Palestinian Ambassador to US speaks at Cornell

 

Afif Safieh, the Palestinian ambassador to the United States, spoke Wednesday night at Cornell University about the need for the U.S. to have a stronger diplomatic presence in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.Half a world away, peace talks were collapsing this week after retaliatory Israeli rocket attacks killed more than 100 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

“We would be your consenting victims if America decided to wage peace on us,” he joked, in a speech that mixed humor with serious pleas for increased efforts by America to resolve the ongoing Middle Eastern conflict once and for all.

Safieh was introduced by Cornell University President David Skorton, who described him as a “frank and engaging advocate of Palestinian points of view.”

“He has long been known as one of the most eloquent spokespersons for the Palestinian peoples,” Skorton said. “He has condemned terrorism and sought common ground with Jewish organizations.”

Safieh spoke extensively about his own experience with the conflict; why his political party, Fatah, failed to control the Gaza Strip; and the need for Israel to stop encroaching on his society’s rightful territory.

The ambassador described himself as a proponent of “popular, non-violent resistance,” and called it the only way to both neutralize the Israeli military and mobilize the Palestinian population. But he also condemned the United States for failing to intervene in a meaningful way.

“Americans need to make decisive diplomacy,” he said. “The superpower of the world deals with Israel with all the political power of Liechtenstein.”

President Bush has said he would like to have a peace plan in place before he leaves office in January 2009, but the collapse of talks this week have set back U.S. diplomatic efforts.

Safieh, a Christian born in Jerusalem in 1950, was educated in Paris and served in various roles with the Palestine Liberation Organization until 1990, when he was appointed as the official delegate to the United Kingdom, and then in 1995 to the Vatican.

In October 2005 he was appointed to serve as a representative of the PLO to the United States in Washington.

During his talk, held at Cornell’s Statler Auditorium, Safieh criticized the terrorist attacks of Hamas, the controlling party in Gaza, but said that Israeli actions on the ground were also responsible for the lack of a lasting peace.

“I believe it is the Israelis’ priority to acquire as much of our geography as possible, with as little of our demography as possible,” he said.

He said that although many Palestinians, including himself, are in favor of a two-state solution, Hamas’ refusal to negotiate “has created a three-state solution” between Israel and the two Palestinian territories, Gaza Strip and the West Bank, controlled by different political parties — Hamas and his party, Fatah, respectively.

Safieh also spoke at length about the economic effect the Israeli occupation has had on his society. He bemoaned the decline of higher education in his society, and described how the 600 military checkpoints surrounding the Gaza Strip resulted in a loss of more than eight million work hours each day.

“After 60 years of diaspora and 40 years of military occupation, the checkpoints are plunging our society into economic decline,” he said.

Several times during his speech, Safieh compared the plight of the Palestinian people to that of the Jewish people after World War II and the Holocaust.

“We have become the Jews of the Israelis,” he said, “and I believe the two-state solution is the way out.”

At the conclusion of his brief talk, Safieh and Skorton opened up the floor to more than a half-hour of questioning.

Safieh avoided a question related to his own party’s relevance in Palestinian society, chastised a student questioner for focusing on Israeli casualties in the face of overwhelming Palestinian dead, and said he thought certain Israeli officials should be tried for war crimes. He also rebuked a claim by a student that Palestinian textbooks advocated hate. At all times, though, the dialogue remained relatively civil.

After the talk, Nora Cohen, a Jewish resident of Ithaca who was born in Egypt, said she thought Safieh should not focus so much on international intervention.

“I wish that some of the Arab countries could get together to make peace,” she said. “The U.S. cannot make peace. I do not think that we should get involved, but I know peace can be made.”

Srikant Iyer, a graduate student from India studying at Cornell, said being involved in a dialogue with Safieh about the conflict was like being physically involved with history.

“There are a lot of human atrocities going on there,” he said, “and I think Israel, which seems to be the major force, need to recognize that human beings matter a lot more than personal investments.”