Intellectuals Pilloried for Peace Alliance

It represents, one Israeli organizer says, “the first dent in the wall.”

Despite the unsettled state of Israeli-Arab relations, 40 intellectuals from Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinian territories and Israel quietly met in Copenhagen in late January and issued a manifesto announcing an “alliance” of respected thinkers to support the search for a just peace and reconciliation in the region.

What’s more, they plan to set up a permanent organization operating separately from governments to further their aims.

The creation of this International Alliance for Arab-Israeli Peace was as unexpected as it was bold, and while it has received little attention in the wider world, it has set off a fiery debate in intellectual circles in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East.

The nine Egyptian participants in the dialogue have been pilloried by fellow intellectuals for their perceived disloyalty--an unacceptable breaking of ranks with the boycott on normalization with Israel--and for the secrecy in which they met their Israeli counterparts.

A counter-declaration has been signed by hundreds of intellectuals, and Lutfi Kholi, one of the prime movers behind the so-called Copenhagen Declaration, last week was hounded out of the leftist National Progressive Unionist Party that he co-founded.

But beneath the surface, there are signs that the discussion has prompted a degree of reassessment about the usefulness of the blanket rejection of anything Israeli.

Kholi, a writer who once opposed the Camp David accords that ended the state of war between Israel and Egypt, said recently that letters he is getting from doctors, engineers and artists run 5 to 1 in favor of the declaration. “Even I was surprised,” he said.

The Islamic, Pan-Arabic nationalist and leftist groups and unions opposing it are mired in dogma left over from the Arab-Israeli wars of the past, he said. They ignore “the new realities in the region and all over the world” and “are not offering any alternatives.”

Egyptian signatory Abdel Moneim Said, director of Cairo’s Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, said the declaration’s basic aim is to unite Israeli and Arab public opinion to rescue the peace process, which has seemed in peril in the past year.

The four-page document condemns the use of violence by either side and urges implementation “in letter and spirit” of all the agreements that have been signed by Israel and the Palestinians. It calls for halting new settlements, paying “special attention” to finding a mutually satisfactory status for Jerusalem and reaching a final-status agreement that grants Palestinians “self-determination, including statehood.” It also urges a comprehensive peace between Israel and Lebanon and Syria, based on U.N. resolutions and the formula of Israel trading occupied land for peace.

Rather than representing an Arab surrender, the statement, as Said sees it, demands of Israel a fair deal for the Palestinians. One of its successes, he said, is that it has attracted not only peace activists on the Israeli left but also intellectuals from the center of the Israeli political spectrum and even a few people in the ruling right-wing coalition led by the Likud Party--people like Maxim Levy, a member of Israel’s parliament and brother of Israeli Foreign Minister David Levy.

When the peace process was going more smoothly, before the 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Arab intellectuals had been slowly coming around to the idea of coexistence. Then, a step such as the Copenhagen Declaration would not have seemed nearly so controversial.

But in the current hothouse atmosphere, the document has set off “a civil war among thinkers,” said Egyptian journalist Salah Eddin Hafez.

“This ‘alliance,’ sadly, represents a mere illusion; it will dissolve into nothing. It only serves to spread [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s lies, allowing him to delude the world” about his commitment to honoring peace accords, wrote Salama Ahmad Salama, a prominent columnist for Al Ahram newspaper.

Some critics have argued that the proper role of Arab intellectuals is to be firmer with Israel than are governments or diplomats, who for purely pragmatic reasons may be forced into compromises.

“If we . . . confuse the role of the intellectual with that of the diplomat, the Arabs will lose the enlightened support of intellectuals who believe in defending Arab rights,” warned Ahmed Youssef, a political scientist at Cairo University.

It is amusing, Said said, that Egyptian thinkers are suffering such angst about the document when Palestinians, the ones most directly affected, have shown few of the same reservations.

The Egyptian intellectual, he lamented, wants to be “more royal than the king.”