By Karen Fredericks
On September 10, the day Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation reached their historic "Gaza-Jericho first" accord, Green Left Weekly spoke to the PLO's representative in Australia, Ali Kazak, about what the PLO hopes will be the first step towards an autonomous Palestinian state and a "just, comprehensive and lasting peace".
In 1969 the then prime minister of Israel, Golda Meir, told a British newspaper: "There was no such thing as Palestinians ... It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist."
Today, after years of struggle by the Palestinians, Israel has been forced to admit that the land it seized, in 1948 and in 1967, was inhabited by the Palestinian people. Further, Israel has been obliged to recognise the mandate of the Palestinians' political organisation, the PLO, and to enter into negotiations, and now an agreement, with that organisation.
"The government of Israel has decided to recognise the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people and commence negotiations with the PLO within the Middle East peace process", said the unprecedented letter signed by Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres in Norway on September 10.
Yet the Gaza-Jericho agreement is repeatedly reported in Western media as a "back-down" by the PLO, prompted, they claim, by a financial and political crisis in the organisation. Because of this pressure, say the vast majority of both columnists and editorialists, the PLO has been forced to accept the existence of Israel.
Ali Kazak sees the situation quite differently. "The PLO recognised Israel in November 1988, and the only thing that's new now is that Israel has changed its line and finally recognised the reality of our existence", he points out. "We have been saying, and most of the world has been saying, for years, that as soon as Israel recognised this reality it would open the door for peace."
The similarity of the Gaza-Jericho plan to the "self-government plan" which was part of the 1978 Camp David Accords, is striking. But the vital new element, as Kazak points out, is recognition of the PLO.
The Gaza-Jericho plan sets out a 10-month timetable leading up to the election of a Palestinian Council which will govern certain internal affairs of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank for an "interim period" of five years. (The PLO will stand in these elections, whereas under the Camp David plan the PLO was not to be permitted to participate in any elections).
The Israeli military is to withdraw completely from Gaza and Jericho within six months of the signing of the agreement, but Israel will retain responsibility for the security of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and for the "international security" of the entire region. The agreement specifies that talks on a permanent peace settlement, finalising the question of territory to be controlled by each of the two states, should begin, at the latest, two years into the five-year interim period.
Perhaps one of the thorniest questions to be negotiated for a final settlement is the control of the city of Jerusalem. Ali Kazak is confident of the PLO's negotiating position on this, and other important questions.
"We will start negotiating Israel's withdrawal from Jerusalem two years from the signing of the declaration", he told Green Left, "as we will negotiate on other outstanding issues, such as the question of the handing back of the settlements, the return of the 1948 Palestinian refugees and the borders between the Palestinian state and the Israeli state".
Kazak highlights other issues the PLO is committed to resolving immediately as part of the new process, such as the release of more than 15,000 political prisoners from Israeli jails, an end to the killings, collective punishments and abuses of human rights of Palestinians by the Israeli military, the return of confiscated lands and properties to their owners and the return of the Palestinians stranded by Israel in Southern Lebanon.
Israel must also return, he says, the $US39 billion in taxes its military has collected in the occupied territories since 1967. He says this might go some way towards relieving the desperate plight of the Palestinian economy after decades of plunder by Israel. But these matters are not covered by the Gaza-Jericho accord.
"These are things which we still have to negotiate on", he said. "The declaration of principles does not name all details of peaceful coexistence, but these are major items Israel and the international community know that Israel has to address immediately. They are part and parcel of the negotiations and the understanding which is contained in the declaration of principles."
Kazak says there is "understandable and legitimate" concern among some Palestinians, and even within the PLO itself, that Israel is not to be trusted to carry out its part of the Gaza-Jericho bargain.
"We have had a long and painful history with Israel where Israel agrees to implement resolutions, including United Nations resolutions such as the partition resolution 181 of 1947, and 194 of 1948 which called on Israel to let the refugees go back home, but they never implemented them. We do hope that this time Israel will deliver and prove to everyone that their cautions and worries are wrong."
Ali Kazak was born in Haifa, on territory seized by the Zionists in 1947. He was separated from his father during the 1948 war at the age of six months, and has not seen him since. Like hundreds of thousands of Palestinians scattered throughout the world, Kazak hopes that the peace accord between Israel and the PLO will enable him to travel to his homeland and, in his case, meet his father for the first time.
"Every Palestinian will be looking forward to having the right to go back home whenever they wish and to leave it whenever they wish like any other human being on this planet", he said. "Palestinians have been prevented from returning home by Israel, despite numerous United Nations resolutions. Now it is expected that Israel will start to comply with the United Nations resolutions, including respecting the right of the Palestinians to go back to their homeland, or to give compensation to those who don't want to go back home.
"What we are looking for is a just, comprehensive and lasting peace. There can never be a just, comprehensive and lasting peace in the Middle East as long as Israel does not address the fundamental questions such as its withdrawal from the 1967 Palestinian occupied territories, the right of the Palestinian refugees to go back home and the exercise of the Palestinian people's right to self-determination and independence.
"What we want to see is a two-state solution in the historic land of Palestine: an Israel and a Palestinian state, living side by side in cooperation and peaceful coexistence, with the right of the Palestinian refugees to go back home."