Back to Ambassadorial Speeches - Ambassador Moshe Arad

Interview with Ambassador Arad and Edward Said on the "MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour" November 15, 1988

MR. LEHRER: Good evening. Leading the news this Tuesday, several countries recognize the PLO declared independent Palestinian state, Israeli Prime Minister Shamir said the Israeli declaration was part of an effort to destroy Israel, Soviet Leader Gorbachev will meet next month with President Reagan and President-elect Bush, and Bush announced another cabinet choice, holdover Nicholas Brady as Treasury Secretary. We'll have the details in our News Summary in a moment. Robin.

...

MR. LEHRER: Our main event tonight is the Palestinian story, the decisions of the Palestine National Council to declare an independent Palestinian state and to agree to a UN resolution that recognizes Israel's right to exist. We have interviews with a member of the Palestine National Council and the Israeli Ambassador to the United States, and we have reaction from two Middle East analysts. They follow this report from Louise Bates of Worldwide Television News.

LOUISE BATES: This was the moment so many Palestinians had been waiting for, Yasser Arafat's defiant declaration of an independent Palestine. Arafat didn't specifically define the boundaries of the unilaterally declared state, which would almost certainly include the West Bank and Gaza. The simple declaration though was received ecstatically by the Palestine National Council members. Arafat's invoked the original 1947 UN Resolution on Palestine. This divided the separate Arab and Jewish states, though it was never implemented. The war of Israeli Independence intervened, sending hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into exile. Already, a site in Algiers has been earmarked for a Palestine embassy. Arafat, himself, laid the foundation stone. Five Arab and several third world countries have also recognized the new state, though hard line Syria and Libya did not, calling instead for a renewed armed struggled. But Yasser Arafat now hopes for a lasting international settlement.

YASSER ARAFAT, PLO Chairman: We are ready. We are willing to negotiate peace through the international conference under the United Nation auspices.

MS. BATES: Arafat knows he needs wider international support if the initiative is to prosper. He's looking to the UN and also to the big powers in the search for his long-standing goal, Palestinian independence.

YASSER ARAFAT: -- plus the national independence for our people.

MS. BATES: Israel responded toe the Algerian declaration by reimposing a curfew in the occupied territories. Demonstrations were banned, no public transport was allowed in or out of the West Bank and foreign reporters were accompanied by military escorts. Some Palestinians did meet reporters though and seemed happy with developments.

PALESTINIAN: -- have our own identity, that's all.

YOUNG PALESTINIAN: We know we have a Palestinian country.

MS. BATES: Israeli reactions have been equally forthright. The Palestinian movement remains violent and extremist, says Israeli Government spokesman Alon Liel.

ALON LIEL, Israeli Government Spokesperson: Once again, the organization that claims to represent the Palestinian people proves unable or unwilling to recognize reality. In its new statements, ambiguity and double talk are again employed to obscure its advocacy of violence, resort to terrorism and adherence to extreme positions.

MS. BATES: Despite Israeli warnings though, there were public displays of rejoicing here in Arab East Jerusalem, and throughout the occupied territories. For these Palestinians, there is a feeling that for them history is again on the move.

MR. MACNEIL: We go first to the Palestinians and to an American of the Palestine National Council which met in Algiers. He is Edward Said, a Professor of Literature at Columbia University. I talked to him earlier today from Paris.

MR. MACNEIL: Mr. Said, the Palestine Council did two things; one was to make this declaration of an independent Palestine state, and the other was the resolution that accepted UN Resolution 242. Which in your mind is the more important substantively of those two things?

EDWARD SAID, Palestine National Council: Well, I think the declaration of the state is more important because it culminates the process of the uprising or the Intifada, which has been going on for almost a year now, and which states that once the Israeli occupation is over, that will be replaced by and is in the process now of being replaced by Palestinian sovereignty as an alternative to occupation. The declaration of independence states all of this clearly. It also sets forth a principle of partition extremely clearly in a document that's meant to be a historical document in which Palestine is to be divided between two states on the basis of the 1947 Resolution, one Arab and one Jewish, and since the Jewish state already exists, this one, this declaration, you know, states the existence now of a Palestinian state.

MR. MACNEIL: Because the reaction here seems to be, President Reagan yesterday and others saying there were encouraging signs in the acceptance of Resolution 242, implying an acceptance of Israel's right to exist, but the reaction today to the declaration on the independent state is that it seems to have been more of a kind of a publicity gesture by the Council.

MR. SAID: No, I don't think it was. I mean, it's happened before in recent history. I mean, the Algerians, which is where, of course, the declaration took place, in Algeria, the Algerians in 1958 declared an independent state while France was in occupation of Algeria and the French during World War II declared a French state, a free French state, while it was under occupation, while France was under occupation by Germany. I think the two absolutely go together. The program is a program for, in a certain sense, implementing those steps that will bring about the state and in both instances I need to say that it was an absolutely momentous and exhilarating and powerful experience for everybody there, because we knew that we were taking a gigantic historical step forward and putting ourselves clearly and unambiguously in the camp of peace, willingness to negotiate, willingness to recognize the realities on the ground, and asking Israelis and their supporters to join us even though at the very same moment, the Israeli elections have returned what looks like a government that is extremely backward looking and obviously intends rather serious, you know, reprisals and repressions on the West Bank, where those heroic people are still demonstrating to end the occupation.

MR. MACNEIL: So you mean it in, the declaration is in a moral or hypothetical sense, rather than in any literal sense. I mean, just let me quote to you what the Israeli Foreign Ministry said today. "The state has no government, no borders, no control over its citizens or territory, no reality."

MR. MACNEIL: Well, I think he's wrong in at least half of what he said because it does have control over the citizens, all of whom recognize, that is to say the people on the West Bank and Gaza, all of whom recognize the authority and the sovereignty of the state over them, and it's very much what they wanted and it's an answer to their demands for a clarity of declared sovereignty. And the leadership of the Palestinian national movement is also there. It has a reality in that it's obviously intended to cover the territories occupied by Israel in 1967. One has to remember, by the way, that when Israel, when it declared its state in 1948, did not declare boundaries either. So what we're saying is we're putting forward the proposition that we have now claimed our rights to sovereignty and statehood and we are now also in the political program saying, let's sit down, you Israelis and us Palestinians, and negotiate the process whereby we can live in peaceful co-existence together. I mean, it's a tremendously far reaching and generous, and I would even say visionary step, and I think it can't be minimized, and it is, above all, a clear break with the past, where a good deal of ambiguity and uncertainty was evinced in all previous Palestinian declarations.

MR. MACNEIL: Okay. I'll come back to that area in just a moment. Just on a couple of practical things. The State Department here said today you cannot determine the future of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip by unilateral acts on either side, and this was such a unilateral act. What is your comment on that?

MR. SAID: My comment on that is that it is the right of a people, especially under occupation, but historically at least in the twentieth century, it is the right of a people to declare itself sovereign, and it's certainly coeval in right and I think has a greater right than states like Israel, which have occupied militarily and ruled with brutal results a people without giving them any rights whatever. The virtues of this is that it identifies the entity, the political entity in which the people who are now without rights, who are in a state, in fact, of political limbo, now have a homeland to which they belong. It's a unilateral act only in that it simply expresses only what is obvious to everyone, that there are two polities in Palestine, but especially on the West Bank and Gaza. There's an Israeli occupation force, and then there is a Palestinian population of 1.7 millions who are denying that Israeli force, which is a unilateral act, in its presence, denying them the moral and political authority to rule over them. So the Palestinians are saying, we are declaring our independence from that.

MR. MACNEIL: Well, as a practical step now, will Mr. Arafat having got the recognition of Algeria, I believe, immediately, will he come to the United Nations and try and get wider recognition for the new state?

MR. SAID: Yes, I think he will. I think the other Arab states will follow pretty quickly upon Algeria and give recognition to the Palestinian state and then in coming to the United Nations he will be seeking, obviously, more international recognition for the state, but also coming to place the case of the Palestinian state before the United Nations in order to get something that's in the declaration, namely, United Nations protection and means to alleviate the sufferings of the Palestinians on the West Bank who have no protection now and are at the mercy of the Israeli occupation forces, you know, in the blowing up of houses, the killing of people, the imprisonment, et cetera, where there are a population without rights. They are now citizens of a sovereign state and in that context, he's asking the United Nations and the international community to give Palestinians that cover, that authority, that legitimacy.

MR. MACNEIL: Come back to the area that -- you used the word "ambiguous" a moment ago, that has seemed until now ambiguous from the Palestinian movement, and that is its willingness to recognize Israel's right to exist -- with the declaration and the vote in Algiers accepting UN Resolution 242, everybody says, we've all been reporting it, that implicitly recognizes Israel's right to exist. Is that how we are to take this, that this willingness is implied, is an implied willingness?

MR. SAID: I wouldn't use the word "implied" here, because it suggests that there is another step to come which is, you know, explicit in some way. This notion of accepting 242 is precisely the condition under which the United States beginning with Sec. Kissinger in 1975 placed before Palestinians as a way of entering and being in a serious part, a full partner in the peace process.

MR. MACNEIL: So you feel you've now fulfilled that requirement?

MR. SAID: Absolutely. There were two main conditions. One was to accept 242 and 338, the two resolutions of the '67 and '73 wars, and the other was the renunciation of terrorism in all its forms. Those are the two conditions which were required of Palestinians in order to enter the peace process. So by doing this unambiguously in the political statement that followed upon the declaration, we have now said, here we are, ready to start peace. And I dearly hope, I mean, I earnestly hope, that pressure will now be placed upon Israel to do exactly the same thing, because without that, we're going to be in the state of continual conflict with Palestinians who are, after all, the aggrieved party at the receiving end of a terrific barrage of brutality.

MR. MACNEIL: There was a further condition that the U.S. has put up for negotiating, entering negotiation with the PLO, and that was that you remove that part of your covenant which calls for the destruction of the State of Israel.

MR. SAID: No, that's not a condition. First of all, I'm not a member of the PLO.

MR. MACNEIL: I beg your pardon, the Palestinian Council.

MR. SAID: The PNC is required in its political program and the declaration of a state, which now takes precedence over historical documents in the past, to be clear and unambiguous without qualification in these two requirements and those are the ones that have been agreed upon for the last almost 15 years. And so I think in that respect, we've satisfied the conditions not just of the United States, but of the international community.

MR. MACNEIL: Briefly, what does the Palestinian Council hope the United States under President Bush shortly will do?

MR. SAID: Well, there was an appeal at the opening of the Council when Chairman Arafat made his opening remarks in which he addressed Bush and he said, listen, we don't want you to be biased in our favor, we understand your relationship with Israel, what we want from you is fairness and to deal with our case on a level of equality, that is to say to judge us by the same standards with which you judge others. He repeated this two or three times. He did it I thought rather dramatically and very eloquently, and I think this is exactly what's wanted. There has been for six or seven years now a neglect of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict with further moves to the right and I would say into the past by Israeli Government with results that have been for Palestinians catastrophic, and the United States has taken little interest in the conflict. There was an attempt by Mr. Shultz as you know, in the last few months, but that never got anywhere because the Palestinian issue wasn't addressed frontally. Now we hope that with this extraordinary, momentous history making three or four days during a time when none of us slept, we were fighting through to come up with a statement that would satisfy Palestinian national demands and at the same time accept the notion of partition and coexistence with a state that has, after all, destroyed our society and dispossessed us, and we hope that the United States in this context then will look anew at this situation and move from that, that is to say, to deal fully with the Palestinian issue, not as, you know, not through Jordan, not through Egypt, not through a whole series of other sort of surrogates, but directly with the Palestinian issue as it stands.

MR. MACNEIL: Well, Mr. Said, thank you very much for joining us.

MR. SAID: Thank you.

MR. MACNEIL: For the Israeli response, we go to that country's Ambassador to the United States, Moshe Arad in Washington. Mr. Ambassador, welcome.

AMB. ARAD: Thank you. Good evening.

MR. MACNEIL: Said said Palestinians have now fulfilled the conditions the U.S. set to enter the peace process, they have broken with the past. Do you think they have?

MOSHE ARAD, Israeli Ambassador to U.S.: Well unfortunately they didn't, and I didn't know that the conflict was between the Palestinians and the United States. I thought the conflict was between Israel and the Palestinians. And the Palestinians continue in their rejection of recognition of Israel, in the rejection of the right of Israel to exist as an independent state. Actually, they agree 41 years later to accept a resolution which was passed in 1947, and which has been rejected by the Palestinian and by the Arab Governments ever since, with, of course, there was one distinction, namely Egypt, which has signed a peace agreement about 10 years ago. And so I feel that the call which came out from Algiers is not a call for recognition of Israel, but rather to see what are the minimum necessary conditions in order to draw in the United States into a process in which there is no interest and no desire to change drastically the radical and rejectionist approach of the Palestinians vis-ˆ-vis Israel.

MR. MACNEIL: Do you think the rest of the world is going to see it that way?

AMB. ARAD: Well, one only has to read the text of the resolution, and I noticed that Mr. Said didn't make any reference to the fact that the resolution in Algiers is also calling actually that all the conflict has to be agreed in accordance and negotiated in accordance with the United Nations resolutions relevant to the Palestinian questions. Now these are resolutions which among other things call for the return of all the Palestinian refugees into Israel, call, actually brand and characterize Zionism as racism, call for a withdrawal to the 1947 partition border, and all these actually for quite a long time have been relegated to the dust bin of history, because we are not dealing with a theoretical situation, in 1947, before the establishment of the State of Israel; we are dealing with a new reality in 1988, after 41 years of warfare, of confrontation, of suffering, and you do not expect, I assume, that the Israelis would be as naive and to accept this statement from Algiers as the formula for negotiations or for peace.

MR. MACNEIL: How -- Prime Minister Shamir said, we quoted him at the top of the program, "These moves are another step in the war against Israel's existence" -- how does he construe it that way? What is the logic of that?

AMB. ARAD: Well, the logic of this is if you take this reference, and I noticed that the word "negotiation" with Israel wasn't mentioned even once by Mr. Said or by any other spokesman -- the notion is that that's a unilateral decision to establish independence detached from the reality on the ground, indeed, in which the way you yourself questioned Mr. Said earlier on, and trying to create a reality and limbo which without addressing the concerns of the Israelis, without addressing ourselves to the past historic experience of the last 41 years, to the aggression which Israel was subjected to since 1947, to the fact that terrorism has been one of the most efficient form of warfare against Israel even after the PLO has already announced in 1985 that it's giving up terrorism. So I see that as another statement for Western consumption, for the consumption of American public opinion, but I don't think we should be taken on such a ride.

MR. MACNEIL: Last week your government launched a diplomatic offensive to stop Arafat from coming to the United Nations with this proposal. Is that still your intention?

AMB. ARAD: Well, we don't think that Mr. Arafat should address or that his -- in view of his background and the fact that his record and direct involvement in terrorism against Israelis and not only against Israelis, against Americans, against Europeans including the former American Ambassador in Sudan back in 1973, that this is a person that should be permitted to address the highest forum of international affairs.

MR. MACNEIL: You've just come, I gather, from a meeting with Sec. Shultz at the State Department. Did you ask him to deny Mr. Arafat a visa?

AMB. ARAD: Well, this was a visit which Mayor Kollek of Jerusalem called on the Secretary and this was the main subject of our conversation. I would say actually that the Secretary commended Mayor Kollek as an excellent example of a leader, an Israeli leader, who set an example of how Jews, Moslem and Christians can live together in a city in which all of these three religions have a very basic interest.

MR. MACNEIL: But your government has said, your foreign ministry said openly last Friday it wanted you representatives of Israel in this country to urge the United States not to grant Arafat a visa. That's correct, isn't it?

AMB. ARAD: That, we made this position clear already last week and there is no change in our position, and I repeated it today.

MR. MACNEIL: You heard what Mr. Said said the Palestinian Council hoped the United States would now do, that to be even handed after, as he saw it, years of not being. What does Israel wish the United States would now do, besides denying Mr. Arafat a visa?

AMB. ARAD: What we expect the United States is to have a historic perspective, an understanding of the right of Israel to exist as an independent country, to support Israel's desire to negotiate a peaceful settlement to the conflict with the Jordanians, with the Palestinians, and the understanding that such a prolonged conflict cannot be negotiated or done away by a unilateral declaration, by a unilateral move, but rather by negotiations. We have indicated our willingness to negotiate an interim settlement. I think that that's the position of this administration and if I'm not mistaken, also, and the statement which Vice President Bush, the President-elect, has made just last month, and September earlier this year, in which is the necessity to bring together the Israelis, the Palestinians and the Jordanians in order to negotiate an interim solution as the first step towards the resolution of the conflict, this should be the policy that we are supportive, and we feel it's an honest policy which would address and addresses itself to the needs of both the Israelis and the Palestinians.

MR. MACNEIL: So in Israel's view, you're saying that this meeting in Algiers, which the Palestinians are claiming was historic and momentous means nothing, and that 25 years from now we will not be looking back at that meeting as a historic point in the Middle East history?

AMB. ARAD: Well, I'm sorry not to join in this celebration of witnessing a historic event. We do not feel that this meeting has brought the peace process forward. It is, if anything, a step which has been taken about 41 years later and too little, too late..

MR. MACNEIL: Mr. Ambassador, thank you. Jim.