had an article, “Hilary the panderer-in-chief”. This pandering going on—those of you that had the strong stomach to listen to the speeches at AIPAC. Did you? They recited the whole litany, everything! It’s as if someone like Lieberman, the Israeli Lieberman not the American Lieberman, or the Taliban told these guys, had written these speeches. There’s this whole checklist, not just Palestinian terrorism and so on, but “Israeli right to self-defense”, “Israel is our strong ally”, and blah blah, “no daylight between us”. They recited everything, exactly the way this extreme right-wing government, not even having anything to do with the reality or the facts. And they got all these standing ovations from AIPAC. And you would think that they were running for office in Israel. I would tell you, if they’re running for office in Israel, they would not get the same percentage of votes they would get here in the States. Really. It’s incredible, that you have to show allegiance to a foreign country and you are good for a foreign country rather than being good for your own people. This is amazing. To us it’s uncon—and the fact that Netanyahu has succeeded in humiliating and insulting the executive branch repeatedly and getting away with it has also undermined the standing of the US everywhere. Because if some nut like Netanyahu can get away with insulting your president and can get thirty standing ovations from a yo-yo Congress, this means that they have no value. Who’s this president? And if his own Congress does not stand up for national pride, and if you can insult your president and—he can intervene in domestic politics and then side with Romney and then side with the Republicans and then side with this and that, and side against an agreement that was supposed to protect Israel from the so-called Iranian threat, and decided to mobilize.

They called AIPAC to mobilize against Congress and to fight against the Iranian deal, and for the first time, AIPAC lost. So that’s a turning point as well. For the first time, AIPAC did not dictate Congressional policy or stance. So AIPAC is not the all-powerful, perfect god, but anyway, one has to understand that, unless the Americans lay claim to their own policies and can hold their own elected officials responsible and accountable, they will continue to owe allegiance to AIPAC and a distorted version of reality dehumanizing the Palestinians, excluding the Palestinians, and supporting Israeli violations, to the detriment of American interests and American national interests and American security. It’s ironic that only the military, the generals were telling the politicians that “What Israel is doing in the region is undermining not just our credibility but is threatening the lives of our men and women abroad.” And that “We cannot afford to keep paying for their mistakes and their violations and the violence of Israel. And we cannot afford to keep giving them more money.” But Obama decided that he has to prove that he is good for Israel. Regardless of the fact that when he came to office and he made that Cairo speech, he raised expectations—you all heard his Cairo speech. And we said, “What a breath of fresh air! Somebody who will say things as they are, who will reach out to the world, who will not subscribe to the clash of civilizations, who will not exclude the Palestinians or the Muslims or the Arabs and so on, and who will speak in a clear, rights-based narrative approach.” Suddenly, Israel snubs their nose at him, so he said, “Ah, I shouldn’t have talked about settlements.” What do you mean you shouldn’t? It was the right approach, you should have talked about those, you should have told them to stop settlements, and then you should have held them to account because you didn’t! Instead of saying “They refused to listen to me so I’m sorry, I made a mistake and asked them to do this.” This was really bad because you were backed down like this and you changed because the Israelis are intransigent. And it doesn’t bode well for your policies or your standing.

And it continued downhill all the way through, to the point where he was placed on the defensive to prove that he was good for Israel. Now he’s giving them 40 billion for the next ten years and they don’t want to sign it because they say it’s not enough. They will wait for the next President, knowing that if it’s Hillary or if it’s who, Trump? Congratulations. That they will get more. I mean, the arrogance, I don’t know, I’ve never seen so much arrogance. And yet he is the one President who gave Israel more money and more weapons than any other president in the history of the US. And they still are not satisfied with him. And they still criticize him and say he’s not good for Israel so that the next president has to do more to prove that he’s good for Israel. So good luck, you guys, really.