Editor’s Note: Jay Nordlinger attended the World Economic Forum on the Middle East last week. It took place by the Dead Sea in Jordan. Below is the fifth installment of his journal. Links to the previous parts are as follows: I, II, III, and IV.
In the next National Review, I have a piece focusing on Saeb Erekat and Ephraim Sneh. They are old friends, and even partners in a way. Erekat is the longtime PLO negotiator (with Israel); he is also the longtime PLO spokesman. Sneh is the former Israeli negotiator, and a very distinguished and veteran figure in Israeli politics. Erekat and Sneh disagree on so little, it would astound you.
I do not propose to recapitulate my NR piece. But I want to give you some more on Erekat and Sneh, in this journal — beginning with Erekat. You have met him before, if you read these journals from various parts of the world. I wrote about him from Israel, here; and from Davos, here. And Erekat is bopping around this conference here in Jordan.
When you go to see Erekat, there is something of the feeling of Ground Hog Day: You see and hear the same things over and over, year after year — maybe decade after decade. But Erekat is not entirely to blame. There is something Ground Hog-ish about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Ground Hog-ish, ghoulish, depressing. There is a stuckness.
But here is something new, or newish: the growing nuclear threat from Iran. Erekat tells a group of us journalists that Netanyahu will do all in his power to make Obama believe that America will have no Arab allies on the question of Iran. Only Israel will help America. Erekat further says that Netanyahu will plead with Obama that Iran must come first: before the Palestinians, as the most important thing.
(Netanyahu would have a point, perhaps you will agree.)
Erekat is quite eager for you to know that he is a poor, put-upon fellow. He says — and I paraphrase (but closely) — “I am the most disadvantaged negotiator in history. Since Eve negotiated with Adam. I have no army, no navy, no air force, no economy, no anything. My people are fragmented.” In the U.S. House or Senate, “if it’s my word against Israel, I’m dead. I have no chance.” Plus, he has “no voters” in America.
“But who said that life was about fairness and justice?”
You could remind Erekat that Israel, his opponent, is the most reviled nation on earth — virtually a pariah among nations. At times, it seems that the U.N. is organized to oppose Israel and boost the Palestinians. That is of some advantage to a negotiator. But why remind Erekat of this? He almost surely knows it.
A journalist says he read somewhere that the PLO is ready to give up “the right of return” — an insistence that all Palestinians with claims in Israel be allowed to establish residence there. Erekat says this is not true, nonsense. Furthermore, he is always reading strange, untrue things about himself in the Arab press. For example, “my mother is Jewish, my wife is American.”
Would those things be so bad? (They would certainly look bad to many Palestinians.)
A journalist brings up the Holocaust, and payments by Swiss banks to victims’ families. The question, or statement, is convoluted. I can’t quite follow it. Neither can Erekat. What he says is, “The Holocaust was the worst chapter in the history of man. There is no comparison” between Holocaust victims and Palestinian refugees.
I wonder whether he talks this way in Arabic, before Arab audiences. Maybe he does.
Erekat is big on Obama, at least for the moment, rejoicing that Obama has declared an independent Palestinian state an American interest. No president has done that before, says Erekat.
And he repeats the idea, as he often does, that anyone suggesting that Arabs aren’t ready for democracy “is a racist.” He says that, in the territories, “democracy did not fail. Hamas failed.” Because it “resorted to bullets and coups d’état,” instead of “ballots.” Elected Hamas officials should have been officials for all Palestinians — but no.
Erekat also takes a shot at Americans, where democracy is concerned. Saddam Hussein was a good dictator, he says, when he was fighting the Iranians. But he became a bad dictator when he invaded Kuwait.
As is usually the case, some of the journalists are more radical than the PLO spokesman in the interviewee’s chair. One of them makes fairly clear that he favors a one-state solution — just like “the late Edward Said.” Erekat says that he himself is for a two-state solution — and favored this even in the 1970s, when he really caught hell from Palestinians because of it. I don’t know about you, but I believe him.
At one point, he says something that I regard as off the wall: The reason Israel went into Gaza last year? Nothing to do with repeated, unchecked terror attacks on Israeli citizens. “The war was not about Gaza.” The war was meant to “separate” Gaza Palestinians from West Bank Palestinians. Crafty, those Israelis, aren’t they?
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