[msb-alumni] Saeb Erekat, Palestinians' Chief Negotiator Amid Turmoil, Is Dead at 65 on November 10, 2020
- From: Steve <pipeguy920@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2020 13:42:41 -0500
BlankIt tangentially mentions this in the article, but when people learned of
his lung
difficulty and need for a transplant, many Israelis burned their donor cards,
lest they
ended up donating their lungs to him.
Steve
Saeb Erekat, Palestinians' Chief Negotiator Amid Turmoil, Is Dead at 65. By
Isabel Kershner.
A passionate champion of Palestinian statehood, his goal seemed to become less
attainable
with time. "I'm not finished with what I was born to do," he said.
JERUSALEM -- Saeb Erekat, a senior Palestinian official and negotiator who
passionately
advocated the establishment of an independent Palestinian state as a resolution
to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, died on Tuesday at a hospital in Jerusalem. He
was 65. The
hospital, Hadassah Medical Center, attributed the death to Covid-19. Officials
there said he
was admitted in critical condition with the disease on Oct. 18 and required
immediate
ventilation and resuscitation; he had previously had a lung transplant. They
said he
experienced multiple organ failure.
For three decades, as a confidant of the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and
his successor,
President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, Mr. Erekat was one of the
most
prominent voices of the Palestinian cause.
As the chief negotiator for the Palestinians, he was one of the main authors of
key parts of
the landmark Oslo peace accords of the 1990s, the first agreements between the
Israelis and
the Palestinians, which established Palestinian
self-government in parts of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Although his public statements sometimes gave him the image of a firebrand, Mr.
Erekat, a
Western-educated diplomat, was liked and respected by many of his American and
Israeli
counterparts, who found him frank and knowledgeable.
But his life's ambition of helping to bring about Palestinian statehood and an
end to
Israeli occupation eluded him, to his great frustration. "I'm not finished with
what I was
born to do," he recently messaged Tzipi Livni, the former Israeli foreign
minister and a
negotiating partner.
Mr. Abbas declared a three-day period of mourning, with flags to be flown at
half-staff.
"The departure of our brother and friend, the great fighter, Dr. Saeb Erekat,
represents a
huge loss for Palestine and our people, and we feel deeply saddened by his
passing,
especially in light of these difficult circumstances facing the Palestinian
cause," Mr.
Abbas said on Tuesday in a statement carried by Wafa, the official Palestinian
news agency.
Mr. Erekat, who was known for occasional emotional outbursts, negotiated with a
determination that his Israeli counterparts sometimes found obstructive. As the
representative of Mr. Arafat and Mr. Abbas, he stuck to fundamental Palestinian
principles
and hard-line, legalistic positions, at least in public, balancing competing
imperatives to
make progress toward an agreement without being seen as capitulating to Israeli
demands.
When he burst onto the international scene in 1991, as the deputy head of the
Palestinian
delegation at the Madrid peace conference, he stood out amid the sea of
dark-suited
diplomats in his black-and-white checked keffiya draped around his neck. The
scarf, a symbol
of Palestinian resistance and solidarity, was viewed by the Israeli delegation
and others as
a provocative publicity stunt.
But the Madrid conference, brokered by Secretary of State James A. Baker III,
was the start
of the first viable peace talks between the Israelis and the Arabs since the
Camp David
Accord 13 years earlier, and the first time Palestinians participated openly in
direct
negotiations with Israel.
Separate, secret bilateral talks led to the Oslo accords, a series of interim
agreements
between the Israelis and the Palestinians, starting in 1993.
Mr. Erekat was instrumental in negotiating the Oslo II Accord in 1995, the
Hebron Protocol
in 1997 and the Wye River Memorandum in 1998, all of which transferred
Israeli-controlled
territory to the Palestinians. He was responsible for drafting the texts of the
agreements
on behalf of the Palestinians.
At other times, though, he was sidelined by his bosses, who preferred to
negotiate through
back channels.
The Oslo process, a source of great optimism at the time, never arrived at its
intended
conclusion: a final and comprehensive peace agreement that the Palestinians had
expected
would be between two sovereign states, Israel and a Palestinian state in the
West Bank and
the Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital.
Negotiations for a permanent deal continued on and off until 2014. In December
2013, during
the last round of serious negotiations, brokered by Secretary of State John
Kerry, Mr.
Erekat took his American counterpart, Martin S. Indyk, on a tour of Hisham's
Palace, the
remains of an 8th-century compound said to have belonged to the 10th Umayyad
caliph, near
Jericho.
"I meant to take Martin to the ruins to show him nothing lasts, and life goes
on," Mr.
Erekat explained in an interview shortly after the talks collapsed. "These were
great
empires -- they're gone. I know that the Israeli occupation will go."
Negotiators remembered Mr. Erekat as feisty and strong-willed. He would often
react to a
proposal that he thought unfair with one of his signature aphorisms: "I'm
willing to limit
my sovereignty but not my dignity" or, "I don't walk around with a neon sign on
my head
saying 'stupid."
"His negotiating style was to hold on to what cards he had because he had so
few," Mr. Indyk
said. "But at heart he was deeply committed to the two-state solution."
Ghassan Khatib, a Palestinian political scientist who participated in the
Madrid talks, said
Mr. Erekat had also worked to document the history of the peace process to
learn its
lessons. "He became the Palestinian memory of this era," Mr. Khatib said.
A loyal member of Fatah, the mainstream political faction led by Mr. Abbas, Mr.
Erekat
resigned several times from various positions to protest a policy or make a
point, but
always returned to the fold. In 2011, for instance, he resigned as chief
negotiator after
the Al Jazeera television network leaked details of Palestinian negotiating
positions from a
trove of confidential documents, embarrassing him by suggesting that the
Palestinians were
prepared to make big concessions to the Israelis. But he was back at the
negotiating table
by the next round of talks.
In 2015, Mr. Erekat became secretary-general of the Executive Committee of the
Palestine
Liberation Organization, the umbrella group representing secular Palestinian
factions. It
was the second-highest post after the chairmanship, held by Mr. Abbas.
"Today, we mourn the loss of a dear colleague and a Palestinian patriot;
someone who loved
life and fought hard to secure a life of freedom for himself and his people,"
said Hanan
Ashrawi, another senior Palestinian official who worked with Mr. Erekat for
decades.
Throughout the many years of negotiations, the Israelis and Palestinians have
accused each
other of intransigence. But Mr. Erekat constantly sought engagement with the
Israelis and
formed deep friendships with several of his interlocutors.
One of them, Ms. Livni, said that their talks were always honest and that when
they
disagreed, which they did frequently, it was in an atmosphere of mutual
respect. Mr. Erekat
was proud to represent the Palestinians, she said, and was admired for his deep
knowledge of
the issues.
"He viewed it as his destiny to try to achieve peace," she said.
Mr. Erekat was less popular among other Israelis, however. They castigated him
for
campaigning to sue Israel for war crimes in the International Criminal Court
and for
accusing Israel of carrying out a massacre in the Jenin refugee camp in 2002,
an allegation
that turned out to be unfounded.
In recent years, as his health deteriorated, he saw his diplomatic achievements
cast aside
and his goal of statehood slip further away. The stalemate with Israel has only
hardened
under the Trump administration, which has openly sided with Israel.
After the United States recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital in 2017 and
moved its
embassy there six months later, upending years of American diplomacy, the
Palestinian
leadership rejected the possibility of further American-brokered talks. Mr.
Abbas declared
the Oslo process "dead," and Mr. Erekat warned that a two-state solution was
becoming
impossible.
Mr. Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel "have managed to
destroy that
hope," he said.
When President Trump presented his long-awaited peace plan in January, the
Palestinian
leadership angrily rejected it out of hand, describing it as hopelessly
weighted toward
Israeli interests.
In August, the administration brokered a deal for Israel to normalize relations
with the
United Arab Emirates and then Bahrain, sidestepping the longtime prerequisite
of making
peace with the Palestinians. Mr. Erekat denounced the new Arab openness to
Israel, reminding
the world that the Palestinians were not going away, that he was still there.
"Whatever happens, I'm the only thing that needs to be resolved," he said.
Insisting that
the Palestinian question could not ultimately be ignored, he added: "I'm the
fact on the
ground. I'm the real fact on the ground."
Saeb Muhammad Erekat was born on April 28, 1955, the sixth of seven brothers
and sisters, to
a family from Abu Dis in the Jerusalem governorate, which was then under
Jordanian
administration. He grew up in Jericho in theWest Bank. His father, Muhammad
Erekat, lived in
the United States for a long time as a businessman.
Mr. Erekat was 12 when the Israeli military occupied Jericho, along with the
rest of the
West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem in the wake of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. He
described
that moment as the end of his childhood and the beginning of his awakening as a
Palestinian.
He told interviewers that he was first arrested by Israeli forces at 13, saying
variously
that he was detained for writing anti-occupation graffiti or for posting fliers
and throwing
stones.
At 17, he traveled to California, where he earned bachelor's and master's
degrees in
political science and international relations at San Francisco State
University. He returned
to the West Bank in the late 1970s and became a lecturer at An Najah National
University. He
later earned a Ph.D. in peace studies from the University of Bradford in
Britain.
Increasingly frustrated by the impasse in the Israeli-Palestinian peace
process, Mr. Erekat
warned in recent years that if all hope for a two-state solution were lost, the
only
realistic alternative would be a single, Israeli-controlled entity in all the
territory with
Palestinians subject to an apartheidlike system.
"If the Trump administration doesn't want to talk about a two-state solution on
the 1967
border or about one democratic state for everyone," he wrote last year in an
Op-Ed for The
New York Times, "what it is actually talking about is the consolidation of a
"'one-state
reality'": "one state, Israel, controlling everything while imposing two
different systems,
one for Israeli Jews and another for Palestinians. This is known as apartheid."
When news broke several years ago that Mr. Erekat had pulmonary fibrosis and
needed a lung
transplant, he said many Israeli officials and private citizens had asked him
if they could
be of help. But others deplored the possibility that his life might be saved by
the health
system of the state he disparaged. The Israeli Health Ministry ultimately said
that its
waiting list for transplants gave priority to Israeli citizens, and the
operation was
carried out in Virginia.
When he contracted Covid-19 last month, Mr. Erekat was initially treated at
home, and his
family said he was recuperating well. But he was transferred to the Israeli
hospital when
his condition deteriorated. Mr. Erekat is survived by his wife, Neameh; two
daughters, Dalal
and Salam; and two sons, Ali and Muhammad.
Mr. Indyk said that Mr. Erekat had been 'committed to peace until his last
breath' and that
he had told Mr. Indyk privately that he had no problem with recognizing Israel
as a Jewish
state once Palestinian needs had been met in a final agreement. The Israelis
have long
demanded such recognition, and the Palestinians publicly rejected it, a major
sticking
point.
For Mr. Erekat, the establishment of a Palestinian state was 'not a question of
if, but
when,' Mr. Indyk said, adding, 'The tragedy is he never got to the 'when.
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