Husseini, East Jerusalem Ready to Face Hard-Line Government

Faisal Husseini has confronted armed soldiers, military police and hostile settlers for most of his life as a Palestinian leader in East Jerusalem. But all the arrests and formal and informal harassment Husseini faced through the years may have prepared him for the challenges posed by the election of hard-line Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

“We’ve managed up until now and we are still on our feet,” Husseini told a Washington, DC invitational audience assembled June 5 by the American Committee on Jerusalem. Over the past 29 years Husseini and the Orient House—the de facto Palestinian headquarters building he created from a former East Jerusalem hotel—have survived Israeli closures, seizures and laws that make it virtually impossible for Palestinian institutions to survive.

“Israel has tried to isolate East Jerusalem with blocking checkpoints for those coming from the West Bank,” said Husseini, the Palestinian Authority’s official in charge of Jerusalem affairs. “It has implemented new laws that make it difficult for [Palestinian] institutions to work and it has allowed settler activity around Orient House.”

The goal of these laws, he said, is to force West Bank Palestinians to use the hospitals, schools and universities outside of East Jerusalem. “They want to force people to deal with Israeli institutions instead of Palestinian ones,” he said. Although these efforts have increased since the Oslo accords in 1993, they have been going on officially and unofficially since 1967. Husseini said one of the earliest moves by Israel after the 1967 war was to annex all the schools in East Jerusalem and replace the former Jordanian curriculum with an Israeli curriculum. Husseini called what followed “the second battle”: to protect Palestinian history and culture. Soon the Israeli-annexed schools were empty and children were traveling further into the West Bank to attend Palestinian schools.

“After two years the Israelis accepted that Palestinian students must learn the Palestinian program,” he said. Over the next 30 years other such attempts to make East Jerusalem a Jewish city were tried and failed. “They couldn’t in the end force themselves into the heart of Jerusalem,” Husseini added. “By the time the Oslo accords were signed in 1993, it was clear to everyone that East Jerusalem was still an Arab city and Israel couldn’t change the character there.”

Netanyahu has alarmed many peace supporters by saying publicly that his goal is to unify East and West Jerusalem under the Israeli flag. Many on both the Israeli and the Arab sides have said the Likud leader’s election marks the end of the peace process. Husseini, however, said Likud policies are “not very different” from those of the Labor government when it comes to Jerusalem. He reminded the audience that the closures over the past three years restricting access to East Jerusalem by residents of the West Bank have been perpetrated by “pro-peace” Labor leaders.

“Maybe this election is not such a disaster,” Husseini said. “Maybe we can face Mr. Netanyahu even more effectively than Labor before him.” He added that the election may show the world the Israeli aversion to peace. And Palestinians will be able to speak out more freely against Likud policies. “For years they’ve told us ‘don’t protest [Labor] or the Likud will come,’” he said. “Well, the Likud has come. Now we can speak out and show the world the challenges we face for peace.”

Husseini said his goal for Jerusalem is to have an undivided city serve as both the Israeli and Palestinian capitals and a city that is open to three world religions. Any other arrangement for the city would be a loss, not only to Israelis and Palestinians, but to the rest of the world that would lose one of its holiest places. The Palestinian scholar and leader said the hopes and goals of the peace process eventually will rest on the fate of Jerusalem. It can become a symbol of harmony among peoples or it can become a symbol of dissonance.

“We have a completely unique opportunity for cooperation in Jerusalem that can set a standard for the next century,” Husseini said. “Jerusalem can be the warm center of the Middle East or it can be the black hole of the Middle East, sucking in all hopes for peace.”

—Geoff Lumetta

PNA Minister Says Peace Process Becoming More Difficult

Nabil Shaath, minister of planning and international cooperation for the Palestine National Authority, painted a bleak picture of life in the occupied territories, describing the peace process as unsustainable under current conditions. “It can’t continue to go on like this if we are going to have peace,” he told an audience at a National Association of Arab Americans lecture May 23.

Since the Hamas bombings in February, closures and Israeli security policies have choked off all commerce in the West Bank and Gaza, Shaath said. The result has been a rapid rise in unemployment and a loss of nearly one-quarter of the Palestinian gross national product. “What we really have is suffocation,” he said. “Construction industries have totally come to a standstill... fishermen, farmers, industrialists have been put out of business.” Gazans, he said, are facing 70 percent unemployment and the West Bank has an unemployment rate of 40 percent.

To make matters worse, the United States has frozen all aid to the Palestinian Authority since the bombings. Members of Congress, chief among them Rep. Benjamin Gilman (NY), chairman of the House Committee on International Relations, and Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC), chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, have frozen aid because they claim the Palestinians are not complying with the Oslo accords. As a result of this and Israel’s restrictions on private donor aid to the PNA, Shaath said, there is virtually no money coming into the occupied territories.

“We have gone a long way to make [the Oslo agreement] succeed, but now we are facing a total freeze on any aid,” he said. “In the meantime, financial and political support of Israel does not waiver... Compliance is a word that only applies to the PLO. Nobody talks about Israeli compliance with the accords.”

Israel continues to hold political prisoners and new settlements continue to grow, despite the agreements that both practices would end after Oslo, he added.

Shaath said the soaring unemployment and frustration among Palestinians has made security difficult in the occupied territories. Addressing the question of human rights abuses by the PNA, Shaath said attempts to crack down on security threats have “led inevitably to human rights problems.” He said interrogations have become more intense and widespread over the past months and efforts to protect security in Israel sometimes interfere with the protection of individual rights. “You have to keep a thin line between security and civil rights,” he said. “It is really very difficult and problematic.”

When asked about the arrest of Palestinian human rights activist Dr. Eyad Serraj by the PNA, Shaath said he did not know the details of the case. He added, however, that the PNA Legislative Council was discussing the issue and Shaath hoped it would handle the case justly. “It would be deplorable to me to find out there were no real charges against him and this was just harassment, but I really don’t know yet,” he said.

—Geoff Lumetta

Washington Report Publisher Receives Foreign Service Cup

Ambassador Andrew I. Killgore, publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, received a major award from his former State Department colleagues at this year’s “Foreign Service Day” observance on May 3 at the State Department in Washington, DC.

The day-long event annually brings several thousand foreign service retirees back to the State Department for talks, briefings and seminars with active duty officers. It also is the occasion for presenting awards to serving foreign service officers and volunteers, and also for honoring foreign service and other U.S. civilian and military officials killed in the line of duty while performing diplomatic duties.

For this year’s ceremony the names of three such officials killed in Bosnia in 1995 and three others, including Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown, killed in Croatia in 1996, were inscribed on memorial plaques for display in the State Department. The plaques also included the names of the private citizens who perished in the military aircraft crash in Croatia in which Brown and 34 other persons were killed.

Ambassador Killgore received the “Foreign Service Cup,” awarded to one retired foreign service officer annually who is selected on a competitive basis by the nation-wide membership of Diplomatic and Consular Officers, Retired (DACOR). The citation that accompanied the award read:

For impressive contributions to increased awareness and understanding of the Middle East and the many dimensions of United States’ interests in the area.

His service took him from Western Europe to South Asia and beyond to the South Pacific, but it is particularly in seven Middle East posts that he acquired a deep knowledge of the complex, controversial and challenging problems of the region. His service culminated in the Emirate of Qatar as U.S. ambassador.

In 1982 he became co-founder of the American Educational Trust, established in pursuit of broader knowledge and understanding of the problems of this area. This led to the publication of a periodic newsletter, the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, with very few subscribers initially. Now it has 30,000 more than the combined circulation of all other monthly magazines that focus on the region.

Remarkable as the circulation figures are, so too are the perseverance and the courage he has shown in consistently promoting peace in the area based on U.N. Security Council Resolution 242. In the process, he has made it possible for a wide variety of views to be represented, even though they may be disputed, as is so much of what happens in the region. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Report includes accounts of events which much of the rest of the media have been reluctant to cover. In addition, he has been a frequent participant in radio and television programs as well as a speaker in demand for civic groups and university audiences.

In his remarks, Ambassador Killgore emphasized the importance of honest dialogue between foreign service officers in the field and their superiors at the decision-making level in Washington. Citing technological marvels now available to enable ambassadors and political officers to communicate instantly and securely with the national capital, he pointed out that none of the elaborate communications equipment is of any use at all if field officers are reluctant to report to senior officials foreign news and opinions that the nation’s political leaders don’t want to hear.

The day’s other principal award, “the Director General’s Cup,” went to Former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Herman J. Cohen. Ambassador Cohen, who now serves as a senior adviser to the Global Coalition for Africa, was cited for his successes in conflict resolution in Angola, Namibia and Ethiopia—efforts that led to the independence of Namibia and self-determination for Eritrea.

—Richard Curtiss