By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
Michael Tarazi came to town on Monday, Dec. 6. On both KUOW radio in the morning and at the University of Washingtons Kane Hall in the evening, the American legal advisor to the Negotiations Affairs Department of the Palestine Liberation Organization inspired his pro-Palestinian base and infuriated a wide range of Jewish and pro-Israeli listeners.
Israel is not interested in creative solutions. Thats not what motivates Israel when it sits down to negotiate with the Palestinians, Tarazi said, warming up for the main part of his address, on why no solutions have yet been agreed to between Israel and the Palestinians. Israel is motivated by one thing: how do you get the most Palestinian land as possible and as few Palestinians as possible? Once you understand that motivation, everything becomes very clear.
Joey Katz, a senior at UW majoring in Finance, and the president of the campus group Huskies For Israel, rejected Tarazis basic premise that there even is such a thing as Palestinian land for Israel to take.
There never was a Palestinian state. I wanted to tell him, Katz said, that you say Palestinian land, there never was a Palestinian state. I think he had his facts a little bit wrong. Katz has his own explanation for the lack of progress in resolving the dispute: the intransigence of the other side.
For the last 56, almost 57 years, Israel has been attempting to reach peace with its neighbors and with the Palestinians living inside Israel, said Katz. The Israelis have become fed up with this circular cycle that has no end.
He said he doubted that Israel had such a single-minded approach to the Palestinian problem as Tarazi implied because, he said, Israelis seldom agree on any particular thing.
If you have five Israelis in a room, he said, you have 10 opinions.
Tarazi was born in Kuwait but grew up in Colorado. He attended Harvard and graduated from Harvard Law School. After starting in corporate law, he went to work for the PLO, where he currently provides advice on an array of permanent status issues such as refugees, Israeli settlements and Jerusalem.
So often we hear that the Palestinians have no ideas or it is an intractable problem and there are no solutions, Tarazi said. I wish to dispel that mythology. There are some solutions that the Palestinians have put forth that are carefully considered that would resolve this conflict in accordance with international law.
He went into some detail on what he described as the three intractable problems the status of Jerusalem, the Jewish settlers in the West Bank, and the so-called Right of Return for Palestinian refugees.
On the status of Jerusalem, Tarazi went back to the original U.N. mandate and proposed Jerusalem be declared an International Protectorate with free access to anyone regardless of nationality or citizenship.
East Jerusalem was occupied by Israel in 1967 and under international law Israel does not have any right to an inch of that occupied territory, Tarazi said. In fact, if you want to get technical, Israel doesnt have any right to West Jerusalem, which it took in 1948.
He described Israels position regarding East Jerusalem as a case of whats ours is ours and whats yours is negotiable.
Tarazi claimed there are 400,000 settlers living in occupied territories, half of them in East Jerusalem alone, and blamed the international press for having bought into the Israeli version of events that East Jerusalem is part of Israel, and so not counting them among the settler population.
He proposed four alternatives for dealing with their status after the creation of a Palestinian state: Incentivize them to move back [to Israel proper], make them the equivalent of Green Card holders here in the United States, make them citizens of Palestine, or a choice among the three options.
Tarazi said 75 percent of the settlers who live in the territories are there for economic reasons: government subsidies in the form of reduced mortgage rates, business subsidies, and other payments to encourage them to move into the settlements.
Theyre there for quality-of-life reasons rather than ideological reasons, he said. Under the second alternative, he said the settlers would be citizens of Israel, citizens of a foreign state but subject to Palestinian laws. The third alternative he suggested was to give them Palestinian citizenship.
Palestinian nationalism is not like their nationalism, he said. Zionism is about exclusiveness, discrimination and preference while Palestinian nationalism does not imply any particular ethnic or religious affiliation.
The Right of Return was the single issue among the three he addressed where there appeared to be the least room for compromise.
If all we have to say at the end of this is yes, we have a peace agreement but millions of refugees are not allowed to go home because theyre the wrong religion, all were going to do is create an alternative PLO, he said. Whatever agreements are ultimately reached, he insisted, would have to include an option for refugees to return to what is now Israel.
That is their legal right and we do not have the ability as Palestinian leaders to take that right away from them. All we can do is to provide options and to facilitate solutions to the refugee problem.
One option, he suggested, is for refugees to simply stay where they are. Another something else in his list of options is to resettle refugees in a third country, like Canada. He joked that when he would mention this option to friends in Ramallah, they answered, No. Bring those refugees here. Well go to Canada.
Option 3: go to the Palestinian state, Tarazi said. These are not refugees from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip… but maybe they prefer to go to the Palestinian state.
Hopefully, he added, that Palestinian state is large enough and viable enough and has enough natural resources to be able to accommodate them.
Though he had plenty to say and effectively shut down several of his detractors during a question-and-answer session, not everyone who attended believed what Tarazi had to say.
He was very eloquent, Huskies for Israels Katz said, a Harvard graduate who was able to portray misfacts throughout history in order to enable these creative solutions. I think all his creative solutions are just masking the fact that he wants to destroy Israel and to destroy the fabric that has been sewn together in the last 56 years.