This Side of Peace

...The generation of young Islamicists that grew up in the early 1960s believed nothing was more rooted in the collective Arab psyche, or more closely related to its quest for meaning, than the call for the unity of the Arab states and the emergence of the new Eden of Arabism...

...What better mythology of hope to turn to, then, than the one that had grown out of the very bosom of Arab culture...

...Yet lead the negotiations they do, Ashrawi and her entourage, whose most notorious member is Faisal Husseini, grandson of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin Husseini...

...Ashrawi believes that whatever modest gains the Palestinian people have made over the years—wresting control of their cause from the Arab governments, etching their name on the consciousness of the world, and the intifada itself—were all due to the astuteness of the PLO leadership...

...Ostracized by the rich Gulf states and denied financial aid, the PLO was broke after the war and teetered on collapse...

...The "people" that Ashrawi has in mind, though, are exclusively her own—those from the PLO and those from her own class...

...y et Ashrawi does not address her- self to these questions...

...Once the need for that consolation is gone, it is probable that Hamas will return to its harmless state before the onset of the initifada in 1987...

...The emerging importance of llamas is part of the recent Islamic fundamentalism that has afflicted the Arab world since the June War of 1967, when the Arab peoples' political values still derived primarily not from the Koran but from a medley of pan-Arabist secular ideologies: Baathism, Nasserism, socialism, and, in the Fertile Crescent, a parochial kind of Greater Syria nationalism...

...0 72 The American Spectator July 1995...

...The four million Palestinians who live in exile—approximately two-thirds of the population—apparently do not merit her attention...

...He is "a legendary leader" who is "human and down to earth...

...The vaudevillian Arafat is referred to throughout by his engaging nom de guerre of Abu Ammar, "the building father," a title she utters with ease...

...Over the years it has squandered the political, financial, and human resources of the Palestinian people with its gaucheries and buffoonery...

...Yet in Palestinian society, where the stratification by class is rigid and mobility is difficult—where, in effect, the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor, from generation to generation—the two groups harbor the greatest resentment towards each other...

...She writes that in 1988, when "the highly emotive and poetic Declaration of Independence was announced, Palestinians all over the world wept...

...a lot of Palestinians will tell you, in fact, that she is part of the problem...

...But the problem is that there is no room for anyone who does not believe in this truth...

...One lives like a Moslem or else—and thus those who wished to transform the society according to Islam became openly avowed fascists...

...That left the largest faction, Fatah, [Arafat's group] and the independents," she writes, "neither being monolithic or unanimous on the issue...

...I sure didn't...

...in This Side of Peace she barely mentions them...

...Palestinians are beginning to understand that the ultimate assault on them has been coming from within—an assault directed by people like Arafat, who have shown such facile contempt for journalists, intellectuals, and others who have dared to criticize his decrepit regime...

...Hamas appeals to the young not because it has developed a coherent or sophisticated political program—its goal of dismantling Israel is absurd—but because it presents what it calls a "clean" alternative to the corrupt and bumbling PLO...

...Ashrawi is not part of that debate...

...When the talks ended, in fact, with the way paved for the official negotiations in Madrid and Washington, most major Palestinian political factions opposed the deal...

...H anan Ashrawi, who has always led what she calls "a sheltered life protected by privilege," became an instant celebrity in the United States after PLO leader Yasser Arafat appointed her spokeswoman of the Palestinian delegation at the Arab-Israeli peace talks in 1992...

...If the Palestinian Declaration of Independence was "emotive and poetic," it was thanks to the Israeli Declaration of Independence, from which relevant sections were plagiarized by brazen PLO scribes...

...It is not altogether frivolous to ask, for example, why she would want to write her first book in English, rather than in the native tongue of her "people...

...It was a far less appealing offer than the one he contemptuously turned down when it came packaged as the Camp David accords more than a decade before...

...Faisal and I felt vulnerable and exposed...

...How the pulverized Palestinian community can recover a sane position in the modern world is the subject of intense debate among Palestinians today—a debate going on in the refugee camps, in the exile community, in the places where intellectual emigres find themselves around the world...

...Those who live in refugee camps elicit but two quick references: in one she speaks in passing of "our old family cleaning lady who lived in Jalazon camp," and in the other she tells us, without a hint of irony, about the Fawaz Turki is the author of Exile's Return: The Making of a Palestinian-American (Free Press...

...In fact, the PLO has a long track record of corruption, ineptitude, and cynicism...

...That, at least, has been the argument advanced by Palestinian democrats, who feel that neither Hamas nor the PLO can offer the free elections, democracy, and political pluralism that Palestinian society desperately needs to meet the challenges of the modern world...

...Many Americans would perhaps be surprised to learn that the mention of her name to many of those for whom she is ostensibly a spokeswoman, would elicit merely a "Hanan who...

...but what was struggled for, and ardently believed in, was the secular movement to unite the Arabs by one ideology within a single territorial homeland—a homeland that included a Palestine liberated from the "Zionist usurpers" by the mighty Arab armies...

...Ashrawi, of course, admits to none of that...

...Most of This Side of Peace takes up the story of the peace talks in Madrid and Washington, and her role as spokeswoman for the Palestinian delegation...

...For decades, both sides soldiered on, as if history had poured fire into their blood...

...T he Gulf War shook long-held assumptions about Arab solidarity and the sense of exceptionalism that the Palestine conflict had had among Arabs for well over half a century...

...Islam THIS SIDE OF PEACE: A PERSONAL ACCOUNT Hanan Ashrawi Simon & Schuster / 318 pages / $25 reviewed by F AW AZ TURKI The American Spectator July 1995 71 was the last great hope, a source of both identity and power that left no question unanswered, no answer in doubt: A corrupt and crippled society would be transformed into an Islamic one, thereby tapping into the meaning of divine truth...

...The heavy chain that this group has around the necks of Palestinians will then be removed...

...Yet a quarter-century after Golda Meir denied that a Palestinian people existed—while the Palestine National Charter denied Israelis their right to statehood—the leader of the hitherto untouchable PLO and the Israeli prime minister shook hands on the White House lawn in September 1993 to sign a peace agreement that bore the mark of history...

...I don't know of any Palestinians who wept...

...Islam was what was practiced at the mosque...

...The Arabs felt tricked by their panArabist ideologues after the cataclysmic June War, betrayed by social ideologies that proved to be hollow and worthless...

...Not surprisingly, there is not an unkind word here about the Arafat organization...

...time she and her friends "worked" in the refugee camps "teaching consciousness raising...

...Ashrawi writes in the borrowed dress of an alien tongue, making sure that her words will never strike root in the culture she pretends to represent—indeed, making sure that those people will not be able to read the "speech bearer of our human reality...

...Where she ventures at analyzing the national mood in Palestinian society, her role as an uncritical PLO advocate precedes and determines her argument...

...And disenfranchised Palestinians—those tens of thousands trying to cross into Israel each morning to work for fifteen dollars a day—are irked and affronted by the spectacle of children of privilege leading them at the negotiating table...

...Ashrawi writes about the bitter and incessant confrontations in the West Bank and Gaza over the last twenty-five years between Israelis and Palestinians...

...In return he would accept initial limited rule in Jericho and Gaza, and perhaps later in the entire West Bank...

...Whenever "Faisal and I" appear in this memoir to meet with James Baker or Warren Christopher, they always seem to humble the Secretaries of State with a Western witticism, a profound and pithy bon mot, some lyric retort dished out with robust clarity and urbane force...

...Vulnerable and exposed, maybe—but that doesn't prevent her from indulging in a bit of old-fashioned Arabic mobalagha, or flowery boastfulness, claiming that she was "the speech bearer of our human reality, to unlock the chest of our silent words and with them the hearts and minds of men and women...

...Hamas consoles those who see no way out, round, or through their social, economic, and political drudgery...

...Others in the organization are treated equally softly: Akram Haniya is "extremely intelligent and creative with sharp political insights," and Sami Mussalem, the chairman's chief of staff, "always maintained his humanity and equilibrium in spite of difficult and dangerous turns of fate...

...If she's aware of these problems, she is unwilling or unable to write about them in This Side of Peace...

...Ultimately, This Side of Peace ends up, in a queer kind of way, leaving Palestinians less Palestinian than it had found them...

...She is prone to such exaggeration...

...Class enmity" is real...

...A shrawi tells us that she had gone "to speak in my people's voice," but she—and, thus, the PLO—clearly went to the talks with little or no mandate to negotiate on behalf of the Palestinians...

...A term such as "class enmity" seems odd to our American ears—it reeks of old-style Bolsheviks and hot-head rhetoric, remote from the social realities of American life...

...Yet Ashrawi never explains the sociopolitical forces that brought this historic handshake about...

...or an exasperated "Oh, her...

...For those who never knew of them, and for those others who had long since stopped turning in nauseated disbelief at them, the stories are all here—the deportations, the collective punishment inflicted on whole villages, the blowing up of homes belonging to the-families of suspected terrorists, the torture of prisoners, the gunning down of demonstrating students...

...What Jacques Necker said of religion in fifteenth-century Europe—that it was "a heavy chain and a daily consolation"—might equally be said of those Palestinians today...

...The feeling is growing that the tired cant and lame banalities of the PLO should be thrown out, like broken toys...

...Ironically, many of these Islamicists were born-again Moslems, originally secular ideologues who had fled to Islam after their secular ideologies had begun to appear impotent and irrelevant...

...For the Israelis it was a propitious moment to reach out with an offer the PLO could not refuse: a peace treaty, the signing of which would rescue Arafat and his organization from imminent oblivion and, above all, from the influential Hamaswhose power was sure to supplant his own unless he showed his people, or those few who still supported him, that he could produce...

...In the West Bank, such characters are called "family boys," self-appointed leaders from the rich land-owning families like the Husseinis and the Nashashibisfamilies that since the 1920s have led the people of Palestine from one military disaster to another, one diplomatic defeat to another, and one act of social grief to another...

...Now Ashrawi, a West Bank Palestinian, has written a memoir about her role in the struggle for freedom of "my people...