By Janis Siegel, JTNews Correspondent
Two prominent grassroots peace movement leaders in the Middle East, Dr. Sari Nusseibeh, a Palestinian and president of al-Quds University in East Jerusalem, and Ami Ayalon, an Israeli and former Israeli Internal Security (Shin Bet) director, have united to put forth one of the latest efforts to bring about a negotiated Middle East peace. This effort is a petition initiative called the People’s Voice.
This document, currently being circulated to and signed by average Israeli and Palestinian citizens, could ultimately dictate the terms of a settlement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict if the numbers of signatures gathered reflect an overwhelming majority.
The activists spoke last week at the University of Washington’s Kane Hall to an overflow crowd about “The Missing Pieces of the Middle East Peace: A public discussion of peace initiatives in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.”
A Mercer Island-based group called Find Common Ground presented the event.
The initiative could potentially resolve the toughest obstacles to peace that stand between Israelis and Palestinians on the ground. It calls upon both parties to make serious concessions regarding final status issues such as Israeli settlements and the Palestinian right of return, among others. The two are hoping that the people will make this set of principles succeed, but both acknowledged it will be painful for both sides.
“In the past 50 years we were too afraid to describe the future, it was too sensitive,” said Ayalon, who is also a retired admiral of the Israeli Navy and the founder of Mifkad, a grassroots Israeli peace organization. “But we Israelis will have to separate ourselves from our dreams. We have to separate ourselves from the dream of the great Eretz Yisrael, which is the land of Israel. The Palestinians will have to separate themselves from great parts of Jordan to the sea.”
Their vision of the future calls for Israel to withdraw to pre-1967 borders, allowing the Palestinians to establish a state on 100 percent of the land Israel conquered in the 1967 Six-Day War, with some land swaps built in to the agreement. It also requires the Palestinians to cede their demand for the right of return to Israel. They would receive financial compensation and the opportunity to live in the new Palestinian state instead. According to the initiative, this new Palestinian state would be demilitarized.
“We face a lot of opposition,” Ayalon said, “but this is the first time Israeli and Palestinian people are putting their names on a common document, and the first time the people are working together.”
Find Common Ground says that more than 90,000 Israelis and 60,000 Palestinians have already signed the petition. They also say that 500 to 1,000 new signatures are added each week.
Both leaders are optimistic, hoping to collect roughly 300,000 signatures from Israelis and 100,000 from Palestinians. To fund the ongoing effort, Nusseibeh has applied for grants from the European Union and the United States while Ayalon is raising funds from private donors.
According to an article in the Jerusalem Report, Nusseibeh believes that many Palestinian leaders secretly favor this approach, but are afraid to say so in public fearing the people do not stand behind them. But he told the Seattle audience he also believes that if the people sign on to these principles, then the leaders will naturally follow.
“Time is running out,” said Nusseibeh, who is also a former political commissioner in East Jerusalem for the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and an Oxford-educated philosophy professor whose family holds the keys, in perpetuity, to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.
“Victory has no meaning in the Middle East today. Soon, the option of the two-state solution will not exist anymore. I know that this is not a place where I would want to raise my children or my grandchildren. This is why we are doing what we are doing.”
Polls conducted in June 2000 by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah and the Truman Center at Hebrew University revealed that 80 percent of Israelis and 71 percent of Palestinians favor reconciliation. When the joint initiative went out in July 2002, Nusseibeh hired 40 activists to work in committees throughout the West Bank and Gaza. That number has now doubled. But Nusseibeh still believes many Palestinians don’t support his views because he advocates giving up the right of return. He is often met with heckling when he speaks in Palestinian refugee camps.
“We can sacrifice and pay this price,” said Nusseibeh to the hopeful crowd gathered at the UW. “We understand that if we want a free Palestinian state without any occupation, then we will have to forfeit the right of return. We understand that we will have to make some painful concessions. We don’t want to do it but we will have to do it.”
The remaining principles require that Jerusalem be “an open city, the capital of two states,” with Arab neighborhoods under Palestinian sovereignty and Jewish neighborhoods under Israeli sovereignty, and neither side exercising sovereignty over the holy places. Palestine will be the guardian of Haram al-Sharif — the Temple Mount — on behalf of Muslims, and Israel will be the guardian of the Western Wall on behalf of the Jewish population. The final principle commits both sides to an agreement that “the full implementation of these principles” will signal the end of conflict.
If necessary, mutually agreed-upon border modifications would only be allowed in order to minimize the number of settlers who would have to leave their homes. Any territorial exchange would be negotiated using a method of based on a one-to-one ratio.
Ayalon says that Israeli settlements won’t be evacuated until the overwhelming majority of Israelis support the move and Palestinians won’t give up the right of return until their people are largely behind this concession.
“The Road Map says nothing about Jerusalem, the right of return, final borders or settlements,” said Ayalon, referring to President Bush’s steps to laying out a plan for peace. “In the end, the international community will have to provide the final framework. But if hundreds of thousands on both sides say they are ready to adopt our principles, then they will, too.”
The event was sponsored by Beyond Borders: An Arab-Jewish Dialogue; the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs and the Middle East Center, Jackson School, University of Washington; Seattle University; Jerusalem Arc; Temple De Hirsch Sinai and the University Temple United Methodist Church.