Faisal Husseini

The Middle East caldron boiled over last week as Israel marked its 50th anniversary and Palestinians commemorated what they call al nakba, the catastrophe of Israel’s founding and their own uprooting a half-century ago. The al nakba demonstrations left at least eight Palestinians dead and hundreds injured in what was described as the worst Israeli-Palestinian fighting in 20 months. The protests sent a message of growing Palestinian impatience over deadlocked peace efforts.

Meanwhile in Washington, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright worked to hold together the fragile peace process by meeting for two days with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Faisal Husseini, 57, the Palestinian Authority’s minister without portfolio in Jerusalem, is touring the United States to build support for the creation of a Palestinian state and peace with the Israelis. He was in Los Angeles late last week.

The Husseini family has a long history of fighting for the Palestinians. Fifty years ago, under his family’s leadership, the Palestinians rejected the U.N. plan to partition the land into two states, one Jewish, one Arab. His father, Abdel Khader Husseini, was killed along the road to Jerusalem in 1948 in a battle that was a turning point of Israel’s War of Independence. His great uncle, Haj Amin Husseini, served as Jerusalem’s Grand Mufti, the head Islamic and political leader from 1921 until the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

The soft-spoken Faisal Husseini would appear, at least in recent years, to approach his differences with the Israelis with more diplomacy. The Cairo-educated Husseini, who keeps an unofficial office in East Jerusalem, made allies inside Israel among members of the peace movement and was a leading delegate to the Madrid conference. He is a voice to be reckoned with in the Palestinian community: Visiting dignitaries, from U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to U.S. representatives, make a point of seeing Husseini while in Jerusalem, usually to howls of protest from Israeli leaders.

While he is well-liked in Palestinian intellectual circles and known as a moderate, the tensions between him and Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat are an open secret, although publicly he maintains that Arafat, despite his human rights record, is the best man for the job of accomplishing a peace pact. Husseini met Arafat as a young man in Egypt and the two shared the same political views. But observers say that Arafat, who gave Husseini the plum position of representing Palestinian interests in Jerusalem, has recently pushed Husseini out of the decision-making circle, as he has done with several other senior officials.

****

Question: There have been riots and violence in Gaza and on the West Bank. Yasser Arafat issued a statement last week that there would be no peace unless Jerusalem is the capital of Palestine, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu raised the ante by insisting on the need for territorial buffers. Is the peace process falling apart?

Answer: Unfortunately, yes. When we started the peace process, we started with certain premises. The first one is that compromise must occur. . . . Because of that, we reached the Oslo agreement and we agreed to start to enter implementation of this agreement--until we had this new [Netanyahu] government. Netanyahu acts as if the opposite of this is true. Instead of being pragmatic, he remains an ideologist. Instead of applying logic, he believes that everything we gain is something he will lose and, because of that, he is refusing to give up anything.

*

Q: The hot-button issue has always been Jerusalem. The Palestinians maintain that East Jerusalem is their capital while the Israeli consensus recognizes an undivided Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Would you consider a peace settlement where Jerusalem is undivided?

A: I live in Jerusalem. Jerusalem now is a divided city. There are two cities actually: one free city, one under occupation. What we are looking to is to have an open, free-access city . . . have a Palestinian side and an Israeli side with free access between the two. . . .

*

Q: Is there a practical plan to divide Jerusalem?

A: I’m not talking about dividing. I’m talking about managing to have the two capitals there with free access between them. Jerusalem itself will have borders surrounding it. A visitor to Palestine who is coming from the eastern side will enter by the East Jerusalem border. He will cross all the way to West Jerusalem without any problem. Only when he reaches the western borders of West Jerusalem will he go through an Israeli checkpoint. And the opposite way for an Israeli who’s coming from the western side. . . .So in this case Jerusalem itself will be an open city.

We can talk also about establishing a place in the middle of Jerusalem--half on the Israeli side and half on the Palestinian side--set aside for free worship of religion where there will be no civilian or government buildings. There are five major religions based in Jerusalem and they all must feel they are sharing the city.

*

Q: How do you envision the future map of the Middle East?

A: I think in the next century there will be no place for small states like the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy. They are already building the European Union. I believe the same will be true for the Middle East. Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon Syria, Egypt--we need to have regional cooperation. Palestine will be part of a larger regional entity in the future. So when we are asking for a Palestinian state, it’s not because we would like to have a state. No, it’s because we would like to solve the problems of the Palestinian people. They are without a homeland and we want to give them their own state that, if they are living elsewhere now, they can come back to. This will give them a psychological release. And it’s good for the people whose countries they are living in to know that Palestinians are there by choice, not because they are forced to be there.

*

Q: There are 2 million Palestinian refugees living in Jordan and many others scattered among the other Arab nations. How many do you think would want to leave their established lives and return if Palestine achieved statehood?

A: . . . I believe that that it is enough for them to understand that they will have a passport and the freedom to come back. Some will come back; others will prefer to stay wherever they are as citizens of other states. No one expects that every Palestinian will come back.

*

Q: I’d like to read you a quote of your words from a 1992 Jordanian newspaper. It says: “Sooner or later we must force the Israeli society to collaborate with a greater society, our own Arab society, and later we will bring about the gradual dissolution of the Zionist entity.” Do you still feel that way and if so, is Israel negotiating its own disappearance?

A: I was referring to the [more distant] future. In the future, there will be mutual cooperation in this area: We will be part of a larger, regional cooperation. There will be no borders. Palestinians can go and live in Israel. Israelis can go and live anywhere. . . What I meant was that in the end, this area will be one community and all of us will be part of it. It will be nothing to say “Egyptian” or “Palestinian” or “Israeli.”

*

Q: In your lifetime?

A: I can’t say that. We can witness the beginning of it. But in my lifetime? I’d love to. If you asked anyone 20 years ago whether they would see the collapse of the Soviet Union in their lifetime, they would say “no.”

*

Q: Let’s talk a little bit about chairman Arafat and the PLO. It’s an open secret that there have been tensions between you and Arafat.

A: Yes, tensions.

*

Q: Do you feel he’s been effective in the peace process or an impediment to it?

A: Every one of us has positive points and negative points. . . . Overall, I believe that Yasser Arafat is the most able one to lead in this field.

*

Q: Are you comfortable with his human rights record?

A: Well, as you said, I have some difficulties in our relationship. I oppose him in some matters. As for human rights, you can say he is the leader of the Palestinian people and trying to build a state. I was the one who created the first human rights commission center in Jerusalem. So over this point, for sure, there will be some contradictory issues. If Yasser Arafat was a human rights activist, he wouldn’t be a leader. . . . Sometimes, Arafat was forced to implement certain steps to serve the security even if it hurt him with human rights activists, including me.

*

Q: You’ve expressed skepticism about Netanyahu’s claim that new settlements are necessary for Israel’s security. Can you explain?

A: Security has nothing to do with it. He creates more of a security problem by making these settlements. On the contrary, each move like this creates a new, complicated situation. By putting a Palestinian location here and an Israeli settlement there, it has just led to bad situations, especially because those who he has gotten to make these settlements are not people who are coming because they are in love with the Palestinians. They come because they are against something the Palestinians did or Palestinian independence. So he is breeding hatred.

. . . We are trying to rebuild our country and we would like to rebuild our economy . . . to build schools, to build factories, roads, hospitals; to create new jobs and allow prosperity. But that’s not possible without investments. No investments will come if there is no stability. And there will be no stability if there is no security. And there will be no security for me as there is no security for the Israelis.

*

Q: You make it sound so reasonable and beneficial for both sides. So why isn’t it working?

A: I’ll tell you: Netanyahu is against the Oslo agreement. He ran an extreme, harsh campaign against the government of Rabin-Peres. Some people even put some responsibility on him [for Rabin’s assassination] because he ran his campaign accusing Rabin of being a traitor.

I believe that Netanyahu is trying not to do anything until the next elections.

*

Q: So you don’t think there’ll be peace so long as Netanyahu is prime minister?

A: No, unfortunately. But I never say never.

*

Q: You’ve painted a somewhat grim picture.

A: Not necessarily. We are talking about 100 years of conflict but it was more than that in Europe. Whatever is said about the wars in the Middle East, they never reached that extreme level of ground warfare . . .that Europe saw.

The hatred? There is a new common world, with TV, the Internet and news reaching more people. I remember the pictures of the explosion in Jerusalem. It moved the emotions of the Palestinians watching and they started, for the first time, [to join the] demonstrations against those mobs. It’s not just anonymous names now, but all can see [the destruction] on the ground--hands and heads and bodies. And because of this, I think we can make peace more quickly.