PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat shake hands with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, as U.S. President Bill Clinton stands between them, after the signing of the Israeli-PLO peace accord, at the White House, on Sept. 13, 1993.STAFF/Reuters
Bill Clay is the former director of research and communications for the federal NDP caucus and chief of staff in the Premier’s Office in Nunavut. He is currently based in Copenhagen, where he works in international development.
“So, we can blame this on you.”
That was the accusation from a Hamas-sympathizing activist pamphleting about the war in Gaza outside Copenhagen’s Kongens Nytorv metro station in the first weeks of the conflict. I had told him that in early 1990, I had delivered a historic message from the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO) then-chairman Yasser Arafat, that he would recognize the state of Israel.
I was a young freelance journalist at the time, and Ian Waddell, then a federal member of Parliament, asked me to join him on a U.S.-sponsored congressional mission seeking that ever-elusive peace in the Middle East. The delegation was led by former U.S. senator Charles Percy, and comprised Democrats, Republicans, Jews, Muslims, Christians and – as is the American style – a Hollywood celebrity. (In our case, it was Mike Farrell, also known as Captain B.J. Hunnicutt from M*A*S*H.)
The delegation held high-level intergovernmental meetings in Damascus, Amman, Cairo, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Among the leaders we met on the Israeli side was Shimon Peres, the once and future prime minister. Fancying myself a young leftist, I asked him if there wasn’t a better way toward peace than war. To his credit, the future Nobel Peace Prize laureate told us he would speak to whomever the Palestinians put forward to negotiate peace. This was radical stuff coming from a former state leader, at a time when the PLO was deemed a terrorist organization.
Across Israel and the Occupied Territories, including Gaza, we met the de facto leadership of the First Palestinian Intifada, but we were missing a direct message from the PLO leader. The Americans and the Israelis were prevented by their own terror laws from talking to the PLO. Who do you call in when you can’t do the talking yourself? Back then, it was the Canadians. Setting up a meeting with Mr. Arafat, who had a reputation for not spending more than one night in the same place, was not something to be left to embassy or congressional staffers.
A young Palestinian woman who was assisting the delegation asked me if Ian and I really wanted to meet with Mr. Arafat, and if we would go to Baghdad. Of course, I said yes. Even though Canada’s ambassador to Israel warned that we’d never get an Iraqi visa, and that even if we did, we wouldn’t get a meeting, just a few days later we were sitting in Baghdad’s Al Rasheed hotel waiting for a call. When it came, we were given 10 minutes to be in the lobby and, with no security detail, we quickly found ourselves in the back seat of a Mercedes heading to an unknown destination. Forty-five minutes later, we pulled up to a low-rise bungalow; two guards with sidearms in the driveway were the only signs this was the day’s PLO headquarters.
There was no body search – we were given the same level of trust we had offered – and we met privately with Mr. Arafat. Knowing that he, like Mr. Peres, called himself a socialist, I asked Mr. Arafat the same question: Is there not a better way to achieve peace than war? He, too, said he would speak to whomever the other side put forward – an effective recognition of Israel by the PLO, which was just as radical as what we’d heard from Mr. Peres.
The two made clear there was no love lost between each side. Where they agreed was understanding that training each new generation to hate and kill was destroying their societies from within.
We duly reported our meeting to the American delegation, and though it would take until 1993, it led to the historic handshake on the lawn of the White House between then-president Bill Clinton, Israel’s then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, Mr. Peres and Mr. Arafat. Unfortunately, what came of that was as foretold by both leaders, who knew what the cycle of violence was doing to their own people: For agreeing to a peace process, Mr. Rabin was assassinated – not by a Palestinian, but by a Jewish Israeli. And now, Hamas erroneously teaches Palestinian children that the recognition of the state of Israel was a humiliation foisted on Mr. Arafat against his will.
Today, both sides are refusing to see what their past leaders knew, and remains true now: Making peace is not an act of capitulation. In fact, it is the brave choice. You don’t make peace with your friends, after all; it is only by making peace with your enemies that you find peace within.
So to the accusation of having played a small role in advancing a peace process: guilty as charged.