How Palestinian leaders wasted the opportunities of Madrid
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We were young and full of energy and hope. As journalists covering the first intifada, attending a conference that was held as a response to the Palestinian uprising was a huge treat. The 1991 Madrid peace conference, worked out in great detail by US Secretary of State James Baker, allowed Palestinians to shine and they did so in every aspect.
We arrived early in the Spanish capital and were given general guidelines by the head of the advance team of the Palestinians, an energetic young professor from Birzeit University named Mohammed Shtayyeh, who is now the Palestinian prime minister. Baker had helped overcome the obstacle of a Jerusalemite heading the delegation by allowing the Palestinians to create a steering committee headed by Faisal Husseini, with Hanan Ashrawi as spokesperson. Opposing the articulate Ashrawi was an Israeli with an American accent named Benjamin Netanyahu. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir had, at the last moment, refused to have the Palestinians as a separate delegation and insisted on them being represented within a Jordanian-Palestinian delegation.
But all that didn’t matter. Everyone in Madrid wanted to hear Palestinians. I remember that, when Ashrawi arrived unannounced and was swarmed by journalists, she and her aide — then-head of the public relations department at Birzeit University, Albert Aghazarian — literally had to scream while they stood on the steps of the building where the press was gathered, since the conference rooms had not yet been opened.
Haidar Abdel-Shafi, a Gazan physician who had attended the very first meeting of the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1965, gave an eloquent and moving speech and was later hounded by Israeli journalists, who kept asking him if he found anything positive about the Israeli occupation. He answered in the affirmative — Abdel-Shafi was enamored with an Israeli classical radio station and he told his questioners that was the only thing he liked about the Israelis and their occupation.
Many today feel betrayed by the leadership that came from abroad, held on to power and has not given the local population a chance to be in the driver’s seat.
Daoud Kuttab
Politically, of course, the Madrid Conference, which began 30 years ago on Oct. 30, gave Palestinians and Arabs a chance to present their points of view, but nothing of substance came out of it. However, a change in government removed Shamir and his Likud party the following year and brought in a more flexible Israeli Labor leader, Yitzhak Rabin, who then authorized his political opponent and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres to conduct secret talks with the PLO in Oslo, Norway, which led to the Oslo Accords.
These were an interim plan that guaranteed the return of the PLO leadership to Palestine and the withdrawal of Israel from major cities, but they failed to provide a clear solution to at least three crucial issues: Whether a Palestinian state would be established at the end of the five-year interim plan, whether Israel would enact a settlement freeze, and what would happen to East Jerusalem. The doubts over these three crucial issues, along with the unexpected assassination of Rabin by a Jewish radical and Peres’ failure to fill his shoes, has left us with an unresolved conflict and a three-fold increase in the number of Jewish settlers.
Thirty years after Madrid, the main question Palestinians and Arabs must ponder is what good is a peace conference without a clear framework of where the meetings are going. Shamir was famously quoted as saying that he would let the negotiations go on forever without giving up an inch of territory. He and all Israeli leaders since then have done exactly that. In fact, today we see in charge a total opponent to peace and negotiations who proudly declares he will not talk to a Palestinian representative and that he is opposed to negotiations with Palestinians. Ironically, the positions have reversed, as the “Three Nos” of the Arab leaders at the Khartoum Arab League summit of September 1967 — to negotiations with, peace with and recognition of Israel — have now become Israeli nos.
In retrospect, should the Palestinians and Arabs have gone to the Madrid Conference? One might be willing to say it was a mistake, but at that time we, as young intifada journalists coming from Palestine, felt it was a huge success, having brought the Palestinian cause to this central stage. How all of this was wasted, and by whom, will be debated for years. One thing is clear: The Palestinians from the Occupied Territories who held up the PLO and were imprisoned in their defense of the sole and legitimate representative of the Palestinian people today feel betrayed by the leadership that came from abroad, held on to power and has not given the local population a chance to be in the driver’s seat. By hoarding power, both Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas erred in their calculations and, as a result, wasted the big success of the international peace conference in Madrid.
- Daoud Kuttab is an award-winning Palestinian journalist and former Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University. Twitter: @daoudkuttab
