The Photograph is of a Jerusalem Masjid and a Church sharing the same
gardens and landscape ... Taken from the Archives of the US embassy, Jerusalem.
Maybe We Have Lost Our Innocence.
But I Will Never Give up the Dream.
Around mid-December 2010, a meeting was organized by the Geneva Initiative and brought together Israeli and Palestinian legislators with Israeli peace activists in Ramallah, Occupied Palestine. Prominent members present included Hanan Ashrawi who was making headlines as a prominent member of the PLO during the Arafat Era according to Julian Walsh of the BBC World Service.
In the introduction to the interview, Julian Wash said that when the Madrid peace conference convened in October 1991, Ashrawi, a professor of English literature from Ramallah, was appointed member of the Palestinian negotiating team. She represented the new, enlightened face of the PLO: Palestinian patriot, peace-seeker, intellectual, woman and Christian all in one. The talks with the Israeli delegation were limping along and getting nowhere when the astounding news of the completion of the Oslo peace accords arrived unexpectedly in September 1993.
Ashrawi said that when the first reports came in, she asked one of her colleagues: "Are you sure there's nothing about a settlement freeze? She said she could not disguise her anger at her colleagues from Tunis. She explained in the interview that the Palestinian representatives at the Oslo talks were living in exile and not sufficiently aware of what living under occupation and the theft of lands really meant.
She told BBC’s Julian Walsh that from the beginning, when they met with James Baker, they asked him to stop all settlements. He said the only way to stop them would be to start negotiations. And that has been the repeated mantra; … Negotiations will stop settlements. The only thing they got was settlement expansion, loss of land, and loss of credibility in the occupied territories; they saw there was a process for its own sake, without substance or application to reality … They were naïve, and they didn’t know it!
Asked about the role of the committee, she said that, among other things, the committee works against false arrests and torture, illegal dismissals from the police force and failure to heed court rulings. The BBC said that In January 1996, Ashrawi was elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council as an independent candidate from the Jerusalem district. No candidate received more votes than she did, Julian Wash explained in the one full hour program.
For three years, she was the Palestinian minister of higher education and research. She founded the Palestinian Institute for the Study of Democracy, which deals with leadership, women's rights, information and policy.
She said that In 2006, she became a member of the committee supervising the negotiations with the Israelis. Last year, she ran as an independent candidate for a seat on the 18-member PLO Executive Committee. She became the first woman member of this senior body.
Julian Walsh asked her Almost 20 years have passed since she first took part in negotiations with Israelis. “Do you believe you will ever get to meet with them when they are no longer representing occupiers and occupied?
She said: "I believe the Israelis never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. When matters come close, something happens and they back down. They think they are not really occupiers because of the wall, which is both physical and metaphorical - they are spared the ugliness of the occupation."
Julian Walsh asked her what she wanted to leave the audience with, she said: “When I was asked in the '90s whether we would see a PA state before the end of the century, I said of course - that's what I promised my daughters - we owe it to our children. And now here we are, and it's heartbreaking. But we can't give up. Maybe we have lost our innocence. But I will never give up the dream.
